“Most are in agreement that the Indians were invited simply because the Pilgrims knew that they would have died had it not been for the help of the local Indians,” Rev. Cho unsentimentally recalled. “Those that we would now categorize as ‘illegal aliens,'” i.e. the Pilgrims, “not only came without invitation but they came to take over,” the clergyman grimly alleged.

Once again, the Religious Left found itself in no mood to celebrate our national day of gratitude.

The academic and Religious Left believe that Western Civilization, especially America, is uniquely contaminating to an otherwise pristine world. So celebrations of the European settlement of the Western Hemisphere are always problematic. Thanksgiving is no exception.

Just in time for the holiday was an anti-Thanksgiving column in Jim Wallis’ Sojourners.

“I’ve been checking my heart for years why I can’t just go with the flow and to see the ‘redemptive’ aspect of present day Thanksgiving,” declared the Rev. Eugene Cho, pastor of a Seattle church.

America’s Thanksgiving, of course, traces to the English Separatists known as Pilgrims who quit the Church of England, and England, to create their own promised land in the American wilderness. Only about half of the original 100 settlers had survived their first winter in what became Massachusetts. In the fall of 1621 they reputedly celebrated a harvest festival that included about a hundred members of the local Indian tribe, which had been very helpful to their survival.

“Most are in agreement that the Indians were invited simply because the Pilgrims knew that they would have died had it not been for the help of the local Indians,” Rev. Cho unsentimentally recalled. “Those that we would now categorize as ‘illegal aliens,'” i.e. the Pilgrims, “not only came without invitation but they came to take over,” the clergyman grimly alleged.

“In fact, beyond the first joint ‘Thanksgiving,’ there were no further meals of mutual peace, dependence, and friendship.” In Cho’s telling, Thanksgiving was just a last sort of last meal for the Indians who would later succumb to an ongoing “genocide” by Europeans of America’s native peoples.

Thanksgiving is darkly the “celebration” of the “colonists'” eventual “oppression” of their “heathen captives,” Cho charges. “The early arrivals of European invasion resulted in the deaths of 10 to 30 million native Indians.” These figures, an unconfirmable estimate of the number of native peoples who died because of European settlement, covers several centuries, from Christopher Columbus’ 1492 arrival up through, presumably, the late 19th century. The vast majority were victims of diseases brought by Europeans for which the native peoples had no immunity. In the several years prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival at Cape Cod, the local tribe had lost perhaps 90 percent of its people because of possible transmission of bubonic plague by European fishermen.

Cho bemoans the European settlement of America as “one of the worst human injustices” ever that entailed the “suppression, oppression, and near annihilation of the Native Indians,” i.e. “genocide.” The pastor urges Thanksgiving’s “repeal” because “no matter how we want to re-tell or re-write that story, we are marking an event of injustice.”

In eliminating this day of infamy, Cho wants the “whole country to express sorrow for such a grave injustice to the Native Indians and create events and various forms of curriculum in parallel” that would include “gratitude and celebration of the story and legacy of the native Indian people.” He also wants “reparation for every single descendant of Native Indians” that, “just for starters,” would “guarantee 100% funding to college for any descendants of Native Indians.”

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