Image

The First Thanksgiving: The Korrekt Version

User avatar
FirstThanksgiving.jpg

Amend your textbooks, comrades!

The First Thanksgiving

Many, many years ago, long before white men (and womyn) had even begun to see the errors of their various racist ways, the Pilgrims came from Europe to occupy North America. They were not very FORWARD! in their ways, and as typically happens to a so-called “civilization” when it's based on capitalism, the Pilgrims began to starve*.

Their peaceful and friendly neighboring Native American collective – in spite of the Pilgrims' racist encroachment upon their sacred land – took pity upon the starving Pilgrims one Thursday in November and brought them bountiful food and drink (including several turkeys, although the Native Americans didn't eat the turkeys themselves, due to their being peaceful vegans who respect all Life).

The Native American collective had, of course, more food than they could eat, as is always the case when you spread the wealth around, so they gladly donated some of their bounty to the poor capitalist Pilgrims, who otherwise were in great danger of starving to death.

As the years went by, and the Pilgrims branched out to occupy more and more Native American land – slaughtering the peaceful, harmonious Native peoples as they went – the occupiers nevertheless felt a small twinge of guilt from time to time, and they decided to honor the benevolent Native Americans one day a year (leaving 364 days to slaughter, imprison, encroach upon, infect, and otherwise take advantage of and oppress them). They called the day “Thanksgiving”, to thank the few remaining Native Americans still living for saving their lives** on that cold day one November.

So today we honor the memory of those generous Native Americans and their life saving gift of food to the starving Pilgrims with a recurring national holiday, Thanksgiving. And it is in that spirit – the Great Spirit of the Native Americans – that I here and now wish everyone reading this a Happy Thanksgiving!

--------
* Pay no attention to the Rethugglikkkan rumor that the Pilgrims actually began their stay in North America in a somewhat communistic way, pooling all of their produce and game for the good of the community – this is an obvious racist lie

** Pay no attention to the Rethugglikkkan rumor that the “Thanks” were actually given to “God”, or that the Pilgrims actually invited the Native Americans to share in THEIR bounty – yet another obvious racist lie


--------
ProgOff.jpg
Happy Thanksgiving to all, with God's abundant blessings!


User avatar
Pilgrims_Power.jpg
Join the Pilgrim's Union and really enjoy the holidays.

User avatar
ThePeoplesComrade - most equal visual agitation! Let's take it a step further:

[img]/images/Thanksgiving_Communist_Leaders_Parade.png[/img]

During Thanksgiving, American toiling masses traditionally give thanks to the government for what it has distributed to them. All conscientious members of community are required to experience (a) deep gratitude to the Party and its leaders; (b) unworthiness in the face of the the glorious state; (c) guilt for consuming according to their needs and not giving back enough according to their abilities. The non-compliant will have their belongings redistributed to the more worthy members of the community. <p>Mandatory reading:</p> <ul class="gen"><li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... anksgiving Holiday Tip # 239-T-1127-A</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/current-trut ... anksgiving With A Space Alien</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/current-trut ... rogressive Thanksgiving Prayer: Blessing of the Taxes</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... anksgiving Caption Contest</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... anksgiving is a discriminative and oppressive holiday</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... anksgiving = Genocide</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... html">Give Thanks... Or else!</a></h4> </li> <li> <h4><a href="https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... html">Prog Off Thanksgiving</a></h4> </li> </ul>

User avatar
Little known fact of the Pilgrams very first encounter with an Indian. They suffered through the first terrible winter in cold, hunger, starvation, disease. By spring their miserable numbers had diminished, many having died of their deprivations.

Then on that fine spring day, the first Indian they'd ever seen in their lives walked right in their little settlement. They were taken aback and fearful as he appeared quite savage. The first words of greeting between civilizations were:

"Welcome, English. I am Samoset. Do you have beer?"

... I've aways thought that would be a great way for a science fiction story to deal with two very different interstellar civilizations meeting for the first time.

"Greetings, humans. I am Zork. Do you have beer?"

User avatar
Margaret wrote:
... I've aways thought that would be a great way for a science fiction story to deal with two very different interstellar civilizations meeting for the first time.

"Greetings, humans. I am Zork. Do you have beer?"

" A Beer ? Not at the moment ..... but we'll take you to Our Dear Leader.

I'm quite certain he'll sit down and have a cold one with 'ya !"

User avatar
In the future, the origin of Thanksgiving will have yet another interpretation:

On this day we give thanks to all the selfless comrades who fought, undermined, subverted, and spied against American imperialism, and celebrate their heroic memory with pumpkins because the glorious KGB spy Alger Hiss was hiding microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

The Pumpkin Papers

Pumpkin_papers.jpg

User avatar
Margaret wrote:"Greetings, humans. I am Zork. Do you have beer?"
Image Margaret, you get to the beet-root of the matter. "Civilizations" should reach out to each other; try to find some common ground to live in peace and prosperity. Those "olive branches" [Beers!] have been offered throughout history ... some taken ... some denied. If only the real world could be written by sci-fi writers! How does a "civilization" respond to the question of "what do you want," when the answer is "we want you to die." ? THAT is, i.e., jihad. Somehow I don't think a beer will do it. Unfortunately.

User avatar
All Right Now! - It's Time To Stop The Amerikkkan Genocide Of Our Heroic Turkey Victims Of Greedy Capitalist Exploitation Of Food Sources.

If any True Obammunist Kamerad has gorged him her itself on any comestible other a Naturally-Grown Vegetation, Then It Is Time For YOU To Report To The Nearest FEMA Peoples' Eating Education Camp! And if you do not willingly report, well, Dear Leader will deal with you differently than the willing Self-Criticizers...


User avatar
Ah yes... the perpetual self-loathing of the progressive... most excellent, mi!

Buncha turkeys if you ask me.

User avatar
ImageComrades, deep down inside…..we all know that the actual tradition of thanksgiving really began when many pilgrims died from a lack of affordable health care, due to the controversial Mayflower Compact which rescinded the patient's bill of rights. As many members of the transgendered community died, these indigenous natives took pity and provided food reserves long after being attacked by gangs of rampaging Christians. Today we can once again count on the Rethugglikkkans who are out in full force, doing their best to damage the credibility of our collective history. Let us enjoy this day and share the blessings of all loyal party members…..

User avatar
sitting bull.jpg
White man's Thanksgiving is a myth that sprang
forth when I said to Custer, "Your ass is mine
you turkey". Lies of our sharing a turkey then
spread to diminish our Glorious victory.
--Sitting BS

Presented by the People's Historical Improvement Society For Fairness and Justice

User avatar
We hope you all have had a wonderful Thanksgiving, being thankful always to our glorious State, the Greatest Giver of All!!

Image ...and I hope you're really thankful to God for your family, friends, and even your country, despite what we're going through now. FORWARD to the stores? Not for me. I don't do Black Friday....heh heh...

User avatar
mi wrote:Life imitates People's Cube. Alternet for alternate reality...

Thanks for this link, mi. It made me laugh before it made me cry.


My family had to work to earn money for the Beneficent State to confiscate and have returned to the Kollectiv in the form of re-education programs to reform the dietetic preferences and teach us all that such choices are no longer Ours to make. I dined upon White Castle sliders with football. Best thing about football: you don't need a recipe.
And the arguments about The True and Akkurate History of White Supreme Thanksgiving Day has been so twisted and misconstrued by certain Academician Comrades as to be deserving of ridicule even outside of the People's Party.
Governor Bradford did institute Agrarian Free Enterprise thereby creating the inequalities and resentments which made necessary the foundings of Our glorious and covetous UNIONS. I belong to the NALC. Even though this quasi-State enterprise is becoming antique, you can only send and receive missives and Party notices on paper through Us for less than the exorbitant fees of other carriers. And because the Party abhors profit, we are $16 billion in the Red. So we must apply to the Politburo for another price increase on postage. This Thanksgiving is not on inflated, but inflationary. Our Party approved logo symbol is still the eagle. And like all loyal apparatchiks, we give you the bird. Next month I will offer advice on appropriate Marxmas tips to all Comrades enjoying unfair advantage of having a regular full time NALC Letter Carrier deliver mail to your dacha every working day, and which the Kollectiv detests. But we have this little understanding.

I haven't been able to even start reading the AlterNet Reality article Comrade Mi. The first thing I thought of was Dr. Churchill saying the Twin Towers were full of 'little Eichmans'. It's right around there I decide to engage some other less painful activity like pulling my fingernails out or reading IRS code....at least until such time coming back to this deriliction of human thought presents itself as being less painful.

The 'using history as a weapon' lie #2 (besides looking back to a pre-selected amount of time to avoid inconvenient context) is the 'superimposition' of contemporary morals upon past events and their players. Besides being ridiculous in terms of logic and histriography it presupposes that the contemporary principle is in any way moral.

Recognizing, what to me is the obvious, that putting the Western Hemisphere into production directly resulted in billions of humans coming into existence that otherwise would not have is another 'superimposition' though not one our good professor would have posited....it doesn't speak to motives of the explorers...they were not saints (thank goodness)...they were people making their way in the world....a world very very different than the one we have now.

User avatar
mi wrote:Life imitates People's Cube. Alternet for alternate reality...

About the author: Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is 'All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice' (Soft Skull Press). He is also the author of 'Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity' (South End Press).

It needs to be quoted here in full for posterity:

No Thanks for Thanksgiving

Instead, we should atone for the genocide that was incited -- and condoned -- by the very men we idolize as our 'heroic' founding fathers.
November 21, 2012

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.

That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."

Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."

As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."

Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.

In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.

This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.

Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."

Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.

History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.

Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.

As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.

User avatar
I must have Robert "Goebbels" Jensen as speech writer for the New Plantation™.

Just as Comrade Expel has articulated about the "superimposition" of modern zeigeists onto historical facts and events where they don't apply and have any relevance whatsoever, this self-loathing screed becomes nothing more than humorous satire at its best.

Not surprising he would author a book about pornography. Fantasy is what fantasy does.

User avatar
Perhaps I should write a 'pulled out of my ass' history of the progressives ala Howard Zinn/Robert Jensen et al.

Those horrible creatures build whole palaces of lies for their ideology to reside. The poor peoples they trap inside have to spend all their energies doing their best to grope for and live in some kind of truth. Collectivism -Socialism; what a ugly old dilapidated haunted house of lies it is.


User avatar
$.$., do you not realize that the palaces of lies are essential to our well-being? We don't sit in a lotus position; we don't do yoga. We filch others' billfolds and yell, "Pay your fair share!" which drowns out any trifling cognitive dissonance.

A progressive who is open to reality is by definition no progressive.

User avatar
Father Prog Theocritus wrote:$.$., do you not realize that the palaces of lies are essential to our well-being? We don't sit in a lotus position; we don't do yoga. We filch others' billfolds and yell, "Pay your fair share!" which drowns out any trifling cognitive dissonance.

A progressive who is open to reality is by definition no progressive.
Exactly, Father Prog. Reality is irrelevent.

User avatar
I so enjoy listening to Senator Reid now. I can smell the nut fudge cooking beneath that thin, cracked skull. (Thanks to P. J. O'Rourke who delivered himself of that remark about another fucking-nuts senator, Cranston from California.)

The reason that we need power is so that we can ignore reality. If you ignore reality and you don't have anything, you're a raving loony on the street. An Occupy person, but then I repeat myself.

If you have money, you can be a raving loony who is listened to. One of Rand's characters, Mitchell Layton, inherited a quarter billion dollars, which is over ten times that now. He was upset that people didn't accept his opinions as gladly as they accepted his checks. But they listened anyway because of the checks.

A Spanish grandee can do no wrong because of his social position. He can be falling-down lecherous drunk, utterly irresponsible, but because of his blue blood, he's untouchable.

H. Ross Perot has been so rich for so long that no matter what he says, it's okay. Same with Al Gore. Or John Kerry, the most successful marital whore since Cleopatra.

There is a character in Waugh's Scoop, which well repays the reading. The Brits have as you know press lords, like Murdoch. And they are usually ennobled, and I guess that the gong is given to the proprietor of a big paper to shut him up.

When the press lord was right, his minions said, "Absolutely, Lord Copper." When he was barking mad, they'd say, "Up to a point, Lord Copper."

That's the maximum intrusion of reality that this Made Prog will tolerate.

Sugar Daddy Bear wrote:I must have Robert "Goebbels" Jensen as speech writer for the New Plantation™.

Just as Comrade Expel has articulated about the "superimposition" of modern zeigeists onto historical facts and events where they don't apply and have any relevance whatsoever, this self-loathing screed becomes nothing more than humorous satire at its best.
Comrade Bear,
Is it not Dogs that suffer constipation via perennial glands?
https://www.sacredweb.com/conference06/conference_introduction.html


 
POST REPLY