Historian John Stewart McLennan said about this practice:

"The punishments of the Indians for wrongdoing by the English were, as all punishments of that epoch, harsh, and in addition they were humiliating and irritated the Indians. The scalp bounties of the colonies included rewards for the killing of women and children . . . [This leads to] the strange conditions, in which we find a benign and devout clergyman praying that the young men who have joined the Mohawks in a scalping expedition against the French and Indians may go in fear of the Lord, and regard the bringing in of French scalps as a good omen."

Martin Niemoeller, a German Protestant theologian who was imprisoned during the Second World War years for his opposition to Hitler, says of silence when others are being persecuted: "When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for women, First Nation people and other minorities, I didn't speak up, since I wasn't any of them. When, finally, they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up for me."

In a critique of the mistreatment of Amerindians by Europeans, nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman described how it varied at their hands: "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him." Parkman's observation about the English is true, but they also, like the Spanish, crushed the Indian.

Persecution

The barbarism employed by Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and other European Nations to subjugate Amerindian peoples during colonial times, and by the countries they begot in the Americas as a result of colonization, probably exceeds, or at the very minimum equals, the barbaric performances of the twentieth-century regimes of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union combined.

Like the people who suffered horribly under those regimes, Amerindians at various times and places over the past five hundred years, have been imprisoned and executed without trial or recourse, enslaved, tortured, relocated without consent, treated as inferior human beings, subjected to deliberate genocide, and demonized to nonhuman status by monstrous lies; children were removed from families, properties were confiscated by the state without compensation, cultures were destroyed, and so on.

These inhumanities were carried out and condoned by a white supremacist population primarily under the guise of helping the Christian Church spread its version of enlightenment. To disavow that most of the white population was involved rings hollow, because the evil was known by everyone and largely unopposed-a fact verified by the historical record.

From the before-mentioned it can be easily deduced that the majority's mentality was warped by a combination of religious zealotry, greed, and White supremacist beliefs. This combination raised hate levels in Europeans toward Amerindians to the point where conscience died and no wrong was seen in crushing them.

The example given, along with hundreds of others, prove that there is an evil in most populations just waiting for the right circumstances to erupt. In modern times, the horrors committed during the conflicts associated with the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s provided an excellent example of this mentality in action.