The End of American Thanksgivings
A Cause for Universal Celebration
Black Commentator
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_
(
http://www.tolatsga.org/wampa.html) , 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_
(
http://www.apva.org/history/jsmith.html) ,
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. Was Chief Massasoit invited to bring 90 Indians with him to
dine with
52 colonists, most of them women and children? This seems unlikely. A good
harvest had provided the settlers with plenty of food, according to their
accounts, so the whites didn't really need the Wampanoag's offering of five
deer. What we do know is that there had been lots of tension between the two
groups that fall. John Two-Hawks, who runs the _Native Circle_
(
http://www.nativecircle.com/mlmThanksgivingmyth.html) web site, gives a
sketch of the facts:
"Thanksgiving' did not begin as a great loving relationship between the
pilgrims and the Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in
October
of 1621 when the pilgrim survivors of their first winter in Turtle
Island sat
down to share the first unofficial 'Thanksgiving' meal, the Indians who were
there were not even invited! There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce
or pumpkin pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a
company of
'pilgrims' led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian
chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth
settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!"
It is much more likely that Chief Massasoit either crashed the party, or
brought enough men to ensure that he was not kidnapped or harmed by the
Pilgrims. Dr. Tingba Apidta, in his "Black Folks' Guide to Understanding
Thanksgiving," surmises that the settlers "brandished their weaponry"
early and got
drunk soon thereafter. He notes that "each Pilgrim drank at least a half
gallon
of beer a day, which they preferred even to water. This daily
inebriation led
their governor, William Bradford, to comment on his people's 'notorious
sin,'
which included their 'drunkenness and uncleanliness' and rampant 'sodomy.
'"
Soon after the feast the brutish Miles Standish "got his bloody prize," Dr.
Apidta writes:
"He went to the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian
man named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was displayed
on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B. Nash, 'as a symbol of
white power.' Standish had the Indian man's young brother hanged from the
rafters for good measure. From that time on, the whites were known to
the Indians
of Massachusetts by the name 'Wotowquenange,' which in their tongue meant
cutthroats and stabbers."
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
The Pequots today own the _Foxwood Casino and Hotel_
(
http://members.aol.com/casinonews/ct-fox.htm) , in Ledyard,
Connecticut, with gross gaming revenues
of over $9 billion in 2000. This is truly a (very belated) miracle,
since the
real first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was intended as the Pequot's epitaph.
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.
Most historians believe about 700 Pequots were slaughtered at Mystic. Many
prisoners were executed, and surviving women and children sold into
slavery in
the West Indies. Pequot prisoners that escaped execution were parceled out
to Indian tribes allied with the English. The Pequot were thought to
have been
extinguished as a people.
According to _IndyMedia_
(
http://indy.pabn.org/archives/213thank.shtml) , "The Pequot tribe
numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims
arrived, but disease had brought their numbers down to 1,500 by 1637.
The Pequot
'War' killed all but a handful of remaining members of the tribe."
But there were still too many Indians around to suit the whites of New
England, who bided their time while their own numbers increased to critical,
murderous mass.
Guest's head on a pole
By the 1670s the colonists, with 8,000 men under arms, felt strong enough to
demand that the Pilgrims' former dinner guests the Wampanoags disarm and
submit to the authority of the Crown. After a series of settler
provocations in
1675, the Wampanoag struck back, under the leadership of Chief
Metacomet, son
of Massasoit, called King Philip by the English. Metacomet/Philip, whose
wife and son were captured and sold into West Indian slavery, wiped out 13
settlements and killed 600 adult white men before the tide of battle
turned. A
_1996 issue_ (
http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/883/thank.htm) of the Revolutionary
Worker provides an excellent narrative.
In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the
remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20
shillings bounty
for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be
sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or
child
under 14 they could capture. The "Praying Indians" who had converted to
Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused
of shooting
into the treetops during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or
killed. Other "peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to
negotiate
or seek refuge at trading posts - and were sold onto slave ships.
It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this
campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the
12,000
Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle,
massacre
and starvation.
After King Philip's War, there were almost no Indians left free in the
northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan's New York
colony:
"There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways
hurtful. It
is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since
the English first settled in these parts." In Massachusetts, the colonists
declared a "day of public thanksgiving" in 1676, saying, "there now scarce
remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain,
captivated or
fled."
Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had
destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The
Wampanoag
chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth,
where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.
This is not thought to be a fit Thanksgiving tale for the children of today,
but it's the real story, well-known to the settler children of New England
at the time - the white kids who saw the Wampanoag head on the pole year
after
year and knew for certain that God loved them best of all, and that every
atrocity they might ever commit against a heathen, non-white was blessed.
There's a good term for the process thus set in motion: nation-building.
Roots of the slave trade
The British North American colonists' practice of enslaving Indians for
labor or direct sale to the West Indies preceded the appearance of the first
chained Africans at the dock in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The Jamestown
colonists' human transaction with the Dutch vessel was an unscheduled
occurrence.
However, once the African slave trade became commercially established, the
fates of Indians and Africans in the colonies became inextricably
entwined. New
England, born of up-close-and-personal, burn-them-in-the-fires-of-hell
genocide, led the political and commercial development of the English
colonies.
The region also led the nascent nation's descent into a slavery-based
society
and economy.
Ironically, an apologist for Virginian slavery made one of the best, early
cases for the indictment of New England as the engine of the American slave
trade. Unreconstructed secessionist Lewis Dabney's 1867 book "A Defense of
Virginia" traced the slave trade's origins all the way back to Plymouth
Rock:
The planting of the commercial States of North America began with the colony
of Puritan Independents at Plymouth, in 1620, which was subsequently
enlarged into the State of Massachusetts. The other trading colonies,
Rhode Island
and Connecticut, as well as New Hampshire (which never had an extensive
shipping interest), were offshoots of Massachusetts. They partook of the
same
characteristics and pursuits; and hence, the example of the parent
colony is taken
here as a fair representation of them.
The first ship from America, which embarked in the African slave trade, was
the Desire, Captain Pierce, of Salem; and this was among the first vessels
ever built in the colony. The promptitude with which the "Puritan Fathers"
embarked in this business may be comprehended, when it is stated that
the Desire
sailed upon her voyage in June, 1637. [Note: the year they massacred the
Pequots.] The first feeble and dubious foothold was gained by the white
man at
Plymouth less than seventeen years before; and as is well known, many years
were expended by the struggle of the handful of settlers for existence.
So that
it may be correctly said, that the commerce of New England was born of the
slave trade; as its subsequent prosperity was largely founded upon it. The
Desire, proceeding to the Bahamas, with a cargo of "dry fish and strong
liquors,
the only commodities for those parts," obtained the negroes from two British
men-of-war, which had captured them from a Spanish slaver.
Thus, the trade of which the good ship Desire, of Salem, was the harbinger,
grew into grand proportions; and for nearly two centuries poured a flood of
wealth into New England, as well as no inconsiderable number of slaves.
Meanwhile, the other maritime colonies of Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations,
and Connecticut, followed the example of their elder sister emulously; and
their commercial history is but a repetition of that of Massachusetts. The
towns of Providence, Newport, and New Haven became famous slave trading
ports.
The magnificent harbor of the second, especially, was the favorite
starting-place of the slave ships; and its commerce rivaled, or even
exceeded, that of
the present commercial metropolis, New York. All the four original
States, of
course, became slaveholding.
The Revolution that exploded in 1770s New England was undertaken by men
thoroughly imbued with the worldview of the Indian-killer and
slave-holder. How
could they not be? The "country" they claimed as their own was fathered by
genocide and mothered by slavery - its true distinction among the commercial
nations of the world. And these men were not ashamed, but proud, with vast
ambition to spread their exceptional characteristics West and South and
wherever
their so-far successful project in nation-building might take them - and by
the same bloody, savage methods that had served them so well in the past.
At the moment of deepest national crisis following the battle of Gettysburg
in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the national fable that is far
more central to the white American personality than Lincoln's battlefield "
Address." Lincoln seized upon the 1621 feast as the historic
"Thanksgiving" -
bypassing the official and authentic 1637 precedent - and assigned the
dateless, murky event the fourth Thursday in November.
Lincoln surveyed a broken nation, and attempted nation-rebuilding, based on
the purest white myth. The same year that he issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, he renewed the national commitment to a white manifest
destiny that
began at Plymouth Rock. Lincoln sought to rekindle a shared national mission
that former Confederates and Unionists and white immigrants from Europe
could
collectively embrace. It was and remains a barbaric and racist national
unifier, by definition. Only the most fantastic lies can sanitize the
history of the
Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts.
"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._
(
http://www.blackcommentator.com/33/33_cover_story.html) "
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.
The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the
expanding American nation. "Manifest Destiny" was born at Plymouth Rock and
Jamestown, later to fall (to paraphrase Malcolm) like a rock on Mexico, the
Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. Little children were taught that the
American
project was inherently good, Godly, and that those who got in the way were
"evil-doers" or just plain subhuman, to be gloriously eliminated. The lie is
central to white American identity, embraced by waves of European
settlers who
never saw a red person.
Only a century ago, American soldiers caused the deaths of possibly a
million Filipinos whom they had been sent to "liberate" from Spanish
rule. They
didn't even know who they were killing, and so rationalized their
behavior by
substituting the usual American victims. Colonel Funston, of the Twentieth
Kansas Volunteers, explained what got him motivated in the Philippines:
"Our fighting blood was up and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' This
shooting human beings is a 'hot game,' and beats rabbit hunting all to
pieces."
Another wrote that "the boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing
jack-rabbits .... I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the
chastening rod, good,
hard, and plenty, and lay it on until they come into the reservation and
promise to be good 'Injuns.'"
Our military leaders in Iraq continue to personify the unfitness of
Americans to play a major role in the world, much less rule it.
What does this have to do with the Mayflower? Everything. Although possibly
against their wishes, the Pilgrims hosted the Wampanoag for three no doubt
anxious days. The same men killed and enslaved Wampanoags immediately before
and after the feast. They, their newly arrived English comrades and their
children roasted hundreds of neighboring Indians alive just 16 years
later, and
two generations afterwards cleared nearly the whole of New England of its
indigenous "savages," while enthusiastically enriching themselves
through the
invention of transoceanic, sophisticated means of enslaving millions. The
Mayflower's cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own
depravity and
savagery in their most helpless victims, who can only redeem themselves by
accepting the inherent goodness of white Americans.
Thanksgiving encourages these cognitive cripples in their madness, just as
it is designed to do.
Things are looking up
We began this essay by saying that "the day grows nearer when the almost
four centuries-old abomination [Thanksgiving] will be deprived of its
reason for
being: white supremacy." We firmly believe this. The wired world works
against the Bushites insane leap to global hegemony, while creating the
material
basis for (dare we say the words) brother- and sisterhood among
humankind. It
becomes clear that the fruits of millennia of human genius cannot be
captured
and packaged for the enrichment of a few for much longer - and certainly not
by a cabal that cannot see beyond the bubble of its own, warped history. The
dim outlines of a new and more democratic world order can be seen in the
often tentative, but sometimes dramatic actions of movements and nations
determined to construct a fairer way to live. As the world witnesses the
brutality,
stupidity and sheer incompetence of the Pirates currently at the helm of the
United States, the urgency of a common, alternative human project becomes
apparent to all. The "end of history" that the Bushites triumphantly
announce
is really the end of them, through a process they have accelerated with
every
deranged action and delusional strategy they have undertaken since 2001.
They are like men in quicksand. White racism as a global scourge will sink
with them, and eventually whither to a mere prejudice rather than a
world-threatening menace.
We at BC are thankful to be alive in the knowledge that a new world is just
over the horizon, close enough to sense, even if we never see it.
We are optimistic about our struggle in the United States - if not, we would
never encourage anybody to fight for anything.
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