Friday, November 24, 2006

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was yesterday, but I'm celebrating it tomorrow. But really, I spend a few minutes everyday thing about what a wonderful concept Thanksgiving celebrates: capitalism and the production & consumption it allows me.
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2 comments:

owner said...

This piece is wrong on so many levels it's about to make my head explode, but that's to be expected to from the pseudo-intellectuals at the Ayn Rand Institute. What's more surprising is that you still subscribe to this objectivism nonsense something like 8 years after graduating high school. You're way smarter than this, Arai. Since when does it make any sort of sense to project our modern day values and world views on people who lived 400 years ago? Watch me refute this entire essay with one link.

The American Thanksgiving holiday grew out of the annual European harvest festival, but was called such because it included the Natives without whose help the Pilgrims would have perished during the colony's first winter and spring. And it is the British Empire, not post-WW2 America (or "America" since 1620, which is what this writer implies), that developed the concepts of international trade, industry, and the science of economics. It was the British Empire that for two centuries created worldwide markets, modern financial institutions, and free trade before their Empire was destroyed in two successive 20th century conflicts, passing the mantle of underwriting the international order to the United States.

And what the hell is he talking about when he says "It is America, by establishing the precondition of production--political freedom--that was able to unleash the dynamic, productive energy of its citizens."? Is he deliberately ignoring the issue of slavery, or is he just stupid? Or: "America transformed a once-desolate wilderness into farms, supermarkets and air-conditioned houses, not by taking those goods away from some have-nots..." Ummm, last time I chcked, this continent wasn't empty when Columbus first arrived. There were thriving civilizations who were utilizing and cultivating the land.

Ugh, I can't go on. What a brilliant peice of historical revisionism... barf!

1:06 PM
Aras said...

Well, you're the historian, but I didn't realize anybody still believed that silly story about Native Americans and Pilgrims helping each other. There's millions of such myth buster pages, I don't have time to sort through them at the moment (it's almost Bedtime for Bonzo).

While the British Empire was an economic super power, that didn't mean everybody was free to take part in tbe bounty that was the result. Maybe it was possible for a pauper to work his way up to the middle class, or from the middle class to the upper class, but it was the exception, not the rule. Again, you're the historian, but I do know that it was always America, not Britain, that was known as the Land of Opportunity.

Regarding the continent as not being "empty," I disagree. The continent was a wilderness, and was completely empty of economic progress. In 30,000 years of living on the land the Native Americans didn't build any houses or office buildings, any dams or windmills or bridges, any tourist information centers. You call that utilization? I call that a waste. They did enough to survive and no more. That's the weakest way to live without actually dying, for Christ's sake, I don't know how you can call that thriving. I'm not blaming them, whatever, they had different ideals, but the newcomers from Europe certainly didn't take over any cities and plantations from them, they did in fact build them themselves. That's what the author meant.

9:49 PM

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