Posted on 11/25/2009 9:33:51 PM PST by TheFreedomPoster
With the United States under direct assault from the evils of Socialism (or other forms of "Collectivism" including: Communism, or Fascism...pick your tyranny), and with Thanksgiving Day upon us, it's timely, appropriate, and necessary to visit the nation's very first attempt with Socialism, nearly four centuries ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at myfreedompost.com ...
· Back in the early 80s, we took the kids up to Plymouth to see my wifes sister who lived there at the time. Visited Plymouth Plantation. During the tour, I was struck by the presence of fortified guard shacks in the town square and asked the guide if they were a last line of defense for the citizens there if trouble with the natives spilled into the compound. He told us that they were for the control of the FOOD RIOTS which broke out those first few winters BEFORE they abandoned their experiment with Marxism before Karl was even born.
Seems each generation or so we must relearn the hard lessons of history.
OBOWMA will teach us the next round of such lessons. I suspect they will be BITTER ones indeed.
· Back in the early 80s, we took the kids up to Plymouth to see my wifes sister who lived there at the time. Visited Plymouth Plantation. During the tour, I was struck by the presence of fortified guard shacks in the town square and asked the guide if they were a last line of defense for the citizens there if trouble with the natives spilled into the compound. He told us that they were for the control of the FOOD RIOTS which broke out those first few winters BEFORE they abandoned their experiment with Marxism before Karl was even born.
Seems each generation or so we must relearn the hard lessons of history.
OBOWMA will teach us the next round of such lessons. I suspect they will be BITTER ones indeed.
It does seem that those of us who forget our history are condemned to repeat it.
Actually, those of us who remember our history appear to have to repeat it, too, despite our heartiest efforts.
I will offer this...if you ever had conceived of a stupid plan...the Pilgrims episode is probably the worst plan of all time.
You had basically a bunch of folks whose sole connection in life...was their church group. Few if any...had skills for this kind of expedition or camping experience. You had no back-up plan...no alternate source of food...and no fancy $500-tents to use when the cabin roof fell in.
Their sole source of management? The Bible. It’s a great book for morals and philosophy but for a camping episode like this....it really doesn’t help.
Like most highly religious groups....there are always outsiders...in this case, Indians. In the end...it is the outsiders who help keep the religious group alive and they survive through their experience.
You can call this a religious commune of sorts...but frankly, it was a planned and doomed episode from day one.
The PC answer is the first Thanksgiving in America was in Plymouth. The correct answer is the first Thanksgiving was in Virginia in 1619 before the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth. Don’t believe me Google Virginia Thanksgiving. This is fully documented.
Their distributist enemies in Europe were those in favor of very centralized government. That and other nasty, Renaissance habits are what kept the first few boatloads of the distributists arriving to the south of the Puritans croaking. To this day, the distributists project their own intents on their enemies.
We can't totally attribute their mistakes to the ignorance of human nature and history, some pilgrims desire the fatal results of the evil isms.
Communism like 0b0z0, FAILS!
A nice presetation in a book by Bill Bryson [Made in America]
excerpt:
“It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers,a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.’ Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”- hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.’
At this remove, it is difficult to imagine just how alone this small, hapless band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbors-at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland*-were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of “wild and savage hue,” in William Bradford’s uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).
For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but every time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region himself. But he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local sachem, or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.
A question that naturally arises is how they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of formidable consonant clusters that are all but unpronounceable by the untutored, as we can see from the first primer of Algonquian speech prepared some twenty years later by Roger Williams in Connecticut (a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame, incidentally). Try saying the following and you may get some idea of the challenge:
Nquitpausuckowashawmen-There are a hundred of us.
Chenock wonck cuppee-yeaumen?-When will you return?
Tashuckqunne cummauchenafimisz?-How long have you been sick?
Ntanneteimmin-I will be going.’
Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English-Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).
That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky-the Pilgrims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them-but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that by 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.”
Yep. This is one of my “48 Liberal Lies About American History” (Sentinel, 2008) that Thanksgiving was all about the Indians “saving” the English and the English giving thanks to the Indians.
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