Every Thanksgiving, some idiot liberal gets it in his head to tell the American people that we have nothing to be thankful for on this day, and that we should instead prostrate ourselves and beg forgiveness for our sins.
I think they must take turns or something because we get the same thing on the 4th of July. But leave it to a liberal to try and make our lives miserable on Thanksgiving.
Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American "sin." That's according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a "white-supremacist holiday."
Jensen's opinion piece "No Thanks for Thanksgiving," appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the "European invasion of the Americas." He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. "How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?" he asked.
According to Jensen, Thanksgiving is "at the heart of U.S. myth-building. "But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today," he explained.
From Jensen's piece, we get to the heart of his critique:
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This is a classic view of the Howard Zinn's, the Oliver Stone's (whose Showtime series on American history is genuine comedy), and many liberals who decry the fact that some of this stuff isn't in textbooks taught in schools.
What isn't in social studies books about our national narrative (they don't even call it "history" anymore) could fill a library the size of the Library of Congress. Jensen, Stone, Zinn, and their acolytes all act as if American history is locked away in a closet somewhere, guarded 24 hours a day by CIA agents. Indeed, they try to elevate themselves by claiming that only they have the "courage" and "wisdom" to take a "realistic" look at American history and spout off about our sins.
It is a nonsensical notion that the "real" history of America is being hidden. The idea that the clash of cultures that resulted in the deaths of 90% of the native Americans who lived here from the time of Columbus isn't being taught is absurd. The question of how to teach such an enormously complex event that spanned 500 years is never mentioned by simpletons who scream "genocide" when the overwhelming majority of native Americans - some medical historians put the percentage at 90% - died of diseases for which they had zero immunity without ever seeing a white man. Remarkably sophisticated trade routes that criss crossed the country proved to be the death of Indian culture when small pox, measles, mumps, and other diseases that Europeans had develped varying levels of immunity against struck native Americans with full virulence and moved rapidly across the country. Some estimates put the death toll from disease at 80% of all North American Indians by 1580. less than 100 years after Columbus sighted land.
Clearly, the native American was treated abysmally by white governments through our history. This is not in dispute and the fact that the forced movement of indigenous peoples resulted in thousands of deaths is also a fact of history. That same history is replete with stories of massacres by white settlers and soldiers of native Americans as well as massacres by Indians of whites. That too, is a fact of history of which little is mentioned by Jensen et al when accusing whites of genocide.
Jensen has a point - a point he fails to make with any rational or logical argument. To prove genocide, he must show that it was the policy of the US government to kill all Native Americans. This simply isn't true and even a casual look at our history shows wild swings by the US government between trying to destoy Indian culture and pursuing policies that sought to save it. In the end, the least successful policies tried to turn hunter gatherer socieites into agricultural communities - policies that are reaping a bitter harvest even today.
Just one Thanksgiving I would like to spend in peace without moonbats like Jensen spouting inanities about the Founders holding views similar to the Nazis.
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