I have lost friends for this.

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

Source: https://mythfighter.com/2026/07/27/i-have-lost-friends-for-this/