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Today's Stories

November 22, 2007

Alan Farago
Who Lost America's Everglades?

Greg Moses
A Thanksgiving Basting

Dave Lindorff
Impeachment is Back on the Table

Omar Azfar
Gore for President of Pakistan?

 

November 21, 2007

Vijay Prashad
Our Dictator, Their Democracy

Martha Rosenberg
Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Epiphany on the Glacier

John Ross
The Last Days of Mexican Corn

Brian McKenna
Cancer Terrorists Unmasked

Stephen Soldz
Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo

Monica Benderman
Needing Peace

Ben Terrall
Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar

Website of the Day
Mercy for Animals

 

November 20, 2007

Oren Ben-Dor
Why Israel Has No "Right to Exist" as a Jewish State

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Norman Finkelstein

Alan Farago
The Dark Arts and the Bush Dynasty

Marjorie Cohn
Musharraf Plays Bush for a Fool

Ralph Nader
Green is Gold?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Whistleblower Launches a New Attack on Rigged Tribunals

Sara Olson
When Going AWOL is the Only Escape

Dave Lindorff
Likelihood of Iran Attack Gains Credence

Paul Krassner
The First Amendment, a Dialogue

Website of the Day
Joanne Mariner on Torture

November 19, 2007

Winslow T. Wheeler
Why Congress Won't Reform

China Hand
The U.S. Game Plan in Pakistan

Allan Nairn
Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia

Uri Avnery
How to Get Out?

David Macaray
The Chalice that Poisoned the Labor Movements

Dave Lindorff
Democrats in Future Shock: They Could Lose It All in 2008!

Bill Quigley
Twenty Thousand Protest at Ft. Benning; Eleven Face Federal Criminal Trials

Ron Jacobs
Sitting on the Group W Bench: War, Thanksgiving and Arlo Guthrie

Sunsara Taylor
Legalized Rights for Fertilized Eggs?

Binoy Kampmark
Why Steve Irwin--You're Dead!

Heather Gray
Another Look at W.E.B. DuBois

Website of the Day
The Meat Market

 

 

November 17 / 18, 2007

P. Sainath
Neoliberalism's Price Tag: 150,000 Farm Suicides in India

David Rosen
The Scarlet Hypocrites: Republicans, Christians and the Politics of Adultery

Mike Whitney
Pentagon Cover Up: 15,000 or More US Deaths in Iraq War?

George Wuerthner
Saving the Big Wild

Brenda Norrell
The Case of Jim Main, Jr: In Montana, Indians are Guilty Until Proven Innocent

George Ciccariello-Maher
Of Submarines and Loose Screws

Karim Makdisi
Lebanon is Hanging by a Thread

Marie Trigona
Wal-Mart in Argentina

Valerio Volpi
The Catholic Church, Incorporated

Fred Gardner
The Straight-Ahead Runner

Robert Fantina
The White House Press Office

Mike Ferner
Thank God for the Senate Republicans!

Missy Comley Beattie
The Radical Majority

Kenneth Couesbouc
Circles of Power

Patrick O'Hayer
A Portrait of Mailer and a Young Poet

Poets' Basement
Davies, Buknatski and Ford

 

November 16, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
The Vices of Hillary Clinton: Secrecy, Intransigence and War

Dave Zirin
The Indictment of Barry Bonds: Busted by a Broken System

Gary D. Barnett
A Day in the Life of an Unwilling Federal Agent

Alan Farago
Sprawl, Mortgage Fraud and Political Corruption

Dave Lindorff
Two Brothers and Two Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: "What Should be Done with Those Protesters?"

Robert Ovetz
Cargo Ships in Paradise: Shipping Lanes Threaten the Yosemite of the Sea

Brenda Norrell
"Today We Experienced America:" Arresting Indigenous People on the Border

David Swanson
Wolf Blitzer Loses Democratic Debate

Peter Letheby
Outside the Box on the Great Plains

Website of the Day
Why Activism Fails

 

November 15, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
Hillary Clinton in Arkansas

Adolfo Gilly
The Spirit of Revolt

Peter Bohmer
10 Days That Shook Olympia

Andy Worthington
The Trials of Omar Khadr: Gitmo's Child Soldier

Gray / Derks
Obama's Pitch to South Carolina's Black Churches Affronts Gay Groups

Liaquat Ali Khan
Liberating Pakistan

Dave Lindorff
Where's the Party?

Christopher Brauchli
Tipping Point: the Politics of Gossip

Anthony Papa
Racism as Law: Crack Cocaine Sentences

Martha Rosenberg
Merck's Big Write Off

Ben Terrall
Thank You, Ehren Watada

Website of the Day
On the Colorado: Drought, Climate Change and Water Supplies


November 14, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
The Making of Hillary Clinton

James Petras
Venezuela Between Ballots and Bullets

Al Giordano
Campaign 08: Don't Trust Anyone Over 50

Paul Craig Roberts
The Lobby

Andy Worthington
Innocents and Foot Soldiers

Stephen Lendman
Torturing Palestinian Detainees

Fatima Bhutto
Aunt Benazir's False Promises: the Dismantling of Pakistani Democracy

Martin Smith
Norman Mailer and the "Good War"

Jeff Leys
Slip Sliding Away: House Votes on War Funding

Website of the Day
Why the Writers are Striking

November 13, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Hillary's Big Problem and How Bill Can Fix It

Jeffrey St. Clair
Mailer and Us: the Writer as Fighter

Robert Bryce
The Pakistan Fuel Connection

David Macaray
The Teamsters and the Hollywood Strike

Mike Whitney
Bulletins from the Titanic

Ralph Nader
Pakistani Lawyers vs. American Lawyers

Nikolas Kozloff
Chavez Blasts the Spanish King

Jordan Flaherty
Education Versus Incarceration in Tallulah, Louisiana

B. R. Gowani
Dear Mrs. Bhutto

Website of the Day
Monty Python: "Fuck You, Very Much FCC"

 

November 12, 2007

Vicente Navarro
Why Hillary's Health Care Plan Really Failed

Ben Brown
Letter from Ho Chi Minh City: a Tribute to My Vietnam Vet Father

Omar K.
A Pakistani Lawyer's Testimony: Life Under the Brutal Emergency

Sadia Abbas
The Roots of Pakistan's Political Crisis: Corrupt Elites and a Kleptocratic Military

Farzana Versey
Mailer's Miasma

Richard W. Behan
The Political Crimes of Complicity

Paul Krassner
Asshole of the Year: Congratulations Tim Russert!

Cindy Sheehan
Faith and War

Peter Stone Brown
The Return of Levon Helm

Dave Lindorff
Dennis, You are Not Alone

Website of the Day
Police Attack in Olympia

 

November 10 / 11, 2007

Alain Gresh
Uncle Sam's New Backyard: How to Turn a Region into a Graveyard

Mike Whitney
For Whom the Closing Bell Tolls: the Last Dead Bull on Wall Street

Ron Jacobs
A View from the Pakistani Left: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Jeffrey St. Clair
The First Dambuster: a Coyote Story

Alan Farago
Tangled Up in Blue: a Brief History of Florida Environmentalism

Binoy Kampmark
When Language Drowns: Torture in America

Robert Fantina
Legitimizing Torture

Fred Gardner
Psychological Torture in the Name of Family Values

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The General in His Labyrinth

Nicola Nasser
NATO's Southward Drift

Philip Rizk
The Blame Game in Gaza

Michael Dickinson
Condom Nation: the Pope vs. Terry Higgins

Joel S. Hirschhorn
The Grand Delusion: a Conspiracy of Two Parties

Paul Krassner
Flunking Out of the Electoral College

Wadner Pierre /
Joe Emersberger
The Ongoing War on Journalists in Haiti

 

November 9, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
In the Kandil Mountains with the PKK

Mohammed Hanif
Musharraf and the Drunk Uncle

John Ross
Blackwater Goes to Mexico

Mike Whitney
Ron Paul, Big Media's Invisible Candidate

Tom Barry
In Latin America, the Hillary Clinton Policy is the Bush Policy

Corporate Crime Reporter
Is the AFL Trying to Derail Single Payer Health Care?

Badruddin Khan
Pakistan and the Israel Lobby

David Macaray
The WGA STrike: the Empire Strikes Back

Martha Rosenberg
The Blood Sport of Vice Presidents

Website of the Day
Stryker Blockade!

 

November 8, 2007

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Meeting the Other in Israel and Palestine

William Loren Katz
Waterboarding in American History

Mike Whitney
The Long Fall: a Market Without Parachutes

Sheldon Richman
Why Woodstock May Have Saved John McCain's Life

Liaquat Ali Khan
Solidarity with Pakistan's Lawyers

Marc Gardner
The Victims of "Jessica's Law": Parolees Without Rights (or Homes)

Jackie Corr
The Big Fish from Whitefish: Montana, the Last Retreat of the Investment Banker?

Brenda Norrell
Between Bombs and Border Walls

Dave Lindorff
Ridiculing Impeachment at the New York Times

China Hand
Rewriting the History of the Sudan Calamity

Sen. Russ Feingold
FISA and America's Basic Freedoms: Let's Not Repeat the Mistakes of the Patriot Act

Website of the Day
The Welfare Poets Meet Hugo Chavez

 

November 7, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Dollar's Fall Collapses the American Empire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: Can't the Democrats End the War By Not Bringing the Funding Bill to the Floor?

Vijay Prashad
The Apotheosis of Bobby Jindal

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Educating Pakistan: What Mukasey Can Teach Musharraf

Alan Farago
To Bee or Not to Bee? The Politics of Colony Collapse

David Macaray
The Writers' Guild Strike: Is There an Ice-Breaker?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Case of the Slimy Senator: Chuck Schumer Greenlights Mukasey

Charlotte Laws
What We Learned from Stephen Colbert's Presidential Campaign

Daniel White
Zahid's Story

William Cook
The Politics of Servility: Congress and the Israel Lobby

Website of the Day
Safe Lawns

 

November 6, 2007

Mike Whitney
Welcome to Year 27 of the Reagan Revolution

Ralph Nader
Who Determines the Price of Oil?

Andy Worthington
The Torture of Ali al-Marri

Pam Martens
Wall Street Metes Out Street Justice to Citigroup

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Dark Future

William Schroder
The Return of Water Torture

Stephen Lendman
Punishing Gaza

William Blum
Cuba and Original Sin

Former US Intelligence Officers
A Memo on Torture, Intelligence and Mukasey

 

November 5, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
How I Spent the Eighth Brumaire

Russell Mokhiber
Pelosi and Me: The Democrats and Single Payer

David Macaray
How to Turn Workers Against Each Other (and Make Them All Poorer)

Gary Leupp
General Musharaff's "State of Emergency"

Dave Lindorff
Those Minot Nukes

Ludwig Watzal
Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
Tensions Ease in Iraqi Kurdistan

Peter Stone Brown
John Fogerty Makes Peace with His Past

Michael Simmons
Yo! What Happened to Peace?

Website of the Day
Petition: In Defense of the Morton West HS Antiwar Students

 

November 3 / 4, 2007

Tariq Ali
Pakistan Sinks Deeper into Night

David Price
Army's Price Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

Jeffrey St. Clair
Splitsville

Alan Farago
The Housing Crash, Suburban Sprawl and the Crisis of the American Middle Class

Paul Krassner
He's Back! Don Imus Meets Michael Richards

Rannie Amiri
Why the U.S. is Safeguarding Iraq's War Criminals

P. Sainath
Indexing Humanity, Indian Style

Ayesha Ijaza Khan
Pakistan in a Daze

Robert Fantina
Is the Bush Administration Talking Itself Into a War With Iran?

Seth Sandronsky
The Politics of Health Care in California

Ron Jacobs
The Bebop of Baraka

Ramzy Baroud
A Case for Arab Dignity

Heather Gray
When Capitalists Get a Free Ride

 

November 2, 2007

Dr. Mary Pipher
Acting on Conscience: Psychologists and Abusive Interrogations

Saul Landau
How Pete Stark Became a Pariah

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as House Arrest

Sharon Smith
A Tale of Two Stadiums

Gary Leupp
Fascist Beatifications: the History and Politics of Sainthood

Gregory Harms
The Chorus of Slander on Palestine

Christopher Brauchli
Racism in High Places

Peter Morici
The Falling Dollar and the Stubborn Trade Deficit

Dave Lindorff
The Easy Way to Stop the Looming US Attack on Iran

David Penner
Zombie Nation

Website of the Day
Fall in Yosemite

 

November 1, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
The Wages of Hegemony

Patrick Cockburn
The Most Dangerous Dam in the World

Dave Lindorff
The Air Force Report on the Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

Jonathan Feldman
The Strange Political Economy of Death in the South

Mike Ferner
They Met the Resistance in Iraq

William S. Lind
A Question for Would-Be Presidents

Diana Johnstone
"Fascislamism" Versus "Shoah Business"

Jacob Hornberger
The War on Telephone Privacy

A..K. Gupta
The Apocalypse will be Televised

Lyuba Zarsky /
Kevin Gallagher

The Enclave Economy of Mexico's Silicon Valley

Felice Pace
Does the SPLC Equate Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism?

Website of the Day
This One's for You, Ed Abbey

 

October 31, 2007

Bill Quigley
New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System

Rev. William E. Alberts
A Trail of American Blood: From the White House to CBS News

Ray McGovern
Attacking Iran for Israel

Eric Walberg
Poisonous Espionage: Litvinenko and the New Cold War

V. G. Smith
The Second Death of Guy Môquet

Luis J. Rodriguez
"Social Cleansing" from Guatemala to LA

Sheldon Richman
Bush has Time to Run the World

Walter Brasch
A Real Halloween Scare

Website of the Day
Boogie Rocks!


October 30, 2007

David Price
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

M. Shahid Alam
The Pakistan Question

Andy Worthington
The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo

Patrick Cockburn
The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba

Anthony Papa
The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws

Floyd Rudmin
What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means

Sherwood Ross
Giuliani and Torture

Website of the Day
The Worst Lobby? You Decide

 

October 29, 2007

Lisa Hajjar
Inside Israel's Military Courts

Joe DeRaymond
The Politics of Lethal Injections

Patrick Cockburn
The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan

Isabella Kenfield /
Roger Burbach

Corporate Murder in Brazil

Fred Gardner
The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner

Farzana Versey
Caricaturing Islam

Stephen Fleischman
The Greening of the Oligarchy

Marcelle Cendrars
The Congressional Rip Cord

Eamonn McCann
Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables

Martha Rosenberg
For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter!

Website of the Day
Campaign 2008

 

October 27 / 28, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Dam That Isn't There

James Bovard
Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture

Ralph Nader
Beyond the Rule of Law

M. Reza Pirbhai
The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!

Robert Sandels
Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations

Jacob G. Hornberger
Ruling By Decree

Missy Beattie
The Arsonists in the West Wing

John Ross
U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca

Robert Fantina
Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader

Ron Jacobs
Labor at the Crossroads

Ali Moayedian
In Search of Logic About Iran

David Michael Green
What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism?

Poets Basement
Block, Davies and Ford

Website of the Day
Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video

 

October 26, 2007

Brian Cloughley
Revenging Bloodshed

Saul Landau
Portrait of Rudy

Ahmad Al-Akras
Getting Justice in the HLF Case

Franklin Lamb
Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry?

Mike Whitney
Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest

Dave Lindorff
Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians

Alan Farago
A Castro Behind Every Bush

Yifat Susskind
Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror

Website of the Day
Dead Life in a Political Prison


October 25, 2007

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Iraq's Environmental Crisis

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homes of the Crash Test Dummies

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fraudulent War on Terror

Col. Dan Smith
The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment

Alan Farago
The Way to Paradise?

Chris Kutalik
The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels

Brian McKinlay
John Howard and the Curse of Bush

Cindy Sheehan
Pete, Nancy, George and WW III

Website of the Day
Support the America's Program!

 

October 24, 2007

Natalie Washington-Weik
White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicides

Michael Birmingham
What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Nuclear Democrats

Tariq Ali
Bush's Cuba Detour

Farzana Versey
Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf

Dave Zirin
White Noise

James Murren
What "Support Our Troops" Means

Todd Chretien
Looking Reality in the Face

Martha Rosenberg
What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage?

Website of the Day
Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power

 

October 23, 2007

Ralph Nader
Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric

Lawrence R. Velvel
Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept.

Vijay Prashad
The Nuke Deal is Dead

Bonnie Bricker /
Adil E. Shamoo

The True Cost of War for Oil

Dave Lindorff
Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment

Mike Whitney
The Big Squeeze

Farzana Versey
Race with the Devil

Stanley Heller /
Ben George

Something New from the Antiwar Movement

Marcelle Cendrars
You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive

Regan Boychuk
Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response

Website of the Day
King Corn

 

October 22, 2007

Ishmael Reed
Should Blacks Go Green?

Marjorie Cohn
Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie

Rannie Amiri
Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness?

Diane Farsetta
Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams

Todd Alan Price
Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education

Robert Jensen
The Quagmire of Masculinity

Stephen Lendman
The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers

Jemima Khan
The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf

Sunsara Taylor
David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth

Binoy Kampmark
No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections

Website of the Day
Support the Center for International Policy

 

 

October 20 / 21, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld

Tariq Ali
A Massacre Foretold

Jeffrey St. Clair
Greetings from Echo Park

Andy Worthington
The Shame of Diego Garcia

Mike Whitney
Housing Flameout

Daniel Wolff
Play It As It Lays

David Rosen
Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution

Saul Landau
David and Goliath in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
COINTELPRO and the Panthers

Robert Fantina
The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones

David Heleniak
Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm

Joe Allen
Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS

Prairie Miller
Lions for Lambs

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Crash!

 

October 19, 2007

John Ross
Che's Mexican Legacy

Sheldon Rampton
Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda

Rahul Mahajan
A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha

Devra Davis
Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer

Christopher Brauchli
Blasphemous Science

Wadner Pierre
Haiti After the Deluge

Bill Quigley
Jailed for Justice

Website of the Day
Textbook Sticker Shock

 

October 18, 2007

Saree Makdisi
Academic Freedom is at Risk

Meg Dwyer
What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead?

Alevtina Rea
Sketches of Russian Life

Norman Solomon
The United States of Violence

Kristoffer Larsson
Something is Rotten in Sweden

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes are Back and So are We

Website of the Day
Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"

 

October 17, 2007

Steve Niva
Counter-Insurgency, American-Style

Andy Worthington
The Case of Mohamed Jawad

Alan Farago
The Credit Shock

Russell Mokhiber
The New Billionaire-Criminal Class

Sharon Smith
Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered

Mike Whitney
Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman

Robert Fantina
Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual

Chris Irwin
Where Have All the Rednecks Gone?

Website of the Day
Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University

October 16, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize

Paul Findley
Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby

Robert Bryce
Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts

Uri Avnery
The Mother of All Pretexts

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraqi Genocide

Ray McGovern
What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It?

Norman Solomon
The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal

Martha Rosenberg
The Curse of Cymbalta

William S. Lind
Out of the Frying Pan

Joel S. Hirschborn
Time to Boycott Voting

Website of the Day
Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play

 

 

 

 

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November 22, 2007

The Myth of Thanksgiving

Native Blood

By MIKE ELY

It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth -- by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, needs to be continually excavated. The myths and lies that surround the past are constantly draped over the horrors and tortures of our present.

I originally wrote this article a decade ago, and it has showed up in different places and publications usually around the holiday. Pass it on.

Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists--and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.

* * * * *

In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 Puritan exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.

The Puritans landed and built their colony called "the Plymouth Plantation" near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived--he had spent the last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the colonists' language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.

These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the Puritans not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace.

John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, "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."

The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the Puritans to survive their first year.

In celebration of their good fortune, the colony's governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621.
How the Puritans Stole the Land

But the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 Puritans in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new settlers came.

And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags.

On arrival, the Puritans discussed "who legally owns all this land." They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual--not communal or tribal--ownership. This debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois "rule of law" does not mean "protect the rights of the masses of people."

Some Puritans argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not "subdued" the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered "public domain." This meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).

The Puritans embraced a line from 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." Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.

The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.

 

The Shining City on the Hill

Where did the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies of Puritan pilgrims come from and what were they really all about?

Governor Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts colony, said, "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." The Mayflower Puritans had been driven out of England as subversives. The Puritans saw this religious colony as a model of a social and political order that they believed all of Europe should adopt.

The Puritan movement was part of a sweeping revolt within English society against the ruling feudal order of wealthy lords. Only a few decades after the establishment of Plymouth, the Puritan Revolution came to power in England. They killed the king, won a civil war, set up a short-lived republic, and brutally conquered the neighboring people of Ireland to create a larger national market.

The famous Puritan intolerance was part of a determined attempt to challenge the decadence and wastefulness of the rich aristocratic landlords of England. The Puritans wanted to use the power of state punishment to uproot old and still dominant ways of thinking and behaving.

The new ideas of the Puritans served the needs of merchant capitalist accumulation. The extreme discipline, thrift and modesty the Puritans demanded of each other corresponded to a new and emerging form of ownership and production. Their so-called "Protestant Ethic" was an early form of the capitalist ethic. From the beginning, the Puritan colonies intended to grow through capitalist trade--trading fish and fur with England while they traded pots, knives, axes, alcohol and other English goods with the Indians.

The Puritan colonies were ruled by a government in which only the male heads of families had a voice. Women, Indians, slaves, servants, youth were neither heard nor represented. In the Puritan schoolbooks, the old law "honor thy father and thy mother" was interpreted to mean honoring "All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church, and Commonwealth." And, the real truth was that the colonies were fundamentally controlled by the most powerful merchants.

The Puritan fathers believed they were the Chosen People of an infinite god and that this justified anything they did. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation. This meant that while they were firm in fighting for their own capitalist right to accumulate and prosper, they were quick to oppress the masses of people in Ireland, Scotland and North America, once they seized the power to set up their new bourgeois order. Those who rejected the narrow religious rules of the colonies were often simply expelled "out into the wilderness."

The Massachusetts colony (north of Plymouth) was founded when Puritan stockholders had gotten control of an English trading company. The king had given this company the right to govern its own internal affairs, and in 1629 the stockholders simply voted to transfer the company to North American shores--making this colony literally a self-governing company of stockholders!

In U.S. schools, students are taught that the Mayflower compact of Plymouth contained the seeds of "modern democracy" and "rule of law." But by looking at the actual history of the Puritans, we can see that this so-called "modern democracy" was (and still is) a capitalist democracy based on all kinds of oppression and serving the class interests of the ruling capitalists.

In short, the Puritan movement developed as an early revolutionary challenge to the old feudal order in England. They were the soul of primitive capitalist accumulation. And transferred to the shores of North America, they immediately revealed how heartless and oppressive that capitalist soul is.


The Birth of "The American Way of War"

In the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits--land which the Pequot had recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.

The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: "Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective."

The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire.

William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: "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."

Mason himself wrote: "It may be demanded...Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But...sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."

Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase "a shining city on the hill" became a favorite quote of conservative speechwriters.

 

Discovering the Profits of Slavery

This so-called "Pequot war" was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.

Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.

The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.

One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a "mania with speculators." These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism.


Thanksgiving in the Manhattan Colony

In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first "scalp bounty"--his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.

A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.
The Conquest of New England

By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies--6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.

In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.

As Mao Tsetung says: "Where there is oppression there is resistance." The Wampanoag went to war.

The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.

When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.

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.

The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the Pilgrim's original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels

But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes: "The first `reservations' were designed for the `wild' Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in Ireland under Cromwell."

The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.

A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was "lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can."

The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o'clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt.
Celebrate?

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.

A little known fact: Squanto, the so-called "hero" of the original Thanksgiving Day, was executed by the Indians for his treacheries.

But the ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That's why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).

Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the "bounty of the American way of life," while covering up the brutal nature of this society.

Previous pieces by Mike Ely here at Counterpunch included the stories and experiences of immigrant strikers at the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina. Email: m1keely (at) yahoo.com



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