Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Some time ago, I wrote a little book in which there was a group of people (they were far too ineffectual to designate them as “villains”) I called the “self-quelled”, a collection of primitive environmentalists who couldn’t live with the guilt of taking up space and breathing oxygen. Their only purpose in life was to make everybody around them as miserable as they were—by force, if necessary.

A shady United States Senator from Massachusetts I read about recently is the latest to demand “recognition of the true history of Thanksgiving as atrocities committed against Native Americans”. We’ve all heard this vicious, ignorant blather before, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (out of the mouth of an Irish actress playing a Jewish witch) to Longmire (from an “Indian” who’s actually a Filipino). To the amateur historian and anthropologist in me, it overlooks the inevitability of tragedy whenever a pre-Enlightenment Iron Age culture met a Stone Age culture. It also overlooks the fact that no American alive today has committed atrocities like this and that no American Indian alive has suffered them (I’ll refrain from mentioning the Miskito Indians, suffering under the communist Ortega regime in Nicaragua). Let the dead past bury its own dead. Kinda like slavery in that regard.

Note: I call them “Indians”, not out of any disrespect, but because that’s what they largely call themselves—and because there’s no such thing as a “native American”. We’re all the descendants of immigrants in North America. Just ask Folsom or Clovis Man, who preceded the Indians, and who somehow found themselves wiped out (et tu, Crazy Horse?) thousands of years before Europeans set foot in what was to them a New World.

The simple, unspeakable truth is, I have never known an Indian who isn’t better off for the arrival of Europeans 500 years ago, who didn’t own a television set, who didn’t own a car, who didn’t have central heating in his home and sometimes air-conditioning, who couldn’t expect to live three times longer than his primitive ancestors did—or mine, for that matter—or who didn’t cherish his rifle just as much as I cherish my own. I am well aware that there are poverty-stricken Indians here and there. There are plenty of poverty-stricken non-Indians, as well.

As I say, lefties, you only get to choose one. The first story of Thanksgiving, which most of us grew up with, is sweet and warm, and all very lovely. The second, an orgy of guilty wailing and gnashing of teeth, is an abject failure to convince anyone with an I.Q. above his hat-size or to describe objective reality. The third is the truth, no matter what anybody says to the contrary. Choose the second, my communard acquaintances, and you’ll be battered into oblivion by the third.

As I recently posted on Facebook, quote: “According to Breitbart.com, some jumped-up professor of Being Ashamed to be Human at Columbia University has declared that, in the future, the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree should be cancelled, because it represents a “toxic relationship shared between nature and capitalism.” The cretin would have wanted me to mention his name.

“On the contrary, cutting a tree down at Christmas—which, whether anybody likes it or not, has become the ultimate celebration of capitalism—defines the proper relationship between nature and human achievement. Nature’s only purpose is to serve Mankind exactly as he wishes. A tree can be a holiday decoration, or planks to build your family’s home, or thousands of boxes of bright yellow pencils.

“My respected religious friends may disagree with me, but it is up to human beings to determine the purpose of all things in the universe, including themselves, and the thin, quavering, reedy voices of the self-defeated among us should be laughed at or ignored.”

End quote. All of that having been said, I feel obligated, somehow, to issue a warning to every Marxist, Maoist, collectivist, Democrat, leftist, liberal, socialist, and communist tempted to use Thanksgiving and Christmas a bludgeons against the American Productive Class whose holidays they are: there are three Thanksgivings, choose one.

There is the traditional Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims had a tough time, but prayed and labored and prevailed and threw a feast to thank God for their survival.

There is the historically Revisionist Thanksgiving of recent years where all of us White Folks must wear hair shirts and pound roofing nails into our foreheads.

And there is the documentable, historically-accurate Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims realized their idiotic blunder, ditched their socialist premises, embraced individual enterprise, prospered accordingly, and proceeded to get fat.

Like I said, choose the second, and you’ll be battered into oblivion by the third. Whatever else the future brings, the Productive Class is no longer your punching bag. Look to your funding, universities. Where We Go 1, We Go All.