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Traditional Catholic Mass includes the rite of communion, a practice when worshippers consume the metaphorical body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest blesses bread and wine which, according to the ritual, turns the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.

All masses were conducted in Latin before Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation in 1517. In Latin, the phrase which transforms the bread into the body is “hoc est corpus.” Translation: this is the body. A bastardization of this phrase by non-Latin speaking worshippers turned into the phrase “hocus pocus” known today.

German East Africa is now known as Tanzania. In the early 1900’s the natives of this land were subjected to German rule and soon sought to rid themselves of the imperial shackles.

A spirit medium named Kinjikitile Ngwale become the voice of the oppressed natives. He changed his name to Bokero after he claimed to be possessed by a snake spirit. His largest contribution to the cause was his claim to have a medicine for the people which would turn German bullets into water (the “medicine” turned out to be water mixed with castor oil and millet seeds). Needless to say, the mixture didn’t work and German machine guns made quick work of the uprising.

The incident is known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. The term maji, in Swahili, means “water.”

The accusation is known as “blood libel.” It was thought among English Christians that Jewish people needed the blood of Christian children for use in their religious rituals. Blood libel received mainstream attention in the case of Hugh of Lincoln, who was murdered at the approximate age of 8 years old. Hugh’s body was discovered in a well after the child had been missing for a month. Blame for the murder fell upon the Jewish people in the area. Although there had been other instances of Jews being accused of murdering a child this particular instance is significant because it marked the first time the English Crown acknowledged blood libel against Jews. The incident is referenced by Geoffrey Chaucer in Canterbury Tales.

The law at the time said that any assets belonging to a Jew who was convicted of a crime would become property of the King. So when King Henry III had 91 Jews arrested and 19 of them hanged for refusing to participate in the trial he became owner of the 19 dead Jew’s property. Two of the arrested Jews were pardoned and the remaining prisoners were sentenced to death, although they were released in the spring of the following year.

Hugh of Lincoln was viewed as a Christian martyr at the time and his shrine in the Lincoln Cathedral attracted many visitors to the site. The shrine has since been destroyed.

In March 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War, U.S. troops massacred hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the village of Son My. The massacre is known as the My Lai Massacre in the United States because one of the areas of the village was called My Lai.

To make matters worse, the incident was kept under wraps until November 1969, over a year and a half after the incident. Once the massacre became public knowledge there was an increase in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Victims of the massacre included men, women, and children. The troops were under the impression that all civilians would have gone to the market and if they were still in the village they must be the enemy.

The lone convicted soldier was a platoon leader. He was sentenced to life in prison but only ended up serving 3.5 years of… house arrest.

The Bagh massacre occurred in the province of Punjab, British India, on April 13, 1919. Thousands of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus had gathered in the public garden on the festival day of Vaisakhi. Additionally, there was a protest planned in the garden in the early afternoon over the arrest and deportation of two national leaders.

On the morning of the massacre British Colonel Reginald Dyer issued a ban on all meetings in an effort to prevent the protest. He had become convinced an insurrection was about to occur. Without the communication networks of today the Colonel’s notice failed to reach the masses.

When Dyer heard about the gathering in the public garden he mistook the protestors and celebrating civilians as the beginning of the feared (and imagined) insurrection. The garden was a two hundred yard square and surrounded by ten foot walls with only five entrances. Each entrance had its own gate and was overlooked by houses and buildings. Dyer took ninety troops and, without warning the crowd in the garden, blocked the main exits. He ordered his troops to fire into the most densely packed sections of the crowd.

The shooting lasted for nearly ten minutes.

When the shooting ended many people had been killed, both from being shot and in the stampedes to the locked exits. More people died when they jumped into a well in the middle of the garden to escape the shooting. To top it off many more wounded civilians died from their wounds overnight when they couldn’t be helped because of the curfew imposed by Colonel Dyer.

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