Whitewashing History: PragerU’s Thanksgiving
by William Trollinger
PragerU is not a university. It is not an accredited educational institution. It is, instead, a slick operation that produces all sorts of right-wing propaganda through all manner of media, including short five-minute videos designed to indoctrinate Americans, including children (PragerU Kids) in public schools. As Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at Penn, has noted, PragerU “is a political propaganda machine, and it promotes mistruths about climate change, slavery, and a whole host of other things.”
Including, not surprisingly, the history of native Americans and the European invasion.
In the five-minute PragerU video, “What’s the Truth about the First Thanksgiving?,” viewers learn from Michael Medved that, for lots of Americans, “Thanksgiving has come to mean . . . food, football, and oppression.” But the reality is that the Pilgrims were not “arrogant oppressors.” In fact, they did not “actually invade” the Indian village where they established their first settlement, “because the former inhabitants” had already “perished during three years of plague.”
No Indians alive to resist = no invasion!
Of course, what the video does not mention is that the “plague” had been brought to the Americas by the Europeans. It was quite possibly chicken pox or smallpox, for which the native Americans had no antibodies. The epidemic lasted from 1616 to 1619. and historians have estimated that (and the video leaves this out) it killed 90% of 100000 Indians in New England. Of course, and again unmentioned by Medved, this was no anomaly, as disease brought over in the “Columbian Exchange” killed perhaps 80 million (out of 100 million) native Americans. It was quite possibly the greatest demographic disaster in world history.
In other words, disease cleared New England in particular and the Americas in general, making it easier for the Europeans to move in and take over.
As the PragerU video concludes:
The only reason to treat this beloved national holiday as a day of mourning is that some foolish Americans actually think that’s a good idea. The Pilgrims knew better. They understood that people of every culture and every era can gain more from gratitude than from guilt.
The message to Native Americans could not be clearer: enough with the whining, and enough with turning Thanksgiving into a National Day of Mourning. It’s long past time to forget the broken treaties, the nefarious means by which land was taken by the invaders, the Indian boarding schools and their forced assimilation of native children, and, of course, the massacres. Instead (and this comes from another PragerU video, “Did Europe Destroy Native American Culture?”), happily accept historical inevitability, and be thankful for the great benefits you have received from Westen culture.
White people, stop apologizing, and stop feeling bad about conquering the continent. Just be happy you won!
More than this, be thankful for PragerU, and its ongoing effort to fabricate a past devoid of all those things that could make white people (and especially white males) feel uncomfortable!
