Reflections On Thanksgiving aka The Indigenous National Day Of Mourning (2019)

As I sit reflecting on this Thanksgiving holiday I can’t help thinking that few things rival Amerikan hypocrisy.

While a huge national memorial sits in Washington, DC in memory of the Jewish Holocaust, Amerikans celebrate a national holiday called Thanksgiving which actually commemorates an even worse and ongoing holocaust committed by Amerika itself against Native Americans.

The Amerindians themselves have renamed Thanksgiving and remember it as a National Day of Mourning, contrasting its reality with the false history it celebrates.

THANKSGIVING’S ORIGINS

The pilgrims, whose survival through the harsh winters in Plymouth was made possible by the advice and help of the First Nations, showed no loving kindness and appreciation towards them as falsely portrayed in the Thanksgiving mythology.

In fact, the first unofficial Thanksgiving of 1621 was held behind an eleven foot high wall constructed to keep the Natives out, and celebrated a massacre carried out a few days before under the leadership of the Pilgrim Miles Standish. The Amerindians who were inside the settlement during that feast were neither invited nor welcomed.

Thanksgiving as an official holiday began 16 years later in 1637. And yet again, it was to celebrate a massacre of Natives. This time the Massachusetts Bay colony’s governor, John Winthrop, declared the holiday to celebrate the return of an expeditionary force that had massacred over 700 defenseless Pequot children, women, and men, in what is today Mystic, Connecticut.

NEVER AGAIN NEVER ENDED

There has been a persistent effort globally to preserve the memory of the Jewish Holocaust, (although the Jews were not the only peoples to suffer brutal oppression and genocide at the hands of the German Nazis), so that they will never suffer a similar atrocity. Indeed, this sentiment is captured in the slogan known and often repeated by most Jews, “Never again!”

Which is one of the stated reasons for maintaining a Jewish Holocaust Memorial in DC.

But what of the Amerindian Holocaust? An unacknowledged holocaust that has never ended. A holocaust that, unlike the German Nazis, was SUCCESSFUL in its aim of largely exterminating the native peoples and their lifestyles to allow for the creation of a race-based continental settler society. In fact Adolf Hitler admitted he was trying to replicate what Amerika did, in his own campaign to create a race-based continental society in Europe. And that he was imitating the same methods that Amerika had used to accomplish this, namely concentration camps, genocide, slave labor.[1]

Amerika’s founding fathers were not only Hitler’s heroes, they expressed and engaged in barbarities that far outstripped anything he did and promoted, and again, they succeeded where he failed.

Here are just a few accounts for some perspective:

“[President Thomas] Jefferson…in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with ‘the hatchet.’ ‘And…if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,’ he wrote, ‘we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond th Mississippi,’ continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.’ Indeed, Jefferson’s writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given the simple choice-to be ‘extirpate[d] from the earth’ or to remove themselves out of the Americans’ way. Had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory.”[2]

And this was the father of the US Declaration of Independence speaking of the violent removal and extermination of Natives, simply to take their land.

Jefferson was also a large slaveowner, who at 47 made a sex slave of a 14 year old slave child, Sally Hemings, which generated a scandal in Europe (exposing him as a pedophile) when he traveled to Paris with her in tow as his obvious concubine. And these are Amerika’s greatest heroes. Men who committed the most inhumane crimes against the very people, like Natives and Blacks, before whom they are exalted. Much like the mythology of Thanksgiving.

Take too George Washington, another huge slaveowner, and genocidal Indian killer:

“[T]he surviving Indians later referred to Washington by the name ‘Town Destroyer,’ for it was under his direct orders thatmat least 28 of the 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the Mohawk River had been totally obliterated in a period of less than five years, as had all the towns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onendaga, and the Cayuga. As one Iroquois told Washington to his face in 1792: ‘To this day, when that name is heard, our women folk look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.’[3]

And what of Andrew Jackson, another huge slaver, genocidal Indian killer, and founder of the Democratic party, which can rightly be called a forerunner of the German Nazi party, and Jackson the Hitler of his time.

Jackson proudly proclaimed that he’d never met an Indian he didn’t kill, and never killed an Indian he didn’t scalp, age and gender notwithstanding. He even boasted of eating his potatoes fried in Indian fat.

Jackson’s memory carries particular notoriety among Amerindians, for his role in the 1838-39 forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma when gold was discovered on their land in Georgia, known as the Trail of Tears. The entire Cherokee nation was forced to march through frigid weather, with little food, causing the death of thousands whom they were forced to abandon where they fell.

Likewise the proclaimed ‘wisest’ of Amerika’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, was no less a genocidal Indian killer. He actually promoted the use of rum as a weapon with which to wipe them out.

And so there be no mistake about the esteem in which these men and what they stood for are STILL held by the Amerikan establishment, each one of them are memorialized with their images on US currency. Which is like printing the faces of Hitler, Goebbels and his ilk on German money today. All of this falls right in line with whitewashing and glorifying Pilgrim Indian killers with the Thanksgiving holiday.

In a similar vein, the Amerikan narrative has always been a cesspool of lies, with one of its recent crowning cultural achievements being the popular Broadway musical HAMILTON, that had Amerika’s rabidly racist founding fathers and their peers portrayed by a multi-racial cast.

These sustaining Amerikan falsehoods are just a few of the many things I reflect on when holidays like Thanksgiving roll around. It was so we wouldn’t be suckered by such lies as these that Malcolm X recognized, “Only a fool would allow his enemy to educate his children.”

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!

Notes

[1] John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p 702 (“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”); Isidor Wallimann, eds. et al. Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, Ct: Greenwood, 1987), p 288. (“Hitler saw the settlement of the New World and the concomitant elimination of North America’s Indian population by white European settlers as a model to be followed by Germany on the European continent.”); Joachin C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), p. 214 (Hitler’s “continental war of conquest” was modeled “with explicit reference to the United States.”)

[2] David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 120.

[3] Ibid, Op Cit. note 2.