The Fulford File, By James Fulford | A Happy Thanksgiving To All VDARE.COM Readers! | Articles

The Fulford File, By James Fulford | A Happy Thanksgiving To All VDARE.COM Readers!

11/25/2009

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Barack Hussein Obama has issued his first Thanksgiving Proclamation:

"What began as a harvest celebration between European settlers and indigenous communities nearly four centuries ago has become our cherished tradition of Thanksgiving."

Actually, they were English settlers, but it's OK—the President was raised overseas in Indonesia, where they think of all white people as Europeans.

"As Americans, we hail from every part of the world. While we observe traditions from every culture, Thanksgiving Day is a unique national tradition we all share. Its spirit binds us together as one people, each of us thankful for our common blessings."

Aargh. But Obama still ends his proclamations the way George Bush did:

"IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA" [Presidential Proclamation — Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2009]

The War on Thanksgiving is happening, to get us all ready for the War Against Christmas:

"Many educators are striving to celebrate a more historically accurate Thanksgiving, ditching the stereotypical Pilgrim-and-Indian stories in favor of true social studies lessons. Teachers say a nuanced approach helps debunk popular myths and can add cultural awareness to the holiday."[Schools updating lessons on 1st Thanksgiving, By Angie Leventis Lourgos, Chicago Tribune, November 25, 2009]

Of course, all this political correctitude isn't actually providing any new and interesting information to the children, it's just changing sides. And this has been going on for some time. A Christian Science Monitor story says Thanksgiving Day: Pilgrims were a surprisingly worldly, tolerant lot [By Robert Marquand, November 25, 2009]

Okay, surprising to whom? Surprising to everyone who's been victimized by anti-Pilgrim, anti-American propaganda for years. The CSM story, after some stuff about Puritans and women's rights, and the multicultural neighbourhoods they lived in seventeenth century Leyden, during their Dutch sojourn, says

"But church historians have complained for decades that few religious groups are more historically maligned and misunderstood than Puritans.

"They are ignored as unimportant precursors to the American Revolution: So stripped of their religious nature had US history books made the Pilgrims that one standard text in the 1980s had only one line on them, infamously calling them "people who take long trips."

"The Pilgrim-Puritans are also slandered as zealots, the taproot of all America's psychic repressions, phobias, guilt, and drive. Historian Edmund Morgan complained that Puritans were depicted as severe figures whose "only contribution to American culture is their furniture."

"The religious essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson calls the popular hostility 'A great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged…'"

Gabriel Matthew Schivone, an Arizona student, quotes Communist Howard Zinn in the Arizona Wildcat:

"In a recent interview with the Wildcat on the subject of popular holidays such as Columbus Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving, eminent historian Howard Zinn remarked that, as Americans, 'We celebrate the wrong things.'

"Veteran's Day is too often celebrated with a love of war and militarism. Columbus Day is often thought of (if at all) with reverence for Christopher Columbus' mythic heroism along with a so-called 'spirit of discovery' he and many like him represented— which was, in reality, the unleashing of mass genocide, disease and European imperialism upon the land that would become America.

"In this sense, Thanksgiving (or 'thanks-taking,' as a friend of mine refers to it) is the all-American holiday. But instead of the usual mass gluttony and mindless consumerism, this Thanksgiving we should try to understand what the coming of the Puritans and other white Europeans meant for the indigenous populations of North America (and what it still means today for indigenous peoples all over the world, from Palestine to our regional neighbors, the Tohono O'odham people): extermination, displacement and ongoing repression."

"Then perhaps we can think about what each of us can do to transform meaningless waste and mediocrity into meaningful change and social creativity." [Howard Zinn on Thanksgiving, November 25, 2009]

This is a (literal) textbook example of anti-American, anti-white prejudice. (If you've never heard of the Tohono O'odham, that's because they're the Papago Indians under another name. They're mostly victimized by Mexican illegal aliens tramping through their territory and littering. )

Zinn's textbooks are used in schools all over America. Daniel Flynn debunks most of what Zinn is saying here.

"Thus the Pequot violence against whites that led to the war is almost entirely absent from the text. The most Zinn can bring himself to admit is that 'Massacres took place on both sides.' In fact, the author details only the atrocities committed by one side: the Puritans. While graphic descriptions of Puritan violence are highlighted, Pequot atrocities are brushed aside. Here are some examples not to be found in Zinn: '[T]hey took two men out of a boat, and murdered them with ingenious barbarity, cutting off first the hands of one of them, then his feet,' writes 19th century historian John Gorham Palfrey about the Pequots' assaults upon settlers. 'Soon after, two men sailing down the river were stopped and horribly mutilated and mangled; their bodies were cut in two, lengthwise, and the parts hung up by the river's bank. A man who had been carried off from Wethersfield was roasted alive. All doubt as to the necessity of vigorous action was over, when a band of a hundred Pequots attacked that place, killed seven men, a woman, and a child, and carried off two girls.'

As I wrote in 2007,

"Oddly enough, many American Indians were thankful for the arrival of the Pilgrims. If you had been battling other Indians with stone knives and wooden arrows for hundreds of years, you'd be overjoyed to see potential allies who had guns, even if they were only matchlocks."

But if Indians and Communists aren't thankful for the Pilgrim Fathers, the rest of us can be. As a more normal Arizona undergraduate writes on the same page as Gabriel Matthew Schivone:

"There are some things about the holiday that allow no negotiation. For example, if your stuffing doesn't have fresh apple slices or cranberries in it, don't even talk to me about it. If you want to expound on early European settlers in America and the terrible events that followed their arrival, tell it to someone else. But if you want to stuff your face so much that you have to wait three hours just to eat dessert, now you're talking about some tender family bonding — and who doesn't like that?"

Happy Thanksgiving!