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TIL In 2014, a rural Iraqi clock maker went to sleep, woke up, and watched a “nice Egyptian film” before realizing he was the last resident remaining after his town had been seized by ISIS. He convinced them he was not a soldier, showed them the Mosque’s light switch, and went back to his house.

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d84kd TIL according to declassified Soviet archives, during Stalin’s great purge of 1937/1938 over 1.5 million people were detained, of whom 681,692 were shot (an average of 1,000 executions a day). In comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes from 1825 to 1910.
MegvV TIL that George Orwell's use of 2+2=5 as a catchphrase of the dystopian government in his book 1984 is based on Joseph Stalin's use of that equation in propaganda. Soviet posters declared "2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5" long before Orwell wrote his novel.
nbDG TIL: Frodo had the ring for 17 years before going on his quest instead of the couple of days the movie shows.
GBg5 TIL A mountain named “Chinaman’s Peak” was renamed to “Ha Ling Peak” because it was seen as derogatory. Ha Ling was the first to climb it and had named it himself.
7rXe7 TIL of the Zoo hypothesis. Life is common in the Universe, but extraterrestrial civilizations intentionally avoid communication with Earth to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, and to avoid interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo.