Thanksgiving Should Not Involve Any White Guilt
1. Thanksgiving should not involve any white guilt because it is an ancient holiday that Native Europeans have celebrated since before Christ.
Thanksgiving, until just 150 years ago, was a harvest festival that was traditionally held on the first full moon after the fall equinox, called the "harvest moon." This happened in early October. Americans celebrated Thanksgiving in early October until 1941. Canadians still celebrate their Thanksgiving in October. So do Swedes and peoples all over Europe -- except their Thanksgivings are still called harvest festivals.
Native Europeans who came to America had Autumn harvest festivals just as they had had back home. It wasn’t until 1863 that this harvest festival became a national holiday called “Thanksgiving.” It wasn’t until after that, during the height of nationalism, that the American government came up with a story about Pilgrims and Indians to attach to the holiday in order to make it American rather than European.
It was also around this time (1870) that the United States government turned the Summer Solstice Festivals, which Native Europeans had been celebrating for thousands of years, into another patriotic holiday—the Fourth of July.
If the Christians hadn’t already turned the Winter Solstice into Christmas and the Spring Equinox into Easter, the government would have reappropriated those holidays as well.
2. Thanksgiving should not involve any white guilt because white people are the people that stopped conquering and enslaving others. They are the most special and strange people in the world.
Human history is one long story about different bands of monkeys conquering each other. Contrary to what was believed about hunter-gatherers in the sixties, there were no peaceful bands of humans. Any band unwilling to fight and defend its territory was wiped out. Native Americans were extremely violent, fighting each other, enslaving one another, and partaking in human sacrifices. One of the most important reasons why Cortez was able to conquer the Aztecs was that he had a Spanish man who could speak to the natives. Why did that Spanish man know their language? Because, on a scouting expedition, they had caught and enslaved him. He was their slave for eight years before Cortez bought him. Likewise in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Slavery and conquering is and always has been rampant.
Christianity made the Europeans special. It made them allow people of other races to join their tribe. This never happened with any other peoples in the history of the human race. The Mongols didn’t have any qualms about eradicating entire peoples, neither did tribes in Africa. The Europeans had strange rules about what it meant to fight morally starting in the middle ages and for this reason they often were tricked and lost badly to the Arabs who did not play by the same “noble” warfare rules that they did (rules like you cannot attack and unardmed man, and you must fight people face to face).
Europeans were the most technologically advanced people in the world in the 1500’s. They had guns and no one else did. If it had been Africans or Asians or Middle Easterners with the guns, would they have pondered the morality of wiping entire races off the Earth so they could take their land? Judging from what I have read in history, only Europeans think there is something wrong with genocide—becacuse they are individualists and everyone else is tribal. Everyone else thinks that morally, what is good for their tribe, is good. Only Europeans think that what is good should be universal.
Europeans could have taken all the land in the whole world at that point. They could have obliterated all peolles. But they didn’t. Instead, they brought their culture—their ideas of individualism and democracy and allowed everyone to live as long as they joined. This is unheard of. It’s amazing. Likewise that they fought one another
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