Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violen

Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their pure and noble citizens -- the same contemptible monkey-trick that Putin used in Georgia. The South Ossetians began the Russian-Georgian War, by firing artillery at Georgian villages; the Boston rioters began the "Massacre," and the British fired in response to one of their soldiers being knocked down -- not by a thrown rock, but by someone hitting him with a club. That's self-defense, not My Lai or the Katyn Forest; and the verdicts from their trials support that statement. The US has a nasty history of describing anything it doesn't like as a massacre; this is particularly visible in the Indian Wars, in which every incident in which the US wipes out an American Indian village is a "battle," and every incident in which an Indian tribe wipes out a US village is a "massacre." I'm not saying that the US was always in the wrong or that it was always in the right -- "American Indian tribes" is a pretty broad brush to be painting with, and some tribes (the Cherokee, most prominently) were more civilized than the US while others (the Sioux, for ex.) were honestly pretty barbarous -- but I am saying that traditional US historiography is propagandistic. However, this is changing (although sometimes only by becoming propagandistic in the other direction); and the connotations of the word "massacre" remain the same regardless of how the word's been abused.