On this day in 1976, power was seized in a coup d’etat by a military junta that would rule Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Throughout those seven grueling years, Argentines endured a repressive regime of indiscriminate violence, persecution, torture, kidnappings, … Continue reading
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great city of Smyrna on the Anatolian coast was one of the world’s richest, most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse metropolises – containing large Armenian and Jewish communities, as well as twice as many … Continue reading
“Who, after all, speaks, today, of the extermination of Armenians?” asked Adolf Hitler in 1939. But, then as now, even less speak of the genocide of the Assyrians – the torchbearers of the earliest civilisation – who fell victim to the same … Continue reading
On 6th August 1945, the United States government unleashed upon the world the first weapon of mass destruction when the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of … Continue reading
On this day in 1967, the Detroit police raided an after-hours bar in the city’s poor black ghetto where nearly 100 locals had gathered to celebrate the return of two African American soldiers from Vietnam. Typically in such raids, the … Continue reading
Today we remember one of the great miscarriages of British justice of the present time, in which the British police – indeed the Metropolitan police, those paragons of English authority whose collective beats are more international and mutli-cultural than probably … Continue reading
At half past five on the morning of July 16th 1945, The Gadget exploded and the whole world shook. Three square miles of desert sand was melted into glass. A mushroom cloud rose almost 8 miles into the sky and … Continue reading
On July 10th 1985, French intelligence agents acting under direct orders of President François Miterrand bombed the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour to prevent its protest voyage to the nuclear testing site of Moruroa in French Polynesia. The French … Continue reading
Today marks the anniversary of the sinking of the Arandora Star – the killing of hundreds of people due to the British government’s callous disregard of their welfare simply because of their nationality. It also demonstrated the common humanity and … Continue reading
On 21st June 1877, in the anthracite-mining county of Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, ten Irish immigrant men alleged to have been members of an oath-bound secret sect of vigilantes called the Molly Maguires were hanged in what came to be known as … Continue reading
On this day in 1938, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Nationalist troops under the orders of Chiang Kai-Shek blew up the dikes holding back the Yellow River in an attempt to stop the invading Japanese. The mighty river was … Continue reading
In the early hours of the morning on June 4th 1989, the Chinese military began a brutal crackdown of the protest movement that had seen up to 100,000 people camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for more than a month. … Continue reading
On the night of 3rd June 1943, as American men of all ethnicities shipped off to service in World War II, the city of Los Angeles witnessed a violent outbreak of racism when a group of fifty U.S. sailors ran … Continue reading
Today we lament the brutal suppression of the Kwangju Democratisation Movement. Ten days earlier, the citizens of the liberal South Korean city of Kwangju joined a student-led uprising in opposition to the illegitimate authoritarian rule of General Chun Doo-hwan. In response, … Continue reading
Today we lament the passage of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act – paving the way for White America’s long-wished-for heave-ho of all American Indians to lands west of the Mississippi river. “What good man would prefer a country covered … Continue reading
Today we recall with epic sadness that dreadful disastrous day 78 years ago when the first McDonald’s hamburger restaurant opened for service in San Bernadino, California. The extraordinary trajectory of McDonald’s flight to world infamy these past seven decades embodies … Continue reading
It was market day on April 26th 1937 in Guernica, a small town in northern Spain considered to be the spiritual capital of Basque culture. In late afternoon, without warning or provocation, Luftwaffe aircraft swooped down over Guernica. Wave after wave bombarded the … Continue reading
Today we lament the beginning of the infamous Armenian Genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Turkey’s Ottoman regime. Force-marched to their deaths across stifling tundra, countless thousands driven en masse into subterranean caves at the … Continue reading
Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. And that astonishing figure only accounts for those that were recorded. Behind every one of those 4,743 extrajudicial “mob rules” executions, there lies a tragedy – but today we … Continue reading
On this day in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh and declared revolutionary Year Zero. After five years of bloody civil war, the conquering Communist guerrillas were welcomed as heroes by a relieved population desperate for … Continue reading
On March 13th 1873, a brutal massacre occurred in Colfax, Louisiana that remains shockingly little-known considering the magnitude of the violence – it is one of the largest incidents of race-related mass murder in America’s non-combatant history – and the … Continue reading
On 6th April 1994, the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down by surface-to-air missiles as it approached Kigali Airport. All on board were killed. The responsibility for the downing of the plane remains a mystery, but the … Continue reading
On April 5th 1992 units of the Yugoslav People’s Army on orders from Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, in combination with Bosnian-Serb militia groups, took up positions in the hills surrounding the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. From there they opened fire on … Continue reading
At four minutes past midnight on March 24th 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Despite not even being in the top 50 global oil spills by volume, the Exxon Valdez disaster … Continue reading
On March 16th 1968, the American combat soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Division swept into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai and massacred 504 unarmed, unresisting women, children and elderly men. Babies were shot at point-blank … Continue reading
On this day in 1942, in response to the Imperial Japanese Army’s attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which cleared the way for some 120,000 Japanese Americans to be relocated … Continue reading
On this day back in 1855, the Woman’s Hospital in New York City was founded. This was the first hospital in the world to be established for conditions specific to women, and from this beginning the study and discovery of … Continue reading
On this day in 1788, the “First Fleet” of eleven ships arrived at Sydney Cove, Australia. Its passengers were the first white settlers of this remote continent: some 750 convicted petty criminals and 500 marine guards and officers shipped out … Continue reading
On this day in 1905, a seismic social shift occurred that would ultimately end Russia’s seemingly unassailable dynastical certainties – setting the stage for the new global force of communism. For nearly four hundred years, a succession of patrilineal descendents … Continue reading
The murder of revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 15th January 1919 at the hands of the proto-Nazi Freikorps marked the end of the Spartacist Week – the failed workers’ uprising in Berlin. Incredibly their murder was ordered … Continue reading
On this day in 1920, in an attempt to rid America of its “moral perverts”, federal agents under the direction of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer raided without warrants pool halls, restaurants and private homes in thirty-five American cities. … Continue reading
On this day 1907 in the city of Iquique, some 3000 striking workers and their families were brutally massacred by the Chilean army on government orders. This state-sanctioned crime was subsequently suppressed for nearly one hundred years; if not for … Continue reading
Today we lament the tragic Rape of Nanking, in which the recently Westernized & ‘modernized’ Japanese army – themselves less than a century out of their fiercely backward-looking Samurai past, and each soldier reeling from the still cruelly harsh authoritarian … Continue reading
Today we recall the 1981 El Mozote Massacre – the largest killing of civilians during El Salvador’s brutal twelve-year civil war – in which nearly the entire 800-plus population of the small village of El Mozote and its surrounding hamlets … Continue reading
On this day in 1989, woman-hater Marc Lépine went on a gendercidal rampage at Montreal’s prestigious École Polytechnique. Armed with a Sturm Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, 25-year-old Lépine – a failed application to the elite engineering school … Continue reading
Today we lament the death of Black Kettle, chief of the Southern Cheyenne, killed 147 years ago when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry in a surprise dawn attack on the sleeping Cheyenne camp – massacring over … Continue reading
Seventy-two years before the infamous 1999 Columbine Massacre – in which two teenage students shot and killed 13 people at their high school – there was another massacre to bear the same name that has been not merely forgotten but … Continue reading
Today we lament the tragic “revolutionary suicides” in Jonestown, Guyana of over 900 brainwashed victims of the Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. Originally based in San Francisco, the enigmatic, almost rock star-like Jones had for decades held his dysfunctional … Continue reading
Ninety-four years ago today, Adolf Hitler – a full decade before actually seizing power – led his young Munich-based Nazi Party in an audacious yet disastrous attempt to force armed revolution upon chaotic post-WW1 Germany, when 600 Nazi stormtroopers gate-crashed … Continue reading
On this day in 1966, 116 children from the South Wales village of Aberfan were suffocated in their classrooms, buried alive – just yards from their parents’ homes – by a forty-feet-high avalanche of liquefied coal waste that swept down … Continue reading
On the 17th of October 1961, just seventeen years after he had expelled nearly 1,600 French Jews to concentration camps to the East, the former Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon – obscenely and most bizarrely placed as Prefect of the Paris … Continue reading
At 2am on October 12th 1492, a sailor aboard the Pinta by the name of Rodrigo de Triana shouted, “Tierra! Tierra!” For his sighting of land, he should have received a yearly pension for the rest of his life. But … Continue reading
Today we pay tribute to the 1,500 Irish civilians murdered by rampaging English Parliamentarian forces, during Oliver Cromwell’s controversial siege of the Irish port of Wexford. Many drowned whilst attempting to escape across the river in preference to being cut … Continue reading
The announcement read: “All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity must come to the corner of Melnikova and Dokhturovska Street by 8 o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 29th 1941. They are to bring with … Continue reading
On this day in 2001, all of America’s postwar bullying, lying, cheating, deceiving, extorting, interloping and specifically self-serving ways resulted in the shocking, gruesome, horrific and utterly tragic massive attack that destroyed the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan.
On this day in 1939, months of brown-nosing Hitler’s Nazis by the winners of World War One – Britain, France and America AKA the Western Powers – resulted not in a safer Europe but in the Invasion of Poland, when, … Continue reading
At about 2.30 am on 28th August 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till was kidnapped at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s house in Money, Mississippi. His kidnappers then drove to a disused plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally … Continue reading
On this day in 1819, during a pro-democracy rally in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field, utter bloody carnage fell upon the peaceful protestors when the local yeomanry set about the crowd of 60,000 with sabres drawn, trampling and hacking down fifteen … Continue reading
An alternative "On This Day", On This Deity aims to bring light to and celebrate Culture Heroes, Outsider Icons, Beloved Immortals and Revolutionary Events in history.
Disclaimer: These are spirited and informed opinion pieces. Photos have been credited wherever possible, which hasn’t often been the case. Please contact me (via Comments) if you are the photographer of any pictures used by On This Deity and would like your photo to be credited or removed.
