Page 21 - Ruminations

19. National Victims Day

Here is a Swiftian proposal. America’s situation as the great retainer
and ingatherer of the peoples exploited, massacred and exiled by
Europeans and white Americans presents a unique opportunity for it
to create a single annual commemoration of that victimization, now
ongoing for five centuries. The descendants and recently-immigrated
members of those Asians, Africans, Middle-Easterners and Native
Americans collectively comprise a demographic threat to Euro-
Americans sufficient to stimulate many of the latter into seeing
themselves as victims of the former—an absurd but politically useful
conceit that could be countered via united action on the part of the
real victims.
At present each group annually observes a remembrance of the
disasters that befell it in Western Civilization’s bloody quest to
dominate the rest of the world. Those solemn occasions are isolated in
time and space from each other, reinforcing group identities and
emphasizing the distinctiveness of these undeserved tragedies. If the
socioeconomically powerful Euro-Americans had intended to keep
those people disunited and weaken their influence by separating such
memorials and encouraging their participants to stress differences
rather than similarities, they could not have done better.
Yet the American nation-state has several holidays with
overarching patriotic, religious and sentimental themes, clearly
working to establish solidarity among its citizens; these events
effectively deny or disguise the real intractable social problems linked
to the continued institutional domination by Euro-Americans. What is
needed is a new holiday celebrated on the same scale, National
Victims Day. It would enable the disparate groups to come together,
experience the commonality of their grievances and focus on the
identity of their past and present oppressor. In that regard, its closest
analogue might be Labor Day—now trivialized in the States.
Other classes of Americans might want to join in this publicly-
sanctioned protest and tribute—people ascriptively denied full
participation in “the pursuit of happiness” guaranteed to all. And if,
some day, Euro-Americans have, in fact, as a group, suffered any
comparable wrongs at the hands of those they wronged, then the
mechanism would already be in place for them to remember publicly
their own enslavement, genocide or seizure of land and property.