This piece is available as podcast. It is part of our larger Kasama offerings on peoples’ history.
The Puritan colonists of Massachusetts 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.”
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by Mike Ely
Intro to that first occupation
We are talking widely among ourselves about “occupying” Wall Street — taking the center of an empire back for the people of the world. We are talking about “Occupy Everything” — sharing our dreams of taking all society away from banks, police, and the heartless authority of money. We hope this moment marks a beginning of the end for them.
And yet, just such a moment cannot be understood without remembering that other occupation — the one that marked the beginning of their beginning.
Arrogant invaders occupied a land using the most naked forms of genocide. They invented new forms of slavery, slave trade and profit making. They arrived with their high-tech arms and bibles. They declared all was theirs by divine right, while they took it all with raw force.
Put another way: That first occupation was a sweeping nightmare that starts with Columbus. It has continued for 500 years. For the Native peoples of today (and therefore for us too) it remains an ongoing story of domination and removal. The nation-state who today labels millions of indigenous descendants “illegal aliens” arrived in boats with only royal decrees and their holy book as documents of legitimacy.
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.
Here is the true story of that Thanksgiving — a story of murder and theft, of the first “corporations” invented on North American soil, of religious fundamentalism and relentless mania for money. It is a story of the birth of capitalism.
This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time.
Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing.
Every day, a conspiracy of armed enforcers hunts down our brothers and sisters. Factories are raided by the government’s ICE, and working people are hauled off for deportation. Local police are emboldened to check for papers at traffic stops, and those without documents are seized for deportation. Mean-spirited racist reactionaries attempt vigilante attacks on immigrants along the border and throughout the country.
I interviewed workers in North Carolina who told me they only went shopping with the whole family in the car, because if they were uncovered they wanted at least to be deported together.
How do we respond to this armed, unjust government hunt for human beings? How do we respond to the fact that they have escalated under this Obama administration?
The constant persecution is made invisible and normal. It is conducted throughout this country. Can we tolerate this? And what does it mean if we do?
What are we doing? Who do we serve?
What does this mean for the strategic approach of revolutionaries and communists? And more what does it mean for the integrity of every honest person faced with the need to speak out and act?
I want to share a story from a previous wave of human-hunting: From 1850, when the notorious Fugitive Slave Act unleashed slave catchers throughout the North to hunt down escaped and liberated Black people, to kidnap them and return them to slavery. It was legal. It was sanctioned by federal law. It was justified by warrants and courts. The captured had no rights to protest or testify. And there was a mounting outrage among free Blacks and among numbers of their white neighbors.
Some chose to act, take risks, and demand the emancipation of the enslaved. This is one of their stories.
New House Speaker John Boehner waving the Constitution demagogically
by Mike Ely
It was amazing today to see the Republican Right — which is otherwise so fervently fundamentalist in its claims — organize the public reading of a carefully rewritten U.S. Constitution.
The new Republican majority demanded that all Congresspeople step up to read outloud the founding U.S. document — in an act of Tea-party-style adoration and worship. But to hide the reality of that founding document, the Congressional leaders removed from the piece any language which (they claimed) had been superceded by amendments.
This meant that they simply removed (from the reading, but NOT from history or from the Constitution itself) language of their “founding fathers” legitimizing slavery and counting African slaves as only 3/5 a human being.
Suddenly not so fundamentalist or constitutionalist in spirit or practice, they presented a Constitution without its defining markings of slavery and white supremacy.
One observor called it the “Huck Finning” of the Constitution — echoing the recent mutilated publication of Mark Twain’s classic book with the work “n*gger” removed.
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Meanwhile, another terrible crime of this country’s rise was made invisible on its 120th anniversary — treated with silence in much of the media and culture.
On December 29,1890, U.S. army cavalry murdered at least 150 men, women and children of the Lakota at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. It stands as a powerful symbol of the many terrible killings that mark this country’s relentless and unjust “Indian Wars.”
The painting by Lorraine Gendron, from the River Parishes, depicts the Slave Revolt of 1811 in St. John and St. Charles parishes; photo by David Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune
“I realized that the revolt had been much larger — and come much closer to succeeding — than the planters and American officials let on. Contrary to their letters, which are the basis for most accounts of the revolt, the slave army posed an existential threat to white control over the city of New Orleans,” he said. “My biggest surprise as I dug into the sources was . . . . just how close they came to conquering New Orleans and establishing a black Republic on the shores of the Mississippi.”
The largest slave revolt in U.S. history is commemorated
By Littice Bacon-Blood, The Times-Picayune
More than a century before the first modern-day civil rights march, there was Charles Deslondes and his make-do army of more than 200 enslaved men battling with hoes, axes and cane knives for that most basic human right: freedom.
They spoke different languages, came from various parts of the United States, Africa and Haiti, and lived miles apart on plantations along the German Coast of Louisiana. Yet after years of planning at clandestine meetings under the constant threat of immediate death, they staged a revolt on Jan. 8, 1811, that historians say is the largest uprising of enslaved people in this country.
“Slavery was very harsh and cruel, but the slaves themselves were not mindless chattel with no aspirations and no basis for humanity,” said John Hankins, executive director of the New Orleans African American Museum. “This revolt demonstrates that there were people willing to make the ultimate sacrifices to better not just themselves but other people.”
A year of events planned
To mark the 200 year anniversary of that revolt, Destrehan Plantation, in conjunction with Tulane University and the African American Museum, located in Treme, is organizing a yearlong look at the uprising that reverberated around the fledgling nation because of the large number of enslaved people involved, its military strategy and oddly enough, because it demonstrated that all was not well among those held in bondage.
African American fighters formed part of the armed force that destroyed American Southern slavery
“In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
150 years ago, on Dec. 20, 1860, the state of South Carolina voted to secede from the United States. It was triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln to the White House the preceding month.
Southern slave owners believed that Lincoln represented a die-hard anti-slavery faction within U.S. politics. A frenzy of secessionism followed the presidential victory of the radical new Republican Party.
Mississippi soon followed South Carolina, seceding a few weeks later. And on January 9, 1861, the armed forces of South Carolina opened fire on a merchant ship bringing supplies to Fort Sumter — which sat in Charleston harbor and was defended by Federal troops.
These events triggered an intense four year armed struggle that wracked the U.S. from the plains of Virginia to the Mississippi — and that ended with the defeat of the Southern slaveowners and the emancipation of African American slaves.
This second revolution also forged the basis for modern industrial capitalism — which sprang out of the defeat of the South with incredible power, consolidating a continent-wide national market through the transcontinental railroad and and the final genocidal defeat of Native peoples on the Great Plains. After the bitter struggle and hard won victories of this war, a period of revolutionary change followed, called the Reconstruction. This moment of liberation and promise ended in a historic betrayal and reversal in 1877 — leading to the long harsh night of Jim Crow and lynch law for African American people.
The revolutionary war of 1860-1865 will be remembered and commemorated over the next few years in the U.S. — as forces from many different political trends and outlooks express their views on these events.
“…the only state right the Confederate founders were interested in was the rich man’s ‘right’ to own slaves.”
From the declaration of secession passed by South Carolina enacted for December 20, 1860 (150 years ago).
“Upon its ratification by nine States, the Constitution of the United States sprang into existence. ‘The ends for which this constitution was framed are declared by itself to be `to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’
“We affirm that these ends have been defeated and the government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non slaveholding states. Those states have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the states and recognized by the constitution; they have denounced the institution of slavery; they have permitted the establishment of abolition societies. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of slaves to leave their homes and have incited those who remain to servile insurrection. . . [and now] all the states north of the [Mason-Dixon] line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the common government, because he has declared that that `government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
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The following piece debunks the old myth that the Southern Confederacy was created in the cause of “freedom” (in defense of “states’ rights” and decentralized democracy).
For a hundred years, the official view has been that this was a “tragic war between brothers” (which obviously adopts a whites-only view). To this day, the generals of the slavocracy — especially Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — are idolized within the U.S. military. And (now refracted through the modern conservative prism) the Confederate cause is depicted as a holy war against big government and federalism — and as a precursor of the culture wars today.
The Bois Caiman, August 14th 1791: the gathering of the slaves at the beginning of Haiti's insurrection.
“The contributions of Toussaint Louverture are undeniably important and crucial. But Toussaint did not embody a revolutionary line.”
Yesterday we posted an article by Mike Ely on The Slave Army of Toussaint Ouverture, the military force that arose from Haiti’s slave uprising and defeated a series of invading armies. We were very glad to receive and post the following response, which proposes a somewhat different historical evaluation of these events, programs and figures.
by Jan Makandal
The historical struggles of the slaves and freed slaves of Haiti have been mostly interpreted by bourgeois intellectuals and petty bourgeois revolutionary intellectuals. Yet this rich history of popular struggle needs to be interpreted from the interest of the Haitian working class and the international proletariat.
I will, in this case, attempt to raise some random points of clarification, demarcations and lessons learned from the essay posted by Mike E in order to contribute to the achievement of two dialectically related objectives: debunk bourgeois theory of the popular struggles of slaves and freed slaves and contribute to raising some important elements in the construction of proletarian theory and ideology in order to defeat capital.
“When the slave revolt broke out, Toussaint was already 45–old for a slave in Haiti. He simply took over the plantation–and waited to see what would happen. After several weeks, he decided that there was a chance of something really lasting. He sent his own family into safety across the border in the Spanish colony, and rode into the surrounding rebel camps. Step by step, he set out to build a disciplined fighting force….
‘Toussaint set about forming a disciplined core and deliberately started small. He recruited a few hundred men and launched offensive actions against the advancing counterrevolutionary troops….
“Toussaint’s force fought with a conquering spirit that soared among the clouds and rainbows. When they ran out of food, they fought hungry. When they ran out of ammunition they fought with stones. When the British troops spread splintered glass on the battlefield, Toussaint’s fighters advanced on bloody, lacerated feet.”
This historical piece is, in its own way, about fusion.
by Mike Ely
It has been over 200 years since Haiti’s slave armies defeated the invading armies of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. News of this soul-stirring victory traveled from plantation to plantation in the whole surrounding region, including the slave owning states of the U.S. South — terrifying the exploiters of slave laborers and giving the captured Africans great hope.
It was the first successful conquest of power by the oppressed and laboring classes in modern times.
The Puritan colonists of Massachusetts 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.”
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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.
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.
This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time. Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing.
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In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 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.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.“
“What is a ‘survival’? What is its theoretical status? Is it essentially social or ‘psychological’? Can it be reduced to the survival of certain economic structures . . . [o]r does it refer as much to other structures, political, ideological structures, etc.: customs, habits, even ‘traditions’ such as the ‘national tradition’ with its specific traits? . . .
“[A] revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the economic was the sole determinant factor), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to ‘secrete’ substitute conditions of existence temporarily.” – Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” For Marx.
The plantation regions of the South, the former heartland of chattel slavery and sharecropping, remain today among the regions in the US with the highest poverty rates. Extending in a crescent-like shape across the South, coinciding with the core territory of the oppressed Black nation, the plantation regions are characterized by lower incomes, higher unemployment, worse housing, less access to health care, higher infant mortality, underfunded public education, and higher school dropout rates.
This book by Charles S. Aiken, a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Tennesse – Knoxville, contains a lot of valuable information on the historical development of these regions and their current conditions. The book draws upon Aiken’s previous work published in geography journals; in particular, the articles “New Settlement Patterns of Rural Blacks in the American South” and “A New Type of Black Ghetto in the Plantation South.”
Julia Ward Howe, Abolitionist and Anti-War Activist
Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was a prominent American abolitionist, social activist, and poet most famous as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1870, Julia Ward Howe took on a new issue and a new cause. Distressed by her experience of the realities of war, determined that peace was one of the two most important causes of the world (the other being equality in its many forms) and seeing war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to gather together women in a congress of action.
Mother’s Day for Peace Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
In the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. They are known to the world as Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. But back then, in the days before they died, I knew them as Andy, JE, and Mickey.
I want to share with you my memories of the time we drove south together to join the Mississippi Freedom Summer project. I want to tell a bit of the story of that summer, and tell it for a purpose. I believe it has implications for today.
Driving South
Mickey was driving as we pulled out of Oxford, Ohio in his station wagon, windows down, through the lush green of early summer. The four of us were volunteers. We were excited. And we felt some fear. We were part of a project to fight white supremacy in Mississippi, where the most basic democratic rights were denied to African American people. We were going to throw ourselves into the front lines of a cause that called itself, simply, the Movement.
“They don’t just want my death, they want my silence.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal [1]
From Panther to Voice of the Voiceless
On August 8, 1978, Mayor Frank Rizzo was in a combative mood at a special afternoon press conference in Philadelphia’s City Hall. Just hours before, Rizzo’s police had staged a massive raid on the home of the radical MOVE organization on Powelton Avenue. After attacking the house with intense gunfire, tear gas and a flood of water, police arrested the MOVE members and publicly beat Delbert Africa as he surrendered.
At City Hall, Rizzo was blunt with the press: he expected them to close ranks in support of police actions. Then, from the crowded pack of reporters, a young Black journalist spoke out in the resonant tones of a radio broadcaster. He raised pointed questions about the official police story Rizzo had just laid out.
Mayor Rizzo exploded in fury and spat out a thinly veiled threat: “They believe what you write, and what you say, and it’s got to stop. And one day–and I hope it’s in my career–that you’re going to have to be held responsible and accountable for what you do.” [2]
The journalist who challenged Rizzo that day was Mumia Abu-Jamal. He had spent a decade exposing the racism of Philadelphia’s police and legal system.
Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.
“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
The gathering at Bois Caiman where Haiti's revolution started
Haiti and the U.S. were always entwined — from their very origins in the 1700s. Slave revolution in the Caribbean caused the American settler-state to tremble as it expanded. Revolution in Haiti — then one of the most profitable colonies in the world — greatly weakened the French empire. It stirred the hearts of slaves throughout the Americas, leading to whispered plans of revolt. And it provided an opening to the slave owners of the U.S. to grab new lands all the way to the Mississippi river — first (on paper) from the French, and then (through bloody genocide) from the Indian peoples.
The following is from Consortium news and appears on Alternet.
Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America
By Robert Parry
Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.
In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.
Last year, Kasama opened this discussion of a central question of revolution in the U.S.: how to understand the structural basis for racist oppression, the relationship of capitalism and racism, and the relative political backwardness of white people.
The discussion started with an appraisal of the work of J. Sakai, an influential contemporary communist thinker on the liberation of people of color in the U.S.
The exchange then moved into a look at the “race traitor” school of Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. And then it ended with a critical glimpse at Harry Haywood’s embrace of comintern-era theory on Black liberation.
We think the important question is how to move off this initial critique toward new communist strategy around the anti-racist struggle for liberation within this prison-house of peoples.
Moderator note: We are reposting comments of that discussion — without chopping them down into soundbites. It makes for one very long post.
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Mike Ely writes:
We need a new and much less blindered theory of nationality in the U.S. — a fresh understanding of its mechanisms, history and dynamics that is closer to reality than the writings drawn from a rather orthodox Marxist-Leninist framework – i.e. rooted in Lenin and Stalin’s once-path-breaking World War 1 writings on the national question.
The way the discussion of race and nationality has (so often and so simplistically) been reduced (among some currents of communist) to “are they a nation or not,” — (are Chicanos a nation? are Native peoples actually nations? Are African Americans a nation or a nationality? and so on). There is a parallel dismissal of any discussion of cultural autonomy and community control. In some communist currents, vision and politics have been trapped within dualities of of assimilation or secession — or remained confined to formulations (and verdicts) drawn from turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe. This backward-looking rigidity has placed an awful constraint on thought around the most central questions of revolution in the U.S. New academic work (emerging from many explorations of identity and racism) has often gone unengaged and the theoretical discussion among revolutionaries has remained impoverished.
It shouldn’t be so shocking to say (among communists) that there are issues of race and color-line from the early development of the U.S. that can’t simply be reduced to the forging of an oppressed nation in the period of Reconstruction’s betrayal. The way the words “race” and “racism” have often been banned from the Maoist press (or dismissed with a simple nonsequitor “race is not a biological and therefore not a scientific category”) is simplistic in a profoundly anti-theoretical way that doesn’t even consider the existing arguments or bases for opposing views.
Throughout the early existence of the United States, slavery was legal. It was honored in the highest offices, in the nation’s pulpits, the courts, and the press. It was defended by troops, police, posses and informants — using extreme violence. And long before there were hopes that it might be ended by a civil war — there were slaves who rose up to rebel and escape. And standing with them was a radical and widely denounced movement of abolitionists who helped prepare the political ground for revolution and emancipation. This political preparation operated on several levels: The slaves, isolated on the broad southern belt of forced labor camps, fought. In the North, the abolitionists waged a fierce campaign of public agitation — denouncing slavery in pamphlets and speeches, often at great risk to their lives. And sections of this movement organized themselves to help the slaves escape — creating the Underground Railroad.
How did this armed resistance movement, and the public political defense of its illegal acts help prepare for the actual revolutionary war that abolished slavery? How does resistance give rise to revolution? What is the role of militant action and outlaw organization — in the process of preparing revolution? And how do we answer such questions today — as we seek ways to uphold our criminalized brothers and sisters among the immigrants or among black youth, or the deserters from the army, or the members of other despised and persecuted sections of society. What can we learn from the Santuary movement of the 1980s? Or the draft resistance movement of the 1960s? Or the illegal strike movements of the coalfields? Or the many other places where the desperate lives and bold actions of people defied the way things are — even before their understanding imagined another way things could be.
There is a certain sense in the minds of millions in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, that we have reached the promised land.
The imagery and oratory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is invoked, to suggest that his Dream, as articulated in his epic “I Have a Dream” speech, has been realized.
There is a deep sense that freedom is here, as we all live in a ‘post-racial America’.
Or do we?
To be sure, we are all on the brink of history, for this has never happened before.
But there was a time, quite a while ago, when similar feelings swept the nation, and especially Black hearts, that a new day was breaking, and the old ways had fallen away, when freedom was as real as rain.
I speak of the Reconstruction era, when the nation formally extended civil rights to millions of Black men (not to women, notably) and scores of Black people took office in state and federal legislatures, beginning a wave of progressive legislation to better the abominable living conditions of millions, Black and white alike.
But Reconstruction was short-lived, due to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the betrayal of Black freedmen by the federal government, and the campaign of white terrorists against Black people and Republicans, which converged to reassert white supremacy.
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.
