Happy National Genocide Day

Well that’s all true, but holidays don’t have to have the same meaning they were created for. Christmas was co-opted from a pagan Roman holiday called Saturnalia that celebrated the winter solstice and involved the giving of gifts, decorating the home with green plants, large feasts in which the masters served the slaves, etc. When I celebrate Christmas, I don’t celebrate the birth of Christ nor do I celebrate the winter solstice…I just celebrate.

Same is true for Thanksgiving. I’ve co-opted the holiday to mean a celebration of food and football and not the events that led to the holocaust wrought upon the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere.

wv wrote:

I too, have constructed a new meaning for Thanksgiving. I use it as a time to reflect on the carnage offensive lines have suffered in the past,
and i give thanks for the Rams healthy but totally ineffective offensive line.

w
v

jeff should build a wall.

around goff.

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

Every square inch of the inhabitable planet earth is presently occupied by someone who conquered that place. …

We can though dedicate ourselves to a future where that kind of thing ends…
….

=————-

True.

My thing is just to at least encourage folks to take the ‘first’ step
and RECOGNIZE their actual history — conquest. Not bullshit mainstream-history stories full of amnesia.

America was built on conquest, lies, broken treaties, ethnic cleansing.

The Constitution was built on a mountain of skulls (to paraphrase a native american writer)

So step one is to look at that history.

I’m not sure what step two is. Reparations? Change the history books? I dunno. Step two is hard. Step one should be easier. But it aint, apparently.

w
v

It’s hard to change the history books because publishers want to make sure their textbooks are purchased by school districts. The textbook that a district uses is approved by the school board. The people who make up school boards are usually not history scholars. They are average people who have been immersed in American Exceptionalism since birth and learned what you and I and everyone else learned in primary and secondary schools – that the US is a benevolent giant that tries to be a force for good in the world and even when it doesn’t succeed its intentions were noble.

So to change how history is taught is a problem, because publishers won’t publish texts that tell the ugly truth because they are afraid that some or most of the school districts won’t buy them. And they can’t make a different text for those districts that might purchase the more enlightened versions. So what they offer all school districts is a single text spouting a sterile, innocuous version of the truth that won’t offend anyone on the board. Publishers want to sell books, not change the world. So the cycle repeats itself and today in 8th grade little Jimmy will learn that the Vietnam conflict was a misguided but well-intentioned effort by the US to protect the South Vietnamese from the evils of communism…