The Great American Atrocities

 

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Pivotal Moments in American History) 1st Edition, by Howard Jones tells the tragic story of the American massacre of over five-hundred South Vietnamese civilians in 1968.  This is a tale of poor leadership, confusing orders, and the lack of clear guidance of strategic goals up and down the chain of command.  My Lai is a moral stain.

But we do our history a great disservice if we think of this massacre as somehow isolated.  The conditions to murder unarmed civilians in war is ever present.  America is not immune from this.  For example, we do not think of the wars we engaged in with Native Americans as war.  In fact they were, and in many cases, old men, women and children were killed in hundreds of battles.  

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are an immaculate people.  We have just finished our “longest war” in Afghanistan.  But the Indian Wars lasted from the arrival of Europeans in America until the turn of the 20th century.  The Indian Wars in the United States did not end until the subjugation of the Apaches in the 1890s.  That was our longest war, and a tragic and costly one for Native American civilians

As a country we need to wake up to our own history.  We have to understand how we use selective definitions to eliminate our need to take responsibility for atrocities of all sorts.