A day to give thanks?

[IndianaGreen]

A day to give thanks?

Paul D'Amato tells the real story of the "first Thanksgiving"--and the history of conquest and resistance that followed after it.

November 25, 2009

THE THANKSGIVING myth is intertwined with this country's origin myth.

Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 in search of freedom. Indians helped them plant corn and survive. They made a compact that is the basis of our first constitution, and they held a feast, together with some Indians, to celebrate and give thanks to God for their first bounteous harvest.

The story has elements of truth, but not much more than elements. What children learn is the overarching message--that Pilgrims were everything good about America: European, Christian, sober, democratic, generous, God-fearing, and so on and so forth.

True, an Indian named Squanto did teach the Pilgrims how to plant corn and saved the invaders from total starvation. What we aren't told is that Squanto learned English because he had been abducted and made a slave in Europe some years before, and the place where he taught the new settlers to plant corn was the village he had grown up in, Patuxet, now depopulated by the impact of European diseases.

Read more at: http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/25/day-to-give-thanks

[GMA]

1. Oh, brother.

Yawn.

[imdjh]

2. Yeah really.

[bhikkhu]

3. Well, there is something to that

The pilgrims were some of the most intolerant bible-thumping bastards around, having made themselves unwelcome in England for wishing to replace all common-law and civil institutions with biblical law. And very few of the native Americans who supped with them lived very long after or managed to die naturally...

but I had a nice dinner with my family, a turkey and all the trimmings, and we did all talk about what we were thankful ourselves rather than the pilgrims and such. They know all about that anyway.

[imdjh]

5. Most of this sort of article fail to note that disease is spread through peaceful trade and ...

.... and exploration, tourism etc. Blaming the Virginians or the Pilgrims for epidemics (which had already happened prior to their arrival) isn't simply dishonest, it's stupid. It would be like blaming Africans for AIDS coming to America. It wasn't soldiers who brought it, it was ship workers.

To its credit, this article noted that the spread of disease was well under weigh which, of course, it always has been and always will be.

[bhikkhu]

6. ...and it was sadly inevitable

as modern science generally concludes. Nobody knew back then about the causes or cures of the diseases they carried, being more prone to see the will of god in epidemics. I think current thinking traces the first wave of epidemics to the Spanish soldiers and their livestock, who traveled with De Soto long before.

Of course there was no shortage of stark genocidal brutality by the colonists where disease hadn't quite done the job. King Philip's war was certainly an ugly business.

[endless october]

4. i still enjoy Thanksgiving.

i don't deceive myself into believing that the kumbaya shit they taught me in third grade is 100 percent true.

however, i have some things i'm pretty thankful for. and i'll take whatever excuse i can use for a dinner with mom and dad.

it's funny how much your mom's cooking starts to kick ass after you start living on your own.