The Little Brown Reader

But we need to understand that this pattern of abuse has deeper causes that have been within American culture since colonial days, and is part of a broader European culture of cruelty. When the Europeans began to conquer and colonize the Americas, they murdered, enslaved, and pushed out the native Indians. In part, this reflected a European culture that was racist and also supremacist, as they regarded Christianity and European ways as inherently superior to the ways of the heathen natives. They treated the Indians as subhuman, like animals, so that they had no moral concern about killing them.

Slavery too reflected this racism and cultural supremacism. This cruel and supremacist streak in European culture goes back to the ancient Roman and Greek civilizations, in which the conquered nations were enslaved and subservient. Conquest and enslavement have been practiced world-wide. The American Indians created empires by conquest, the Mongols conquered a vast empire in Asia, and there were wars of conquest and domination in Africa. Violent cultures have come to dominate the world, because peaceful cultures get conquered.

Other nations and governments, such as Japan and Germany during World War II, and the previous regime in Iraq, have committed atrocities many magnitudes worse than the abuses committed by Americans in Iraq. But Americans have to acknowledge their historical maltreatment of persons. In addition to the evil of slavery and the genocide against the Indians, Americans lynched Blacks in the old South, mistreated captives in the Philippines during the rebellion after the war of 1898, and violated human rights in Vietnam. Moreover, there is plenty of cruelty inside prisons in the US, and few Americans are concerned.

Non-Americans who properly condemn America for its failings should equally admit their own evils. Every nation that is casting stones is not without sin. There are Muslims and Arabs massively violating human rights now in Sudan; where is the outrage for that?

Why do nice people do evil acts? In the old South, White folks who were polite to their families and neighborhoods would gang up to hang innocent Blacks. Germans who listened to classical music and were kind to their children would turn around and send Jewish children to death camps. Why? It is because human beings compartmentalize their thinking. We mentally divide the world into categories with different standards.