Imagine soldiers coming back from an attack on a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapahoe, with women’s genitalia, men’s testicles, babys’ scalps hanging from their standards. The attack was led by Maj. John Chivington, a brash man of conceit.

What does one call such a man who rides up in sneak attack and slaughters peaceful people? Call it Evil? Sick evil? Demented? Hatred-larded? Brain and heart dead?

Maybe there are no names for those who murder innocents.

What kind of men were those who unleashed bullets and fire on a peaceful village encampment of Native people, murdering 80 women and children, ripping the foetuses out of pregnant women? [“There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, traveling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, ‘let me try the son of a b-. I can hit him.’ He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.
— Major Anthony, New York Tribune, 1879”]

Is there a name for such a man, for such men?

What do we call the mass murder by firearms of an estimated 500 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, led by Lt. Calley in the Charlie Company assault on My Lai? 500 murdered. All at once.

Battle fatigued men, meaning enraged, grief stricken, having lost 40 members in 3 months it was claimed? Killing and killing and killing unarmed women and children. That is the remedy for sorrow and anger? Dead little ones, old white haired elders sprawled with gaping wounds, teens and adult women and men trying to protect their children, all shot to death with firearms.

Yes, we have heard all the stories of children carrying hand grenades and hurling them at GIs. William Thomas Allison, a professor of Military History at Georgia Southern University, wrote, “By midmorning, members of Charlie Company had killed hundreds of civilians and raped or assaulted countless women and young girls. They encountered no enemy fire and found no weapons in My Lai…”

Terrified women and children in My Lai, picture taken just before their murders by Charlie Company seconds later. Woman adjusting her blouse for she has just been sexually assaulted by a member of Charlie Company, according to later testimony

Is it different between Sand Creek, My Lai and No Gun Ri in Korea in 1960 where 150+ South Korean refugees, unarmed and innocent, were murdered, 55 injured many of whom died within days …orders issued to fire on South Korean civilians in front-line areas, orders discovered decades later in declassified military archives after the murders of civilian refugees fleeing was denied, denied, denied by US government.

Among those issuing the orders to murder fleeing refugees was 1st Cavalry Division commander Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, who deemed Koreans left in the war zone to be “enemy agents,” according to U.S. war correspondent O.H.P. King and U.S. diplomat Harold Joyce Noble.

The Maj Gen.’deemed’ it. No intel, no proof. He ‘deemed’ the murders just ought be: 41 percent were children under 15, and 70 percent were women, children or men over age 61.

What does one call this man who gives orders to fire on civilians fleeing for their lives?

South Korean refugees fleeing for their lives, only to run into the guns of Maj. Gen. Gay’s army and his order to shoot to kill any left in the war zone…those burdened with illness, trying to carry their children and enough food, the halt, the babies, the mothers and fathers, the elders…

What does one call the massacre of blacks trying to gain their freedom throughout the 1800s, or the massacre of entire ranchos of Mexicans in order to take their lands, or the massacres of native people in order to take the black hills for its gold?

Are these different than people attending a music festival when a man sicker than a dog smuggles half his deadly arsenal into a hotel room on the 32nd floor in order to shoot to kill as many souls as possible.

Isn’t the ground zero factor that the people are innocent, what they did three days ago or ten years ago, irrelevant. They were just being. And a person of no mind and no heart, cut then down. Whether it be the braggert Chivington at Sand Creek, or Charley Company, or Lt. Maj. Gay’s command to murder… they were all innocents who were raped, shot to death, defaced and desecrated… they were innocent. Surly that counts for something still.

Sure. War is hell. Blah and more blah that attempts pitifully to side step responsibility for harming the unarmed, shooting them in the back, in the head, in the gut, breaking their legs and arms with bullets.

Why those in the USA, who are African Americans, Mexicans, Native American who were slaughtered en masse are not counted as ‘the worst massacre in US history,’ I do not know, and it saddens me that once again MSM leads the way in tilting history, in this case, giving out inaccurate information about ‘worst’ etc.

But what I do know is that in the US, at Sand Creek, two regiment captains refused to follow Chivington’s orders to fall upon the native people with gunfire. Also same at My Lai in Vietnam, several men refused to participate. Same at No Gun Ri in Korea; some few refused orders.

What do we call those who refused to murder? For they are the opposite of the ones who slaughter. Perhaps we should study the ones who refuse to murder, instead of endlessly trying to speculate, often way off point, the murderer.

Maybe we ought study those ordered to join in slaughters of innocents, but refused… Yes, let us study them in order to know exactly WHAT is missing in the one who unleashes without pause, a massacre of the innocents.

I’m completely for it.

CODA
the image behind the headline here, is of one of the three souls who survived Sand Creek massacre. She is Mochi- Southern Cheyenne Nation.