Every American Thanksgiving, This "Pleasant Fiction" Is Resurrected

--The Iroquois developed a system of economics very different from the now dominant Western variety. This system was characterized by such components as communal land ownership, division of labor by gender, and trade mostly based on gift economics.-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Iroquois In point of fact: --Not every European admired this democratic spirit. Indians "think every one ought to be left to his own opinion, without being thwarted," the Flemish missionary monk Louis Hennepin wrote in 1683. "There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America," a fellow missionary unhappily observed. "All these barbarians have the law of wild asses - they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit."-- --Indians, for their part, were horrified to encounter European social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. When the 17th-century French adventurer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried to convince the Huron, the Iroquois's northern neighbors, of Europe's natural superiority, the Indians scoffed.-- http://www.danielnpaul.com/IroquoisConfederacy-FoundingSachems-CharlesCMann.html Now, isn't it amazing that William Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, would promote European social hierarchy as the ultimate "freedom", while scoffing at the natives "communal land ownership" as failure...........? But this pleasant fiction of the superiority of free enterprise is re-iterated every year, no doubt in large part because the European hierarchical system, with it’s need to control and regulate, eventually wiped out the natives’ “liberty without restraint”, and must needs be continuously justified.

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