No More Misplaced Gratitude

On this Thanksgiving weekend let us give thanks, not for the self-righteous Pilgrim Fathers who arrived to America full of persecutorial wrath, but to those genuine heroes down through the ages who have struggled to bequeath to us a legacy of freedom and democracy.

Obviously, there are too many candidates to mention in a brief blog post. But the abolitionists have to rank high on the list. Without their herculean efforts to end chattel slavery, the ¨peculiar institution¨would long since have destroyed the republic for which the United States supposedly stands. It is thanks to them that we know the difference between a human being and an animal, a subtlety that escaped our forebears.

We might also express gratitude to the labor movement for having created a middle class, forcing capital to accede to social democratic dignities it is now struggling mightily to retract. Long may its example live to inspire us to widen the circles of compassion that alone give meaning to the word ¨community.¨

Our thankfulness ought also to extend to the movements that conspired to liberate us from the dogma that women are mindless appendages of male egotism, by nature dedicated to serving the masculine delusions of omnipotence that have come dangerously close to ending human civilization altogether. A century ago women were widely considered to be childlike creatures whose infantile ambitions could only lead them astray, unless a man took pity enough to guide them right. Their labor went almost completely unpaid, and on the few occasions when a paycheck was granted, husbands and fathers had rights to collect it for them. Over the past century women have managed to put patriarchal domination consistently on the defensive, extracting concessions that have given them a vastly more independent life than that they knew before.

A word of thanks could also be extended to human rights movements around the world that have codified the rights to which every human being has fallen heir, while publicizing the inherent tendency of nation states to abuse them. This publicity has subtly constrained the worst excesses of state power, continually giving hope that future movements might find a way to transcend the arbitrary nature of unchecked power altogether.

And a special thanks to Ernst Zundel and many other Holocaust heretics, whose stoic dignity in challenging the Holocaust Industry´s vengeful orthodoxy has taught us once again that the price of freedom is eternal dissidence.