The head of a Brazilian private furniture delivery company suddenly stopped delivering to customers in the summer of 1983. As it later turned out, his naked body was found in his office. It was covered with a marker with inscriptions such as "Rot in hell", "Everyone deserves to live but you". The murdered man had never been convicted before.

Brazilian Mysterious Murder

We hold many assumptions about police work—that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self-defense. But in The Killing Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in São Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of “normal” killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups—the police and organized crime—both operating according to parallel logics of murder. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Willis's book traces how homicide detectives categorize two types of killing: the first resulting from “resistance” to police arrest (which is often broadly defined) and the second at the hands of a crime "family' known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Death at the hands of police happens regularly, while the PCC’s centralized control and strict moral code among criminals has also routinized killing, ironically making the city feel safer for most residents. In a fractured urban security environment, where killing mirrors patterns of inequitable urbanization and historical exclusion along class, gender, and racial lines, Denyer Willis's research finds that the city’s cyclical periods of peace and violence can best be understood through an unspoken but mutually observed consensus on the right to kill. This consensus hinges on common notions and street-level practices of who can die, where, how, and by whom, revealing an empirically distinct configuration of authority that Denyer Willis calls sovereignty by consensus.

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Books

We hold many assumptions about police work—that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self-defense. But in The Killing Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in São Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of “normal” killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups—the police and organized crime—both operating according to parallel logics of murder. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Willis's book traces how homicide detectives categorize two types of killing: the first resulting from “resistance” to police arrest (which is often broadly defined) and the second at the hands of a crime "family' known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Death at the hands of police happens regularly, while the PCC’s centralized control and strict moral code among criminals has also routinized killing, ironically making the city feel safer for most residents. In a fractured urban security environment, where killing mirrors patterns of inequitable urbanization and historical exclusion along class, gender, and racial lines, Denyer Willis's research finds that the city’s cyclical periods of peace and violence can best be understood through an unspoken but mutually observed consensus on the right to kill. This consensus hinges on common notions and street-level practices of who can die, where, how, and by whom, revealing an empirically distinct configuration of authority that Denyer Willis calls sovereignty by consensus.

Graham Denyer Willis

The Killing Consensus

In 1967 a 49-year-old man went missing in Osaka. According to the family of the missing man, after the great changes in Japan he was unable to find his way in the dynamically developing society. There were many rumours about the missing man's alleged debts to usurers. The investigation into his disappearance was closed after 19 hours by the police and resumed a decade later without any results.

Mysterious Missing

And this is the story that no one heard 🤫

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Personal Development

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Time Management

The Japan Times

During the deep communism of the 1950s-1970s in Poland, the government mainly hunted down the opposition and political opponents. A special unit called the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (Security Bureau) was established to track down and arrest oppositionists. At present, the number of executed is unknown, it is said to be between 10,000 and 55,000.

Communist slaughter 

Collects and analyzes seventy years of communist crimes that offer details on Kim Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho," and Cuba under Castro.

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years."Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience--in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards.As the death toll mounts--as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on--the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

Stéphane Courtois

Nicolas Werth

Jean-Louis Panné

Andrzej Paczkowski

Karel Bartosek

Jean-Louis Margolin

The Black Book of Communism

Here you will find unknown, tragic and unsolved murders committed in the United States during World War II. Sources: “Missing Persons” G. Greene, “Daily Southern Magazine” 09-04-1945,

Murders obscured by the whirlwind of World War II 

Around April 1940, the murder of two six-year-old twins under unclear circumstances occurred in Bel Air.Due to the war at the time, the local court was closed and replaced by a much less effective MilitaryCommission, which failed to track down the perpetrators. After this tragedy, an urban legend arose about thelost souls of the twins wandering the corridors of the local courthouse.

The Lost Chapter Of Bel Air's History

At the end of World War II as the Allies were taking over Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy went missing in Edna Hill in the southern United States. He was the son of the owner of a roadside store frequented by passing motorists. According to the shopkeeper and local residents, the boy was abducted by a strange man who stayed at a nearby motel for two days. He inquired about kindergartens in the area and hunting stores, among other things. The man was never later found, nor was the missing boy or body.

Roadside Store Mystery

Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. As the last of her family, Greene’s losses are stark, first her aunt, then her mother, in quick succession. She is as ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person at home as she is for the other losses, long repressed, that rise to confront her at this time: the suicide of her younger brother, the death of her father. As the professional identity on which she’s based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of “who am I?” and “what have I done with my life?” The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. As the last of her family, Greene’s losses are stark, first her aunt, then her mother, in quick succession. She is as ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person at home as she is for the other losses, long repressed, that rise to confront her at this time: the suicide of her younger brother, the death of her father. As the professional identity on which she’s based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of “who am I?” and “what have I done with my life?” The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”

The Killing Consensus

The Japan Times

The Black Book of Communism

Missing Persons

Unsolved Cases Igor Lange