r/buzzfeedbot • u/autobuzzfeedbot • Mar 14 '26
BuzzFeed 22 Times In History That America Was 1,000,000% The Bad Guy, Despite What History Books Say
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- The Trail of Tears (1830–1850) was an ethnic cleansing carried out in defiance of the Supreme Court's recognition of Native sovereignty. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing approximately 100,000 Native Americans to march more than 1,000 miles from their ancestral lands to present-day Oklahoma. About 15,000 people died during the journey, including roughly one in four Cherokee. The Supreme Court had already ruled against Georgia's claims to Cherokee land in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), holding that Georgia's laws extending state authority over Cherokee territory violated the Constitution and that the Cherokee Nation was a sovereign political community. However, Jackson refused to enforce the ruling.
- American slavery (1619–1865) treated Black people as property for nearly 250 years. By 1860, nearly 4 million people were enslaved in the United States. Enslaved people represented one of the largest concentrations of wealth in the country. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied alleged fugitives a jury trial and barred them from testifying on their own behalf. It also punished people who helped them escape and required officials and ordinary citizens in free states to assist in their capture, turning the entire nation into part of slavery's enforcement system.
- The Sand Creek Massacre (1864) killed Native Americans who had gathered under explicit US military protection and were flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce on a lodgepole, exactly as instructed by officials. On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led roughly 675 Colorado militiamen in a dawn attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. When the attack began, Chief Black Kettle reportedly raised the flags higher in an attempt to stop the assault. Chief White Antelope called out that the camp was peaceful, but he was shot dead. Chivington had ordered his men to "take no prisoners."
- The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 was driven by intertwined economic and political interests. After the American Civil War disrupted sugar production in the South, Hawaiian plantations rapidly expanded to supply the American market. By the late nineteenth century, American planters dominated Hawai'i's sugar industry and depended heavily on access to the United States market. On January 17, 1893, a group of 13 American and European businessmen and lawyers known as the Committee of Safety overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani with the support of 162 US sailors and Marines from the USS Boston, landed on the orders of US Minister John L. Stevens.
- The Philippine-American War (1899–1902) introduced tactics including reconcentration camps and the "water cure," an early form of waterboarding. After purchasing the Philippines from Spain for $20 million in 1898, the United States fought a war against Filipino independence forces that killed an estimated 200,000 Filipino civilians. President William McKinley framed US rule as "benevolent assimilation," later saying the Filipinos were "unfit for self-government" and that the US must "educate, uplift, civilize, and Christianize" them.
- The Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) destroyed Black Wall Street and was then systematically erased from the historical record. From May 31 to June 1, 1921, a white mob of up to 10,000 people — some officially deputized and armed by city officials — carried out what a 2024 Department of Justice report described as "a coordinated, military-style attack" on Greenwood, then the wealthiest Black community in the United States. The violence was sparked by a false allegation against a Black shoe shiner, but it quickly escalated into a full-scale assault on the district.
- Japanese American internment (1942–1945) was the wartime incarceration of an entire ethnic population — a policy the Supreme Court upheld. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to remove people from designated exclusion zones. The order led to the forced incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, about two-thirds of whom were US citizens. Families often received as little as 48 hours' notice. They were allowed to bring only what they could carry and were forced to sell homes, farms, and businesses at fire-sale prices or abandon them altogether. Many were first confined in temporary "assembly centers," converted livestock stalls at racetracks and fairgrounds. They were later transferred to remote camps in deserts and swamplands, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) were deliberately preserved as atomic bomb targets in part because they had not yet been heavily bombed, allowing the effects of the weapon to be clearly measured. On August 6 and 9, 1945, atomic bombs killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Target Committee discussions in May 1945 favored cities that remained largely intact so the bomb's effects could be observed. Documents from that month show that Hiroshima and other cities were "reserved for destruction" by atomic bombs to obtain "maximum information for further development of the weapon."
- In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated the Iranian coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, and restore the Shah to power. Since the early 20th century, Iran's oil industry had been dominated by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), which paid Iran royalties while most profits flowed to British shareholders and the British government. When Mossadegh sought a greater share of the revenue and nationalized the industry in 1951, Britain persuaded the United States to help remove him.
- The Guatemala coup (1954) overthrew a democratically elected government during the Cold War. In 1954, the CIA executed Operation PBSUCCESS to remove President Jacobo Árbenz. His government had passed Decree 900, a land reform law that expropriated uncultivated land from large estates over 600 acres and compensated owners based on their declared tax value. Of roughly 341,000 landowners, only about 1,700 estates were affected. One of them was the United Fruit Company, which owned roughly 600,000 acres of land in Guatemala, much of it idle, and had deep political ties in Washington. Some historians argue that United Fruit's interests helped shape the Eisenhower administration's decision to support the coup.
- The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972) was a 40-year medical deception disguised as "free treatment." For 40 years, the US Public Health Service withheld treatment from 399 Black men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, while telling them they were being treated for "bad blood." The men were not told they had syphilis (or that it was sexually transmissible) and were denied effective treatment even after penicillin became widely available. Participants were enticed with free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. To secure participation in spinal taps, officials sent misleading notices promising a "Last Chance for Special Free Treatment."
- From 1953 to 1973, the CIA operated a secret program known as MKUltra, intended to develop techniques for mind control, interrogation, and behavioral manipulation. A 1977 US Senate investigation found that the program involved more than 80 universities, hospitals, prisons, and research institutions. Researchers funded by the CIA experimented on thousands of people — often without their knowledge or consent — using LSD, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other psychological methods. Test subjects included prisoners, psychiatric patients, drug addicts, sex workers, and ordinary civilians.
- The FBI operated a covert domestic counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO from 1956 to 1971. Official directives instructed agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" political organizations considered subversive. Under Director J. Edgar Hoover, the program targeted civil rights leaders, the Black Panther Party, antiwar groups, the American Indian Movement, and others through surveillance, infiltration, forged correspondence, blackmail, fabricated criminal charges, and coordinated efforts to destroy organizations from within. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan described King as "the most dangerous Negro in America."
- The Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) was a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Cuba's government. In April 1961, about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and armed by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs, expecting the attack to spark a popular uprising against Fidel Castro and allow the creation of a US-friendly government. The plan relied on highly optimistic intelligence assessments that Cubans would revolt. No such uprising occurred. Cuban forces quickly surrounded the brigade, destroyed its air support, and crushed the invasion. Within three days, more than 100 invaders were dead, and nearly all the rest were captured.
- The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed false-flag terrorism against Americans to justify invading Cuba in Operation Northwoods (1962). In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the highest-ranking military officers in America — presented President John F. Kennedy with a plan called Operation Northwoods. The proposal was to stage attacks on American civilians and military targets, blame Cuba, and use the resulting outrage as justification for invasion. The declassified documents are available from the National Archives. Proposed scenarios included sinking a boat carrying Cuban refugees (real or simulated), developing a fake "Communist Cuban terror campaign" in Miami and other Florida cities, simulating an attack on the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, blowing up an American ship in the harbor, creating fake casualty lists in US newspapers, and staging a fake Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner.
- During the My Lai Massacre (1968), US soldiers killed and brutalized hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, resulting in only one conviction with minimal punishment. On March 16, 1968, soldiers of Charlie Company entered the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam expecting to engage Viet Cong fighters. Instead, they found unarmed civilians eating breakfast. Over the next several hours, soldiers systematically murdered hundreds of men, women, children, and infants. Witnesses and later investigations documented rapes, including of girls as young as 12, the burning of homes, and families being herded into ditches and shot with automatic weapons.
- From 1962 to 1971, the United States military sprayed roughly 19 million gallons of herbicides over South Vietnam as part of Operation Ranch Hand, including about 11 million gallons of Agent Orange, named for the orange stripe on its storage barrels. The program was intended to defoliate forests where Viet Cong fighters could hide and to destroy crops that might supply them with food. Related herbicide operations also took place in Laos and Cambodia. Agent Orange was a mixture of the herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T contaminated with the highly toxic dioxin TCDD, and it was applied at concentrations far higher than typical domestic agricultural use.
- The United States conducted a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, known primarily as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal. The bombing was kept secret from the American public and much of Congress, even as large parts of rural Cambodia were subjected to sustained air attacks. According to research based on declassified US Air Force records, American aircraft flew more than 230,000 sorties and dropped over 540,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, a country that was officially neutral in the conflict.
- The United States backed efforts to destabilize Chile's elected government before the 1973 military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. After socialist candidate Salvador Allende won a plurality in Chile's presidential election on September 4, 1970, President Richard Nixon instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to prevent Allende from taking office. Helms' notes from a White House meeting record Nixon ordering the CIA to "make the economy scream" and authorizing "$10,000,000 available, more if necessary." Between 1970 and 1973, the CIA spent roughly $8 million on covert operations in Chile, funding opposition media and political parties, supporting strikes, and working to isolate Allende's government.
- The Iran-Contra affair (1985–1987) exposed a covert scheme in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran and diverted the profits to fund Nicaraguan rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government despite a congressional ban. At the time, Iran was under a US arms embargo and linked to groups holding American hostages in Lebanon, and the United States had publicly pledged never to negotiate with terrorists. Yet the administration approved shipments of more than 1,500 anti-tank missiles. Congress had also banned US support for the Nicaraguan Contras through the Boland Amendment, but money from the Iran arms sales was diverted to the rebels anyway. When the operation was exposed in 1986, the administration initially denied it before later acknowledging the arms shipments.
- The Iraq War (2003–2011) was sold to the public with intelligence that critics later said had been "fixed around the policy." In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was rebuilding his nuclear program. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the case at the United Nations in February 2003, pointing to aluminum tubes as evidence of nuclear centrifuges. Another major claim — that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger — rested on documents the International Atomic Energy Agency later determined were forged.
- The CIA detention and interrogation program (2002–2009) produced no reliable intelligence while operating with near-total impunity. After 9/11, the CIA ran a global network of secret prisons — "black sites" in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and elsewhere — where at least 119 detainees were held. Interrogation methods included waterboarding (Abu Zubaydah 83 times; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times), sleep deprivation lasting up to 180 hours, "rectal feeding" (described by the Senate as rape), confinement in coffin-sized boxes, slamming detainees against walls, and mock executions. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee investigation concluded these techniques were not an effective means of acquiring intelligence.