Wikipedia notes an interesting anniversery today.
225 years ago, a unit of 160 men of the Pennsylviana Militia under the command of a certain Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson rounded up a group of Lenape (Delaware) Indians harvesting their own fields and accused them, of all things, of treason. After imprisoning the (christian) Indians in their own church the good militamen held a council and voted what to do. In democratic fashion they voted to kill them all. After the decision, they went to get a good night's sleep.
The next day the righteous Americans methodically brought the Indians out of the church, in pairs, and killed them by crushing their skulls with mallets. Thus died 29 women, 39 children and 28 men. All were subsequently scalped.
The place this happened was the Moravian mission and settlement "Gnadenhütten" (tents of grace), around which the indians had settled. The event went to be known as Gnadenhütten Massacre.
As a consequence of this, most of the Delaware Indians, many of whom had remained neutral (like this group) or were even allied with the Americans, joined the British side of the war.
Why did I bring this up ?
The cold blooded cruelty of the act is staggering. This wasn't a massacre committed in the heat of battle. It wasn't committed by a loose band of criminals. A military unit, commanded by a commissioned officer, committed a premeditated mass murder in cold blood. And since the objective evidently was to remove these people from existence as a group, it was clearly a genocidal act.
It wasn't the first massacre and it wouldn't be the last, but the story itself isn't all there is. More important is the reaction.
As Wikpedia notes:
Many White Americans were outraged by the Gnadenhütten massacre. [...] Although there was some talk of bringing the killers to justice, no criminal charges were filed.
And the most famous and influential American of its time reacted, too:
When General George Washington heard about the massacre, he ordered that no American soldier allow himself to be taken alive
Now Americans weren't all too concerned for their war hero's wellbeing: according to a source Col. Williamson got into bad business after the war and died in debtor's prison. The good Americans gave him a burial with all military honors, though. But he was never in danger to have to answer for his crime.
We see here an element that transcends all periods of American history and can be seen until today: an American unwillingness to do justice. Had Washington, who was commander in chief of the whole Continental Army at the time, done his duty he should have courtmartialed and executed them all. Had the Americans any sense of fairness they would have arrested them and extradited them to the aggrieved Delawares to deal with them, as they saw fit, since the Americans themselves always claimed the right to deal with grievances done against them on their own territory by their own laws.
But in their very birth, and by explicit non-acts of their top leader, the United States became the might-makes-right society. While there are laws mostly protecting its citizens from each other, a general written and unwritten consensus indemnifies anyone who tramples the rights of the outsider du jour in official capacity.
Indian wars, Slavery, segregation, war crimes - most of these were at some time corrected. But there was never personal accountability for anyone involved. No slave owner was convicted for abduction, enslavement, torture. None of Custer's comrades ever saw a court martial for their numerous massacres. Several thousands of lynchings went basically unpunished over the better part of a century. Police misconduct is still until this day basically unprosecutable (and that involves right wing hot topics like Waco and Ruby Ridge as well as the numerous cases of police shootings of unarmed and/or harmless black citizens that keep passing as "accidents" in this country). And it ends in sort of officially sanctioned torture, in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in Haditha, in war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.
Let's call it, fitting to this day, the curse of Gnadenhütten. Until this nation is willing to face its tormentors, to exorcize its demons, it will never see sanity. These things will continue to happen again and again and again, until one is one too many and the nation itself will fail.
If we are not willing to make a stand, we are complicit in what happens.
Responsibility means prison times for soldiers who torture, for officers who organize or order torture.
Responsibility means prison times for policemen who shoot unarmed or harmless people.
Responsibility means prison time for justice dept lawyers and prosecutors who destroy the law by bending it, who slowly and determinedly break the mind a small criminal somehwere in a brig in Alabama without any recourse to courts or any semblance of due process.
Responsibilty means prison time for politicians who break the law or order others to break the law, even if the law is something as arcane as the FISA act.
And responsibility means impeachment for the likes of Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney and Bush, the people where "the buck stops", the torturers in chief, the lawbreakers in chief, the law benders in chief, where responsibilty for all the mayhem ultimately comes to rest.
Until we make responsibility relevant, the curse of Gnadenhütten will be on us all.