"Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? It is necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?"

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Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.

This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn’t make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

She said the United States should be a “democracy of superiors only,” with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It’s useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.

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Over the next two centuries [after 1540], wars of outright extermination had been fought by British colonists against “the Indians of Virginia” and nations such as the Pequot (who were among those who had fed the Plymouth Colony on the first “Thanksgiving” in 1620). […]

By the mid-19th century, U.S. policymakers and military commanders were stating — openly, frequently, and in plain English — that their objective was no less than the “complete extermination” of any native people who resisted being dispossessed of their lands, subordinated to federal authority, and assimilated into the colonizing culture. The country was as good as its word on the matter, perpetrating literally hundreds of massacres of Indians by military and paramilitary formations at points all over the West. A bare sampling of some of the worst must include the 1854 massacre of perhaps 150 Lakotas at Blue River (Nebraska), the 1863 Bear River (Idaho) Massacre of some 500 Western Shoshones, the 1864 Sand Creek (Colorado) Massacre of as many as 250 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the 1868 massacre of another 300 Cheyennes at the Washita River (Oklahoma), the 1875 massacre of about seventy-five Cheyennes along the Sappa Creek (Kansas), the 1878 massacre of still another 100 Cheyennes at Camp Robinson (Nebraska), and the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakotas at Wounded Knee (South Dakota). As the U.S. Bureau of the Census put it in 1894:

“It has been estimated that since 1775, more than [8,500 Indians] have been killed in individual affairs with [whites]… The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of… about 30,000 Indians… The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much greater than the number given, as they conceal, where possible, their actual loss in battle… Fifty percent additional would be a safe number to add to the numbers given.”

This comes to a minimum of 56,750 Indians killed outright by Euroamericans militarily pushing into native lands during a period roughly conforming to the century spanning the years 1775-1875. Thornton, who has examined the matter closely, suggests that the official number is far too low and might “easily” be doubled.

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During 1763, while striving to defeat Pontiac’s confederation of Ottowas and other peoples:

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces, wrote in a postscript of a letter to Bouquet [a subordinate] that smallpox be sent among the disaffected tribes. Bouquet replied, also in a postscript, “I will try to [contaminate] them with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself” … To Bouquet’s postscript Amherst replied, “You will do well to [infect] the Indians by means to blankets as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this exorable race.” On June 24, Captain Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, noted in his journal: “…we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”

It did. The disease spread rapidly among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, and other nations of the Ohio River Valley, killing perhaps 100,000 people and bringing about the collapse of Pontiac’s military alliance.

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The issue goes to the concept of the “Norman Yoke,” an element of juridical philosophy arising among medieval Anglo-Saxons and subsequently incorporated into the British variants of the Doctrine of Discovery and Rights of Conquest. In simplest terms, the concept, as it was eventually articulated in John Locke’s philosophy of Natural Law, held that any “Christian” (read: European) happening upon “waste land” — most particularly land that was vacant or virtually vacant of human inhabitants — assumed not only a “natural right,” but indeed an obligation to put such land to “productive use.” Having thus performed “God’s will” by “cultivating” and thereby “conquering” the former “wilderness,” its “discoverer” can be said to “own” it. It was upon this peculiar doctrine that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, in his 1823 opinion in the Johnson v. McIntosh case, based the notion that the U.S. holds “inherent and preeminent rights” over Indian lands.

For Marshall’s utilization of the idea of the Norman Yoke to work out for the United States, it was/is necessary to believe that there were very few native people prior to the onset of the European invasion of North America. A substantial precontact native population would imply that the land was for all intents and purposes not vacant. […]

For Eurosupremecists, either historical or contemporary, to admit that the precontact Native North American population had been fifteen million rather than one or two million would compel their admission of a number of other uncomfortable facts. For instance, the larger population figure could only have been sustained by a primary reliance upon extensive agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. This, in turn, means that precontact American Indians were primarily “sedentary” rather than “nomadic,” cultivators of the land, and residents of permanent towns rather than wandering occupants of a “barren wilderness.”

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Imagine you live in a nation where the government owns your property. It has a powerful agency called the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs to control wards of the state, including you. The agency supervises your family and decides what is best. It handles your money, enforces morals, personal appearance, and manner of dress. It provides state-approved religion, schooling, and food for your community. This is all done by the superintendent — a government bureaucrat placed in charge of your community with complete control over it. No one can leave without his permission. Like a god, he makes the laws and acts as the police, prosecutor, judge, and jury. The courts cannot review his actions, for they are all, by definition perfectly legal.

Sound like totalitarianism? Nope, it is the abuse of guardianship. For several generations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) used its trustee powers to become an intolerant and all-powerful ruler of Indian people, and the courts allowed this anomaly to happen.

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"American history was for a long time written and taught as a single story, a narrative of nation building and unending progress that united the diverse participants in the country’s past in a single American “experience.” It was a national success story, celebrating the human triumphs made possible in a society based on the principles of liberty and equality. American historians tended to ignore or dismiss people whose experiences and interpretations of the past did not conform to the master narrative. The experiences of American Indians during the years of nation building told a story of decline and suffering rather than of “progress” and “the pursuit of happiness.” As a result, notes historian Frederick E. Hoxie, the authors of United States history textbooks had “great difficulty shaping the Native American experience to fit the upbeat format of their books.” The Indians’ story was not the American story; best to leave them out."

"So let me say this as clearly as I can — the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam."

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A friend of mine has an American boyfriend, who once said that he always had figured that the odds that his girlfriend wouldn’t have sex with him (or have huge hangups about it) would be around 50-50, and I never really understood why. I think I unconsciously imagine American culture as “just like ours except everyone speaks English” (I’m Swedish), probably because American media is everywhere here and thus kind of feels like “home” even though it’s not. I know the gender roles are a bit different but that didn’t seem to be the whole explanation. I thought there must be something else going on, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Then, I started reading http://www.fugitivus.net/ and Tiger Beatdown, and I learned just how hard it can be for Americans to get birth control, plan B or an abortion, even though they’re legal. Here, there are youth clinics that seem pretty similar to PP, except they are not controversial at all. You will probably visit one as part of sex ed around 8th grade. Abortions are free up to a certain age (18 or 20 or something) but even when they’re not, they won’t cost more than 300 SEK (around $45). Minors don’t have to notify their parents. Birth control is subsidized and you can get free condoms from the youth clinics. Some people dislike abortions, but they have no political influence, and absolutely no one thinks the plan B pill is immoral.

Several of my friends have needed plan B, some of them while minors, and they just went to the nearest youth clinic and asked for it. No charge, no hassle, no protestors, no conscience clauses, no having to travel hours and hours just to find a clinic. Just swallow the pill, withstand some friendly teasing and get on with your life.

I think this difference between American and Northern/Western European women’s lives is absolutely fundamental, and to me it completely explains why my friend’s American boyfriend expected that girls wouldn’t sleep with him – not because they wouldn’t want to or because American women are more sensitive to pressure from gender roles, but because they would be taking a huge personal risk. I totally get why a lot of people wouldn’t be up for that. (It also explains why some Americans want to use condoms and the pill at the same time – before understanding your lack of abortion access that seemed pretty paranoid to me, but now I get it!)

I try to imagine not having access to affordable birth control or abortions, and it’s a horror movie level of scary. Just imagining that someone could impregnate me against my will and not being able to do anything about it… holy shit.

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