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Today's
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November 27, 2003
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
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Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
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A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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TG
Day Edition
November 27, 2003
First
Genocide, Then Lie About It
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
By
MITCHEL COHEN
With much material contributed by
Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been
lost.--MC
The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of
the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak
men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from
their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get
a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his
sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks
ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus
later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
"They brought us parrots and balls
of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged
for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything
they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome
features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I
showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves
out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of
sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy
-- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the
Indians called "Turtle Island."
You probably already know a good piece
of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people
prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of their
gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how,
with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians
prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa
Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today,
the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken
prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death.
Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain.
During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's
part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand
of Spain:
"The Indians are so naive and so
free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed
them would believe it. When you ask for something they have,
they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with
anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little
help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them
"as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."
Columbus returned to the New World --
"new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships and more
than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went
from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives.
But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad
on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left
behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in
gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus
later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go
on sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians
began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors,
even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's
men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall,
dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases
brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian
people were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the
Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs
of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers
of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.
Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the
gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur
the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism.
Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation
of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate
system of technology, business, politics and culture that would
dominate the world for the next five centuries.
All of this were the preconditions for
the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies,
the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands
of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English
settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven
ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them
stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole
Indian village.
The Jamestown colony was established
in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy,
led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle
on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began
starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where
they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times
tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves
-- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away
to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children
there.
In the summer of 1610 the governor of
Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were
living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those
who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown
then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian
community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down
the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of
the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing
the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water.
The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to
death.
By 1621, the atrocities committed by
the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian
villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists.
From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians
the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.
When the Pilgrims came to New England
they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited
by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were
Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution
in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from
there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth
Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
Religious persecution or not, they immediately
turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of
others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of
me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance,
and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans
13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
damnation."
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with
the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut
and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted
their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly
over Connecticut settlers in that area.
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston
to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English
landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick
forests of the island and the English went from one deserted
village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back
to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying
crops again.
The English went on setting fire to wigwams
of the village. They burned village after village to the ground.
As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather
put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls
were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather,
clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians
in the name of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered
in New England over the next few years. It is important to note:
The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very
often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger
Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined
the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England.
It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land,
for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of
10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced
to less than one million.
The way the different Indian peoples
lived -- communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal
councils, each tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships,
where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm --
contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist
values. For the Puritans, men decided everything, whereas in
the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose
the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils;
it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether
or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and
female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
There were many other cultural differences:
The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did
not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually
allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they
did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land,
lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The
European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the
emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything --
even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim
colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And
surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness
of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first
place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their
education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues
may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that
had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a combination of slavery,
murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the Wonderful
Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His
People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed
Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead
for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were
being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them.
Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England
prior to its introduction by the English, who began the practice
by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied:
"Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea."
And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of Christian
Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been
more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they
encountered, and so slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians
"saved", and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving.
Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian
nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in
Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak
English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold
Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive
their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate
the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He
pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could
be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between
the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty
that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And
even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the
First Thanksgiving.
My own feeling? The Indians should have
let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity
made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful,
human, loving connection they -- and those of us who are not
Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the
original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
Let's look at one example of the Puritan
values -- which were not, I repeat, the values of the English
working class values that we "give thanks for" on this
holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first
landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge
revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought
Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order
to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This
alliance between international finance, national capital and
military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist
nation-state.
The young workers of London took their
revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality
-- the vision of communal society that would counter the rich,
the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners
-- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened
-- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't
hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They
were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers
stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners
were freed. A French capitalist's house was trashed.
Then came the repression: Cannons were
fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers
patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was made that no women
were allowed to meet together, and that all men should "keep
their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought
through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven
sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged.
The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.
Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime
of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the
beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation
(people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for
centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs,
as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers
and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism
-- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest,
famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their
commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole.
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol
of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles
(just as, during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon
banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into
the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans'
war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished
May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were
attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home
as well.
Although translators of the Bible were
burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian
manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world upside
down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers,
Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went
to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put
up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him,
plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton
had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was
Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian
who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who
praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up
the wall.
The story of the Maypole as a symbol
of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through
the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance
in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which
was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers,
stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit."
They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of
all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the
invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise
it might as well have been a Mayday!
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it.
Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars
to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited.
The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking
alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking
twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers!
Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance,
everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine
took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and
Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with the right,
hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned
the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux
outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused
the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing
people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29 1890 the Government (with
Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute
-- always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men,
women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust,
or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed
responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney
to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The
Indians were responsible for the engagement."
In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by
the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend.
That year -- the year of Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia;
the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded
for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black
Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department
of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to
mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the
first Thanksgiving.
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was
selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show
a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony.
When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to
read it.
First, the genocide. Then, the suppression
of all discussion about it.
What do Indian people find to be Thankful
for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for
in the genocide of the Indians, that this "holyday"
commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking
any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets
and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all
the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to
do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history,
and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist
lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the
colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust
for gold and labor.
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American
in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving.
I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being
against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to
go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists'
Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism,
their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of
women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look
forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known
as Amerika -- not the people, not the beautiful land, but the
machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all
that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have
children with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians.
Mitchel Cohen
is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper
of the Greens/Green Party
USA,, and organizes with the NoSpray
Coalition and the Brooklyn Greens. He can be reached at:
mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
In memorium. Lest we forget. The First
Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November,
1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't
a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration
of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist
says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about
the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he
discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from
two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology
department at the University of Connecticut.
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially
proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children
who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving
Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting
they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The
Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth
they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building,"
he said.
Newell based his research on studies
of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History,
both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials
to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers
of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York
colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
"My research is authentic because
it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything
more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."
Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings
commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton,
Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration
with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting
around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious"
although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
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