THE DARK DISASTERS IN HUMAN HISTORY. FROM SHANIDAR CANOVA AND BEYOND

1

AMANDA LAOUPI Dr Archaeologist – Environmentalist – Disaster Specialist – Independent Researcher – Author – Educator https://archaeodisasters.blogspot.com/

To my mommy Lily.

The sweet light of her love always protects my soul from the cruelty of the darkness

© Adamantia (Amanda) N. Laoupi. All rights reserved

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

2

PROJECT: DISASTERS AND HUMAN PSYCHE THE DARK DISASTERS IN HUMAN HISTORY. FROM SANIDAR CAVE TO CANOVA AND BEYOND

The co-mingling of religious and scientific explanations about disasters in the past, was a common factor in most ancient societies, at least till the Enlightenment. One can handle the sufferings by being an observer, an analyst, an actor or all of them. There is a very rich literature over this topic, especially how human psyche (body – mind – emotions - behaviour) reacts, at some conscious or unconscious level, when the phenomena are both unexpected and unexplainable.

On the other hand, science-based hazard management may not handle natural calamities always based on innocent intentions. Throughout human history, many hazardous phenomena, such as epidemics and famines, may have started as natural events, but they turned out to be severely aggravated by the human factor. Moreover, huge human migrations, plagues, blood-soaked wars, fierce conflicts, and devastating attacks have been caused after severe environmental catastrophes. Catastrophes are the triggering mechanism for collapses of even the mightiest of empires, as history has taught us. The breakdown of a highly structured society is deeper and might lead people to try and survive in near-anarchical conditions, while other societal forms are more resilient to catastrophes.

And, how easily can the disaster mitigation policies be turned into biopolitical abuses? Even though conventional approaches in risk management, try to address risks in a ‘value-neutral’ and ‘objective’ way, recent insights in Moral Philosophy and the Social sciences have shown that, this objectivity is illusory, and unfair as well, because ethical reflection is deeply needed in normative disciplines, such as risk management. All the same, the methodological approach of Applied Ethics concerning the dichotomy expressed as conflicts of interests, goals or values, such as stakeholder versus shareholder, Economy versus Ecology, security versus innovation dynamics, etc, adopted by Engineering, Economic and Social Sciences, should be rethought and revised.

Legal issues are often invisible in emergencies, but they are always present. Even today, a small number of countries have connected Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policy with their national development planning frameworks.

Generally speaking, there is a worldwide consensus on ethical and practical framework for disaster victims: A. Protection of Life, Security of the Person, Physical Integrity and Dignity (evacuations, relocations and other life-saving

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

3

measures, protection against the negative impacts of natural hazards, protection against violence including gender-based violence, camp security ; B. Protection of Rights Related to Basic Necessities of Life (access to goods and services, and humanitarian action, provision of adequate food, water and sanitation, shelter, clothing and essential health services; C. Protection of Other Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, education, property and possession, housing, livelihood and work; D. Protection of Other Civil & Political Rights (documentation, freedom of movement and right to return, family life and missing or dead relatives, expression, assembly & association, religion, and electoral rights).

According to Moral Philosophy, Vulnerability Principle (VP) should be present and activated in societies. VP is “moral agents which acquire special responsibilities to protect the interests of others to the extent that those others are especially vulnerable or in some way dependent on their choices and actions”. Refugees who have lost everything and they are without food, shelter or clean water, those stricken with natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods, those who are sick without access to medical care, and in general, people who lack the ability to protect their own most basic interests are amongst the most vulnerable people in the world. Although environmental protection was present in ancient societies, with laws and other forms of expression (e.g. religious and mythical normae which forbade or enhanced specific attitudes and behaviours), disaster planning and disaster mitigation within a legislative framework was almost absent. This issue would be more thoroughly investigated in the future.

Another key-concept is the Doomsday Argument and how humanity deals with it. If environmental ethics are controversial, disaster ethics are far more complicated and manifold. How may certain decision-making ‘centres’ ‘manipulate’ human groups with it, and how does humanity perceive its own survival? Even though there are few resources available for disaster ethics decision-making, policy makers, humanitarian agencies and individual responders need ethical guidance and training materials to better address the challenging and distressful ethical dilemmas in disasters.

In fact, the endless complexities of the human mind, along with disasters which are major change agents, have created the panorama of human cultures and landscapes all over the world. For us, today, the underlying question remains more important than ever: “who knows, who plans, who decides and why?” Future research should pay more emphasis on this perspective, when dealing not only with contemporary catastrophes, but also with archaeodisasters and past societies.

In parallel, disaster dynamics had proved to be so powerful that they changed the course of human history. Mighty empires collapsed and vanished or shocked irreversibly. Wide-ranging case studies have shown that natural factors triggered the fall of well-organized social systems when their normal coping mechanism failed. Drought or flooding, epidemic diseases like plague, syphilis Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

4

and smallpox, tremendous volcanic eruptions and meteoritic impacts, tsunami and earthquakes, influenced the circum-Mediterranean civilizations, the northwestern European, Asian and American civilizations. Disaster research is a relatively new area of interest among archaeologists, psychologists and other social scientists.

More attention should be given, also, to the varied social implications of hazards and disasters in the lives of people, especially from gender perspective, since biological, social, political and economic factors seem to influence the profile of vulnerability within human groups. How is to be vulnerable during disasters?

Women (especially the pregnant and post-partum women, the married and these who take care of their parents), face greater marginalization and oppression than their male counterparts, throughout human history, and still in many parts of the world. Gender differences and inequalities exist, especially in the case of natural resources or natural hazards. Children, the elderly, the chronically ill, people with mobility impairments, and people with mental illness, people of lower socioeconomic status, migrants, refugees and the homeless are, also, more vulnerable.

Thus, poverty, injustice, and inequality always aggravate when disasters happen. These societies become increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards.

Children, and, especially, children with disabilities, are the most vulnerable members of societies when facing disasters. Approximately, two-hundred million children worldwide experience various forms of disability. They have various physical, psychological, and educational issues in terms of disasters.

Their traumatic loss for the separation from caregivers is heavier. That’s why they need medical, familial, social, and educational protective frameworks and vital social networks.

Disaster Psychology is a relatively new discipline which focuses on the crisis intervention and stress reduction for survivors. It enables humans to understand the lingering trauma and mental wounds of men, women and children, which might otherwise go unrecognized. It includes refugees and survivors of torture, terrorism, genocide attempts, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, and other manmade or natural disasters.

But what is a human-made disaster? The wars, the technological accidents, the environmental catastrophe (the 6th extinction) or much more than these atrocities? It is the darkness, the madness and the sinister fate of humanity never to be taught by the errors of the past‌

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

5

A human-made disaster could be also the annihilation of dignity and freedom, of language and customs, of personal ideals, belief systems and memory, the violation of human rights, the catastrophe of monuments, ways of life and lifestyles, the violent dominion over less strong people with power of any kind, the use of wars, weapons, of any kind, tortures, brutalities, blackmails, distortion of truth (reality) to impose this power, and much more…

No comments, no expression of author’s ideals or beliefs. Just a presentation of humanity’s dark moments. No religion, no nation, no area, no ideology can miss this presentation. None of institutions or companies either.

Here is a presentation, not accusation or defamation of names, people or beliefs.

Just data from history. The truth of many victims has been already shown and declared in courts and transparent legal systems.

The style of writing is not “academic” per se, with bibliographies, contradicting references and personal beliefs (it would require, anyway, millions of titles, papers and data). Some information has been taken simply from Wikipedia, when it comes with known personalities. Of course, anyone should start from there and go deeper and further for the collection of data, controversies, hypotheses, and any kind of information existing today. This presentation belongs to the project “Disasters and Human Psyche” launched by the author in 2010. The researcher is not a judge, advocate or prosecutor, and she has not any gain from the categorization of data. All data are already public and worldwide known, and they are treated like “cases”. This presentation is about memory, ethics, power and life, as well as about the patterns of human psychology in relation to any crisis (perceived or real). It is an honoring process. Memory is life. People who have no memory, they don’t live anywhere.

We ask apologies for the millions of victims and cases who are not mentioned in this research. Unfortunately, human soul and mind have so many faces of darkness to register here…

This presentation is just another perspective of human “civilization”.

Mental health involves being able to face life in a realistic way--to take the good with the bad, the strengths with the limitations, the love with the hate, the joys with the disappointments. Finding that kind of balance is a lifelong task. It is a balance worth seeking because it allows us to do what we can do to make our lives the best that they can be. But the truth comes will all sorts of anxieties, disappointments, and responsibilities. WE should give voice to the darkness, too, if we want to spot it and to handle it in order to live in light.

The Psychology of the Mass (mob psychology, crowd psychology) is a branch of Social Psychology that explains how the individuals can change their

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

6

behavior when are along with a group of people, acting together against other humans. Gustave Le Bon in 1841, established the discipline, formulating the Contagion Theory.

The notorious Milgram Experiment tries to explain the limits of human compassion. It was conducted by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, professor at Yale University, beginning on July of 1961 CE. Human history has proven that, apart from the sadists, ordinary people can be transformed into a torturer with ease when societal constrains are subsided.

Moreover, the Psychology of War is fundamental for the study of human psyche, and the atrocities that accompany the conflicts (reaching even to cannibalism), are present in human history since the prehistoric times (especially after 10 000 before Current Era onwards). Under this perspective, a "nation" (group of people)- state will preserve ‘order’ in its own society while simultaneously creating an outlet for aggression through warfare projected against a rival "nation".

Elisabeth Kolbert provided a thought-provoking article in The New Yorker in 2011, where she discusses the thesis of Harvard psychology professor and best-selling science writer Steven Pinker in his book, that statistically the rates of violence and the violent deaths percentage are limiting in industrialized societies. In fact, the term ‘atrociology’ is coined. The idea can be found in a classic atrociological study, published in 1991 CE, by the anthropologists from Penn State and the University of Kentucky. Unfortunately, by reading only the next pages, you will observe that the violent instinct of humankind is stable and expressed through various and bizarre ways along human history. Killing violently is not a scheme in literature. Apart from the simple questions arisen from this phrase, violent ways of ‘killing’ exist, including any kind of torture and when we refer to ‘killing’ violently, we include people’s environments, beliefs, ways of life, customs, language, freedom, biological, ethical and psychological integrity, etc. Societies and civilizations did not alter human nature, though. Perhaps the mysticism doctrines of all eras and areas that speak about the dual nature of humans (angelic and daemonic) are truth, as reality and history confirm them. Humans are made to choose between them and have never achieved a ‘blissful’ stage of peace, love and compassion toward all the others who are different, less powerful or unlucky.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

7

CENSORSHIP – DESTRUCTION OF PEOPLE, HERITAGE and ANYTHING ‘DIFFERENT OR DANGEROUS’ – RULERS, RELIGIONS & IDEOLOGIES = BLAME THE ZEALOTRY

Often, the ways of life expressed by other groups of people, are considered dangerous, wrong, different or strange, so they must be destroyed in order to maintain the status quo. Here is only a glimpse into humanity’s dark past, present and unfortunately, future too.

The Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire occurred intermittently over a period of over two centuries between the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE by Nero and the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, according to which the Roman Emperors Constantine the Great and Licinius legalized the Christian religion. The estimation of the numbers of victims involved is inevitably based on inadequate sources, but one historian of the persecutions estimates the overall numbers as between 5,500 and 6,500. Nevertheless, during the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. It seems that local administrators and governors incited some antiChristian violence of their own.

In 392 CE, Byzantine emperor Theodosius prohibited by law all pagan worship. Pagan religions from this point were increasingly persecuted, a process which lasted throughout the 5th century. However, even with the closing of the Neoplatonic Academy by decree of Justinian I in 529 CE, its philosophers were permitted to remain within the Empire without converting to Christianity, although many of its scholars chose to move to the more tolerant Sassanid Persia. Lay Christians took advantage of these new anti-pagan laws by destroying and plundering the temples.

The Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt was one of the largest and most significant libraries in antiquity! The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Museum, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine Hellenic goddesses of the arts. The idea of a universal library may have been proposed by Demetrius of Phaleron, an exiled Athenian statesman living in Alexandria, to the Ptolemy I Soter, but the Library itself was probably not built until the reign of his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The Library quickly acquired many papyrus scrolls. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height. So, the city was regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning.

Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BCE, while during the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a daughter library was established in the Serapeum, a temple to the GrecoEgyptian god Serapis. Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

8

was burned once and destroyed, it declined gradually over the course of several centuries, starting with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BCE. Between 270 and 275 CE, the city of Alexandria saw a rebellion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. The daughter library of the Serapeum may have survived after the main Library's destruction. The Serapeum was vandalized and demolished in 391 CE under a decree issued by Coptic Christian Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, but it does not seem to have housed books at the time and was mainly used as a gathering place for Neoplatonist philosophers. In 642 CE, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of Amr ibn al-’As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar, saying: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them”.

Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 CE) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria of Egypt.

She was a prominent thinker, a great teacher of philosophy and astronomy, the first female mathematician well-recorded, a writer of scientific treatises, and a wise counselor. Hypatia is also known to have constructed astrolabes and hydrometers. Although she herself was a pagan, she was tolerant towards Christianity and taught many Christian students. In fact, ancient sources record that Hypatia was widely beloved by pagans and Christians alike and that she established great influence with the political elite in Alexandria. In March 415 CE, she was murdered by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter. Her murder shocked the entire Roman empire and transformed her into a “martyr for philosophy". During the Age of Enlightenment, Hypatia became a symbol of opposition to Catholicism, in the 20th century, she became seen as an icon for women’s rights and a precursor to the feminist movement.

According to historians of that era, leading Byzantinists and other researchers and scholars, 90,000 Christians were massacred by the Jews in the notorious Jewish revolt against the Byzantine emperor Heraclius or deported to Mesopotamia (sold as captives by the Persians), as part of the ByzantineSasanian War of 602-628 CE. Notorious are the Mamilla Pool Massacre (614 CE) of all Christian inhabitants in Jerusalem when Persians took the city leaving Jews to kill the population (they burnt also monasteries and churches, killing monks, children and women alike), and Tyre siege. Bands of Jews from Jerusalem, Tiberias, Galilee, Damascus, and even from Cyprus, united and undertook an incursion against Tyre, having been invited by the 4,000 Jewish inhabitants of that city to surprise and massacre the Christians on Easter night.

The Jewish army is said to have consisted of 20,000 men. The expedition, however, miscarried, as the Christians of Tyre learned of the impending danger and seized the 4,000 Tyrian Jews as hostages. The Jewish invaders destroyed the churches around Tyre, an act which the Christians avenged by killing two thousand of their Jewish prisoners.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

9

The French Wars of Religion were a prolonged period of war, atrocities and popular unrest between Catholics and Huguenots (Reformed / Calvinist Protestants) in the Kingdom of France, between 1562 and 1598 CE. It is estimated that three million people perished in this period from violence, famine, or disease in what is considered the second deadliest religious war in European history (surpassed only by the Thirty Years War, which took eight million lives)!

The Thirty Years' War was a conflict fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648 CE. But it turned out to be one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. Initially a war between various Protestant and Catholic States in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the European great powers, which employed relatively large mercenary armies. So, the war became less about religion and more of a continuation of the France – Habsburg rivalry for European political pre-eminence and a Habsburg attempt to rebuild the imperial authority in Germany.

The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229 CE) is considered by the modern researchers as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history". It was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in the area of Languedoc (Southern France). This theology, derived in part from earlier forms of Gnosticism, was dualistic, a belief in two equal and comparable transcendental principles: God, the force of good, and the Demiurge, the force of evil. Cathars held that the physical world was evil and created by this demiurge, which they called Rex Mundi (Latin, "King of the World"), who encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful.

Cathars rejected the Catholic priesthood, labelling its members, including the pope, unworthy and corrupted. Amongst other beliefs, they disagreed on the Catholic concept of the unique role of the priesthood, they taught that anyone, not just the priest, could consecrate the Eucharistic host or hear a Confession.

The pope called for a crusade against the Albigensians, with the view that a Europe free of heresy could better defend its borders against invading Muslims.

The time period of the Crusade coincided with the Fifth and Sixth Crusades in the Holy Land.

The Holy Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church, whose aim was to combat heresy. Before 1100 CE, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, and seldom resorting to executions. The Inquisition started in 12th century France to combat religious dissent. During the Late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, the concept and scope of the Inquisition significantly expanded. It expanded to other European countries, resulting in the Spanish and Portuguese Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

10

Inquisition. These operated inquisitorial courts throughout their empires in Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions focused particularly on the issue of Jewish Anusim and Muslim converts to Catholicism. On the other hand, the prosecution of witchcraft generally became more prominent throughout the late medieval and Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of that time – the Black Death, Hundred Years' War, and a gradual cooling of the climate that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries CE). Modern historians estimate the death toll up to several thousand people apart from the prosecuted who were many more in number.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars in western Asia and Europe initiated, supported and sometimes directed by the Catholic Church between the 11th and the 17th centuries. A number of historians restrict them to the armed pilgrimages to Jerusalem, others, though, include all Catholic military campaigns with a promise of spiritual benefits, all Catholic ‘holy wars’ or those with characteristic religious fervor. The most well-known are those fought against the Muslims of the Eastern Mediterranean for the Holy Land between 1096 and 1271 CE. Crusades were also fought from the 12th century against the Iberian Moors, the Ottoman Empire and for a variety of other reasons (e.g. for fighting pagans, heretics and other conflicts between Catholic groups).

The Arabic word for struggle or contest, particularly one for the propagation of Islam -jihād - was used for a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers, often taught as a duty by the Quran and traditions. ‘Franks’ and ‘Latins’ were the western Europeans confronted by the peoples of the Near East during the crusades, distinguished from the Byzantine Christians who were known as ‘Greeks’. Crusader sources used the term ‘Syrians’ to describe Arabic speaking Christians who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church, and ‘Jacobites’ for those who were members of the Syrian Orthodox Church.

Meanwhile, waves of Turkish migration into the Middle East had created an intersection of Arab and Turkish history, dating from the 9th century CE. Further waves of Turkish migration had changed the political situation in Western Asia again, particularly the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the 10th century. The Seljuks and their followers were from the Sunni Islamic tradition which quickly brought them into conflict in Palestine and Syria with the Shi'ite Fatimids. The habitually nomadic, Turkish speaking and occasionally shamanistic Seljuks, were alien to their sedentary, Arabic speaking subjects.

The byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes had attempted confrontation with the Seljuks to suppress sporadic raiding, but he was defeated in the battle of Mantzikert in August 26, 1071 CE. The siege and sack of Constantinople occurred in April 1204 CE and marked the culmination of the Forth Crusade. Crusader armies captured, looted, and destroyed parts of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

After the city's sacking, most of its territories were divided up among the Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

11

Crusaders. Byzantine aristocrats, also, established several small independent splinter states, eventually recapturing Constantinople in 1261 CE and proclaiming the reinstatement of the Empire. However, the restored empire never managed to reclaim its former territorial or economic strength, and eventually fell to the rising Ottoman Sultanate in the 1453 Siege of Constantinople. The sack of Constantinople is considered as a major turning point in medieval history. The Crusaders' decision to attack the world's largest Christian city was unprecedented and immediately controversial. The Byzantine Empire was left much poorer, smaller, and ultimately less able to defend itself against the Turkish conquests that followed; the actions of the Crusaders, thus, directly accelerated the collapse of Christendom in the East, and in the long run facilitated the expansion of Islam into Europe.

In parallel, the doctrine of papal supremacy caused conflict with eastern Christians, who claimed that the pope was only one of the five patriarchs of the Church (the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem, Rome). Furthermore, differences in custom, creed and practice spurred Pope Leo IX to send a legation to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 CE, event that had ended in mutual excommunication and East - West Schism.

In the Far East, Qin Shi Huang (259 BC - 210 BCE) was the founder of the Qin Dynasty and the first emperor of a unified China (unification in 221 BCE). He was born as a prince of the state of Qin under the name Ying Zheng or Zhao Zheng. He self-invented the title of ‘emperor’. It was traditionally said that the emperor had banned and burned many books and he had executed many scholars. Recent research suggests that the "burying of the Confucian scholars alive" is a Confucian martyrs' legend; rather, the emperor ordered the killing of a group of alchemists after having found that they had fooled him. In Han times, the Confucian scholars, who had served the Qin loyally, used that incident to distance themselves from the failed dynasty. His public work-projects included the unification of diverse state walls into a single Great Wall of China and a massive new national road system, as well as the city-sized mausoleum guarded by the famous life-sized Terracotta Army. The Chinese historian Sima Qian, writing a century after the First Emperor's death, reported that it took 700,000 men (slaves) to construct that mausoleum. The secrets of the tomb were maintained, as most of the workmen who built the tomb were killed.

The Nazi book burnings was a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (the "DSt") to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities. Works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires. The book burnings Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

12

stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship. Heinrich Heine wrote, prophetically, in his 1820-1821 play Almansor, the famous admonition, "Dort, wo man BĂźcher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen": "Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people". The famous blind /deaf writer Helen Keller published an Open Letter to German Students: “You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on"!

The September 11 attacks (also referred to as 9/11) were a series of four coordinated symbolic terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al -Qaeda against the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks resulted in 2,997 victim fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and additional victims due to attack-related diseases in the months and years following the events. The events were the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history.

Another disgusting moment of dark human history was the Beslan school siege (also referred to as the Beslan school hostage crisis or Beslan massacre), that started on 1 September 2004, lasted three days, involved the illegal imprisonment of over 1,100 people as hostages (including 777 children) and ended with the deaths of at least 334 people. The crisis began when a group of armed Islamic militants, mostly Ingush and Chechen, occupied School Number One (SNO) in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia (autonomous republic in the North Caucasus region belonging to the Russian Federation).

Furthermore, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), aka the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is officially known as the Islamic State (IS) or Daesh by its Arabic -language acronym. The terrorists follow a fundamentalist, Salafi jihadist doctrine of Sunni Islam. The United Nations as well as many international organizations and individual countries have been designated it as a terrorist organization. The beheadings, various tortures and hideous kinds of death of both soldiers and civilians, including journalists and aid workers, the rapes, abductions and the destruction of cultural heritage, were the daily agenda of those terrorists in the name of Allah. The United Nations holds ISIL responsible for committing human rights abuses, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. They committed, also, ethnic cleansing on a historic and unprecedented scale in northern Iraq.

Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people for the foremost spiritual leader of the "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, in fact, the newest of the classical schools of it. The 14th and current Dalai Lama lives as a refugee in India and not in Lhasa. Since the time of the 5th Dalai Lama in the 17th century, his personage has always been a symbol of unification of the state Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

13

of Tibet, where he has represented Buddhist values and traditions. Throughout its troubled history, several Tibetan representatives, in 1913 CE signed a treaty between Tibet and Mongolia, proclaiming mutual recognition and their independence from China, however the legitimacy of the treaty and declared independence of Tibet was rejected by both the Republic of China and the current People’s Republic of China. The Dalai Lamas headed the Tibetan government afterwards despite that, until 1951. China invaded Tibet in 1950.

Inside its borders and across the world, Tibetans have never stopped believing Tibet is a nation. Tibetans still resist China's rule and defy its oppression, even after more than 60 years of occupation. The 14th Dalai Lama supported the possibility that his next incarnation could be a woman. As an "engaged Buddhist" the Dalai Lama has an appeal straddling cultures and political systems making him one of the most recognized and respected moral voices today.

In parallel, the Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions by the Myanmar government against the Muslim Rohingya people. It consists of two phases, the first of which began in October 2016 CE and ended in January 2017 and the second of which began in August 2017 and is ongoing as of now.

The crisis has forced over a million Rohingyas to flee to neighboring countries, most of whom have fled to Bangladesh. The largest wave of Rohingyas to flee Myanmar occurred in 2017 and it resulted in the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War. The UN has found evidence of wide-scale human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, arson of Rohingya villages, businesses, and schools, and infanticides. A study estimated in January 2018 that during the genocide, the military and the local Rakhine Buddhists killed at least 24,000 Rohingya people, gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence took place against 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, and 36,000 Rohingya were thrown into fire. It is now recognized worldwide as a genocide. This stateless Indo-Aryan ethnic group who predominantly follow Islam, faced such legal conditions that it have been widely compared to Apartheid by many international academics, analysts and political figures.

Recently another crime has been brought to light: China’s hi-tech war against the Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others. Since, 2016 CE, in detention and ‘re-education’ centers in North-west China, these ‘minorities’, estimated being over 3 million people, are forced to be captive for at least one year and work like slaves, to suffer medical ‘therapies’, to live away from their relatives without any communication, to disavow their Islamic identities, to learn and use the Chinese official language instead of their own. The Uyghurs are a Turkic minority ethnic group originated from and culturally affiliated with Central and Eastern Asia. They appear in Chinese records under other names since the 4th century CE.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

14

The authoritarian regimes throughout history are notorious for the violation of all human rights, and the madness of their rulers. According to the first-person account of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (604-562 BCE),this arrogant king was struck down for his disbelief in the Hebrews’ God, leaving his palace and living in the wild. His seven-year descent into animal-like insanity is one of the most fascinating sections of the Old Testament book of Daniel.

Gaius (Caligula), Emperor of Rome (12-41 CE), was the cruelest and craziest Roman emperor, known for his lavish projects, his sadism and his eccentricity. The emperor Nero (37-68 CE) was his nephew. Although he was because he was aided by some very able men, including his tutor – the writer Seneca, he was also unquestionably a murderer, starting with his stepbrother Britannicus, with whom he had been supposed to share power, and progressing through his wife Octavia, whom he deserted for his lover, Poppaea, who then had been executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery. Nero wanted his own mother to be murdered using a collapsible boat, but the whole attempt went wrong, and she had to be beaten to death instead. He then kicked Poppaea to death in a fit of anger while she was pregnant with his child. But, contrary to the myth, Nero did not start the great fire of Rome, nor did he ‘fiddle’ (nor even play the lyre), while the city burned. He undoubtedly persecuted Christians, though, in large numbers.

Attila the Hun (ca 406 -453 CE) became the leader of the Huns in 434 CE and over the next 10 years, he led multiple invasions and succeeded in capturing territories that encompassed modern-day Hungary, Spain, Greece, and Italy.

Attila was a skilled horseman and a tactical military leader. His authority remained unchallenged throughout his rule and in time, because he turned the Huns into a lethal fighting force. He is notorious for his war methods, he often rampaged through enemy colonies, burning down or capturing towns, and killing every single civilian occupant. In Italy, he caused such destruction that the entire city of Aquileia was brought to its knees. His men were trained to be ruthless towards their enemies.

Genghis Khan (ca 1162-1227 CE), born under the name of Temujin, was a Mongolian warrior and ruler who went on to create the largest empire in the world – the Mongol Empire. From 1206 to 1227, for 21 years, his troops marauded through northeast Asia destroying any tribes that got in their way and conquering nearly 12 million square miles (31 million square kilometers) of land. But Genghis Khan was ruthless in his expansion. He created a bloodbath that swept through Asia and Europe, leaving behind millions of dead people. He was also known to be tolerant of other religions and gave full religious freedom to everyone in his empire if they paid him taxes. One cannot quite comprehend the exact number of people Genghis Khan killed during his extended conquests in Asia and Europe, but historians speak about 38 to 40 million. In fact, evidence shows that during the period of his conquest in mainland China, the Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

15

native Chinese population declined by millions. Modern historians also claim that he may have devastated around three-quarters of contemporary Iran’s population during the war between the Mongols and the Khwarezmid Empire.

In fact, the Mongol expansion might have reduced the world population by about 11%.

The Zheng-de Emperor of China (1491-1521 CE) is considered as one of the most notorious rulers of the Ming Dynasty for both his foolishness and his cruelty.

Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584 CE), who was the first czar of all Russia, expanded Moscow’s influence into the lands of the ancient Eastern European federation (Kievan Rus). He took great pleasure in bringing members of the nobility to heel through torture and sadistic executions. In 1581 Ivan murdered his own son and heir, striking him with a pointed staff in a fit of rage. Despite his cruelty, he is one of the most respected czars in Russia’s history.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jughashvili (1878- 1953 CE) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician. Although initially he governed the Soviet Union as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. Being a communist, he ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, formalizing these ideas as Stalinism. To eradicate accused “enemies of the working class”, he instituted the ‘Great Purge’, in which over a million were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. By 1937, he had complete personal control over the party and state. Widely considered as one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin retained popularity in Russia and Georgia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as a major world power. Conversely, his totalitarian government has been widely condemned for committing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, deportations, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines which killed millions (total estimated number of victims from his government = 5,8-8,1 million people).

Mao Zedong (1893-1976 CE), aka Chairman Mao, became the founding father of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – a single-party state, the chairman of the Communist Party of China from 1949 to 1976 and the ruler of the country. His Marxist – Leninist ideology, his military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. His campaigns against landlords, the suppression of the ‘counter-revolutionaries and the Korean War, altogether, caused the deaths of several-million Chinese. Later, his autocratic and totalitarian methods were responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 30 to 80 million victims through starvation, persecution, prison-labor and mass executions.

Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975 CE) was a Spanish general and dictator who ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975. The Spanish Civil War began Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

16

in July 1936 and officially ended with Franco's victory in April 1939, leaving 190,000 to 500,000 dead. During the first decade of Franco's rule following the end of the Civil War in 1939 saw continued repression and the killing of an undetermined number of political opponents. Estimation is difficult and controversial, but the general number of people killed in that period lies between 15,000 to 50,000. On 14 June 1940, Spanish forces in Morocco occupied Tangiers and did not leave it until the war's end in 1945. After the war, Franco allowed many former Nazis, and other former Fascists, to flee to Spain.

After the second worldwide war, the Spanish government tried to destroy all evidence of its cooperation with the Axis. In 2010 documents were discovered showing that on 13 May 1941, Franco ordered his provincial governors to compile a list of Jews while he negotiated an alliance with the Axis powers.

Franco supplied Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Nazis' ‘Final Solution’, with a list of 6,000 Jews in Spain. Francoism preached the devotion to the traditional role of a woman in society, that is being a loving daughter and sister to her parents and brothers, being a faithful wife to her husband, and residing with her family. Official propaganda confined the role of women to family care and motherhood. Immediately after the civil war most progressive laws passed by the Republic aimed at equality between the sexes were nullified. Women could not become judges or testify in a trial. They could not become university professors. Their affairs and economic lives had to be managed by their fathers and husbands. Until the 1970s a woman could not have a bank account without a co-sign by her father or husband. In the 1960s and 1970s these restrictions were somewhat relaxed. Franco belongs to the group of Spanish dictators.

One of the cruelest amongst them was Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (1915-2006 CE), who was a Chilean general and politician ruling as dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, first as the President of the Government Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, before being declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974. The support of the United States was crucial to the coup and the consolidation of power afterward, overthrowing the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Alliente.

By the time of his death, about 300 criminal charges were still pending against him in Chile for numerous human rights violations, atrocities, corruption, tax evasion and embezzlement during and after his rule. The list of his crimes and the tortures forced on his victims is large and disgusting. Forced disappearances, murder, and various kind of torture, ended to at least 3,197 people dead and about 29,000 tortured. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973. Modern researchers estimate that 1,500–2,000 Chileans were killed or ‘disappeared’ during the Pinochet regime. The "routine sadism was taken to extremes" in the prison camps. The rape of women was common, including sexual torture. Beating with extremely cruel methods and leaving to die from internal injuries, abuse and executions were the style of the dictator. Then, corpses were interred in secret graves, dropped into rivers or the Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

17

ocean, or just dumped on urban streets in the night. The ‘ Free Helicopter Rides’, or ‘death flights’ (vuelos de la muerte) when thousand victims were thrown alive from helicopters over the Pacific or the Andes, were daily phenomena in Chile of Pinochet. In Argentina of the Admiral Luis María Mendía (1925-2007 CE), the victims were known as ‘Los Desaparecidos’ (up to 30,000 victims), but this was a preferred method also applied by other dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in Philippines or states such as Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hong Kong, Colombia, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany under Nazis, Guatemala, India, Iran, Iraq, Morocco / Western Sahara, North Korea, Pakistan, Rumania, Russia, Spain under Franco (up to 150,000 victims including children), Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Turkey.

Especially, North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or DPR Korea), is widely accused of having perhaps the worst human rights record in the world. A 2014 UN inquiry concluded that "the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world". Amnesty International reports of severe restrictions on the freedom of association, expression and movement, arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment resulting in death, and executions. Furthermore, people perceived as hostile to the government (e.g.

Christians or critics of the leadership), are deported to labor camps without trial, often with their whole family and mostly without any chance of being released.

The North Korean regime denies these allegations. The security apparatus is very extensive, exerting strict control over residence, travel, employment, clothing, food and family life. North Korea is governed by the "Ten Principles of the One-Ideology System", which establishes standards for governance and a guide for the behaviors of North Koreans. They are ruled by the Kim dynasty, which in North Korea is referred to as the Mount Paektu Bloodline, descending from the country's first leader Kim Il-sung since 1948. His grandson Kim Jongun is the present dictator of the country.

Finally, two more issues with ethical, socio-economic and cultural perspectives, are the following. Globalization, not as few universal trends or wide use of technological achievements by most humans (phenomenon that existed since the dawn of civilization, of course in a different extensity, intensity, velocity and impact than today), but as annihilation of the variety of human cultures, voices, perspectives, needs and expressions. A global net which treats people as numbers, machines, recycling parts of a system that enslaves humanity perhaps with the sneakiest and cruelest way in all its history.

Governments, businesses, organizations, persons and close groups are responsible for this. An amazingly small percentage of people in the name of money (as power) keeps the nations under misery. And this ideology is surely a crime against humanity itself. Transportation and communication advances helped globalization to be the absolute lord of life and thinking among the Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

18

nations of the world. Capital, technology and data (information) annihilate people as cultural units, ethical and original beings and the environmental sources are only for gain (for the very few).

Globalization thus, could be the totally opposite ideology of Anarchism, because it does not allow the variety, the autonomy, or humans to be freely expressed. Anarchism is a radical political movement (everyone is a citizen, responsible for its fate), that is highly skeptical towards authority and rejecting all forms of hierarchy. The state is undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful.

Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and other forms of free associations. During Prehistory people lived in anarchistic societies (without extended established authorities) long before the establishment of formal states, kingdoms or empires and other hierarchical bodies. It wasn't until the 19th century that a self-conscious political movement was formed. During the latest half of 19th and the first decades of 20th century, anarchist movement flourished to most parts of the world, and had a significant role in worker's struggles for emancipation. Generally, Anarchism employs various tactics in order to meet their ideal ends, these can be broadly separated in revolutionary and evolutionary tactics. Revolutionary tactics aim to bring down authority and state, having taken a violent turn in the past. Evolutionary tactics aim to prefigure how an anarchist society would be look like. Anarchist's thought, criticism and praxis has played a part in diverse fields of human society. It has been accused mainly of being internally inconsistent, violent and utopian. Its etymological origin of the word anarchism is from the ancient Greek word anarkhia, meaning "without a ruler", composed of the prefix a- (i.e. "without") and the word arkhos (i.e. "leader" or "ruler"). The word anarchism appears in English from 1642 as anarchisme and the word anarchy from 1539.

Most notable precursors to anarchism in the ancient world were in China (by Taoist philosophers Zhuangzi and Lao Tzu) and Greece (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Socrates, Cynics and Stoics). During the Middle Ages, there was no anarchistic activity except some ascetic religious movements in the Islamic world or in Christian Europe.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

19

GENOCIDE (one of the biggest scourges of humanity)

As Genocide is considered each intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial or religious group) in whole or in part. This hybrid world is a combination of two words, of the Greek γένος (race, people) and the Latin suffix -caedo (act of killing). Although a universal and old phenomenon, the term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 CE. This researcher pointed out the difference between the wars of extermination that took place during ancient times and Middle Ages, and the modern wars of the ‘civilized’ societies.

A genocide may include: (a) Killing members of the group, (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; this could include, also, deaths from the deliberate infection of enemies (e.g. of Tutsi women with HIV/AIDS through rape in the Rwandan genocide or from the abuse and denial of food inflicted by ISIL on Yazidi sex slaves through sexual slavery), (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (by eliminating key-elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure), (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (e.g. during the 15th century, elite military units made up of soldiers called ‘Janissaries’ were created; they were originally staffed by Christian youths from the Balkan provinces, taken into the corps as children, who were converted to Islam on being drafted into the Ottoman service; they were indoctrinated to fight and die for the Ottoman sultan, but they were considered as kuls, which technically means ‘slaves’. Or the child suicide bombers used mainly by the Islamic extremists around the world).

Sociologists and psychologists discern eight stages in the psychology of the killers. Through stage 1, the Classification makes people divide into “us and them”. Through stage 2, Symbolization combined with hatred, forges pariah groups. Through stage 3, Dehumanization makes "One group to deny the humanity of the other group, so members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases". Through stage 4, Organization is built by special army units or militias who are often trained and armed...". Through stage 5, Polatization makes people to hate " groups broadcasting polarizing propaganda...". Through stage 6, during Preparation, victims are “identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity...”; the whole situation is declared as emergency. Through the stage 7, Extermination, the killers don’t believe that their victims are fully human. Through the final stage 8, Denial is the characteristic behavior of the perpetrators, because they deny having committed any crime!

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

20

Since 1948 CE, The United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide. The term has been coined and applied to the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and many other mass killings including the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the Indonesian genocide, the Guatemalan genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and after 1980 the Bosnian genocide, the Anfal genocide, the Darfur genocide, the Rwandan genocide and the Rohingya genocide. Others are listed in Genocides in history and List of genocides by death toll (just check the links and search further for details).

It seems that between 1956 and 2016, a total of 43 genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people! The UNHCR estimated, also, that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008.

Since then, a plethora of studies that review the mental health impact of genocides have took place, investigating a variety of outcomes, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress, as well post-traumatic growth. Some studies documented a negative impact, while others found resilience or no association notwithstanding immense cruelties to which survivors had been exposed. Some of this variability may be due to the methodological challenges. Some are common to any epidemiological research and include recruitment bias, measurement error, and the need to adjustment for potential confounding. Attempts to attribute symptoms to the experience of genocide may be complicated by confounding factors unrelated to the genocide, such as discrimination in another country due to migration or poverty. Other factors, however, are specific to genocide research. One is memoralization, whereby groups valorize, marginalize, or disable acts of remembrance, or forgetting. Anthropological research has reported how some genocide survivors or children of survivors challenge the pathologizing construct of long-term impact of genocides.

But in human history, mass murdering was not a rare phenomenon at all.

Of course, the disappearance of Neanderthals has been attributed to many different reasons by the scientists, but one major theory supports that Homo Sapiens sapiens gave the last blow to the isolated groups of Neanderthals across Europe, replacing them totally at the end (like the colonization of new species).

Generally speaking, Neanderthals (Homo Neanderthalensis) are classified as paleoanthropological specimens of Pleistocene species of the Homo genus, which inhabited Europe and parts of West and Central Asia. Compared to anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals were stockier, with shorter legs and bigger bodies, as an adaptation to preserve heat in cold climates. They were named after one of the first sites where their fossils were discovered in 1856 Current Era, the Neander Valley, just east of DĂźsseldorf, at that time in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia (now in North Rhine - Westphalia, Germany).

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

21

Nevertheless, Neanderthals coexisted and admixed with anatomically modern humans for several thousand years before their ‘disappearance’, as paleoanthropological finds have confirmed. Biological, anatomical, pathological, climatic, environmental and social factors seem to have been interdependently contributed to the phenomenon of their extinction. Moreover, according to the Human Genome Project, the nuclear genome of modern humans comprises approximately 3.2 billion nucleotides of DNA (= base pairs), divided into twenty-four linear molecules, the shortest fifty million nucleotides in length and the longest 260 billion nucleotides, each contained in a different chromosome. In December 2013, a high coverage Neanderthal genome was reported for the first time. It stemmed from a Neanderthal female bone fragment found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia from around 50 000 to 100 000 years ago. The genetic difference between Neanderthals and modern humans is slightest, in nucleotide sequences (= the nucleotides are organic molecules, parts of the DNA and RNA, mainly responsible for the metabolism at the cellular level). 99.7% of the nucleotide sequences of the modern human and Neanderthal genomes are identical. And the Neanderthals contributed up to 4% of modern Eurasian genomes.

Iliad by Homer describes another human characteristic in war. The winners kill all the male enemies and sell the women and children as slaves or keep them as their own property back home. This was a tactic applied to all societies from antiquity till modern era. But the crime of western societies through imperialism is far beyond those war atrocities.

All empires throughout human history (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, Persia, China, Mongolia, Byzantium, Vikings, Venetians, Arabs etc) tried to wipe out the strong ‘elements’ of their subjects and enemies. But, starting in the 15th century CE, some European states (transforming into empires) established their own empires during the European colonial period. The Belgian, British, Danish, Dutch, French, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Japan, United States, China, Germany and Italy, established colonies across large areas too far away from the homeland.

All the colonial eras suffered tremendously under the command of foreigners who claimed to be the absolute rulers of these countries. From South Africa and the most African states, to the lands of Asia and South America, apart from economic and geopolitical reasons, imperialists destroyed local tribes, cultures, languages, beliefs and memories in the name of interest.

Modern historians calculated that by 1800, before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans already controlled at least 35% of the globe, and by 1914 CE, they had gained control of 84% of the globe.

From the ‘discovery’ of Americas by the Europeans onwards, it is estimated that over nine million Native Americans died from violent conflict or Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

22

disease. For too long this history has been under-recognized and too little discussed. Along with the persons, died also their cultures, environments, languages, beliefs, ways of life and valuable knowledge. Today there are over 500 Native American tribes in the United States, each with a distinct culture, way of life and history. Even today, Native Americans face large challenges to cope with the discrimination.

Especially the Conquistadors, who invaded and conquered much of the Americas and the Philippines Islands and other islands in Asia Pacific. were the knights, explorers, and professional soldiers of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. They sailed beyond Europe to the Americas (North, Central and South), Oceania, Africa, and Asia, conquering territory and opening trade routes. Their troops exterminated whole populations, cultures and societies (e.g. the Inca empire in S. America, the Aztec empire and the kingdoms of Maya in C. America).

The indigenous tribes of Oceania, suffered tremendously, also, by the arrival of foreigners during the European colonization. Apart from the indigenous tribes in the islands of the Pacific and the Maori culture in New Zealand, the famous civilization of Aborigines in Australia was destroyed too.

The colonizers brought many of their own plants and animals, including rabbits, deer, opossum, willow, poplar, gorse, which they introduced into the environment without permission or attention. These flourished in the environment but only at the huge expense of the indigenous plants and animals.

They introduced, also, without forethought, firearms and alcohol to them, which, together with disease, served to massacred half of the population. Then, under the blessings of their God and religion, they taught the local populations doctrines that destroyed their religion, art, and language. All these phenomena were genocides.

Although, according to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (it took effect on June 1, 2005 CE, and was introduced as part of a package of penal law reform in the process preceding the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of EU), it is illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, Turkish government institutions, or Turkish national heroes such as Mustafa Kemal AtatĂźrk (1881- 1938 CE), many intellectuals amongst modern Turks and a pleiad of foreign countries and institutions around the world, recognized the crimes of Turks against the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Maronites and Kurds (at the level of genocide) during the 20th century CE. They are considered as holocausts, because they resulted in the mass murdering and expulsion of millions of people from their homeland, though tortures (and rapes and impregnating of young girls), extreme conditions / starvation / forced labor, and barbaric ways against women, children and elderly. Moreover, the existing spots of populations inside Turkey, suffer various economic, social, educational and other kinds of discrimination. The same scenario was used during the Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

23

Turkish military invasion in Cyprus in 1974 CE, against the local populations of Greeks who withdrawn in the half south part of the island (the initial ambition of Turks was to take the whole island). The northern part remains under occupation. In 1976 and again in 1983, the European Commission of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of repeated violations of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

24

ENVIRONMENT AS KEY-FACTOR

The Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene (2.588 million years ago to 11 700 years ago) and the Holocene (11 700 years ago to today). It is the Age of the humans. The Quaternary geological record is preserved in greater detail than that for earlier periods, and it is rich in archaeological evidence, too. During this era, two major extinction events happened: The Late Pleistocene or Last Ice Age extinction and The Holocene or Recent Extinction. Humans have played a very important role on both.

Initially, Homo erectus and other hominids had been accused of hunting with their tools the surviving megafauna (animals more than 900 kg) of the Pliocene Era in Africa. Now, the scientists propose a supernova explosion dated to 2.6 million years ago (almost 600 000 years after Lucy, the famous remains of an Australopithecus afarensis).

After the emergence of modern humans, few known extinctions occurred in those areas of longest human occupancy (Africa and Eurasia), since the migration of those human groups into other areas is linked to the loss of many large vertebrate species. For example, it is estimated that around 50 000 years ago, Indonesia lost about 50% of its large mammals, when modern humans migrated there; likewise, their appearance in Australia 60 000 to 40 000 years ago resulted in large mammals and other vertebrates disappearing.

The Ice Age Extinction Event (from about 15 000 to 9000 years ago) is characterized by the extinction of many large mammals (mega-fauna) weighing more than 40 kg. In North America, around 33 out of 45 genera of large mammals went extinct, in South America, 46 of 58, in Australia 15 of 16, in Europe 7 of 23, and in sub-Saharan Africa only 2 of 44. Only in South America and Australia did the extinction occur at family levels or higher.

Modern scientists have proposed various hypotheses for this extinction.

The two main hypotheses are: (1) the animals died off due to environmental and climate change or (2) the animals were exterminated as a result of human activity - the ‘prehistoric overkill hypothesis’.

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), the Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus or Giant Deer), the cave lion (Panthera spelaea), the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), and sabertoothed cats (Machairodontinae) were amongst the major mega-fauna species exterminated during that period.

In ecological terms, mega-fauna species are generally K-strategists. Their growth pattern is characterized by large body, long juvenile period and great longevity, slow population growth rates, low death rates, and few or no natural predators capable of killing adults; population grows exponentially and then stabilizes around a max value. Their population size is characterized as smaller, but stable. Their environment is stable but characterized by diverse ecology.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

25

Their reproductive strategy is characterized by mate choice, pair bonds, large investment, parental care and few offspring. They are highly vulnerable to human overexploitation.

The prehistoric Overkill Hypothesis, though, seems not to be universally applicable and is imperfectly confirmed. For instance, there are ambiguities around the timing of sudden extinctions of marsupial Australian mega-fauna. In parallel, those populations of humans, such as the Clovis culture in Americas, were too small to be ecologically significant.

Even more, recent research has demonstrated that the annual mean temperature of the current interglacial, at least, what we have seen for the last 10 000 years, is no higher than that of previous interglacials, yet some of the same large mammals survived similar temperature increases. And the megafauna was more abundant and more widely distributed during interglacial.

Moreover, Second Order-Predation Hypothesis (which recognises an initial disturbance in ecological balance) is more consistent with extinction than is Overkill. And, the fossil record of Australia reflects the human-driven megafaunal extinction.

On the other hand, The Hyper-disease Hypothesis claims that the extinction of large mammals during the late Pleistocene was an indirect result of the newly arrived aboriginal humans, because animals and highly virulent pathogens travelled, also, with them (like chickens or domestic dogs, too).

Nevertheless, the disease hypothesis is not applicable in any case of Pleistocene fauna, due to the absence of evidence and various, pathological, immunological, biological and other reasons.

Another perspective wants both parameters to be capable of the overkill: humans and climate. The mega-events that took place during the whole history of our planet were always the result of interdependent triggering mechanisms, phenomena and processes. New research seems to be in tune with the aforementioned statement.

Drastic climate change may have caused severe changes in habitats and diets of animals. The lack of minerals could be the triggering mechanism for metabolic disorder and bone diseases (osteoporosis, osteofibrosis, osteomalacia, osteolysis, cartilage atrophy and fractures) resulting both in losing the ability to follow the herd and in high traumatism - in the formation of false joints, ulcers and friction grooves. This kind of change decimated, for example, the woolly mammoths, whose extinction has been debated already since 1700 Current Era. In fact, three major waves have been detected by scientists, the first dated around 24 000-20 000 years ago, the second dated to around 12 000-9000 years ago and the third dated approximately to 3700 years ago, in the last small survived groups in Alaska and Russian northern areas. The reading of mammoths’ complete genome has just disclosed another genetic bottleneck during the period between 300 000 to 250 000 years ago.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

26

The extinction rates have been continued throughout Holocene. Wellknown fauna extinction episodes have taken place in the islands of the Mediterranean Sea about 10 000 years ago, during the settlement of Madagascar starting with the arrival of modern humans 2000 years ago, in Hawaii between 1600 to 1400 Before Current Era, and, finally, in New Zealand after Polynesian settlers between 1200 to 800 Before Current Era. Notably, all terrestrial vertebrates outside Africa and Asia, that weighed more than 1000 kilograms, have become extinct!

Today, a broad party of intellectuals believes that we are, at this moment, at the beginning of an accelerated anthropogenic mass extinction According to researchers, by keeping the current rates of human destruction of the biosphere, one-half of all species will be extinct in 100-year period!

Other researchers are sceptical about the current mass extinction arguing that, even if the current rate of extinction is comparable or higher than the rate during a great mass extinction event, as long as the current rate does not last more than a few thousand years, the overall effect will be small. But, the detailed analysis of the human impact on the environment are beyond the scope of this research.

Unfortunately, the impact of human intervention on the degradation of ecosystems, climate, biological richness, and any form of pollution is already huge; we just hope not to be irreversible. Humans have destroyed the oceans, the quality of the air, the forests and the fertility of the soils around the world. In an unprecedently unethical way, only few groups of people & countries make all the other population of the Earth to suffer daily. These disasters know no borders, they are universal.

Pollution, means the presence of pollutants (substances, noise, radiation, etc) in the environment in such a quantity, concentration or duration that may cause harm on human health, on the proliferation of living organisms and on the equilibrium of ecosystems, making the environment unfit for human uses. Its main forms are air, water and soil, noise and light, littering, thermal and radioactive pollution. Some of these existed since antiquity (e.g. the cases of Greek, Roman and Chinese metal production).

Each form of pollution that is characterized by the presence of pathogenic micro-organisms in the environment, or other indicators that imply the probability of the presence of such micro-organisms is called Contamination. It causes undesirable and dangerous change in the natural, the chemical and the biological properties of air, soil, subsoil, and the water, which can influence and threaten the health, the survival and the operations of all forms of life.

On the other hand, the anthropogenic pollution or any other change in the environment, which is likely to impact: a. the ecological balance, b. the quality of life and the health of residents, c. the historical and cultural heritage, and d. the aesthetic values, can be considered as Degradation. It is the negative impact

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

27

of pollution on the ecological equilibrium, the quality of life, and the salvage of cultural heritage and the aesthetic values of human communities.

Thus, crises, wars, terrorism, environmental accidents caused by humans, modern activities (such deforestation, natural sources over-exploitation, constructions of huge dams, pollution) and natural phenomena, do not destroy only human infrastructures, but also natural landscapes and many valuable ancient monuments and other features (archaeological, cultural, ethnographic, ecological, scientific and industrial), which today are known as Heritage. These features may be in plain sight or “hidden” in modern landscapes. The landscapes may be natural or cultural or both.

According to the Article 27 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “the right to a cultural heritage is an integral element of humanity” and “the diversity of such resources is essential for sustaining the ability to cope with the past, present and future”.

Whole tribes disappeared or are at great risk by the anthropogenic climatic change. Their entire way of life, their cultural identity, beliefs, language etc, along with their ‘biological identity’ have been changed or destroyed. The environmental catastrophe changes, also, the characteristics, hormonal balance, homeostasis and psychosomatic adaptation of all modern humans.

Under this perspective, the human-made disasters can be included in the list of the ‘crimes against humanity’.

Another hideous social phenomenon that remains a human taboo is cannibalism. Generally, anthropologists categorize cannibalism into several typologies, such as: dietary (gluttony, gastronomic, preferential), ceremonial (ritual, magical), obligatory or emergency cannibalism (survival, famine), competition or revenge cannibalism, fertility, pietistic cannibalism, mortuary cannibalism for “the maintenance and reproduction of the social order", punishment and revenge cannibalism, shipwreck, and siege cannibalism, etc.

Usually, environmental stress on human populations, can lead to cannibalism as a survival mechanism when the environmental resources are restricted or fluctuated.

Various pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas performed sacrificial rituals. Amongst the most notorious were: (1) Incas, who performed child sacrifices (children were considered as pure beings) during or after important events, such as the death of their emperor (Sapa Inca) or during/after a famine, eclipse, earthquake or epidemics, (2) the Teotihuacano culture, where burials of children have been uncovered at the four corners of the Pyramid of the Sun and newborn skeletons have been associated with altars, and (3) the Aztecs, who practiced human sacrifice on a large scale (by thousands).

The most dreadful of all were combined with anthropophagy, when they offered human victims to the god Huitzilopochtli to restore the blood he lost (as the Sun was engaged in a daily battle to light the world), and to prevent the end Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

28

of the world that could happen on each 52-year cycle. The name of the Aztec god means "Blue hummingbird on the left". The xiuhcoatl (turquoise or fire serpent) was his mystical weapon. The great temple at Tenochtitlan was surmounted by two sanctuaries, the one on the left dedicated to the god Tlaloc (god of Rain and Agriculture) and the one on the right to the god Huitzilopochtli (god of the Sun and the War).

The preparation of Tlacatlaolli (= a Nahuatl word roughly meaning ‘maize-and-man stew’ or alternately ‘human stew’) was the culmination of an elaborate Aztec ritual of human sacrifice, described in the Codex of Mendoza.

Today, many scientists (anthropologists, ecologists, sociologists, theologists and psychologists) have been studied this phenomenon.

Evidence for survival cannibalism at Anasazi sites of southwestern USA has caused friction in the scientific community. In fact, this is one of the great prehistoric puzzles: what pushed those people who created one of the most sophisticated civilizations in North America (their modern-day descendants are the highly spiritual Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo peoples), to abandon their beautiful stone dwellings in the mid-12th century Current Era, in great haste, leaving behind even food cooking over fires and sandals hanging on pegs?

In Chaco Canyon, Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, and Mesa Verde researchers have already discovered at least thirty-eight sites with cannibalistic evidence. Population pressure and environmental problems seem to be the main culprits for the onset of such attitude and for their subsequent demise as well.

But, what can we say about the cannibalistic rituals of the Neolithic and Palaeolithic tribes? Cannibalism (either survival or aggressive), is a behaviour occurred since the beginning of human history. Today, we can’t tell for sure if it was a ‘usual’ one, amongst Neanderthals and archaic hominids, too.

Stone core-choppers, chipping debris and the bones of bison, deer, wild sheep and other animals, along with the butchered remains of at least six human children and adolescents, were the finds of an archaeological excavation at the cave called Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, northeastern Spain), one of the oldest human sites in Europe (only Dmanisi in Georgia being older). The human bodies were decapitated, the brains had been eaten and the bones smashed to get the nutritious marrow inside. This oldest layer, called the Aurora Stratum (or TD6), was dated using electron spin resonance to approximately 780 000 years ago, or a little earlier.

The evidence of butchering, including dismembering, defleshing, and skinning of the hominids is the oldest proof of human cannibalism found to date. Anthropologists claim that the human remains belonged to a hominid ancestor called Homo antecessor, or perhaps Homo erectus. The whole evidence spans a period of around hundred thousand years. This means that the practice was not just chosen during times of food crises.

In Spanish cave (Sidrón Cave - Piloña municipality, Asturias, northwestern Spain), scientists recovered the remains of at least twelve Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

29

Neanderthal individuals: three men, three adolescent boys, three women and three infants. This case of cannibalism is characterized by scientists as a response to severe episodes of extreme scarcity, around 43 000 years ago.

Modern researchers have assumed that Neanderthals may have been eaten by anatomically modern humans in ritual defleshing (known also as excarnation = removing the flesh and organs of a dead body).

There is archaeological evidence of human sacrifice in Neolithic to Eneolithic Europe. For example, in southwestern Germany (Herxheim), archaeologists unearthed clear evidence of mass cannibalism. Even children and unborn babies were on the menu! Around 7000 years ago, the first European farming societies may have been collapsing in upheaval and violence.

The phenomenon of ritual cannibalism was still practiced in Papua New Guinea (country in Oceania, Pacific Ocean) till 2012 CE, for cultural reasons; and by various Melanesian tribes, in ritual cases and in war, too. The beautiful and famous Fiji Islands were once known as the ‘Cannibal Isles’!

Hansel and Gretel are a well-known German fairy tale about a young brother and sister. It was recorded by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 CE. The children were kidnapped by a cannibalistic witch living in a forest, in a house constructed of cake, confectionery, candy, and many more treats than are imaginable. This fairy tale may have originated in the medieval period of the Great Famine(1315–1321 CE), which caused desperate people to abandon young children to fend for themselves, or even resort to cannibalism.

Cannibalism has been well documented from Amazon Basin to Congo in Africa and to the Māori people of New Zealand. It was also practised in ancient Egypt, Roman Egypt and during great famines. Myths, legends and folklore around the world is full of creatures that perform cannibalism.

Famines are another disgusting social phenomenon because terror expresses itself at its clearest form. Instinctively, human nature prioritizes its needs putting first hunger, security (shelter) second, and then all the others.

Billions of people have been died throughout human history by the slow and agonizing death of hunger.

We shall, also, not forget that throughout human history, many hazardous phenomena, such as epidemics and famines, may have started as natural events, but they turned out to be severely aggravated by the human factors. And vice versa, huge human migrations, plagues, blood-soaked wars, fierce conflicts, and devastating attacks have been caused after severe environmental disasters.

In our modern world, the existing famines are a disgrace for the technologically and economically developed countries, which sponsor technological breakthroughs of satellites and spaceships to travel even beyond our galaxy costing trillion of dollars, but these very same countries cannot find solutions for the hungry areas.

When we use the term famine, we mean the widespread scarcity of food that can be caused by several factors including war, inflation, crop failure, Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

30

population imbalance, or government policies. During ancient times, environmental disasters caused extended periods or events of famine; human societies have always been very vulnerable to this phenomenon, because it is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemics, and increased mortality.

Famine always goes hand in hand with humanity and the following are only indictive few examples. They show that famine is the commonest of all disasters, the most torturing and the one which is interrelated with all kind of other disasters, too. Mythologies (e.g. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek), languages, folklore and evidence dated back to thousands of years speak about famines since the dawn of prehistory. Between 108 BCE and 1911 CE there were no fewer than 1828 major famines only in China! Between 800 and 1000 CE severe drought killed millions of Maya people along with famine and thirst and initiated a cascade of internal collapses that destroyed their civilization. In 1235 CE, due to famine in England, 20 000 die in London alone (a total of ninety-five famines in the Middle Ages). Between 1315 and 1317 CE, the great Famine in Europe made people vulnerable before the arrival of the Black Death.

Between 1601 and 1603 CE, one of the worst famines in all Russian history killed as many as 100 000 in Moscow and up to one-third of Tsar Godunov's subjects; same famine killed about half of the Estonian population. Between 1630 and 1631 CE, the Deccan famine in India kills two million people (there was a corresponding famine in Northwest China, eventually causing the Ming dynasty to collapse in 1644). Between 1708 and 1711 CE, famine in East Prussia killed 41% of its population (250 000 people). Between 1788 and 1789 CE, the winters were harsh in France and the weather conditions very bad due to strong El Nino cycle and to previous eruption of Laki volcano; the extreme famine lead to the French Revolution. Between 1845 and 1849 CE, the Great Irish Famine killed more than one million people. Between 1888 and1892 CE, the Ethiopian Great Famine killed about 1/3 of its population; conditions worsened with cholera outbreaks (1889-1892), a typhus epidemic, and a major smallpox epidemic (1889-1890). Between 1891 and 1892 CE, famine in Russia caused 375 000 to 500 000 deaths. Especially in Africa and Asia, millions of people have died during famines, one of the most notorious being the Biafra Famine (1967- 1970 CE). They are still dying‌ Thus, famine is a widespread shortage of food that may apply to any animal species. The phenomenon can be acute (short-term) or chronic (longterm or periodical). It usually follows natural catastrophes or/and humaninduced events and it is followed by increased mortality, regional malnutrition and epidemics. The phenomenon reflects the hazard management of human societies and it is considered as the most severe aftermath of catastrophes, apart from human losses during disaster events. But famine, nowadays, is also regarded as a more complex condition. In fact, it is a socio-economic collapse rather than mere food crisis. Although it can be identified in the historical

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

31

period from written records and potentially with archaeological evidence, it can’t be traced with accuracy in Prehistory. And, there is no clear evidence that the evolution of human civilization has reduced the risk of resource failure and starvation as successfully, as we like to believe. Rebellions, revolutions, migrations, plagues always followed famines which shaped human history. No empire, no power, no nation, no tribe has ever escaped its lethal breath.

Having non appropriate water (or no water at all) to drink or to use for sanitary reasons and the daily routine (cooking and cleansing), is also a form of genocide because water is a fundamental common good along with food.

No water or polluted water is equal to death and serious diseases.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

32

TORTURES

Torture (from the Latin word tortus: to twist, to torment) is the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological suffering on someone by another as a punishment or in order to fulfill some desire of the torturer or force some action from the victim. Torture, by definition, is a knowing and intentional act. Torture has been carried out or sanctioned by individuals, groups, and states throughout history from ancient times to modern day, and forms of torture can vary greatly in duration from only a few minutes to several days or longer. Punishment, revenge, extortion, persuasion, political ‘reeducation’, deterrence, coercion of the victim or a third party, interrogation for information of confession, or as a sadistic gratification are included in the list of reasons. Alternatively, some forms of torture are designed to inflict psychological pain or leave as little physical injury or evidence as possible while achieving the same psychological devastation. The torturer may or may not kill or injure the victim. Depending on the aim, even a form of torture that is intentionally fatal may be prolonged to allow the victim to suffer, as long as possible. In other cases, the torturer may be indifferent to the condition of the victim.

Judicial torture was probably first applied in Persia. Over time torture has been used as a means of reform, inducing public terror, interrogation, spectacle, and sadistic pleasure. Until the 2nd century CE, torture was used only on slaves (with a few exceptions). After this point it began to be extended to all members of the lower classes. During Middle Ages, the whole process became a ‘science’.

Unfortunately, today we can list a huge variety of sufferings (methods, tools or situations) imposed from one human being to another.

Kept hungry, thirsty, wounded and not treated, locked in dark and moisty places without any hope for at least a court process, been bodily hurt or mutilated, being under psychological pressure and mental stress, agony and sadness, are very common ways used on the victims in human history. Local lords, emperors, priesthoods, military armies, political parties and whole nations made tortures their brand mark. Perhaps the most notorious and disgusting examples are the Nazi camps where millions of innocent people suffered hideous tortures before their death, along with the Nazi tortures imposed on people who fought for their freedom in their enslaved homelands, Holy Inquisition, slavery in Americas and ISIS practices on innocent victims.

But let us think deeper. Tortures are social phenomena demanding very thorough psychological investigation. The condition of slavery is not a torture?

As slavery is considered any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

33

such an arrangement and works without remuneration. The phenomenon of slavery existed (and still exists under a bit different style) in many cultures dating back to the early civilizations.

Slavery was known in almost every ancient civilization and society (after the Neolithic Revolution) including Sumer, Akkadian Empire and Assyria. In ancient Egypt, India, China and Greece, in the Hebrew kingdoms and the preColumbian civilizations of the Americas.

The last country to officially abolish slavery was Mauritania in 1981 CE. Nevertheless, there are million people worldwide subjected to some form of modern slavery. Modern slave trade is known as human trafficking and includes debt bondage and serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, in sexual slavery, or children used as soldiers or working illegally under terrible circumstances because they are viewed as economic solutions to the problematic income of the family.

Especially the African people have encountered numerous and various tortures in the name of the ‘white supremacy’, both in Africa and Americas.

Apart from the slave trade (we will mention about slavery again not only as a humanistic torture due to the treatment of slaves, but also as an economical crime), what to say about Ku Klux Clan and Apartheid? Ku Klux Klan was an American white supremacist secret society, hate group and a terrorist organization, that has existed in three distinct eras at different points in time during the history of the United States. Apart from violent acts and any kind of discrimination, riots and catastrophes in the properties of colored men and women, thousands were victims of KKK too. In 2020 CE hate groups of white supremacy still exist in USA and Europe.

Furthermore, Apartheid was a political and social system in South Africa during the era of White minority rule. It enforced racial discrimination against non-Whites, mainly focused on skin colour and facial features. This existed in the twentieth century, from 1948 until the early-1990s. According to this system of social stratification, white citizens (the minority) had the highest status. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day. The two above-mentioned racist situations gave birth to two great leaders who inspire younger generations against racism and civil rights: Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968 CE) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918-2013 CE).

The total violation of many human rights and any form of racism made and still makes millions of our co-humans to live under awful conditions, to suffer and to lose their dignity, hope and birth-right to freedom.

Domestic violence, rapes, forced marriages are tortures too.

Brutal uprooting of people from their homelands, that forces them to become immigrants is also a form of torture with unmeasurable socioeconomic, cultural and anthropological consequences. Bombardment of infrastructures and facilities leaving innocent people without life basics and the total neglection of vulnerable groups (handicaps, sick people, pregnant women, Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

34

children and elder etc) is a kind of torture leaving people living in hell. Been born and ‘condemned’ in a cast, in a stereotype or other form of prejudice (e.g. the casts in India, being a Romani / Roma in a sedentary world who denies giving shelter to nomadic people) is a kind of lifelong torture. Of course, any kind of discrimination based on skin colour, external appearances, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, gender, origins, age, disabilities etc, or the prohibition of free expression and communication is a lifelong torture, too.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

35

ECONOMIC TERRORISM

Money and the insatiable need for exotic goods, plants, valuable assets, knowledge, information and slaves were always the culprits in human history.

People wanted and people got. The strongest was winning… Thus, human history is written on blood of the innocents, the less powerful or just of the unluckiest. Truth to tell, all conflicts and wars of humanity have been made for the interest and for economic reasons. Even the Trojan War did not take place due to revenge for the kidnapping of beautiful Greek princess Helen by the Trojan prince Paris Alexander, but for the control of the Dardanelles and the trade route of the Black Sea. The colonization of many parts of the world, turned into imperialism, and entire countries / nations / areas were drained. From the Arab slave trade in Africa, the Conquistadores, and the slave trade from Africa to Americas, to the European colonizers in Africa and Asia, the bottom line was always money and resources. Generations of men, women and children lived, worked and died dramatically. The Japanese orgy of war crimes and atrocities during their invasion to Manchuria (1931 CE), and the Nazi genocide during the WW II had economic reasons too.

The greater Kurdistan (the land of the Kurds, nation which exists thousands of years in the area between modern southern Turkey, western Syria, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, with its own language, history and civilization) not only as a geo-cultural entity, but as a free independent country, simply cannot be established because these areas are the richest in oil, so the might countries prefer the divided nations and countries instead, in order to control them better and play accordingly.

Palestine usually refers to: Palestine (region), a geographical and historical region in the Middle East, the state of Palestine, a de jure sovereign state in the Middle East recognized by 136 UN members and with non-member observer state status in the United Nations, the Palestinian territories occupied or controlled by Israel, comprising the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, and in some definitions, parts of western Jordan and the Palestinian National Authority established by the Oslo Accords and governs Palestinians in the West Bank. This name was used by ancient Greek writers, and it was later used for the Roman province Syria Palaestina, the Byzantine Palaestina Prima , and the Islamic provincial district of Jund Filastin. The region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics, because it is situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and it is also the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel captured and incorporated a further 26% of the Mandate territory, Jordan captured the region of Judea and Samaria renaming it the ‘West Bank’, while the Gaza Strip was captured by Egypt. Following the 1948 Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

36

Palestinian Exodus (aka al-Nakba), the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes were not allowed to return according to the Lausanne Conference of 1949 CE. During the Six-Days War in June 1967, Israel captured the rest of Mandate Palestine from Jordan and Egypt and a policy of establishing Jewish settlements in those territories began. From 1987 to 1993, the First Palestinian Intifada against Israel took place. The declaration of the State of Palestine in 1988 and the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, along the creation of the Palestinian National Authority were included. In 2000, the Second Intifada (aka al-Aqsa Intifada) began, and Israel built a separation barrier. In the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Israel withdrew all settlers and military presence from the Gaza Strip, but maintained military control of numerous aspects of the territory including its borders, air space and coast.

Israel's ongoing military occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues to be the world's longest military occupation in modern times. In November 2012 CE, the status of Palestinian delegation in the UN was upgraded to non-member observer state as the State of Palestine.

Meanwhile, the destruction of the 20% of the Amazon basin in South America (in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, even in Argentina), not only by deforestation and wildfires, but also by the violent seizure of lands from their indigenous inhabitants and the subsequent disappearance of local tribes and ways of life, is a huge crime against humanity. The destruction of soils and rainforests in Amazon and elsewhere (e.g. Borneo, Indonesia) makes our planet poorer in oxygen, clear skies, vegetation, animals, biodiversity, cultural diversity… Powerful local landlords, private sector, governments, organizations, global brands and meet & soya feed companies continue to sack humanity’s treasures.

On the other hand, corrupted rulers within Africa continue to play the dirty play of the westerns who want oil, uranium, gold, platinum, and other precious metals, coffee, tea and diamonds. Whole nations live in extreme poverty (although their lands are rich in resources), children work in the bloody diamond industry, AIDS claims its toll in countries where at least half of the population are infected, western companies make experiments /donate medicaments and vaccines that destroy further people in need, starvation is a ‘natural’ phenomenon, civil wars decimate whole nations, extreme natural phenomena ravage the environments, etc…

Drug dealers elsewhere in the world are mighty and even governments and international organizations cannot end their empires. The illegal drug trade or drug trafficking is a global black market dedicated to the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of drugs that are subject to drug prohibition laws (except under license). Although the use of drugs for various reasons was known to humans since prehistory, the trade has been gone beyond control in the modern era. Cannabis, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

37

methamphetamine, temazepam and other substances make millions of people addicted, sick due to the transmission of diseases like AIDS or hepatitis, marginalized, poor and destructed, even in young ages, worldwide. The local cartels sustain the economy of their countries but so many youngsters die before even living. Laboratories that refine the products have been detected even in Europe and Russia, apart from the countries where the products initially start (e.g. China, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Colombia, Japan, Vietnam, Nigeria, Morocco).

Another human shame is the trade of human organs, especially from children and teenagers who are unprotected and orphans or kidnapped, usually during wars or in the undeveloped countries. The sellers receive huge amounts of money and bribe local authorities and medical workers to achieve their goals.

With the confirmed cases of children being trafficked for their organs, child organ trafficking, which once called a "modern urban legend", is a disgusting reality in today's world. The inadequate response of civilized societies continues because they are often the receivers of such ‘products’, that cost thousands of dollars each.

In ancient times, children were used as ritual offerings to appease and please the gods by the priesthoods and the agreement of local societies, mainly in times of crises. Often their mummies (e.g. on the Andes in South America) tell their sad stories reminding humanity that technological progress has not made us more human even after millions of years of evolution. Till now, evidence of such rituals exists in many places of the world, in Mayan, Aztec and Incas / Moche cultures, in India and in circum-Mediterranean cultures (Minoan, pre-Islamic Arabs, Hebrew, Babylonians, Phoenician and Carthaginian). Today, the revival of the practice as a commercial enterprise takes place in India and Africa (Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Liberia, South Africa and Swaziland).

Human ritual sacrifices in general were common almost all cultures from Neolithic times onwards.

Another kind of economic crime is the economic asphyxia and the terms under which live people and nations / countries today under the globalization era. Poverty is the worst terrorist of people which leads to hideous situations.

Humanity has experienced such barbaric situations after the so-called Neolithic Revolution, and perhaps 99% of all people who have ever lived on this planet lived in poverty and still live. But the organized crime of ‘murderers of states’ (as they are called the people who plan the economic catastrophe of countries like Greece in the recent past) is beyond imagination nowadays. False criteria, false calculations, false evidence is created to make specific nations be in debt and in continuous struggling processes. Then they are asked to change their identity and ‘sell’ their culture in order to sweep this debt. This planet is in debt (trillions of dollars) to whom? To the aliens maybe? No. In 2000 CE, the International Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

38

migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge. Of course, the other face of this process is the catastrophe of the environment in the name of gain by few at expense of most of the humankind, as well as the catastrophe of cultures, ideas and descent work conditions (achieved in many countries with bloody strives). Thus, globalization is not only an economic phenomenon, is a political, social and cultural modern ‘dictatorship’ on nations, tribes, states, countries and people all around the world. Firstly, they destroy, then they come to help under the cover of international organizations.

Who is behind IMF and globalization? Who rules the world? According to modern researchers, the New World Order is governed by Lord Jacob de Rothschild (richest man on the planet), Baron David de Rothschild (who recently said they are indeed working towards global governance), Sir Evelyn de Rothschild (his wife Lynn Forester is a big money maven in US politics), David Rockefeller (Sephardic Crypto-Jew, his son Nick told film director Aaron Russo about 9/11 in advance), Nathan Warburg (his family was not only instrumental in bringing about the Federal Reserve act, they were also behind the financing of Adolf Hitler - to get German Jews to move to Palestine), Henry Kissinger (Globalist genocidal schemer), George Soros (another Jew schemer and NGO manipulator), and others.

On the other hand, Corporations working as think-tanks controlled everything after WWII. For example, RAND (aka Research and Development) is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 to offer research and analysis to the US Armed Forces. It is financed by the US government, private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals. The company has grown to assist other governments, international organizations, private companies and foundations, with a host of defense and non-defense issues, including healthcare. RAND aims for interdisciplinary and quantitative problem solving by translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and the physical sciences into novel applications in other areas, using applied science and operation research.

Each country of the modern world including the royalty families and the governments, the leaders and the people behind thrones, crises and wars, are governed by specific dynasties. For example, modern Greece is governed since 1743 CE by the German Jewish dynasty of Mayer Amschel Rothchild, founding father of the international finance and founder of the Rothchild banking family.

The Bank of Greece is private and holds the golden reserve of the state and the right to circulate money without disclosing the names of its stockholders and the movements they make, as other private institutions must do according to the law.

The idea of masonic brotherhood is not fresh. Freemasonry or Masonry was known from Middle Ages. But, today, the masonic lodge (in every big town, state, country and continent), the meetings, the rituals, the degrees, the grand master, the secrecy under oath, the branches, the hierarchy, the methods Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

39

and the targets, are quite known all over the world, because masons rule the world (high-ranked priesthoods in various religions, leaders, people in crucial roles within institutions, a whole net of masons who hold specific positions everywhere in the countries). Words / titles such Illuminati, Zionism, Bilderberg Club are included in this worldwide model of government. Astana (aka Nursultan), capital city of Kazakhstan in Central Asia, is considered the center of the economy of Worldwide Order. The Worldwide Order wants most people on Earth to belong to them and live like ‘walking dead’. Without freedom, variety, dignity, fraternity and any other characteristic of being human.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

40

BIOTERRORISM – BIOLOGICAL WAR – NUCLEAR WAR – NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS

Ancient lore and examples from human history, e.g. the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides, has shown that weapons of biological and chemical warfare have been in use for thousands of years. For example, the darts of Hercules (tipped with Hydra's venom), the legendary violent death of Odysseus who was killed by an extremely rare poison weapon (a spear tipped with a sting ray spine), the Mithridatium (a combination of small doses of poisons and their antidotes invented by King Mithridates VI of Pontus, a brilliant military strategist and master of toxicology), and the dread scorpio bombs in a terracotta pot (like those found at the desert fortress of Hatra near modern Mosul, Iraq, and used successfully against the Romans in 198 CE). Arsenic (used by Hippocrates to treat ulcers, as an ingredient in Fowler's solution created in 1786 CE, the first effective remedy for syphilis in 1910 - later to be replaced by penicillin), was used as arsenical smoke / weapon in China, at least by 1000 BCE onwards; it was, also, the poison of choice for the Romans), and, later, for Borgias, in the Italian Renaissance.

In the Anatolian War of 1320-1318 BCE, during which Arzawans fought against the Hittites, the later drove rams and donkeys - carriers of Francisella tularensis (deadly tularaemia was known as the “Hittite plague”) into Arzawan lands. This lethal plague was transmitted to humans via ticks and flies. Later, similar cases were known as pestilentia manu- facta (man-made pestilence), term coined by the ancient Romans.

The conquest of Americas caused mainly by the biological advantage of Europeans against pathogens that decimated native populations, such as overwhelming pandemics of measles and smallpox, influenza and plagues, both bubonic and pneumonic (apart from their technological advantages) is beyond dispute. But, whether Europeans deliberately infected indigenous peoples with diseases, or poisoned wells after 1572 CE, remains still controversial.

Another example that seems to alter the history of humankind, or at least Europe’s destiny, is the siege of the city of Kaffa (now Feodosija, Ukraine) in the Black Sea. A 14th century account by the Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, described how the Black Death reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack, when the Mongol army hurled plague-infected cadavers into the besieged Crimean city. Later, the Japanese used plague as a weapon in World War II, and there were huge Soviet stockpiles of Yersinia. pestis prepared for use in an all-out war. The Great Plague of Marseille, which caused 100,000 deaths between 1720 and 1723 CE, was the last case of the significant European outbreaks of bubonic plague. Only by 1765 CE, growing population was back at its pre-1720 level. In 1998, scholars from the Université Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

41

de la MĂŠditerranĂŠe, excavated a mass grave of victims of that plague outbreak, providing an excellent opportunity to study more than 200 skeletons from an area in the second arrondissement in Marseille, known as the Monastery of the Observance. The results of research showed that several factors indicate we are still at risk of plague today.

During the British colonization of Australia, land ownership was forcefully transferred from the various Indigenous populations to the colonists.

Usually this was done violently with firearms to intimidate or kill the native people. Some colonists though, chose an alternative approach, using poison concealed in consumables as a method of extirpating the original custodians of the land. The tainted consumables were either knowingly given out to groups of native people, or purposely left in accessible places where they were taken away and eaten collectively by the local clans. As a result, incidents of mass deaths of Aboriginals due to these deliberate mass poisonings occurred throughout the continent. The mass poisonings were generally done in a secretive manner but there are many documented cases with some involving police and government investigations. They appear to have begun as a colonial method in Australia during the 1820s when toxic substances utilized in the farm industry became readily available. Chemicals such as arsenic, strychnine, corrosive sublimate, aconitum and prussic acid were all used. There are no cases of convictions being reported against any of the perpetrators of these mass poisonings.

But the deadly list goes on.

Viruses (e.g. Ebola, AIDS, Zika, H1NI, Coronavirus 2019) handled and controlled by laboratories, nations or institutions can shape and re-shape global economics and environmental equilibrium. Polyvalent vaccines (full of mere poisoning substances) given even in neonatal babes have nothing to do with the pioneering vaccines before 1974 CE. They have strongly accused for the terrible increasing of autism in children and other inflammatory diseases. Today, official US opinion admits that many reappearing diseases (like measles and other child contagious diseases) spread via the vaccines.

Vaccines given in the undeveloped poor countries are manufactured to sterilize women in order not to give birth anymore, or without any safety measures. According to modern sources, the notorious and peculiar flu of 1918 CE was not a flu virus strain, but a meningococcal pneumonia strain given as a test vaccine both in US and Europe.

Unfortunately, diseases like cancer, diabetes and cholesterolaemia, although treatable with simple substances, methods and protocols, are used by the pharmaceutical companies to make billions of dollars and perplex the life of patients without aiming at the nucleus of their problem.

In the same wavelength are companies that spread the terror (with mutated seeds and lethal substances in air, soil and waters), the chemtrails, the pollution of petrochemicals by crude oil companies which provoke wars to change the equilibrium of energy players globally (causing unprecedented Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

42

disasters), the Codex Alimentarius, and laboratories that make illegally bioweapons (of smallpox, anthrax etc) as attack weapons.

Horrible medical experiments on human beings, especially on youngsters, mental ills, prisoners, captives or just poor (by USA, Nazi, European companies in India and the third World, and the other global powers), in concentration camps, laboratories and institutions, are also parameters of the same crime.

Only during the 20th century, the wars devastated environment and humans in unprecedented rates and depth. The chemicals used during the two world wars, the Vietnam war and former Yugoslavia are examples of how far humankind can go for money, power and energy. The nuclear bombs that hit Japan in order to close the WWII by USA, is another sinister example that humankind cannot control technological progress for just causes.

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 CE, was devastating, of course, but it included a strong ethical problem, too. The intentionally delay, the treatment and the misinformation of the victims, of the neighboring countries and humankind generally, remain a dark event in human disasters. The spread of coronavirus 2019 in China before the official information of all countries, without any measures taken in the field of vast transportations of the country with the globe (via its products and people travelling) is also a dark event. Just notice that in the Space Age, the horrific rabies is still untreatable – the known vaccine is working only if given within the first 48 hours after the accident (only the Milwaukee protocol has been applied to extremely few people who eventually survived).

Two other crimes against humanity are the access to strong health systems (for prevention or therapy) from only the rich and powerful of this world, and the Agenda 21. Money can buy health, security, well-being. The system reproduces well via the private health insurances (colossal companies) which just divide people to privileged and to the unlucky.

Agenda 21(and the recent ones Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2050) is a plan to depopulate 95% of the world population by 2030 CE. It is an action plan devised by the UN and signed by 178 governments at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Its goal is the depopulation of humanity because “we are too many”. It is promoted by the elites to “save the planet” and implemented by governments worldwide. Bill Gates even (Microsoft founder, one of the world's wealthiest men, and a ‘philanthropist’) shared his view about how to achieve this goal by vaccinations and other means in a TEDx lecture: “The world today has 6.8 billion people.

That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent”.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

43

THE DIACHRONOUS ‘CRIME’ OF BEING A WOMAN

The natural state of humanity is when men respect women, revere and honor them (as bearers of life) and treat them as equal human beings.

Prehistoric people, ancient Egyptians, Pelasgians (a vast cultural substratum from Caucasus to Western Europe from Epipalaeolithic onwards), Celts, Vikings, Polynesians, Aborigines and Indians, some religious beliefs, myths and archaeological finds testimony this perspective.

Many archaeologists and historians of religion claim that Shamanism may have been a dominant religious practice for Humanity in the Palaeolithic.

The word shaman was brought to Western Europe in the late 17 th century Current Era, by the Dutch traveler Nicolaes Witsen, who reported his stay and journeys among the indigenous people of Siberia. Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest known shamans, of the Upper Palaeolithic, were women (a female shaman is called shamaness or shamanka), who exhibited a two-spirit identity. They could reach an altered state of consciousness (a ‘religious ecstasy’ or trance) and communicate with the wolrd of the benevolent or malevolent spirits. They could guide the misguided souls, heal illnesses of the human soul and perform various forms of divination. Shamans still are the primary teacher of tribal symbolism in aboriginal tribes; they have a leading role in this ecological management of local societies. Today, shamanism is a ‘system’ that includes beliefs and practices related to the communication with the spiritual world; it is considered as an inner journey into healing and wellbeing, through spiritual and/or mystical experiences and soul-retrieval practices.

Women in ancient Sumer could buy, own, sell, and inherit property. They could engage in commerce and testify in court as witnesses. Nonetheless, their husbands could divorce them for mild infractions, and a divorced husband could easily remarry another woman, provided that his first wife had borne him no offspring.

In ancient Egypt, women enjoyed the same rights under the law as a man, however rightful entitlements depended upon social class. Landed property descended in the female line from mother to daughter, and women were entitled to administer their own property. Women in ancient Egypt could buy, sell, be a partner in legal contracts, be executor in wills and witness to legal documents, bring court action, and adopt children.

Unfortunately, and probably after Sedentism, men wanted to manipulate women, even torture them via a large spectrum of humiliations, tortures, laws, customs, blackmails etc.

Today, only few tribes in the world practice matriarchy. Amongst them, the Mosuo women are China's last surviving matriarchy. There are about 40,000 of them, and they practice Tibetan Buddhism. The BriBri people in Costa Rica Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

44

are an indigenous tribe with an estimated 12,000-35,000 members. The Umoja tribe in Kenya is a true-blue No-Men Land, because men are banned. This village is a home to women who have experienced sexual or gender-based violence. The Umoja village, which means "unity" in Swahili, was founded in 1990. The Minangkabau people in Indonesia are a part of the largest surviving matriarchal society encompassing approximately four million people as of 2017.

The social organization of the Akan people in Ghana is built around the matriclan. Within the matriclan, identity, inheritance, wealth, and politics are all decided. As of 2011 CE, this matriarchal society of Khasi in India was comprised of about one million.

On the other hand, especially natural disasters and wars offer the suitable conditions for the suffering of women. Sexual violence is a hallmark of genocidal violence, with most genocidal campaigns explicitly or implicitly sanctioning it. It is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped in the three months of the Rwandan genocide, many of whom were subjected to multiple rapes or gang rape. In Darfur, a systemic campaign of rape and often sexual mutilation was carried out, and in Burma public mass rapes and gang rapes were inflicted on the Rohingya by Burmese security forces. Sexual slavery was documented in the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turks and Daesh's genocide of the Yazidi. These acts are frequently, but not exclusively committed against women.

According to the pagan Roman law, in its Twelve Tables, provisions against evil incantations and spells (intended to damage cereal crops) are included. In 331 BCE, one hundred and seventy women were executed as witches, because they were accused as responsible for an epidemic illness. In 184 BCE, about two thousand people were executed for witchcraft (veneficium), and in 182-180 BCE, another three thousand executions took place, again, triggered by the outbreak of an epidemic. These persecutions of witches continued in the Roman Empire until the late 4 th century Current Era. The Roman tradition, expressed via the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis by Lucius Cornelius Sulla in the 2nd century BCE, became an important source of late Medieval and early Modern European Law on Witchcraft. This hideous phenomenon was always related to human psychic reactions under stressful environmental conditions (for example, during the Black Death outbreaks). Later, it had been known as the witch hunt orgy of massacres in Europe and North America during the Early Modern period (between 1480 and 1750 CE), resulting in an estimated 40 000 to 60 000 executions! The witch-hunts sponsored by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, begun only in the Late Middle Ages.

Christianity tolerated and supported various methods of tortures imposed by the husbands to their wives. The English Church and culture in the Middle Ages regarded women as weak, irrational and vulnerable to temptation who was constantly needed to be kept in check. This was reflected on the Christian Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

45

culture in England through the story of dam and Eve where Eve fell to Satan's temptations and led Adam to eat the apple. It was belief based on Saint Paul, that the pain of childbirth was a punishment for this deed that led mankind to be banished from the Garden of Eden. Women's inferiority also appears in many medieval writings.

Furthermore, the major religions do not accept women in the priesthood, excluding them from ceremonies and churches due to the natural and holy phenomenon of menstruation, perhaps the oldest and most persistent taboo in human history.

Even today, girls and women cannot mix with others when they menstruate (in their tribe, university, local society). They should stay away from them for few days. In Central Asia, during harsh winter months, women with menstruation are frozen to death because they cannot enter their heating houses.

Barbaric customs have been also imposed to girls. The status of women in China was low largely due to the custom of foot-binding. About 45% of Chinese women had bound feet in the 19th century. For the upper classes, it was almost 100%. In 1912 CE, the Chinese government ordered the cessation of foot-binding. Foot-binding involved alteration of the bone structure so that the feet were only about 4 inches long. The bound feet caused difficulty of movement, thus greatly limiting the activities of women.

From the concubines of ancient emperors to the widows of India who should follow their dead patron / husband to his death fire, to honor-killings and the victims of rape who are condemned as disgraced after the rape without having the legal right to proceed to any abortion, billions of women suffer still in the 21st century. Traffickers of sex, beliefs that women are only for reproduction and family duties (e.g. to care their parents and other ill relatives), or the concept even of the western civilization that a woman should be ageless and beautiful always and at any cost, harm in the same way the female idea.

Whole religions teach that children molestation is not illegal (Talmud), or that girls of three years and one day are considered as women (Islamic teachings). The forced marriages of very young girls, even below 10 years old, are common practice in India, countries of Africa and in the Islamic world, including immigrant communities in the West. The forced marriages or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. The laws of many countries almost never punish the culprits of men who torture, rape and then burn their victims. The women - victims of mutilation and injuries with burning substances, who must live hidden, poor and disgraced after their ‘accident’ are seldom justified, equally.

Sacred prostitution is where girls and women are pledged to priests or those of higher castes, such as the practice of Devadasi in South Asia or fetish slaves in West Africa. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

46

According to World Health Organization, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons. The practice also violates a person's rights to health, security and physical integrity, the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to life when the procedure results in death. The practice has no health benefits for girls and women. FGM can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, intolerable pain during menstruation and sexual intercourse, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths. More than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated. FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15. WHO is opposed to all forms of FGM and is opposed to health care providers performing FGM. Treatment of health complications of FGM in 27 high prevalence countries costs 1.4 billion USD per year.

Moreover, the unequal participation of women in decision-making is another hideous paradigm of how the societies treat them. Women's rights are the fundamental human rights that were enshrined by the United Nations for every human being on the planet nearly 70 years ago. These rights include the right to live free from violence, slavery, and discrimination; to be educated; to own property; to vote; and to earn a fair and equal wage.

Thus, issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights include the right to bodily integrity and autonomy; to be free from sexual violence; to vote; to hold public office; to enter into legal contracts; to have equal rights in family law; to work; to fair wages or equal pay; to have reproductive rights; to own property; to be educated.

Only thousand years later, starting in the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th century, rights, as a concept and claim, gained increasing political, social, and philosophical importance in Europe. Movements emerged which demanded freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery, rights for women, rights for those who did not own property, and universal suffrage. In 1893 CE, New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote on a national level, while Australia gave women the right to vote in 1902.

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

47

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Since society began, human history has witnessed both the good and the bad aspects of human nature. There have been many infamous people who displayed a penchant for being the physical manifestation of evil. Today, we remember them not for the good they did (some of these in fact brought about positive changes), but for the despicable deeds they carried out to remain in power. They did not hesitate in torturing and killing innocent people if it furthered their personal cause. But, wait a minute. Only ill persons are culprits for violence, not groups, nations and communities who acted consciously and supported these crimes? Where were people who had the power to stop the evil?

This research is not an atrociological research per se. It aims at highlighting the dual nature of humans and erasing illusions and delusions of any supremacy theories born between religions, eras, ideologies, tribes, people, nations and countries in history. Violence is violence, its forms, ways and methods are not justified. Victims are victims and there are no excuses of any kind. The stupidity of humankind is that continues to choose selective amnesia and finds all the others guilty. In 2020 CE, people, casts, genders, tribes, nations, whole continents are still doomed to live and die under inhuman conditions. From the paleolithic cannibalism in times of famine to the glorious Space Era, this is the continuous shame of being human. Humans exterminate humans with no mercy. From the bombardment of schools and hospitals or the convoys of Red Cross, to the innocent victims of any kind of terrorism and the Agenda 21, millions of years of evolution cannot and should not be erased or misunderstood.

Thus, which is the symbolism of the title: From Shanidar cave to Canova and beyond? The research is not about biological, anthropological, sociological, cultural, economic and other scientific approaches of the phenomenon of violence. In fact this presentation is a hymn to light, beauty and love, honoring humans who fought the darkness, who stayed brave and true, who never betrayed their human soul living and dying with dignity, who preferred peace over violence of any kind, who had great ideals without sacrificing the beauty in their nature, not stuck in ideologies and, these who helped / help / will help their co-humans with any possible way, thinking that co-humans are not enemies and antagonists but human beings, brothers and sisters with equal rights...

All the expressions and achievements of human life, science and technology included, even if are glorious, they are not ‘human’ without Humanism and Art. Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site located on Bradost Mountain (15 km N-W of its peak) in the Erbil Governorate of Kurdistan region in Iraq. The Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

48

site is located within the Zagros Mountains. Anthropologist / Archaeologist Ralph Solecki lead a crew from Columbia University to explore the site. With the accompaniment of Kurdish workers, the group excavated the Shanidar Cave and found the remains of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals, dating from around 65,000-35,000 years ago. These individuals were uncovered amongst a Mousterian Middle Palaeolithic layer (a techno-complex archaeological industry of stone tools, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, and to a lesser extent the earliest anatomically modern humans in North Africa and West Asia) accompanied by various stone tools and animal remains. The cave also contains two later Proto-Neolithic cemeteries, one of which dates back about 10,600 years and contains 35 individuals.

The best known of the Neanderthals at the site are Shanidar 1, who survived several injuries during his life, due to care from others in his group, and Shanidar 4, the famed 'flower burial'. Until this discovery, Cro-Magnons, the earliest known Homo Sapiens sapiens in Europe, were the only individuals known for purposeful, ritualistic burials.

According to Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Eric Trinkaus (study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis), referring the specimen Shanidar 1 (found in 1957 CE), pinpoints that “More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival�. Thus, he sustained a serious blow to the side of the face, fractures and the eventual amputation of the right arm at the elbow, and injuries to the right leg, as well as a systematic degenerative condition. This fact required significant social support to reach old age. As for the specimen Shanidar 4, the mortuary practices included flowers gathered in the landscape near to the cave.

Shanidar 1 experienced a crushing blow to his head.

Inside the Shanidar Cave. Hardscarf - Own work. CC BY-SA 4.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave#/media/File:Shanidar_Cave_-_overview.jpg

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters

49

Antonio Canova (November 1, 1757 – October 13, 1822 CE) was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival and has been characterized as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss was commissioned in 1787 by Colonel John Campbell. It is regarded as a masterpiece of Neoclassical sculpture (and by the author as the best symbolic piece of art till today), and it shows the mythological lovers at a moment of great emotion, characteristic of the emerging movement of Romanticism. It represents the god Cupid (the primordial force of the Universe and the highest form of love) in the height of love and tenderness, immediately after awakening the lifeless Psyche with a kiss. It represents the highest level that the human psyche can and shall reach.

Particolare de " Amore e Psiche" Antonio Canova 1788. Transferred from it.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Maudb using CommonsHelper.

Original uploader was Alexanderinvictus. Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Canova#/media/File:Amore_e_psiche_(1).jpg

Sapere aude

Dr Amanda Laoupi. Dark Disasters