MDMD thankful colonists

[Doug Millison]

http://www.counterpunch.org/gonzalez1.html

"[...] It may seem crude, but thanking God for your enemy's demise is very
much in keeping with the Thanksgiving tradition. In 1637, John Winthrop,
first Governor of Massachusetts, gave solemn thanks for the safe return of
his troops from the messy, but necessary, job of massacring over 700 Pequot
women, children, and men. The governing council of Charlestown,
Massachusetts, issued our country's first official Thanksgiving
Proclamation on June 20, 1676. The proclamation thanked our Creator for
making sure that heathen natives were "in any measure disappointed or
destroyed." Leave it to the Puritans to find the rosy side to colonial
domination. [...]  Indigenous people, on the other hand, tend to dwell on
unpleasant things. They can be genuine sticks in the mud, if you ask me.
They're likely to remind us, as they typically do, that September 11 was
not the first major act of terrorism on American soil. The hackneyed line
is that native people have been the targets of over 500 years of
uninterrupted terrorism. They might point out that tens of millions of
their people lost their lives to European expansion, a colonialism with
precursors to today's bioterrorism (millions died from smallpox, measles,
etc.). They may even have the audacity to offer examples, all of them
historically marginal by any sensible measure, of how Manhattan has seen
its fair share of terrorist attacks pre-September 11. They may mention that
in the 1640s the Dutch acquired the island by exterminating the
Weckquaesgeeks, the island inhabitants.