The Liberty Papers

Leftist author and University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen wrote an article for Alternet (hat tip: Instapundit) where he bashed Thanksgiving as

“the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers. “.

In 2003, Mitchel Cohen had a Thanksgiving Day bashing article for Counterpunch where he describes himself as

“I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists’ Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts.

Clearly, these two leftists use Thanksgiving to attack America for its “genocide” against native Americans. What these men forget is that native Americans and white settlers fought a series of wars, wars that the native Americans happened to lose everytime. For reasons why Westerners have mostly won in warfare, I recommend Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hansen. I especially recommend the chapter dealing with the conquest of the Aztecs and Hansen’s explanation of the native American’s collectivism and lack of individuality held them back technologically.

But when you read both the linked articles, you also see attacks on capitalism as well. This is assisted by the leftist dominated government schools which omit the real story of Thanksgiving, which is that the real story of Thanksgiving is that capitalism works better than socialism. Mike Franc has an article about this at Human Events Online:

Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,” cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.” The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.” Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth”) bred “confusion and discontent” and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.”

Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.

On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.

As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,” Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.” In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been” and productivity increased. “Women,” for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.

A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America. This is the real reason why leftists hate this day and seek to turn into a day-long Blame America fest. The Pilgrims are the historical reminder of the defeat of socialism, over 380 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. My biggest fear this Thanksgiving is that America is steadily abandoning capitalism and individualism, which why we as classical liberals (I like this much better than neo-libertarian or the other names that have emerged to describe people like me) must work to preserve the ideals of our Founding Fathers and those who settled America.

Crossposted to Louisiana Libertarian