History is filled with massacres that became infamous because of their scale, brutality, or historical impact. Here are some of the best-known.
Keep in mind that all the following were committed by otherwise “normal” human beings, many of whom were nice, honest, church-going, just like your friends, neighbors, and relatives. They weren’t brought up as monsters but became monsters as their leadership ordered.
In short, there is some bad in most of us, or at least many of us, waiting to be uncorked by an evil leader.
- Nanjing Massacre (1937)– Often called the “Rape of Nanking.” During the Imperial Japanese Army occupation of the Chinese capital, an estimated 100,000–300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed. Widespread rape and torture accompanied the killings.
- Katyn Forest (1940) – The Soviet NKVD executed about 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals. The Soviet government denied responsibility for decades.
- Babi Yar (1941) – Over two days, Nazi Einsatzgruppen, aided by collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews outside Kyiv. Tens of thousands more were later killed at the same site.
- Oradour-sur-Glane (1944) – German SS troops killed 643 villagers, including women and children, and burned the village. The ruins remain preserved.
- Lidice (1942) – After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis destroyed the village of Lidice, executing the men, deporting the women, and killing or dispersing the children.
- My Lai (1968) – U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. It became one of the defining atrocities of the Vietnam War.
- Srebrenica (1995) – Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. International courts later ruled it a genocide.
- Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) – U.S. Army troops killed an estimated 250–300 Lakota, many of them women and children.
- Sand Creek Massacre (1864) – Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment, killing about 150–200 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly.
- Kigali Genocide (1994) – During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi, were murdered in roughly 100 days.
- Auschwitz II-Birkenau – The Holocaust involved the murder of about six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, across occupied Europe.
- Choeung Ek Genocide – Under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979), approximately 1.5–2 million Cambodians died through execution, starvation, and forced labor.
Some nations initially denied these horrors existed, but later recanted and apologized, though apologies do not save the victims.
America likes to portray itself as the “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of compassion and morality. We even have it engraved on our Statue of Liberty:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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There are those who heard about “The Rape of Nanking,” and shrugged. “Just a bunch of Chinese.” And the killing of Polish people was ” just a bunch of Poles.” The Jews were “just Jews.” The Indians were “just Indians.” The Cambodians were “just Cambodians.” The Vietnamese were “just Vietnamese.”
And now, the destroyed lives are “just immigrants,” and illegal immigrants at that. Not criminals. Just immigrants.
Frankly, I shrugged at a couple of those, too. Cambodians? I’d seldom heard about Cambodia, much less knowing any Cambodians.
But what’s now happening in America is too close to home for me to shrug. This is my country that is committing such horror upon real families, a couple of whom I know.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, analyzed nonpublic data from ICE leaked to Cato, and he found that among those with criminal convictions detained by ICE, only 8% were convicted of violent or property crimes (about 5% were violent criminal convictions).
“And that includes very minor assaults. I mean, not like rape and murder,” Bier said in a radio interview with KPFA on Jan. 22. “These are someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.”
Contrary to administration rhetoric about targeting the worst of the worst, Bier described the arrests under Trump as “indiscriminate.”
“They have removed the prioritization that was in place under the Biden administration to go after those violent criminals that they’re highlighting,” Bier said. “They got rid of that policy and replaced it on Day One with a policy of arresting people who are the most convenient to arrest.”
Cato’s findings were corroborated by a New York Times analysis of ICE data obtained through the Deportation Data Project. Between the period of Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, the Times found that nationwide, 37% of those arrested in ICE operations had any past criminal conviction. Just 7% had a violent conviction. Another 30% had pending criminal charges, and 33% had no criminal charges.
The disparity was even wider in cities and states that have been targeted for enhanced immigration enforcement. In the four areas analyzed — Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Illinois, the majority of those swept up by ICE had no criminal record (convictions or even pending charges).
The New York Times analysis noted that while only a fraction of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.”
Hundreds of thousands of good, valuable, honest families have been destroyed for the “crime” of wanting to work for a better life for themselves and their families.
They generally were not looking for a handout. In fact, they didn’t even qualify for Social Security or Medicare, although they paid the taxes for these programs.
You may know some of these people. They sweat in the fields picking your vegetables; they clean your house and your office; they bus your table and empty your trash. They taxi you. Some of them have lived here for many years, building good lives. Some even started businesses that might have hired you or someone you know.
And now their lives are broken, their children have lost futures. We have lost good people. And we shrug and turn away, or worse. “Serves them right for being illegal,” as though it were even possible for a poor brown-skinned or black-skinned or Muslim to gain citizenship in this new America of hatred.
We turn away because Trump, the convicted sexual abuser, claims they are “rapists.” We turn away because a hatemonger has aroused in us the latent hatred of those who are different from us, whether they be not Christian, not white, not rich, or not born here. (By the slimmest of a Supreme Court’s decision, Trump failed to punish those born here.)
We lost the compassion and decency that made us so proud to say, “I am an American.”
Those who submit to hatemongering (which really is fearmongering) are the morally weakest among us, who defend their lack of integrity with a veneer of church attendance and biblical preaching.
Hatemongers come and go, along with their weak-minded followers. Then the silent moral may begin to make their voices heard, and our nation might return to civilization.
Trump may go. MAGAs may go. They may deny “really” believing anything Trump has said. They even may deny voting for him or speaking for him, though I know some who will retain the anger they felt at me because I spoke against Trump.
I have lost friends for reminding them about the truths they wish to deny and/or forget. But I simply couldn’t shrug. I just couldn’t.
And history will be written and rewritten. We vaguely may remember My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, the mass deportation of immigrants or the murders of Americans by I.C.E. and the Republican Party.
But will we ever regain our compassion, our honor, our common sense, our decency, our own morals and our moral standing in the world?
It’s hard to say what a people will do after they have supported a low-intelligence, indecent, compulsively lying, psychopathic, often convicted felon, who has led them into hell. I can’t predict.
Trump himself has said he could shoot someone in the street and not lose any followers. Is he right?
The next few weeks will begin to tell us who America and we Americans really are.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Excellent, excellent post Rodger. Stress, unresolved problems and a desparate desire to resolve them is the very process and temptation of the authoritarian mindset…and the natural philosophical concept of grace, graciousness and its systemically applicable aspects…like Gifting for instance, is its remedy.
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You will find this interesting, chdwr: https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/july-27-2026?r=52nrkk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Rodger, your words struck me — especially this line:
“But will we ever regain our compassion, our honor, our common sense, our decency, our own morals and our moral standing in the world?”
You ask whether Americans can recover these qualities, yet your own conclusion seems to deny the very compassion you claim to defend. You describe millions of people as victims of one man’s cruelty, but you do not acknowledge the complexity of the situation, nor the fact that many Americans — including some of your friends — are trying to balance compassion with order, safety, and fairness.
My feeling, and perhaps that of others who care about you, is simple:
You judge, but you do not extend compassion to those you disagree with.You condemn, but you do not consider their reasons.You speak of common sense, yet you dismiss any alternative perspective.
Let me offer a broader lens.
⭐ 1. Voluntary Return Programs Are Not “Massacres” — They Are Policy Options
You list historical atrocities — Nanjing, My Lai, Srebrenica — horrors committed by governments against innocent people. But returning migrants to their home countries is not genocide, nor is it comparable to mass murder.
Many nations — Canada, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Australia — have voluntary repatriation programs that:
These programs are not “hatemongering.” They are standard international practice.
⭐ 2. Trump DID propose financial assistance for voluntary return
This is a fact that rarely appears in emotional discussions.
Trump publicly stated that migrants who wished to return home voluntarily would receive:
This is not cruelty. This is policy — and it mirrors what many European nations already do.
Whether one agrees or disagrees, it is not comparable to the atrocities you listed.
⭐ 3. Was the “flooding” deliberate? Many analysts believe it was.
You ask whether Americans have lost their moral standing.
But we must also ask:
Was the sudden, unprecedented surge of migrants into the U.S. an organic humanitarian crisis — or was it politically engineered?
Multiple analysts, journalists, and former DHS officials have suggested:
This does not excuse cruelty. But it does demand common sense, which you yourself call for.
⭐ 4. Compassion must apply to ALL sides — including citizens
You mourn the suffering of migrant families — and rightly so.
But compassion must also extend to:
Compassion is not one‑directional. It must include everyone affected, not only one group.
⭐ 5. The real root cause is monetary — not moral
You describe atrocities committed by nations in moments of moral collapse.
But today’s immigration crisis is not driven by hatred. It is driven by monetary architecture:
As Frederick Soddy warned:
“No force can save a system once its contradictions have matured. Only a change of design can.”
If we redesign the monetary system, migration becomes voluntary — not forced.
If we do not redesign it, migration becomes inevitable — not moral.
⭐ 6. My conclusion
Rodger, I respect your passion. But compassion requires understanding, not condemnation.
America is not committing genocide. America is struggling with a broken monetary system that produces human movement faster than any nation can absorb.
The solution is not moral outrage. The solution is monetary redesign — the very path Soddy, Werner, Brown, and Hudson have mapped.
I hope we can discuss this with clarity, not anger.
Warm regards, Carmen B. (“Justaluckyfool”) Please: READ-EXAMINE-ANALYZE-DECIDE: No judgement. Your call.
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You are absolutely correct that there are at least two sides — perhaps more –to every story.
Your opinions are neither new nor unique. In fact, history shows Americans making exactly the same cases intermittenltly for over a century: “THEY are overrunning us. We can’t absorb them all.
“They are taking our jobs. They are poisoning the blood of our nation. This is a Christian nation.
“They come from shithole countries. They are rapists and criminals. The countries are not sending us their best.
“We only are deporting the ‘worst of the worst.’ Our schools can’t handle the influx. We’ll take only white immigrants from South Africa.”
Have I missed a few?
And perhaps we shouldn’t mention Trump’s illegal and heartless desire to deport children born here of non-citizens, some of whom have been here for decades. No empathy or compassion there.
As for: financial support, safe transport, documentation assistance, and the right to reapply legally, really? Is that what you have been told?
Please tell me how that “financial support” works, or are you referring to a one thousand-dollar, one-time stipend to surrender one’s home and friends to be sent to where they have nothing?
And “document assistance“? C’mon, you’re just messing with me, now. How about “document assistance here in America? How does one expect document assistance from other nations when they can’t get it here?
How many of the deportees, who had good lives here, have been deposited into hellhole nations, where they not only do not know the language, but are offered nothing for survival? Do you know? Do you care? Would you like that for your parents or children?
And as for reapplying, the line stretches around the block — intentionally. This administration wants only two kinds of immigrants: The rich ones and the white Christians. The rest are viewed as garbage. Since Trump makes no secret of that, why would you deny it?
“American families overwhelmed by sudden population surges?” Which families are overwhelmed? I haven’t heard that families are overwhelmed by immigrants, but if you empathize with families, I suggest they are overwhelmed far more by I.C.E. than by new relatives. Quite the opposite. Families desperately want their relatives here.
“Cities whose budgets collapsed under emergency housing.” It seems to me that the cities have been fighting ICE’s cruelty, in a desperate effort to KEEP the immigrants. Then again, I don’t receive my news exclusively from FOX. Perhaps your city has been overwhelmed. My city wants and needs the immigrants and benefits from them. No overwhelming here.
” . . . Schools unable to absorb thousands of new students overnight,” If the entire nation’s educational system had not been decimated by ‘chainsaw Musk,’ perhaps it would be less dire.
Yes, schools need more money, teachers, and classrooms, and if you ever hear that the Republican Party favors providing that money, do let me know. Meanwhile, they voted for billions more for deportation and cut education.
As you may know from reading this blog, a Monetarily Sovereign government cannot unintentionally run short of its own sovereign currency. Deporting good people simply because the vetting system is designed to reject them is a heartless, indeed foolish and cruel approach,
“hospitals stretched beyond capacity,” Yes, and they are short of doctors, nurses, equipment, hospitals, and the solution is to deport healthy workers?? That is what is happening right now, as thousands of nurses and doctors and other hospital workers are being deported.
and then the inevitable: “workers whose wages were depressed by illegal labor markets.” That is the same lie we hear from every Hitler wannabe for decades. It isn’t true and never has been.
First, they claim that our services are short of help. Then they claim that adding workers cuts salaries. The right wing takes opposite sides of the same issue and always seems to argue passionately for whichever side is more cruel.
Those deported workers also were consumers whose dollars enrich businesses that hire more workers. How do you think America’s economy has grown, if not for the increased sales by businesses to new consumers?
This discussion has been repeated every couple of decades. At different times, it was a problem with all those Italians. And all those Irish. And all those Jews. And all those Chinese. And all those Japanese. Lately, It’s all those Mexicans and all those Haitians and Venezuelans.
The reality is that America’s population is now growing too slowly, and those whose income relies on an ever-growing economy will be amazed to learn that a growing economy needs a growing number of consumers, which we fortunately have had for longer than you are alive.
And I don’t apologize for having compassion for good, honest men, women, and children who are grabbed from their homes because a fearful, mean-spirited criminal is elected by the very people who claim to hate criminals and to love God, while their actions speak exactly the opposite.
Finally, “are trying to balance compassion with order, safety, and fairness,” are nice words, but there is no balance.
“Order” is the classic fascist dictator’s demand.
“Safety” relies on the false claim that immigrants are criminals, a claim the right wing makes daily (along with the nauseating claim that Americans murdered by I.S.E. were “terrorists from within”) The fact is that immigrants are LESS likely to commit crimes than citizens.
And “fairness” is the word that means: “Only white Christians born here of white citizen parents deserve to be in America. All others: Raus!”
Thank you for your enlightening comments, which help answer the very last line in the original post. We indeed are on the cusp of learning who we really are.
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Yes, QUOTE GANDHI, “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
One of my top quotes.
******“The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS. LAWS by POLITICIANS. POLITICIANS by VOTERS. VOTERS by PUBLIC OPINION. PUBLIC OPINION by the MEDIA & EDUCATION, so whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY.” ( William J. Federer, “Change to Chains”)
“I feel for you and others that you are not aware of your being victimized”
MY BEST: ***** “Believe nothing merely because you have been told it…But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.”- Buddha[Gautama Siddharta] founder of Buddhism
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Agreed. “kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings” would absolutely be my description of a lying cheating fool oft-bankrupt, oft-criminally convicted, oft-election denier, a crooked businessman and a failed husband, who attacks women, beds whores, whose daddy bailed him out of trouble, who inherited a great economy and screwed it up with tariffs, made inflation worse., fired government workers who provide service to the public, deported millions of hard-working, honest families;, fired our generals and hired an incompetent TV boob to run the military, has ICE running roughshod over people’s rights, has an idiot running healthcare and a wrestling idiot to run, education, a low IQ psychopath who insults all our allies so no one will help us when we need it, a liar who promised no wars then started an unnecessary war he doesn’t know how to finish while American kids are dying. If Biden had screwed up a tenth as much as the Hitler wanna-be, the MAGAs would be having strokes, a guy who has no idea what the hell he is doing except to personally steal billions, but whose only retort is to claim Democrats are Communists while he plays footsie with Putin. And of course there’s the Epstein scandal, which normally would outrage everyone, except in Trump’s case it’s like a match compared to a forest fire.
And you actually spend your time and effort trying to prove what? That he’s a good President? A good man? Are you truly that blind to what Trump is? He doesn’t even hide it.
Or maybe you just enjoy being contrary.
I wrote this post, well before he was ever elected to office: Hitler in America. Why a bigot can win the Presidency. Bingo.
He’s a naked emperor, but since you like aphorisms, how about this one:. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
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I do apologize for failing to mention yet another dummy in the Trump fold, yet another Fox TV talking head, Jeanine Pirro who wasted time and money trying to convict one of America’s Olympic stars for damaging Trump’s reflection pool, WHEN HER OWN EXPERT ADMITTED THE POOL ALREADY WAS DAMAGED, AND COULDN’T SAY WHETHER OR NOT THE ACCUSED DAMAGED IT FURTHER.
Question: Why does Trump hire such misfits?
Answer: Because he knows they will obey him, being too stupid to attempt a coup or even get a good job in the future. So, he owns them.
The most brainless administration in American history.
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Of course anything that trump says is pretty much BULLSHIT
The CBP Home app:
Legal aid groups and immigration attorneys report that many individuals who complied and left the country never received the cash payout or encountered broken digital wire transfers…
Some applicants have had their flight bookings fall apart or fail at the airport despite following official app instructions…
Advocacy organizations warn that using the application to register does not waive future legal re-entry bans, which can last from 5 years to a lifetime
Otherwise, the wordy, retread story, the appeals to “authority” (more below) that you’re pitching-they just ain’t compelling [sic]
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It took a long time, but Germany has recovered from Hitler, and so have most others — though some no longer exist. The USSR is no longer under Stalin, but Putin is not that far from it.
But in the USA, Atlas is still shrugging, it’s brain has been cut off from its heart, but is still attached to its penis. It is in desperate need of a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Stephen Biko.
Or maybe just a John Wilkes Booth! Anyone will do…
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A small point in a tsunami of bad points, but on the reflecting pool: Trump, ever the ego-maniac and having the need to dominate EVERYTHING, even an inanimate object like a historical pool for contemplative reflection
(Trump: “What’s that?”), forced his secret service driver to actually drive him in the special protective car called the Beast, down the length of the emptied reflective pool. The Beast is armor-plated. Everything is beefed up to transport the armor and do it fast if necessary. It weighs 10 tons.
The tire tracks were visible in the emptied pool on the relatively delicate rubber liner. That, not some fictional knife wielding pro-Hamas Antifa whosit, is what damaged the liner more than anything else.
Bad installation by a hand-picked small time pool maintenance company with no experience for such a large complex job, but with ties to Trump is also responsible.
The cost has ballooned fro $2m to $18m, but they seem to have stopped counting after the pool was drained for the third time, also to clear the algae.
Reflecting pool indeed. But does it reflect just on Trump’s utter incompetence and corruption, or on the rest of us for electing him, twice?
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