Thanksgiving is over, but the country is probably lucky it took place at all. Various reports disclose that the war against Thanksgiving is almost as ferocious as those against such other evil institutions as Christmas and the Confederate Flag.

A story in the Washington Times last week discussed the war and who's behind it. As you might expect, it's pretty much the same people who want virtually every other white, Christian and national holiday abolished or, even better, subverted to suit their own political purposes.

Two years ago the Board of Selectmen of Plymouth, Mass., where the Pilgrims landed in 1620, put up a plaque denouncing them for coming at all.

"Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers," smirk the officials. "To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture."

That doesn't stop the officials from continuing to live on the land their ancestors stole, which today is worth a good deal more than when the Pilgrims swiped it. [Pilgrims' progress? November 25, 2003, by Robert Stacy MCCain]

The Selectmen are not the only warriors in the jihad against Thanksgiving. The Times also notes that in 1996, an instructional guide published by the U.S. Department of Education warned school teachers, "At Thanksgiving, shift the focus away from re-enacting the first Thanksgiving."

The guide, written by a teacher who's a Pueblo Indian, might be suspected of containing hidden racial agendas, if it were permitted to suspect anyone but white people of such wickedness:

"The conception of Native Americans [she meant Indians, not citizens born in the United States] gained from such early exposure is both inaccurate and potentially damaging to others."

Just to confirm her point, this year a school principal in Skokie, Ill., banned cardboard Indian headdresses in the school's Thanksgiving pageant because it might offend Indians.

Yet another Native American (I mean Indian) named Moonanum James, who led a protest against Thanksgiving in Plymouth back in the dark ages when there was no plaque denouncing the white settlers, has even more damaging lessons to impart: "The Pilgrims did not come here seeking religious freedom. They already had that in Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture."

There are two problems with that thought: (a) it's not entirely true, and (b) so what if it were true?

The real problem with the Pilgrims' commercial venture, says Mr. James, was that it

"introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails and the class system to these shores. About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful European strangers would not have survived their first several years in 'New England' were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people."

The Wampanoags, as you may have guessed, were also Native Americans (even though there was no America at the time).

"What native people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our lands and never-ending repression."

There are those lands again.

It would be pointless to refute all this kind of stuff, since those who believe it or worry about it probably aren't terribly open to persuasion (nor are those who don't believe it or worry about it).

The point of the war against Thanksgiving is not to teach history but to destroy the national myth—and therefore the nation itself—that the holiday and its traditional representation help symbolize.

Some years ago, when the war against the Confederate flag and similar Southern symbols cranked up, a good many Americans thought it made sense to denounce them because of the blatant "racism" they represented.

What they didn't get was that they and their own local myths and symbols were next on the hit list.

Now what is happening ought to be obvious, even to them.

What is being fought in the jihad against the Confederate Flag, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day and Christmas is not the "sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry" and other pastimes of Western man but the West itself and its local manifestation in American civilization.

The isms being denounced are icing on the cake. The real target is the cake itself, and those taking aim at it know the only way they can get to it is by scraping off the symbols and icons that represent it in the minds of most Americans.

Americans who still care what the real meanings of their holidays, as opposed to the three-day orgies of stuffing, guzzling and spending the national ruling class wants them to mean, need to know that the war against holidays is a war against their country and against them.

If they don't hang together in defending each other's myths and icons, sooner or later their enemies will hang all of them separately.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred's review.]