When our government, our media, and our institutions of higher learning
select 
certain events for remembering and ignore others, we have the
responsibility to 
supply the missing information.
Those of us who were of age during the Vietnam War remember the My Lai
Massacre 
of 1968, in which a company of American soldiers poured automatic rifle
fire 
into groups of unarmed villagers, killing perhaps 500 people, many of
them women 
and children. How many high school students know about the My Lai
Massacre today ?
My Lai was not a unique event. An Army colonel charged with covering up
the My 
Lai incident told reporters: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai
hidden 
someplace."
Recently, Nelson Mandela stated, correctly, “The United States, which
callously 
dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has no moral
authority to 
police the world.” 
We must consider Mandela’s statement objectively.  We 
must understand the atrocities our leaders commit now and in the past, in
the 
name of "freedom" as they like to say.
The use of the atomic bomb against Japan was one of those shameful acts.
According to many historians, the United States used the atomic bomb
against 
Japan to keep the U.S. from suffering one million casualties in an
invasion of 
Japan.  Is this assumption valid?  Would it really have been necessary to
invade 
Japan?
In 1906, an American military detachment attacked a village of Filipino  
("Moros") living in the hollow of a mountain in one of the southern
islands. 
Every one of 600 men, women, and children were killed. This was the Moro 
Massacre, which drew an angry response from Mark Twain and other 
anti-imperialist Americans.
In one of many Native American massacres, "The Pequot Massacre" of 1636,
when our "Puritan" ancestors, in an expedition led by Captain John
Mason, 
set fire to a village of Pequot Indians on the Connecticut shore of Long
Island 
Sound? Most treaties the U.S. promised the indians were never honored.  
"Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword, some hewed to
peeces . . 
. and very few escaped," wrote a contemporary, William Bradford, in his
History 
of Plymouth Plantation. And the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather wrote:
"It was 
supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell
that day." 
I guess Mather was an expert on the destination of souls....