Dark-History

In a sealed military compound outside Harbin, in the Japanese-occupied region of Manchuria, a facility operated for nearly a decade under the bureaucratic name “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.” Inside, thousands of people — Chinese civilians, Soviet and Mongolian prisoners, Korean detainees, and an unknown number of others — were used as subjects in experiments that included deliberate infection with plague, cholera, and anthrax; vivisection without anesthesia; and frostbite testing that left limbs blackened and rotting. ...

In 1977, a CIA director sat before the United States Senate and confirmed that his agency had, for over two decades, conducted covert experiments on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. The experiments involved LSD administered without consent, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive therapy beyond any therapeutic dose, hypnosis, sexual blackmail, and psychological torture. At least one person died as a direct result. Many others suffered permanent psychological damage. The program was called MKULTRA. ...

On November 18, 1978, in a remote jungle clearing in the South American nation of Guyana, 918 people died. Most of them drank cyanide-laced punch willingly. Parents gave it to their children first. Nurses administered it to infants with syringes. People who hesitated were injected by force. A few tried to flee into the jungle and were shot. It was the largest mass death of American civilians in history — a record that stood until September 11, 2001. ...

At 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded with a force that blew the 1,000-ton reactor lid clean off its housing. It was the worst nuclear accident in human history — and the Soviet government’s first instinct was to lie about it. Not just to the world. To its own people. To the firefighters it sent in without proper equipment. To the children still playing outside in radioactive rain. ...

In the year 2000, Enron Corporation was the seventh largest company in the United States. It employed approximately 29,000 people. Its stock traded at over $90 a share. Fortune magazine had named it “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years, from 1996 to 2001. Fourteen months later, it was bankrupt. Its stock was worth pennies. Roughly 20,000 employees had lost their jobs. Thousands of ordinary workers had watched retirement savings — invested heavily in Enron stock at the company’s encouragement — evaporate to nothing. ...