Holocaust Holidays In The USA

Holocaust Holidays in the USA

June Terpstra, Ph.D.

November 26, 2008

Did you ever notice how most major USA holidays celebrate genocides and holocausts? The first official Thanksgiving Day celebrated the massacre of native American men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies.

"Gathered in this place of meeting, they were attacked by mercenaries and English and Dutch. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth were shot down, The rest were burned alive in the building-----The very next day the governor declared a Thanksgiving Day.....For the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won." (Professor Newell)

Then there is Columbus Day. He was a terrorist according to today’s definition. Las Casas, a priest traveling with Columbus tells how the Spaniards in the Caribbean "grew more conceited every day" … They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings." Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys." (Howard Zinn, Peoples History of the USA )

There is the Fourth of July. Those revolutionaries would be tortured at Guantanamo or water-boarded in a CIA prison in Poland or Romania today. The American revolutionaries of the 1700’s sponsored a new nation with a constitution built on "Indian removal" and genocide of an estimated 11 million natives and slavery of Africans. The figures from the 18th Century Slave Trade show approximately 5,000,000 people transported and 8,100,000 people died.

Then there is Memorial Day celebrating the deaths of all the men that bought the military industrial complex’s war propaganda. The United States has sent troops abroad or militarily struck other countries' territory at least 216 times since independence from Britain . Since 1945 the United States has intervened in more than 20 countries throughout the world. Since World War II, the United States actually dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954,Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo1964, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73,Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983,Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998,Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999. Post World War II, the United States has also assisted in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and the CIA was responsible for half a dozen assassinations of political heads of state.

My personal favorite holiday is Labor Day. Here are some highlights from Illinois , my state of residence demonstrating how much the USA government values its laborers:

14 July 1877
A general strike halted the movement of U.S. railroads. In the following days, strike riots spread across the United States . The next week, federal troops were called out to force an end to the nationwide strike. At the " Battle of the Viaduct" in Chicago , federal troops (recently returned from an Indian massacre) killed 30 workers and wounded over 100.

Haymarket on 11 November 1887, four anarchists were executed. All of the executed advocated armed struggle and violence as revolutionary methods, but their prosecutors found no evidence that any had actually thrown the Haymarket bomb. They died for their words, not their deeds. A quarter of a million people lined Chicago 's street during Parson's funeral procession to express their outrage at this gross mis-carriage of justice.

5 July 1893
During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago 's Jackson Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to ashes. The mobs raged on, burning and looting railroad cars and fighting police in the streets, until 10 July, when 14,000 federal and state troops finally succeeded in putting down the strike.

3 February 1930
"Chicagorillas" -- labor racketeers -- shot and killed contractor William Healy, with whom the Chicago Marble Setters Union had been having difficulties.

30 May 1937
Police killed 10 and wounded 30 during the "Memorial Day Massacre" at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago.

For over five hundred years whether it’s Europeans calling themselves Catholics or Puritans; Europeans calling themselves Zionists; or the democratic crusaders of the USA it’s never a good thing for indigenous populations to have invaders "settle" on the stolen land to which they say they have a divine right. . The Puritans embraced a line from Psalms 2:8, "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heather for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." Their mantra of "God told me it’s mine" means the shit is hitting the fan for the people of the land.

I attempted to explain this history recently to my grandchildren while discussing natives and pilgrims. The four year old who has not had the benefit of public school programming said those Europeans should never again steal the land from the natives! Her five year old brother, who is being programmed in the public school system told me the pilgrims were the good guys and that I would understand when I go to school someday.

I understand alright. In June 1637 John Underhill slaughtered a Pequot village in a similar manner to that described above.

"The Pequot had a festival to welcome in the new harvest. At that point, the pilgrims came over and ambushed and slaughtered them. The next day the pilgrims went to church and gave thanks to God for the food and success. That's how Thanksgiving started." Sundust Teocuauhtli Martinez

Read the rest...

A Reader Comments On Cultural Appropriation

This spot-on, intelligent comment was written in response to our post "A Victory In The Struggle Against Cultural Imperialism." We've forwarded it to the front page because the writer sums up in a few paragraphs what has taken us almost an entire blog to articulate.

I'm Jewish and I don't want him either. Direct descendent of Aaron, my ass. Aaron lived in 1200 BC, something tells me that genealogy.com doesn't go back that far. Hah.

I think that because white culture is seen as being empty (having no race of ethnicity), white people get hungry for personal cultural significance - especially when "ethnic minorities" seem to have it - and develop a sort of desperation to find some "ancient, tribal roots". (This can happen before, after, or in conjunction with attempts to ingratiate ourselves into, or appropriate, Native cultures.)

In other words, we're jealous. Which can be a legitimate feeling, if a bit misconceived, but it often gets expressed in totally illegitimate ways.

You can tell us to just come up with our own rituals or use the shit of our own identities, but either it's too authentic (i.e., mainstream, like Christianity or Judaism or generic European, and therefore less special) or not authentic enough (i.e., doesn't already exist in another culture).

If you tell us appropriation is wrong, we don't care - we're sure that Native ceremony is just about "what feels right" and isn't grounded in any actual procedures or history. That anyone could do it. Which is funny because it betrays a basic disrespect for the practice; that we don't have to worry about fucking up or ruining the ceremony because it wasn't anything seriously spiritual anyway, it's just "what you make of it".

There's this attitude that as long as we say "please", Native peoples should share. And if they won't, it's just because they're paranoid or "reverse racists" or misunderstood us or thought we were like those "other white people" who are assholes (not us!) and so it's probably cool to go ahead and do that sweat lodge ceremony anyway.

I really don't know what to do about attitudes like this. When someone feels entitled to something, how do you make them understand that they're not?

*sighs*

11/15/2008 1:19 PM

Our answer to your great question - "When someone feels entitled to something, how do you make them understand that they're not?" - is -"By any means necessary" for as long as it takes to either stop them completely, or at least limit their predation.

A Victory In The Struggle Against Cultural Imperialism

After a thorough search of both the main Teaching Drum web page and Tamarack Song's own personal page, we have noticed the disappearance of the wretchedly fake sweat lodge article Tamarack wrote called "Gifting Path," which was lambasted in our post "Masturbating In The Sauna: Tamarack's Non-Indian Sweat Lodge."

Apparently, Tamarack has buried the beast, as its rotten, racist smell (and our criticism) had become too much for even him to bear. We have no idea if it remains a part of the Wilderness Guide Program materials, but if so, the article is not advertised in the contents list.

Maybe, too, the fact that Dan Konen has at last discovered and acknowledged his ancestors has left him less inclined to co-opt (steal) from Indigenous cultures (a process we recommend for all non-Natives). Oh, he's still pimping some hokey version of "native" on the Teaching Drum's website, but hopefully with a few more years of our relentless, withering critiques, he finally will dump even that culturally imperialist abomination.

Thanks to Dan Konen's own words, we have learned that his father's lies about his family's true origins encouraged Tamarack to become a self-hating Jew. This, we believe, is the personal root of Tamarack's racist pathology in relation to American Indians - he was ashamed of his own heritage so he created a New Age Indian-wannabe persona with which to bury it. This is likely also a key motivation in his choice to change his name to Tamarack Song.

Ancestors

"When as a child I asked my father what he knew, he would proudly--and defensively--state that we were German. I sensed that he was hiding something that he himself may not have completely understood. 'Why was most of his side of the family dark-skinned?' I would ask myself. 'And why did kids at school ask if I was Jewish?'

My mother’s ancestry was shrouded by another veil: the shame of illegitimacy. No one seemed to know--or at least was willing to tell--where her mother came from. Her birth certificate was fabricated to look as though she was the product of a normal Christian marriage.
...

The ancient tribes of North Africa's Nile Delta are my father's people. Originally pastoralists, they migrated to the fertile lands of the eastern Mediterranean, where they gave up their nomadic ways to become the first agriculturalists. Perhaps my father would have been proud of his ancestry had he known he was a member of the kohan, the Hebrew hereditary priestly caste. If genealogical and Biblical records are correct, my father is a direct male descendant of Aaron, elder brother of Moses and the first Kohan Gadol, or High Priest."

Sadly, Daniel still cannot seem to get history right. The ancient Hebrews were hardly the first agriculturalists, as agriculture has been practiced around the world for over ten thousand years, and possibly much longer.

And why would a hunter-gatherer wannabe be proud his father's people were "the first agriculturalists"? Desperate still for some relevance, however far-fetched? You betcha.

Still, we celebrate a victory today. That horrible, fakelore sweat lodge article is no longer available for purchase.

Dan Konen's struggle to speak his own truth reveals even more deeply the genocidal nature of a racist America that wants non-Natives to deny their ancestors and become white, all the while stealing and perverting real Native American culture so that this land's Indigenous peoples will be less Indian.

Don't buy it, Folks. Find your own ancestors. It's a key step in destroying whiteness.