A Pensee on the Thanksgiving Day

“History will be kind to us, Gentlemen, for I plan to write it.” Winston Churchill

A majority of Christians around the globe are taught at their Sunday school about the Thanksgiving Day as follows: in early 1630s the English Pilgrims, who escaped from the religious persecution, arrived in “New World” sailing aboard the Mayflower from Holland and settled in Plymouth Rock (Massachusetts) where the Pequot Indians called it home for hundreds of years.
And the Pilgrims thanked God for divine favors and goodness feasting and celebrating with the native Indians, as the day was first officially proclaimed a National Holiday by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637.


It is said that history is largely a one-sided record composed by the victor…. this is well demonstrated by the sanitized, filtered, and falsified history of triumph of the Western Civilization, as we termed the invasion of European colonists toward America a “discovery” and our sense of the past is manufactured for us mostly by history’s winners.

Worst, when this filtered history becomes a mainstream, orthodox, or conventional ones that carried through a process of repetition by “expert, historians, and other reputed institutes”, people readily accept it as true and legitimate description of the past.

As human history is written and marketed such a politically constructed way that we are effected not to enlighten ourselves in understanding the past but to solidify the current political, social, cultural, and religious climate.

When, however, someone gives a revisionistic and dissident view on the mainstream myths, people who were given a steady diet of orthodoxy become more alert and interested on unlearning the dis-information that they have been exposed during their entire life.

Heterodoxy always offers more diversified prospect in life than orthodoxy, as pagan religion is more generous and tolerant toward other religion than a monotheistic religion like Christianity.

In this perspective, you never lose anything but surely gain some truth about the origin of the Thanksgiving Day as you lend your ear toward my following spiel, though your pastor or teacher definitely cry wolf.

As we learned at school that Columbus was a great Navigator who “discovered” Americas, omitting an atrocities that he gave to the Arawak Indians in return for their kindness and tributes, Christians were encouraged to know only the good half of what took place in the Pequot Indian village in 1630s.

They were not told that the Thanksgiving Day was celebrated to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance—Thanksgiving Day to them—in their own house.

Indians were ordered by the English Puritan Christians and Dutch mercenaries to come out from their home and were shot down, while others were burned alive in their wigwams.
Irony is these Indians were saviors for their Puritan attackers who were starving to death when they arrived in the land, and the Indians taught the Puritans how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables, and brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims.

How did the Puritan Christians justify the killing of their saviors, the Pequot Indians?

They appealed to their sacred Bible:
Romans 13: 2 “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
Psalms 2:8 “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”

The book of Romans was said to be written by Apostle Paul who counseled the total obedience to the very state, Rome, that crucified his savior Jesus…his apologia is that since there exists no authority sans an act of God, it follows that those who do not submit to earthly rulers are in effect resisting celestial authority and shall receive to themselves damnation.

The Puritan Christians also believed that they were entitled to possess the whole land and property on earth and celestial space sanctioned by the Great Real Estate Agent as if the Zionist state of Israel has been rampaging through the Palestine, killing, maiming and massacring innocent Arabs men, women, and children.

As Jews cite the words of the Pentateuch as the guide to their conscience and early Christian Fathers supported the state power of Roman Emperor like Nero as a necessary tool to survive, Puritan Christians justified the massacring of Indians as a divine instruction from the heaven.

In Europe, both before and after the Reformation, whether in Protestant or Catholic countries, the established ecclesiastics sided with the princes against peasantry, the established powers no matter whether it is despotic, marauding, or exploitative ones, showing little or any sympathy for commoners, as we can see with Paul, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al.

That is, contrary to conventional belief that Christianity ameliorated the plight of the poor, the Christian Church always stood behind the state powers collaborated with Kings and Emperors as a “minister of God” and supported class oppression, slavery, sexism and ecclesiastical autocracy.

Recently, in his apologia on the issue of supporting and praying for Bush fils, a Korean pastor (Lim Hyeonsoo) at the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto (www.lkpc.org) assured his congregation that it is a Christian duty to bless President Bush for his endeavors no matter what, if he is not against our Christian power.

It is not surprise for him to quote the same verses of Romans 13:2 in his sermon that early Puritan Christians employed in massacring 700 innocent men, women, and children…if Bush is with us Christians, he is a minister of God no matter what he does, invading other sovereign country, destroying the property, killing innocent civilians, and torturing prisoners of war…all are sanctioned by God that we should pray and support for his power.

“Torquemada Lim” seems to be calling for a warrior Christ whose fire and brimstone breathe on the necks of infidels as a squadron of Apache helicopters of US invading forces drops a dozen of phosphorous bombs on the fleeing Muslims.

In sum, history has been kind to the Christians because the keepers of faith were also the keepers of records in the past human history as commoners remained illiterate and were not even allowed to possess the Bible, and clergy had monopoly over the written words educating laymen a predominantly dogmatic theological nature and the book burning at the libraries was one of early Christian Father’s task to suppress the heterodoxy.

To term “a real history” revisionism is a pap to whitewash the silenced, hidden part of mainstream history, and it is also important to relay a real history with the standard history in order to see a broad social implication.

Did I give you a bitter taste for your feast of turkey at the Thanksgiving Day?