## It had been done... People state that states couldn't (order the) murder or people outright forget that in the past, there were *several* countries that regularly made people *disappear* or had them outright murdered on the streets or in concentration camps, or whatever other name those institutions went by. #### 6-8 Million - Nazi Germany In Germany, [(technically illegal) laws][4] were passed, and people were deported under those laws and fed to the death machinery of [the Holocaust.][5] Those laws were outright illegal even under german law of the time, and people acting on them are still prosecuted for murder these days - Murder doesn't have a statute of limitations. #### ~1 Million - Soviet Union A different picture appears in the Soviet Union. Stalin had anyone he didn't like shot or sent to [Gulags][6] on fictive charges - where they were worked to death, starved to death, or just shot for *showing uppity*. At times his right hand just filled lists to meet *quotas* in [the Great Purge][7]. Unlike the Holocaust, those acts often didn't even attempt to appear lawful. The rest used sham courts to get people - opposition as well as innocents - convicted on paper. But in any way, there were several cases of murder ordered by the state, where people were just... shot in a back alley on the governance's order. The accounting is wonky, and there is and was no serious attempt at trying to make the surviving victims or their families whole. #### ~2 million - Cambodia Cambodia fell under the Khmer Rouge in about 1951, and Pol Pot ordered the extinction of several groups of people. Those wearing Glasses, speaking more than one language and anyone even *seeming* to be educated were among the targeted groups. [Genocide followed][8]. Sure, it might have been *technically illegal* to kill those people, but it took a new law in 1979 (Decree Law No. 1) to be able to prosecute the Khmer Rouge. There are serious attempts to try and vindicate the victims, but... it's slow. ## Legal Murdering in the US? SURE! ~20000 cases in California. The USA often *forgets* that their military and settlers had taken part in [dozens of massacres][1] outside of formally declared wars. The state didn't object or prosecute in most cases, in some cases even congratulated the perpetrators. As a random example, let's take the 1850s: California enacted a law in 1850 that allowed enslaving Native Americans and in 1951 they allowed settlers to kill Native Americans and have the state pay for the expenses of such lynch mobs. When the first white settlers arrived in [Round Valley][3] in 1854, they immediately started with killing natives and abducting them into slavery, often selling them as slaves and brides to gold diggers. Between 1856 and 1859, less than 30 white men accounted for the death of more than a thousand Native American males. Over the years, by stealing the kids and women as well as the almost regular massacres, the settlers managed to decimate the native population from about 20000 to about 300 in 1864. This literal *hunting* of people to enslave them was technically legal. It was not just government-allowed and financed, it was even government-ordered: In 1859, a settler got a letter from the Californian Gouverner that allowed him to kill natives. 1860 saw expenses of more than 9300 USD paid for this campaign of murder. It took the US Army to halt any further violence in 1862 and the 1951/52 laws that allowed the enslavement and murder of native Americans in California were revoked in 1862. There are little to no attempts to rectify this chapter of Californian History. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tallushatchee [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_Valley_Settler_Massacres_of_1856%E2%80%931859 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide