The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Informed Mom — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 11:52:51 GMT

As a student of history, I find your story to be interesting, although William Bradford's account does leave out the subsequent assault to the Native Indian population. The first 200 years of violated treaties sound very much like what the radical Islam leaders are doing now....agreeing to "treaties" until they can conquer those they enter into agreements with. Isn't that what the American Government did and before that the British Government? And isn't it interesting as a parallel that they justified the taking of land in spite of those treaties using their Christian Faith as their justification for iradicating what was viewed as idolatry or voodoo or whatever, just as Islam does in the name of Allah.

When you look at the vastness of these United States and understand the thousands and thousands of Native Indian Tribes that populated it, were wiped out in order for the conquering population to expand their own destiny to the Pacific.... was that not genocide? It had to be. I know this for a fact, since I am descendant of one of the survivors of the "Trail of Tears" purpetuated by the Jackson Administration.

And today.... our Government... in ever increasing "gaul" takes the freedoms we have ... away with a stroke of a pen...and the same laziness that prevailed in Jamestown initially among the people (in not speaking up and taking action), will bring about a famine much worse than food... a famine of "individual thought and creative invention", a famine of "healthy and vital lifestyles" and a famine above all famines...the right to be free at all. The Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act, Military Commissions Act, Codex Alimentarius, The WTO, FDA, UN and new rules of Homeland Security and the Security & Exchange Commission will virtually change the landscape of our society and there will be a "Trail of Tears" that will take a monumental struggle to overcome if it ever could be overcome at all.

Yes, we are Thankful for the holiday without all the hype & shopping.... but we better be ready to defend what we are so thankful for. It is as simple as writing and calling and speaking up... and it will be as dangerous to do so as it was during the Revolution, in the early days of our nation...but we must speak up for the sake of our children and grandchildren, of which I have 10 grandchildren. I am not an alarmist...but the writing is on the wall.

Sincerely,

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Mitchel Cohen — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:26:48 GMT

There sure is a lot more to the "Great Thanksgiving Tradition" than the author puts out there. You don't find many people these days defending the genocide of the native population of the Americas in the name of "free market capitalism." Please read my essay, "Why I Hate Thanksgiving," at http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen11252004.html for a completely different reading and analysis.

The problem most certainly was NOT the alleged "socialism" of the Puritans, but their religious and economic colonialism. To bring this up to date, and to tie together THEN and NOW, I'd hope that Dr. Mercola and readers of this very important website would understand how the continued myths about Thanksgiving are used today to continue and consolidate that empire-building.

On Thanksgiving morning 2003, George W. Bush showed up in Iraq (or so we're led to believe) before sunrise for a photo-op, wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers. He cradled a platter with what appeared to be a golden-brown turkey. Washington Post reporter Mike Allen wrote that "the bird looks perfect, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings, completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and secrity in one of the most dangerous parts of the world."

As the world was soon to learn (but quickly forgot), the turkey platter was a phony plastic decoration that Bush posed with for the cameras. Bush shook a few hands, said a few "God Bless Americas," and scurried back to his plane as quickly as he arrived.

Thus, in one fell swoop, the New Conquistador had tied to history's bloody bough the 514-year-old conquest of the "New World" -- whose legions smote the indigenous population in the name of Christ -- with the bombardment and invasion of Iraq and the torture detentions of prisoners of war at U.S. military bases.

Since then, George Bush's America has filled the Iraqi landscape with depleted uranium armaments that have poisoned the agriculture and water supply for the next several billion years.

As I was writing my article, "Why I Hate Thanksgiving," in 2003, U.S. troops were blasting their way through the Iraqi town of Fallujah and hundreds of civilians lay dead in the streets having been burnt alive by the white-hot heat of U.S. chemical weapons, white phosphorous. The military calls them "corpses" and "collateral damage" -- and so too do the media. U.S. and British journalists fled the carnage and returned only as "embeds" -- reporters planted in the safety of large army squandrons -- embellishing on military press releases and faxing their reports to their editors as "eyewitness news." It is only through the photos taken by Arab journalists and independent media that we learned of the actual horror, of the children's bodies lying in the street alongside the tanks as American soldiers satisfactorily surveyed the scene.

The NY Post ran a picture of one of these soldiers and captioned him the "Marlboro Man," the generic embodiment of what it means for them to be a "man," rugged, oil-smeared face dragging on a U.S. cigarette. It's not the individual grunt's fault that the media needs to invent its heroes in such caricatures, but forgive me if I look elsewhere for reminders of what it means to be human in an era of robots.

Similarly, in Palestine where Israeli occpiers are building a huge wall -- basically a concentration camp -- around and through Paelstine, paid for by US tax dollars.

The mindset that created the first Thanksgiving in the 17th century on the corpses of murdered Pequot Indians runs free today in the 21st century over the corpses of murdered Iraqis, Afghais, and Palestinians.

In November 2003, as George Bush's plane was landing in the pre-dawn hours for his faux-dinner in Iraq, I wrote "Why I Hate Thanksgiving," and it ended up being published all over the place under various titles, such as Counterpunch's "Genocide? Pass the Turkey." Much has transpired since then. Despite the onging attempts to appropriate this holiday and use it to promote the new conquistador's empire-building efforts, the true history of Thanksgiving as well as what it represents is slowly emerging. Meanwhile, the elections were stolen, Fallujah invaded and destroyed, and ignorant armies are clashing everywhere by night.

Why do we fetishize the food we eat on Thanksgiving? Where it comes from? While I fondly remember the results of Aunt Dora's secret recipe for her delicious turkey stuffing that I enjoyed so much as a kid, I am revolted by the annual ritual slaughter of tens of millions of turkeys, which many of us feast on while watching equally sanitized images of blown-up Iraqi and Afghan children. William Kunstler, bless his soul -- whirling as he is in his grave furiously trying to generate the energy needed to power all the indymedia websites worldwide -- towards the end of his life began to speak of the link between the mass slaughter of animals, capital punishment, and the history of colonization ... and, what we'd need to do to begin to change things:

"Marjorie Spiegel, a neighbor of mine in Greenwich Village, has written a most compelling book -- The Dreaded Comparison -- in which she details the devastating similarities between animal and human slavery," Kunstler argues. He continues:

Alice Walker, in her most eloquent foreword, states that "The aimals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.' ...

We owe it to ourselves and the animal world as well to create, not merely a body of rules and regulations to govern our conduct but a level of sensibility that makes us care, deeply and constructively, about the entire planet and all of its varied inhabitants. If we can accomplish this, then, perhaps, in some far-off day, those who follow us down the track of the generations will be able to dwell in relative harmony with all the cratures of the earth, human and nonhuman.

The ritual slaughter or turkes; the fact that each American's average Thanksgiving dinner is 2000 calories, and that we live in a country with 5 percent of the world's people consuming 27 percent of the world's natural resources while making 50 percent of its garbage -- these present us with strong arguments against factory farming, with its subjugation of animals (and plants) to severe abuse, genetic engineering, pesticides, and a sewer of antibiotics, leading to conditions that not only torture the animals but enter the U.S. diet and severely impact on human health.

We are getting sicker as a nation physically, as well as mentally. The two are related.

We know that we need to speak truth to power, and that justice will prevail enventually; the questions, though, are "How long is eventually?" "How many people must be tortured and killed in the meantime?" And, "How can we stop it? What do we need to do, NOW?"

What we need to do can be answered in one word: "Resist." Celebrate Resistance, in its political, artistic and social forms.

On Thanksgiving Day in 2004, I got together with MY family -- a bunch of Greens from Brooklyn who believe in resistance -- and we FASTED in front of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer's condominium in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to protest his support for the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. fincning of Israel's occupation of Palestine, and the detention and torture of immigrants and prisoners of war by the U.S. government.

We fasted outside Sen. Schumer's residence in order to meditate upon the historical threads that bind U.S. policy today to its colonial genocide of the Native people of Turtle Island, and Sen. Schumer's support for that war against Iraq and Afghanistan.

We fasted for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and all political prisoners in the United States.

We fasted against the USA Patriot Act, repression of immigrants, and the decimation of the Bill of Rights.

We fasted against global ecological devastation.

We fasted to better contemplate what new forms the resistance will take.

This year, -- 2006 -- the Bush regime is fraught with contradictions and stands exposed for the world to see. But "seeing" is not enough. The Common Ground Relief effort in New Orleans is showing us the way forward.

We need to turn consciousness into movement. The effort in finding ways to turn despair into resistance is a happy one. CREATE the alternative. BE the alternative. Don't let the so-called "free market" capitalist system that the author of the above essay promotes determine for us how to experience its rituals or warfare, nor the approved ways to combat its terror. Be Creative. Resistance keeps us young forever!
------------------------

That is my introduction -- my contextualization -- of my historical article, "Why I Hate Thanksgiving," which present a much more complete refutation of the "free market" misreading (to put it nicely) of history presented by Richard Marbury in "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax." Dr. Mercola, I urge you to read it, at www.counterpunch.org/cohen11252004.html .

Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party, and
co-ordinator, No Spray Coalition
www.nospray.org

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Patri Dimitria — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:26:11 GMT

Thanksgiving’s truth as told by Julia White from an article I saved.
As history teaches us, the greatest conflicts and the bloodiest wars throughout time have been waged because of belief systems and boundaries. We can trace this from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition through Hitler to the "ethnic cleansing" now going on around the world.
This mentality does not tolerate differing political, social and religious beliefs, and it does not hesitate to seize another's land and property if it suits a purpose.
It was the custom in European countries to mark the boundaries of land with fences ranging from palisades to low rock walls. Once word spread throughout Europe and Spain about this wonderful land called The Americas, which was wild, untamed and unclaimed, this new territory became a safe haven for outlaws, prisoners, exiles, and the radical element of politics, social structure and religious practices - the violent and the non-conformists.
Even though the first explorers and early settlers had been warned about the heathen savages found in the "New World", they found the First Peoples of this land curious about these strange people, and more than willing to teach them how to survive and live well in their new surroundings.
The flow of people into this country was slow in the beginning and, even though there was the occasional hothead among the newcomers, life was generally a peaceful co-existence for almost 150 years.
However, as the trickle of settlers turned into a steady river, the atmosphere began to change.
In 1614, a band of English explorers had landed in the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay. When they returned home, they took with them Native slaves they had captured, and left smallpox behind.
By the time the Puritan pilgrims sailed the Mayflower into southern Massachusetts Bay, entire nations of New England Natives were already extinct, having been totally exterminated by smallpox.
The Puritans were religious radicals being driven into exile out of England. Since their story is well known, I will not repeat it here.
They settled and built a colony which they called the "Plymouth Plantation", near the ruins of a former Native village of the Pawtucket Nation.
Only one Pawtucket had survived, a man named Squanto, who had spent time as a slave to the English. Since he understood the language and customs of the Puritans, he taught them to use the corn growing wild from the abandoned fields of the village, taught them to fish, and about the foods, herbs and fruits of this land.
Squanto also negotiated a peace treaty between the Puritans and the Wampanoag Nation, a very large Native nation which totally surrounded the new Plymouth Plantation.
Because of Squanto's efforts, the Puritans enjoyed almost 15 years of peaceful harmony with the surrounding Natives, and they prospered.
At the end of their first year, the Puritans held a great feast following the harvest of their new farming efforts.
The feast honored Squanto and their friends, the Wampanoags.
The feast was followed by 3 days of "thanksgiving" celebrating their good fortune. This feast produced the image of the first Thanksgiving that we all grew up with as children.
However, things were doomed to change.
Until approximately 1629, there were only about 300 Puritans living in widely scattered settlements around New England.
As word leaked back to England about their peaceful and prosperous life, more Puritans arrived by the boatloads. As the numbers of Puritans grew, the question of ownership of the land became a major issue. The Puritans came from the belief of individual needs and prosperity, and had no concept of tribal living, or group sharing.
It was clear that these heathen savages had no claim on the land because it had never been subdued, cultivated and farmed in the European manner, and there were no fences or other boundaries marked.
The land was clearly "public domain", and there for the taking.
This attitude met with great resistance from the original Puritans who held their Native benefactors in high regard. These first Puritan settlers were summarily excommunicated and expelled from the church.
With Bible passages in their hands to justify their every move, the Puritans began their march inland from the seaside communities.
Joined by British settlers, the seized land, took the strong and young Natives as slaves to work the land, and killed the rest.
When they reached the Connecticut Valley around 1633, they met a different type of force.
The Pequot Nation, very large and very powerful, had never entered into the peace treaty negotiated by Squanto as had other New England Native nations.
When 2 slave raiders were killed by resisting Natives, the Puritans demanded that the killers be turned over. The Pequot refused. What followed was the Pequot War, the bloodiest of the Native wars in the northeast.
An army of over 200 settlers was formed, joined by over 1,000 Narragansett warriors. Because of the lack of fighting experience, and the vast numbers of the fierce Pequot warriors, Commander John Mason elected not to stage an open battle.
Instead, the Pequot were attacked, one village at a time, in the hours before dawn. Each village was set on fire with its sleeping Natives burned alive. Women and children over 14 were captured to be sold as slaves; other survivors were massacred.
The Natives were sold into slavery in The West Indies, the Azures, Spain, Algiers and England; everywhere the Puritan merchants traded. The slave trade was so lucrative that boatloads of 500 at a time left the harbors of New England.
In 1641, the Dutch governor of Manhattan offered the first scalp bounty; a common practice in many European countries.
This was broadened by the Puritans to include a bounty for Natives fit to be sold for slavery.
The Dutch and Puritans joined forces to exterminate all Natives from New England, and village after village fell. Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches of Manhattan announced a day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages.
This was the 2nd Thanksgiving.
During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls.
The killing took on a frenzy, with days of thanksgiving being held after each successful massacre.
Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape.
Their chief was beheaded, and his head placed on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained for 24 years.
Each town held thanksgiving days to celebrate their own victories over the Natives until it became clear that there needed to be an order to these special occasions.
It was George Washington who finally brought a system and a schedule to thanksgiving when he declared one day to be celebrated across the nation as Thanksgiving Day.
It was Abraham Lincoln who decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day and at the same time he was ordering troops to march against the Sioux in Minnesota .....
In our society, it is not uncommon for our modern celebrations to have arisen from black and evil beginnings.
Over the centuries, Thanksgiving has become a special day to join with loved ones in an offering of thanks for our blessings. Some give of their time to help with the homeless and the hungry. It is now a day of giving, and of honor, and of true thanksgiving. I do not mean to diminish that.
In your Thanksgivings to come, I would ask that you offer a silent prayer for the spirits of those who were sacrificed so long ago.
You and I did not commit these atrocities, and we are certainly not responsible for the behavior of our ancestors be they red, white, black or yellow.
However, we are charged with the responsibility of learning our true history, and of having the courage to behave with honor and dignity toward our fellow man. Remember that, if the lessons of history are not learned, they will surely repeat themselves. The todays and tomorrows of history are ours to shape.
Shape them carefully.

Love & Light, Patri

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

JoelMeyers — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:33:21 GMT

I read your article about the hoax of Thanksgiving, and I couldn't believe what you identified as the hoax.

Thanksgiving was first celebrated in 1637, to revel in a massacre of Native Americans of the Pequot People. That was the apparent pay back for the Native people teaching the new arrivals how to survive the harsh winter.

When Americans say that they are giving thanks for the land as if it were a gift from a deity, the fact is that the indigenous peoples were nearly exterminated, yes, often in the name of a deity, so that their land could be converted from a shared creation into a free maket property belonging to the individuals who forcibly stole it, along with millions of lives.

That land grab, enforced by genocide, was a principle development in creating the wealth and prosperity. Is this really the will of any deity, or is that the dirtiest slander of those who took the narrow, ethical, road, and suffered for the principles at the core of major religions which center around the Ten Commandments. Another source of the primitive accumulation of wealth and prosperity were the centuries of America's "peculiar institution", as it used to be euphemized, of racial slavery, followed by more than another century of white supremacy, attended by unspeakable steady, bloody brutality and discrimination.

Slavery and genocide were not only the root of the fortunes of affluent Americans, but also of the rise of a financial-corporate elite in Europe. The ravages of early capitalism in Europe, particularly in America's mother country, England, also produced a near genocide of the Irish, as capitalized British lords drove out a subsistence peasantry. This in fact was the dress-rehearsal for North American Native Peoples' near annihilation.

The industries that fed from slavery and genocide always preached free markets, but erected tariff barriers against each others' competition, to insulate their infant industries, without which, their would have been no prosperity even for the owners.

After the initial genocide and slavery garnered wealth for a moneyed oligarchy, which corrupts every government, manipulating the democratic impulse, the same rule was extended globally in the form of world imperialism, in which billions suffer in grinding near-starvation at the hands of a few great powers, who distribute enough of the booty to buy the inhuman loyalty of their home populations, who start out by giving blameful thanks to their deities, and then act as mercenaries to enforce the plunder, until the inevitable revolutionary result blows up in their faces.

It is ironic that you ventured such an extreme and one-sided opinion of the free market, when much of your fine work consists of an uphill struggle against the pharmaceutical giants and their insurance-company enablers, who have worsened the health of many, sacrificing everything to the almighty dollar. In New York State, where I live, hospitals are being closed en masse. The excuse is that there are empty beds in facilities that used to be overcrowded. Is this because people are so much healthier today? Of course not. It is because people do not have the resources to get health care. All of that is a result of the Free Market system, which sells obesity, diabetes and cancer-inducing diets to school kinds as a captive clientele.

Shortly after the death of Milton Friedman, an acolyte of the Ludwig von Mises laissez-faire school of free market out-of-control capitalism, wound up by proposing the "negative income tax" to compensate the many direly impoverished victims of the maurauding profiteer class.

The ruling class is terrified of socialism, because it means returning the wealth that they monopolize to be shared by all who created it. Yes free enterprise made a great historic contribution to expanding production, at one time, but today has been taken over by a monopoly at the top in a corporate-financial elite, as the pivot of all policy. In the end, Karl Marx was right. The corruption of government by the superrich makes the regulation of corporate wealth pathetically limited, unless the stolen wealth is taken back on a world scale, and equitable distribution of sustenance democratic governance of power are combined into a truly human world. This does not preclude a well-regulated private sector to generate creativity for the ultimate benefit of all, nor to begrudge profitability to the extent that it compensates for the benefit of society as a whole.

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Pat Ormsby — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 06:21:52 GMT

As I celebrate this season with an abundant harvest of bug-eaten beans, I give sincere thanks that I live in a country where everyone can afford health insurance, and where the vast majority of people understand what is right about sharing success. While medical care for chronic degenerative diseases is worse here in Japan even than that in America, and we pay a high price for alternative health care, I don't have to fear bankruptcy as the result of an accident.

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

mmc88121 — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 02:44:25 GMT

All these articles are very interesting. If you assume that the Native Americans were savages. However, if you go farther back you will find that the Native Americans did have a tradional celebration after there harvest times, not every Native American tribe was hunter/gatherers. And several of these tribes celebrations are close to the Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. source " He Walked the Americas" by L. Taylor Hansen

mmc88121

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Matthew Ryan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:06:46 GMT

Since we are on the topic I thought I might mention something that has interested me very much about health and politics. That is how some hardcore conservatives and some hardcore liberals seems to meet on the issue of health. Both are very much against the mainstream conventional healthcare paradigm and for natural non-invasive well-being paradigm. Granted, I think their motivations are different (perhaps even fundametnally), but the fact remains that this is a issue where two extremes find common ground and that has always facinated me.

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

friendly curmudgeon — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:46:20 GMT

It's always edifying to know the history (especially the history not in the books), but let's give thanks for the modern evolution of this holiday. Thanksgiving is relatively stress-free and simple. It brings families together. No one has to shop (except for food, which they do anyway every week) or worry about what people will think of their gifts.

The merchandisers and even Hallmark haven't figured out a way to cash in (a REAL PLUS -- and the reason why stores go directly from the cash cow called Halloween to the cash elephant in the room, Christmas, in their displays and ads). Finally, there's football on the television. What's not to like?

I'll take more days in the year built on families gathered to give thanks and appreciation for all they have, especially the fine, locally-produced organic food on the table. Even Squanto would approve, no?

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Mercola Fan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:16:41 GMT

I am of the opinion that, for whatever reason, a nationally recognized holiday that forces the masses to rest is in everyone's best interest. There are many people who would not get a break otherwise.

Happy Thanksgiving, Dr M!! We are thankful for YOU!!

..Shari

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Dude_203 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 08:52:29 GMT

http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/thanksgiving_nelte.html

This is a balanced view on the origins of Thanksgiving.

A short summary is that the original pilgrims, who were a religious bunch, usually gave thanksgiving for major milestones, like a good harvest, etc.

The pilgrims from 1620s did not share with the Indians, rather they stole from them, and later, killed them in great numbers.

Later as the US was established, it was celebrated for specific events by Presidents and governors, and then in the 20th century it became the tradition that it is today.

If the actions of the pilgrims are to be an example of socialism, they're a very poor example because they were savages compared to the native americans who lived there and were a lot more structured and communal.

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Matthew Ryan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 06:24:38 GMT

I was very surprised and impressed to see this article posted here. Austrian economics should be required learning in every education. Ignorance of the basics of economics is resposible for more stupidity than I would care to admit. All too often arguments based on emotions are made to implement policies that defy common sense and strip our freedoms. Live free or die!

re: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Lisa B. — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:10:08 GMT

Capitalism equals Individualism. Look at France and their socialized government structure - they are going downhill fast. It didn't take the Pilgrims long to figure out Socialism doesn't work. Why hasn't Europe caught on after all these years? After all our country is only a few hundred years old. Beware of George Soros. He's trying to change the face of this country to Communism (read the book Shadow Party).

Something to think about is Socialized Medicine. Now that's a scarey thought. Remember Hillary Care?

Always remember one simple rule "The smaller the government the more control you have over your own life."

In Good Health