From DRANT# 202: TALKIN' TURKEY
November 26, 2006
A great deal of the inspiration and information for this DRANT came from:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
By Charles Mann
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/140004006X/103-9077762-6675023?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
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"No Halloween of the imagination can
rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains
the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome,
humanity-insulting day of the year - a pure glorification of racist
barbarity..." (Black Commentator, Nov. 2008)
To honor our National Holiday of THANKSGIVING, let's GIVE THANKS: Let us pause for a short moment of appropriate reverence to GIVE THANKS for the Wondrous Gifts we White People have -- in our bottomless generosity - bestowed and continue to bestow on uncountable Godless Savages throughout history.
First among these surely is
Wondrous Gift #1- the gift of immeasurable Human Arrogance.
The notion that Humans are the last, ultimate, and unimprovable final step in Evolution.
That Humans have been granted Dominion over The Earth and all of its beings and creations and inhabitants.
That every Thing on earth is Human property, and belongs to Humans to do with as they wish.
In 1491, there were many millions of Americans living right here in America, and few of them could imagine this concept.
In 1491, Americans largely shared the notion that all of Earth's beings co-existed, each with a place in the Universe, each infused with the timeless Spirit of our Creation.
In 1491, Americans had no idea that anything on Earth could actually be owned, or that any parcel of Earth could be claimed as exclusive personal property.
Well what can one expect from half naked Heathens ?
But-- By Divinely Inspired good fortune, White People were able to shuffle off to America, first in small numbers and then in droves, to enlighten and elevate the ignorant masses.
In 1491, Copernicus was a College Freshman, and as far as White People were concerned, the Sun still revolved around the Earth.
In 1491 Tenochtitlan, a city then bigger than Paris, had been an immense thriving modern city for centuries, and the Mayans had built Chichen Itza before Jesus was a glimmer in his daddy's eye.
In 1491 the Reformation was just beginning to take hold, and people were still buying Indulgences from their friendly neighborhood Priest.
In 1491 there were millions of Indigenous People in the Americas, who had developed writing, reading, astronomy, medicine, advanced mathematics, and bio chemistry.
By 1491, Muhammad II had taken Constantinople for Islam (1453), and the Ottoman Empire had taken most of Europe.
Except in Spain, where the Moors were finally defeated, and where The Spanish Inquisition became a booming business, and the auto da fe the much preferred means of transportation, which also allowed Devout White People to get in some excellent practice on Jews and Moors before they left for America.
Which brings us to
Wondrous Gift #2-
WE are The Chosen. With it's concomitant corollary-
You are either with Us or against Us. (hello hello ?)
You're against Us ? Well, since God chose Us and not You, You dead bro.
Not my fault. Its God's will, uhhh sorry.
Yes yes, we Chosens brought this Wondrous Gift #2 with us to America too.
God gave us the Earth, and everything on it. God also helps us to show how very very chosen we are by how much stuff we are able to accumulate. Best of all GOLD.
And where da Gold ?
Over there- in India. (Wellll, close enough, just make a sharp right at the end of Chile.)
Since We are the Chosen, and You ain't, You work for Us.
Oh, we also have a few guns, God's everlasting gift to Chosen People everywhere, so shut up and get to work.
Now we White Folks had a hell of a plan here.
Make the locals show us where the gold is. Then make them dig it up for us, then help us drag it back home, and We make the big bucks.
It woulda all worked fine, except for
Wondrous Gift #3-
Disease.
Now imagine a few hundred men on tiny ships for three months or so.
Filthy beyond imagining, starving, unwashed and totally unaware of any glimmer of hygiene. The ships actually reflected much of what life was like at home.
Whew. Disgusting. (Just in passing, The Aztecs shocked The Conquistadores because they bathed so much.)
Well, when We struggled ashore, We brought some lovely germs with Us.
Germs, of course, to which the Indigenous People had never been exposed.
Lovely things like Smallpox, Typhus, Influenza, Diptheria, Measles.
Mmmmmmmmmm.
"Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, ... the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, ... the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia..."
Elizabeth Fenn, cited in 1491- An article by CHARLES MANN in The Atlantic of March 2002 http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html
We WP knew a little about epidemiology- since We had been through a plague or three, but in 1491, when a Native American got sick, his family and friends and Shaman gathered to his bedside.
If just one arriving guest clambering through the surf brought the flu, it was death by the hundreds of thousands for the Americans.
And don't forget- we White Folks sure do looooove our bacon and eggs.
So sure enough, when some of us arrived, we brought Pigs.
Yes, Pigs. The Incas had never seen a pig much less eaten one.
We couldn't do without that pork.
Pigs are if anything, durable.
When disease had destroyed most Americans, (estimates vary from 60 - 95%) and a hell of a lot of the Invaders, the pigs did just fine, and multiplied like, umm, pigs-- continuing to spread pox and other disease everywhere they wandered. Vengeance was theirs, for sure.
The estimates of how many Indigenous People lived in all of America in 1491 vary widely, but let's take a low-middle view. 25 million.
When Columbus landed first in what he humbly called Hispaniola, historians have uncovered data that indicates there were minimally 10 million in the neighborhood.
We have here what I call The Palestine Principle, closely connected to what in scholarly circles is called The Pristine Myth.
When White People come to a place and see only Brown people, they don't count them as Humans. So, the BP don't really exist, and they are damn sure not too Chosen, and so, they kinda disappear.
Like they weren't there.
And when racist Archaeologists go back later to count - they can't see the Brown folks too well in the dark.
That's where the myths come from that in 1948 Palestine was empty desert, until the Jews arrived with water and fertilizer.
Or similarly - that Hispaniola or New Jersey or Arizona or Marajo in the Amazon, were empty sparsely populated wastelands.
We count. They don't.
So, White Peoples' diseases decimated millions of Americans.
Florida, Massachusetts, Peru, Mexico. Everywhere.
In our pursuit of El Dorado, enormous evolved brilliant civilizations - just gone.
And what, after all did We take - what at last in the end did we gain ?
Some gold to finance the Spanish Empire ? or The British ? Well, ya know how long those lasted.
Just think of what we could have taken-
The profound wisdom of those we murdered, the accumulated knowledge of the vast civilizations we destroyed.
Idiots that We are, We took the gold, and destroyed the wisdom.
Wisdom about how to measure and predict the heavens, how to grow totally sustainable crops and manage forests and plains in harmony with Nature, mathematics still unimagined, and evolved concepts of communal life and governance by consensus still unequaled by any of us.
The wisdom we destroyed, and We grabbed the gold---
Which leads us to Iraq, AIDS, Katrina, Global Environmental Disasters, GMOs, DU, Intelligent Design.
For We have never stopped waging and continue to wage, the same ruinous venal destructive deadly war -- against present day Americans and against the world-- as we did 500 years ago.
So, let's give THANKS. For all the gifts we have given to the world. Amen.
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FROM BLACK COMMENTATOR
NOVEMBER 25, 2008
(excerpts. For complete article, please access the websote below:)
http://www.blackcommentator.com/301/301_cover_end_of_american_thanksgivings.html
William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the 1621 feast, was also on hand for the great massacre of 1637:
"Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy."
The rest of the white folks thought so, too. "This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots," read Governor John Winthrop's proclamation. The authentic Thanksgiving Day was born.
Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving quite like Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of "the founders" as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year - a pure glorification of racist barbarity.
We at BC are thankful that the day grows nearer when the almost four centuries-old abomination will be deprived of its reason for being: white supremacy. Then we may all eat and drink in peace and gratitude for the blessings of humanity's deliverance from the rule of evil men.
Thanksgiving is much more than a lie - if it were that simple, an historical correction of the record of events in 1600s Massachusetts would suffice to purge the "flaw" in the national mythology. But Thanksgiving is not just a twisted fable, and the mythology it nurtures is itself inherently evil. The real-life events - subsequently revised - were perfectly understood at the time as the first, definitive triumphs of the genocidal European project in New England. The near-erasure of Native Americans in Massachusetts and, soon thereafter, from most of the remainder of the northern English colonial seaboard was the true mission of the Pilgrim enterprise - Act One of the American Dream. African Slavery commenced contemporaneously - an overlapping and ultimately inseparable Act Two.
The last Act in the American drama must be the "root and branch" eradication of all vestiges of Act One and Two - America's seminal crimes and formative projects. Thanksgiving as presently celebrated - that is, as a national political event - is an affront to civilization.
Celebrating the unspeakable
White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children's version of the story - kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved. But they will also never forget the core message of the holiday: that the Pilgrims were good people, who could not have purposely set such evil in motion. Just as the first Thanksgivings marked the consolidation of the English toehold in what became the United States, the core ideological content of the holiday serves to validate all that has since occurred on these shores - a national consecration of the unspeakable, a balm and benediction for the victors, a blessing of the fruits of murder and kidnapping, and an implicit obligation to continue the seamless historical project in the present day.
The Thanksgiving story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human. Most importantly, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims - of harsh weather and their own naïve yet wholesome visions of a new beginning. In light of this carefully nurtured fable, whatever happened to the Indians, from Plymouth to California and beyond, in the aftermath of the 1621 dinner must be considered a mistake, the result of misunderstandings - at worst, a series of lamentable tragedies. The story provides the essential first frame of the American saga. It is unalloyed racist propaganda, a tale that endures because it served the purposes of a succession of the Pilgrims' political heirs, in much the same way that Nazi-enhanced mythology of a glorious Aryan/German past advanced another murderous, expansionist mission.
Thanksgiving is quite dangerous - as were the Pilgrims.
Rejoicing in a cemetery
The English settlers, their ostensibly religious venture backed by a trading company, were glad to discover that they had landed in a virtual cemetery in 1620. Corn still sprouted in the abandoned fields of the Wampanoags, but only a remnant of the local population remained around the fabled Rock. In a letter to England, Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop wrote, "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."
Ever diligent to claim their own advantages as God's will, the Pilgrims thanked their deity for having "pursued" the Indians to mass death. However, it was not divine intervention that wiped out most of the natives around the village of Patuxet but, most likely, smallpox-embedded blankets planted during an English visit or slave raid. Six years before the Pilgrim landing, a ship sailed into Patuxet's harbor, captained by none other than the famous seaman and mercenary soldier John Smith, former leader of the first successful English colony in the New World, at Jamestown, Virginia. Epidemic and slavery followed in his wake, as Debra Glidden described in IMDiversity.com:
In 1614 the Plymouth Company of England, a joint stock company, hired Captain John Smith to explore land in its behalf. Along what is now the coast of Massachusetts in the territory of the Wampanoag, Smith visited the town of Patuxet according to "The Colonial Horizon," a 1969 book edited by William Goetzinan. Smith renamed the town Plymouth in honor of his employers, but the Wampanoag who inhabited the town continued to call it Patuxet.
The following year Captain Hunt, an English slave trader, arrived at Patuxet. It was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them into slavery for 220 shillings apiece. That practice was described in a 1622 account of happenings entitled "A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia," written by Edward Waterhouse. True to the explorer tradition, Hunt kidnapped a number of Wampanoags to sell into slavery.
Another common practice among European explorers was to give "smallpox blankets" to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have any natural immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. William Fenton describes how Europeans decimated Native American villages in his 1957 work "American Indian and White relations to 1830." From 1615 to 1619 smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to the north. The Wampanoag lost 70 percent of their population to the epidemic and the Massachusetts lost 90 percent.
Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for their own. A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University's Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was "the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people's abode in the Western world."
Historians have since speculated endlessly on why the woods in the region resembled a park to the disembarking Pilgrims in 1620. The reason should have been obvious: hundreds, if not thousands, of people had lived there just five years before.
In less than three generations the settlers would turn all of New England into a charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the economic engines of slavery throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock is the place where the nightmare truly began.
The uninvited?
It is not at all clear what happened at the first - and only - "integrated" Thanksgiving feast. Only two written accounts of the three-day event exist, and one of them, by Governor William Bradford, was written 20 years after the fact...
...What is certain is that the first feast was not called a "Thanksgiving" at the time; no further integrated dining occasions were scheduled; and the first, official all-Pilgrim "Thanksgiving" had to wait until 1637, when the whites of New England celebrated the massacre of the Wampanoag's southern neighbors, the Pequots.
The real Thanksgiving Day Massacre
...Sixteen years after the problematical Plymouth feast, the English tried mightily to erase the Pequots from the face of the Earth, and thanked God for the blessing.
Having subdued, intimidated or made mercenaries of most of the tribes of Massachusetts, the English turned their growing force southward, toward the rich Connecticut valley, the Pequot's sphere of influence. At the point where the Mystic River meets the sea, the combined force of English and allied Indians bypassed the Pequot fort to attack and set ablaze a town full of women, children and old people.
William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the 1621 feast, was also on hand for the great massacre of 1637:
"Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy."
The rest of the white folks thought so, too. "This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots," read Governor John Winthrop's proclamation. The authentic Thanksgiving Day was born.
"Like a rock"
The Thanksgiving holiday fable is at once a window on the way that many, if not most, white Americans view the world and their place in it, and a pollutant that leaches barbarism into the modern era. The fable attempts to glorify the indefensible, to enshrine an era and mission that represent the nation's lowest moral denominators. Thanksgiving as framed in the mythology is, consequently, a drag on that which is potentially civilizing in the national character, a crippling, atavistic deformity. Defenders of the holiday will claim that the politically-corrected children's version promotes brotherhood, but that is an impossibility - a bald excuse to prolong the worship of colonial "forefathers" and to erase the crimes they committed. Those bastards burned the Pequot women and children, and ushered in the multinational business of slavery. These are facts. The myth is an insidious diversion - and worse.
Humanity cannot tolerate a 21st Century superpower, much of whose population perceives the world through the eyes of 17th Century land and flesh bandits. Yet that is the trick that fate has played on the globe. We described the roots of the planetary dilemma in our March 13, 2003 commentary, "Racism & War, Perfect Together."
The English arrived with criminal intent - and brought wives and children to form new societies predicated on successful plunder. To justify the murderous enterprise, Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into "savages" deserving displacement and death. The relentlessly refreshed lie of Indian savagery became a truth in the minds of white Americans, a fact to be acted upon by every succeeding generation of whites. The settlers became a singular people confronting the great "frontier" - a euphemism for centuries of genocidal campaigns against a darker, "savage" people marked for extinction...
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