{"id":49761,"date":"2015-11-26T14:52:33","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T21:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=49761"},"modified":"2015-11-26T14:52:33","modified_gmt":"2015-11-26T21:52:33","slug":"thanksgiving-celebrating-the-genocide-of-native-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/11\/26\/thanksgiving-celebrating-the-genocide-of-native-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilbert Mercier\u00a0<\/span><\/span>NEWS JUNKIE POST<\/b><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
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In many ways, the US\u2019 celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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T<\/span>he sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the land of the free, home of the brave\u201d are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery.
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\nThis grim reality is far removed from the fairy tale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. The most recent version of this mythology was expressed by Ronald Reagan when he said that America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly and extremely generous Native-American tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers\u2019 gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native-American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>hen Christopher Columbus discovered\u201d the Americas in 1492, on his quest for gold and silver, the Native population, which he erroneously called Indians, numbered an estimated 15 million who lived north of current day Mexico. It was, by all considerations, a thriving civilization. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Native American population north of Mexico would be reduced to fewer than a million. This genocide was brought upon the Natives by systematic mass murder and also by disease, notably smallpox, spread by the European colonists.<\/p>\n

The genocide begun [by Winthrop] in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die\u2026\u201d<\/div>\n

Columbus and his successors\u2019 proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. They viewed the land as tribal collective ownership, not as a property that could be owned by individuals. Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.\u201d<\/em> wrote Howard Zinn in his masterful A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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In many ways, the US\u2019 celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The original crimes of genocide and slavery are not limited to US early history but have found an extension in the policies of modern-day US. The systematic assault on other nations and cultures still goes on under various pretenses or outright lies. United States wars of empire are going on today more than ever before. These wars have left millions of people dead across the world in the course of American history, and they are still fought for the same reasons behind the Native American genocide and slavery: namely, to expand the wealth<\/strong><\/a> of the US elite.<\/p>\n

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Defenders of Thanksgiving will say that whatever the original murky meaning of the holiday, it has become a rare chance to spend time with family and show appreciation for what one has. For most Americans today, however, it is hard to be thankful. As matter of fact, unless you belong to the 2 percent who represent the US ruling class you should not be thankful at all. How can you be appreciative for what you have if you have lost your house to foreclosure, don\u2019t have a job and can\u2019t feed your family? How can you be appreciative if you are a homeless veteran? How can you be appreciative when you are poor or sick in a society without social justice? On this Thanksgiving day, rich celebrities and politicians will make a parody of what should be real charity by feeding countless poor and homeless<\/strong><\/a>. This will ease their conscience, at least for a while. Charity, however, should not be a substitute for social justice. Just to ruin some people\u2019s appetites before they attack that golden turkey: keep in mind that today we are celebrating a genocide.<\/p>\n

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\"gilbertmerciernewsjunkie-150x150\"<\/a>Gilbert Mercier<\/a><\/strong> is the Editor in Chief<\/strong> of News Junkie Post<\/em> and one of its co-founders. He is the author<\/a> of The Orwellian Empire<\/em>. Mercier is a French journalist, photojournalist and filmmaker \u2014 writer\/concept writer, director, producer and art director \u2014 based in the US since 1983. In the early 1980\u2032s Mercier hosted and produced Performance,\u201d a radio show in France.\u00a0Mercier\u2019s coverage of New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina received international praise. Over the years, he has been a guest analyst on television and radio programs for RT (Russia Today), BBC World News, Progressive Radio Network, Sputnik, Al Hurra TV, CounterPunch Radio,<\/em> and Radio Islam.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gilbert Mercier\u00a0NEWS JUNKIE POST In many ways, the US\u2019 celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}