Wednesday, November 27, 2019

The US holiday Thanksgiving is tomorrow

By SJ Otto

Each year I write something about the traditional holiday Thanksgiving. It is a holiday based on miss-information and it is truly politically incorrect. The real story behind this holiday is not as cheerful as most people make it. However, people across the country, including me, will travel to a relative’s house for a traditional turkey dinner. It’s unlikely this holiday will just go away. But the one thing we can do is to let people know that this was not the happy story it was supposed to be. The Native American Indians helped the pilgrims survive their first winter and year in the American continent. Their reward was to be massacred and moved off the land they lived in for thousands of years. The genocide of the Native American Indians and the theft of their land and cultures is one of the greatest crimes committed by white people and their capitalist system. When people try to claim that communism has caused more deaths and suffering than any other ideology, we need to point out that capitalism killed millions of people, during the US Indian wars.

So for the rest of the story:

Thanksgiving claims to have its roots in Plymouth Rock in the 17th century. But that event has little to do with the holiday we celebrate today. Native American Indians and white settlers from Europe came together to celebrate a difficult year, where the settlers

were helped by the Native Americans, who helped them grow corn and other new world vegetables. There was three days of feasting on native plants and animals, such as fish and deer, corn and pumpkins. There were also games played. It was a real big bash. From that event until the 20^th century, people found various reasons to get together and celebrate a kind of “end of the harvest” celebration.

The holiday we celebrate today was officially established in 1941. A “Thanksgiving” celebration has taken place from various days of the years and inspired by various events, such as the end of the Civil War. This took place of and on throughout US history, until the official holiday was declared, by Congress and the President, in 1941. The traditional fixings and food menu, such as turkey, came from a women’s magazine in the 1850s. Thanksgiving is a holiday dominated by Christianity, even though it is legally a secular holiday. Being Christian isn’t necessary to this celebration, but most Christians see it as a time to “give thanks to God.” While it is a nice day to get together with friends and family, it is ironic that we celebrate an event in which white settlers from Europe came together to feast and party with Native American Indians. For most of our history after that this country fought at least two Indian wars and Native American Indians didn’t enjoy all of the benefits of being American citizens until the early 20th century, when they were finally declared to be US citizens.

For a truly ghoulish look at the Thanksgiving holiday see: “American Thanksgiving: A Pure Glorification of Racist Barbarity” –from Humans are Free.

There are some groups of people who find it barbaric to celebrate a holiday by killing a bird and eating it. Some people are vegetarians and don’t take part in eating a dead bird. Some religions oppose eating and killing dead animals.