As the nation approaches the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, mainstream media are predictably excluding from their tragedy porn any substantive analysis of the idiosyncratic, misleading, and in some cases flagrantly propagandistic reportage of the event that might call the official story into question.
As with a majority of scandals and coverups over the past several decades where powerful interests are implicated, American journalism has become more and more complicit if not actively involved in delivering dubious information that establishes a dominant narrative, while thereafter failing to vigorously interrogate and amend faulty coverage that leads to vast public misconceptions.
The assassination of JFK, the falsely-reported Tonkin Gulf incident that sparked the costly Vietnam War, and the similarly questionable events of 9/11 that have together brought the US to the present national and geopolitical impasse all come to mind. One is left to ponder how the behavior of a wholly government-controlled media system would differ from our corporate-run consciousness industry that routinely and shamelessly showboats its First Amendment protections.
The consequences of such a communication breakdown are vast, with countless lives and entire nations having been undermined and destroyed. Moreover, the “first drafts of history” become plagued by myth and distortion that eventually cohere as collective memory, thus robbing a people of their self-determination, nullifying their humanity, and ensuring that the cycle repeats interminably.
Those rationally dissenting from the official record and who occupy positions to alter public opinion are usually written off by establishment-controlled media outlets as “conspiracy theorists,” “wackos,” and so on. If such individuals cannot be neutralized through defamation or blackmail, and if they possess information or occupy positions where they are capable of posing a serious and immediate threat to official fictions and thus the power structure itself, they are prone to becoming oddly “suicidal,” (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), or are simply killed outright (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, and here and here).
What else won’t we see in the corporate media’s series of heart-tugging memorials devoted to the anniversary of Sandy Hook? The two most recent and obvious indications that the event itself is at the very least a coverup include, first, the wholly unreported story of the Obama administration’s $2.5 million payout (read: bribe) to state and local law enforcement agencies directly involved in responding to the incident, and second, what is by almost any measure the entirely illegal destruction of pertinent evidence in the demolition of the crime scene itself.
Empowered by the internet as their primary means of communication, a broad array of independent researchers have conduced an impromptu “truth commission” that together calls the Sandy Hook narrative presented by corporate news media into serious question. For those with eyes to see and the ability to think critically they have also shamed the mainstream journalists directly involved in (mis)representing the event to the American public.
Yet without a genuinely independent investigation of the incident apart from the oversight and influence of the [Governor Dannel] Malloy and Obama administrations, the broader public will likely never know what actually took place on December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut. As has too often been the case throughout the last half century, the prospects are high that yet another “big lie” has again taken root in the ever-malleable and somnambulent public mind.
Whenever there’s a cheerful jobs report propagated by corporate news, many of us know they’re lying (because it just doesn’t correspond to reality) though we might not know exactly how the numbers they use decieve us. At Counterpunch.org, Paul Craig Roberts dissects some of the figures cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as support for claims of an economic recovery. For example, their payroll jobs report says that the US economy created 203,000 jobs in November. Since it takes about 130,000 new jobs each month to keep up with population growth, the remaining 70,000 of the jobs would have only slightly reduced the unemployment rate yet it supposedly fell from 7.3 to 7.0 which is too much. It turns out the payroll survey counts a person holding two jobs as if it were two employed persons, while the unemployment rate is calculated from the household survey, which counts a person holding two or more jobs as one job. Though the two figures are often reported together, they actually have no connection.
Payroll numbers can be skewed by seasonal hiring and because the birth-death model used to estimate the numbers of unreported business shutdowns and startups often underestimate the former and overestimate the latter. The unemployment rate figures are innacurate because it leaves out people who have given up on looking for work. The greater the number of discouraged workers there are, the lower the rate of unemployment, according to the BLS.
So exactly where and what are the 203,000 new payroll jobs created in November? Paul Craig Roberts breaks down the figures as reported by the BLS and discovered that the majority are lowly-paid, part-time, nontradable (non exportable) domestic service jobs including:
…retail trade with 22,300 jobs, transportation and warehousing with 30,500 jobs, temporary help services with 16,400 jobs, ambulatory health care services with 26,300 jobs, home health care services with 11,800 jobs, and the old reliable waitresses and bartenders with 17,900 jobs.
This is the jobs profile of the American super economy. It is the profile of India 30 or 40 years ago.
PCR continues his analysis by citing the work of statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com), who found more misstated jobs that could be attributed to the government shutdown and reopening, the birth-death model, and concurrent-seasonal-adjustment errors. According to Williams, whose figures include long-term discouraged workers who cannot find a job, the US unemployment rate is actually 23.2%.
Of course there’s no recovery with a 23.2% unemployment rate, but to keep stocks and bonds at all-time record high levels, the Federal Reserve is printing $1,000 billion new dollars annually, potentially creating an economic bubble. Despite these issues, the BLS estimated a third quarter GDP growth of 3.6%. Paul Craig Roberts challenges this claim with the following figures:
US real per capita income has declined from $29,554 in 2007 to $27,319 in 2012, a drop of $2,235 or 7.5%.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1,277,000 fewer seasonally adjusted payroll jobs in November 2013 than in December 2007.
He concludes by asking:
How it is possible for the economy to have been in recovery since June 2009 (according to the National Bureau of Economic Research) and there are 1,277,000 fewer jobs today than existed six years ago prior to the recession?
How has real Gross Domestic Product recovered when jobs and real consumer incomes have not?
Yesterday marked the 72nd anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, which from today’s perspective can be viewed as the template on which 9/11 was modeled after. In both cases, documentation exists implicating the U.S. government. In the case of Pearl Harbor, there’s the McCollum Memo which describes in detail the strategy used to successfully provoke the Japanese government into attacking. Shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack, Secretary of State Hull presented “peace terms” to the Japanese government that all but guaranteed an inevitable attack.
In the case of 9/11, there’s a policy document from Project for a New American Century called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which provides a clear motive to create a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. It’s not conclusive proof they were behind the attacks, but it’s suspicious to say the least that the people with established motives for conducting an event like 9/11 were responsible for national security at the time multiple unlikely and implausible coincidences made such a successful attack possible.
A number of other dubious aspects of the Pearl Harbor attack were compiled at Washington’s Blog last year, including:
Active Interference with Military’s Ability to Defend
It has also recently been discovered that the FDR administration took numerous affirmative steps to ensure that the Japanese attack would be successful. These steps included taking extraordinary measures to hide information from the commanders in Hawaii about the location of Japanese war ships (information of which they would normally be informed), denying their requests to allow them to scout for Japanese ships, and other actions to blind the commanders in Hawaii so that the attacks would succeed. See, for example, this book (page 186).
Just like 9/11, Pearl Harbor was used as a tool to focus mass hatred on a race demonized by propaganda. The attack created a culture of fear allowing for suspension of civil liberties while crushing opposition to the war. Most importantly (for powerful interests pushing for war) the attacks were a pretense for pursuing and expanding global political and economic hegemony.
Jasun Horsley at Omni Reboot recently shared a number of intriguing insights on the topic of death and how it relates to science fiction, culture and transhumanism. He outlines how science fiction, whether utopia or dystopia, are scientific versions of a belief in a spiritual afterlife since they can soothe awareness of mortality and make us feel better about the present.
Horsley cites the work of Sheldon Solomon which shows how culture is a means of denying death via the manufacturing of extensions of the self and the body, including values which are carried by artifacts we create (ie. books, IPods, spaceships, etc.). The technology we create is meant to improve our lives and bring us closer to the utopia of sci-fi fantasies, but more often than not contributes to a dystopian reality. In his opinion, this happens because we’re unconscious of whatever it is within us causing the problems we’re trying to solve. We’re making things worse the more we try and improve them. A classic metaphor for this is Shelley’s Frankenstein which describes how the inability to accept death and the drive to “play God” creates a tragic monster.
According to Horsley, transhumanism is the religion of the (imagined) future, which most of us are already followers of, whether aware of it or not. For those not familiar with transhumanism (also known as extropianism), he provides an accurate and succinct definition in the following excerpt:
Transhumanism is a scientistic movement based on the belief that who (and what) we are can be divorced from biology. In its more extreme camps, Transhumanism divorces human existence from the psyche by suggesting that:
• At least some of the elements of consciousness can be converted to digital information.
• This data will be self-aware.
• It will be a continuation of the biologically-based awareness which it copied.
Horsley is skeptical of this view because it ignores the importance of the unconscious. In his words:
“Who we are” is not a mind-body system but a psyche-body system. We aren’t meat vessels with an internal stream of mental data running through them and animating them. The vast majority of our total “psychosoma” system functions at an unconscious level.
What he sees as a potentially more productive and fulfilling approach is the acceptance of death. Because it’s such an uncharted path (for the majority of us) it’s difficult to imagine the social impact such a paradigm shift would have, but he asks the following speculative questions which encourages further exploration:
Time is supposed to bestow wisdom on human beings. But can there be wisdom without acceptance of death?
How would both our fantasies and our culture be transformed if, instead of conquering death, we learned to accept it?
If death anxiety fuels human progress, maybe accepting death would not only be the end of fantasy, but the end of the fantasy we call “history”?
What it would be the beginning of, however, is anybody’s guess.
“Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.” – Mandela (1996)
The wrong people are in charge… that’s pretty obvious. But what is not so obvious is how they got there? And once having found an open gate, why have we left them to graze the best pastures while we grovel around in the barren fallow?
A very strange phenomenon…
This World is run by those of whom the great majority have absolutely no qualifications to be at the helm of anything – not even a small rowing boat. Yet, somehow or other, there they are perched in their palaces, surveying their empires – while simultaneously engaging in the systematic degradation of planet Earth.
Doesn’t matter whether they are generals, headmasters, corporate executives, CEOs of banks, media moguls, ministers or prime ministers, or just about any big bosses – they have the distinction of all acting in unison. While by contrast, the great majority of intelligent and able bodied citizens of this planet, only manage to act – or react – in sporadic and discordant bursts; if at all.
The current controlling masters – and it hasn’t changed much over many centuries – have a commonality of intent: to extract the last ounces of profit and prestige from any and all assets and opportunities that fall into their grasp.
Yet even that isn’t enough for some of them. Profits get a bit boring when they come in the tens of millions year after year, and one has occupied the prime suite at Claridges for the past six months. No, there always needs to be just one more thing that can be ‘owned’ and brought under control, so as to satisfy the false agrandissement that is part and parcel of an endless, and ultimately fruitless, attempt to become omnipotent and untouchable by ordinary mortals.
Such is the aphrodisiac called ‘power’.
Time and again, those who suffer most from a sense of being inwardly dispossessed are the very ones to seek, as compensation, the maximum level of outer possessiveness. And this is the mechanism whereby the wrong people get to be in charge.
Ironically, many who do not suffer such delusional power urges are quite happy to just tick along fulfilling their aspirations and daily needs as best they can. Yet in doing so, they unwittingly allow the magalomaniacs a direct route to the seats of power.
Those who are secure enough in themselves to take a responsible attitude towards the life around them seldom come forward to take-on positions of authority and civil responsibility. Their preference is to leave it to others – and in too many cases these ‘others’ often harbour barely disguised ulterior motives.
Yet we look on, aghast, as our world is torn apart by duelling crooks and madmen, each more desperate than the other for the top job in the race for planetary ecocide. Each more desperate than the other to fill any power vacuum that might emerge. Each more desperate than the other to hold a cosh over the disinterested daily workers who struggle on, trying not to notice how bad it’s gotten.
Where do you belong in this mad scrum?
The wrong people are in charge and the right people don’t want to bother themselves unduly to do anything about it. That just about sums-up the dire state of our post industrial ‘civilisation’. Something has to give…
The question is what?
Will a critical mass of the 99% finally act to bring back some genuine self autonomy through wresting control from the 1%?
Or will the 1% finally complete their annihilation job, trashing our planetary assets and crushing our human propensities once and for all? That is the question.
But none of us are free to sit back and play at second guessing the outcome. We are all in there. We are part of the pack. Our every move, whether we see it or not, is either promoting or resisting the despot’s master plan. There is no such thing as being ‘in between’ in this game. The fence you once sat on is broken. The wires are hanging limp. There is no no-man’s-land left to hide in.
At some point soon, those who are fit to lead must take over from those who are unfit. It may be a bloodless coup – or it may be a bloody insurrection. One way or another, the shift has to happen.
Forget about Divine intervention. There will be no Divine intervention unless and until there is a very visible human determination already out of the starting blocks and heading for the finishing line. Only then is it possible that higher energies will join the race to bring justice back to this battered World.
We are approaching the point of no return. If we don’t respond to the myriad calls for help that are echoing around this World at an ever-increased velocity each day, then we will be condemning ourselves – and those who call upon us – to being forever stranded upon a desolate and barren shore.
That help starts with helping each other to break free from our learned and self-induced state of fear and pacifism. A combination that pretty much guarantees an unwillingness to act. An unwillingness to act even when presented with the choice of participating in a mass genocide or opposing it.
This unwillingness is giving voice to the notion that ‘no action’ is the spiritual choice of the knowing. That to retire into a cul-de-sac of meditation and inward-looking self examination can ‘change the world’ by dint of a shifted value focus. Can serve to hermetically seal the self away from the trials and tribulations of the outer world and thereby help avoid any confrontation with that which demands a full and spontaneous response.
Confrontation, in this view, is a negative, reactionary manifestation that undermines ‘peace’ and the supposed tranquility of a chimeric world, which takes over from rational observations and becomes the new reality. A ‘virtual reality’.
This is a deeply flawed and dangerous ethos. For it splits in half that which is whole and sets the two halves in opposition to each other.
We are ‘of nature’ not above or outside it. We go forth and we return. That is the Tao. Universal forces all dance to this tune. Breath, ocean waves, cycles of birth and death, growth and decay, all is in motion and at rest, all the time. There is no contradiction.
Outward action and inward contemplation are two halves of one whole. They are synonymous. One should move between the two constantly and joyously.
“When injustice become law, resistance becomes duty”
Well, injustice has become law – yet resistance remains doggedly muted, and the search for an escape route remains the preferred option.
Cultivate spirit, wisdom and deep awareness – yes. Yet not as an alternative to toppling our oppressors from their corporate thrones, but as part of it.
Don’t be fooled. There is a war on. We are all called to the front. Just as the white corpuscles of our bodies are fighting off attempts by the pathogens to take hold – all the time. We should be doing the same – all the time.
Everyday we should be conjuring-up and putting into affect actions to end the draconian government/corporate dictatorship that continues to herd great swathes of humanity ever faster towards a sheer and genocidal cliff.
We can have no ‘peace’ until the criminals at the master control consulate are ejected from their padded leather chairs and are forced to confront the true price of their obscene power games.
Peace and enlightenment, at the individual level, are only possible if we are engaged in this battle. The battle to rid both ourselves and this planet of that which seeks to dominate and destroy the true well-spring of life.
The road to victory also requires the wise and aware to form a council of responsible oversight to step-in to the void once the despots are dethroned. That is an essential ingredient of any uprising determined to manifest genuine justice.
The lessons of history teach that fickle rebellion simply replaces one bunch of power predators with another. That is no longer an option; we are now at the point of no return. This time we have to get it right.
Footnote: some may see this as being at odds with my essay “Reverse Engineering the Illuminati Mind Set,” I don’t believe it is. The action I speak of here does not eclipse the need to draw deeply upon compassion. However, to exercise compassion one needs to be in a position of strength, not slavery.
About the Author
Julian is a committed international activist, writer, farmer and actor. He is an early pioneer of UK organic farming methods and is currently involved in the front line of efforts to keep Poland free from genetically modified organisms. Julian is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. His book Changing Course for Life can be purchased on www.changingcourseforlife.info. His latest book In Defence of Life – a Radical Reworking of Green Wisdom is available at Amazon or can be requested on http://www.julianrose.info/
This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.
Today, humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.
– Fawzi Ibrahim
Freedom is having time to live.
– Uruguay’s president, Jose Mujica
Here it comes again. Another Black Friday of shoppers being trampled to death at the entrance of Target, Bed Bath & Beyond and Walmart. And then, hallelujah! … the Christmas shopping season begins.
This year, let’s rise above it! It’s time to start challenging the entrenched values of capitalism, which have hijacked our lives and our cultural rituals for far too long. ’Tis the season to make a pact with ourselves … to start changing our own lives so that we can collectively face the gigantic psycho-financial-eco crises of our time.The journey toward a sane sustainable future begins on a deeply personal and individual level with a single, voluntary step: make a vow to yourself to go cold turkey on consumption this Friday (in North America – Saturday for the rest of the world). Do not buy anything for 24 hours … and watch what happens … you just might have an unexpected, emancipatory epiphany!
Buy Nothing Day is legendary for instigating this type of personal transformation. As you suddenly remember what real living is all about, you may sense an upsurge of radical empowerment and feel a strange magic creeping back into your life.
Join millions of us in over 80 countries on November 29/30 and find out for yourself what it feels like.
And why not play some jazz while you are at it!? Put up Buy Nothing Day posters in your office, neighborhood, on campus … organize a credit card cut up, pull off a Whirl-mart at a box store, or put on an anonymous mask and walk zombie-like through your local mall.
Then, if you feel inspired, take the next step … for generations, the holidays have been hijacked by commercial forces … this year, why not take the season back? Have a heart to heart with your family and decide to celebrate Christmas, Chanukkah and Kwanzaa in a whole new way. Go for it!
This year, let’s throw a well-honed, fun-filled monkey wrench into the doomsday machine!
It’s always nice to celebrate special occasions like holidays with loved ones, and while it’s good to be thankful for what one has, we should also feel discontent for what so many do not have or for what they’ve had taken away from them. Sometimes ignorance may seem like bliss, but the pain of reality is good for the soul, potentially liberating, and necessary to avoid sugarcoating or forgetting atrocities committed against any group of people (to hopefully prevent repeats in the future).
An excerpt from The Hidden History of Massachusetts by Dr. Tingba Apidta:
Much of America’s understanding of the early relationship between the Indian and the European is conveyed through the story of Thanksgiving. Proclaimed a holiday in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, this fairy tale of a feast was allowed to exist in the American imagination pretty much untouched until 1970, the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. That is when Frank B. James, president of the Federated Eastern Indian League, prepared a speech for a Plymouth banquet that exposed the Pilgrims for having committed, among other crimes, the robbery of the graves of the Wampanoags. He wrote:
“We welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.”
But white Massachusetts officials told him he could not deliver such a speech and offered to write him another. Instead, James declined to speak, and on Thanksgiving Day hundreds of Indians from around the country came to protest. It was the first National Day of Mourning, a day to mark the losses Native Americans suffered as the early settlers prospered. This true story of “Thanksgiving” is what whites did not want Mr. James to tell.
What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621?
According to a single-paragraph account in the writings of one Pilgrim, a harvest feast did take place in Plymouth in 1621, probably in mid-October, but the Indians who attended were not even invited. Though it later became known as “Thanksgiving,” the Pilgrims never called it that. And amidst the imagery of a picnic of interracial harmony is some of the most terrifying bloodshed in New World history.
The Pilgrim crop had failed miserably that year, but the agricultural expertise of the Indians had produced twenty acres of corn, without which the Pilgrims would have surely perished. The Indians often brought food to the Pilgrims, who came from England ridiculously unprepared to survive and hence relied almost exclusively on handouts from the overly generous Indians-thus making the Pilgrims the western hemisphere’s first class of welfare recipients. The Pilgrims invited the Indian sachem Massasoit to their feast, and it was Massasoit, engaging in the tribal tradition of equal sharing, who then invited ninety or more of his Indian brothers and sisters-to the annoyance of the 50 or so ungrateful Europeans. No turkey, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie was served; they likely ate duck or geese and the venison from the 5 deer brought by Massasoit. In fact, most, if notall, of the food was most likely brought and prepared by the Indians, whose 10,000-year familiarity with the cuisine of the region had kept the whites alive up to that point.
The Pilgrims wore no black hats or buckled shoes-these were the silly inventions of artists hundreds of years since that time. These lower-class Englishmen wore brightly colored clothing, with one of their church leaders recording among his possessions “1 paire of greene drawers.” Contrary to the fabricated lore of storytellers generations since, no Pilgrims prayed at the meal, and the supposed good cheer and fellowship must have dissipated quickly once the Pilgrims brandished their weaponry in a primitive display of intimidation. What’s more, the Pilgrims consumed a good deal of home brew. In fact, each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day, which they preferred even to water. This daily inebriation led their governor, William Bradford, to comment on his people’s “notorious sin,” which included their “drunkenness and uncleanliness” and rampant “sodomy”…
The Pilgrims of Plymouth, The Original Scalpers
Contrary to popular mythology the Pilgrims were no friends to the local Indians. They were engaged in a ruthless war of extermination against their hosts, even as they falsely posed as friends. Just days before the alleged Thanksgiving love-fest, a company of Pilgrims led by Myles Standish actively sought to chop off the head of a local chief. They deliberately caused a rivalry between two friendly Indians, pitting one against the other in an attempt to obtain “better intelligence and make them both more diligent.” An 11-foot-high wall was erected around the entire settlement for the purpose of keeping the Indians out.
Any Indian who came within the vicinity of the Pilgrim settlement was subject to robbery, enslavement, or even murder. The Pilgrims further advertised their evil intentions and white racial hostility, when they mounted five cannons on a hill around their settlement, constructed a platform for artillery, and then organized their soldiers into four companies-all in preparation for the military destruction of their friends the Indians.
Pilgrim Myles Standish eventually got his bloody prize. He went to the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was displayed on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B. Nash, “as a symbol of white power.” Standish had the Indian man’s young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that time on, the whites were known to the Indians of Massachusetts by the name “Wotowquenange,” which in their tongue meant cutthroats and stabbers.
Who Were the “Savages”?
The myth of the fierce, ruthless Indian savage lusting after the blood of innocent Europeans must be vigorously dispelled at this point. In actuality, the historical record shows that the very opposite was true.
Once the European settlements stabilized, the whites turned on their hosts in a brutal way. The once amicable relationship was breeched again and again by the whites, who lusted over the riches of Indian land. A combination of the Pilgrims’ demonization of the Indians, the concocted mythology of Eurocentric historians, and standard Hollywood propaganda has served to paint the gentle Indian as a tomahawk-swinging savage endlessly on the warpath, lusting for the blood of the God-fearing whites.
But the Pilgrims’ own testimony obliterates that fallacy. The Indians engaged each other in military contests from time to time, but the causes of “war,” the methods, and the resulting damage differed profoundly from the European variety:
o Indian “wars” were largely symbolic and were about honor, not about territory or extermination.
o “Wars” were fought as domestic correction for a specific act and were ended when correction was achieved. Such action might better be described as internal policing. The conquest or destruction of whole territories was a European concept.
o Indian “wars” were often engaged in by family groups, not by whole tribal groups, and would involve only the family members.
o A lengthy negotiation was engaged in between the aggrieved parties before escalation to physical confrontation would be sanctioned. Surprise attacks were unknown to the Indians.
o It was regarded as evidence of bravery for a man to go into “battle” carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance-not even bows and arrows. The bravest act in war in some Indian cultures was to touch their adversary and escape before he could do physical harm.
o The targeting of non-combatants like women, children, and the elderly was never contemplated. Indians expressed shock and repugnance when the Europeans told, and then showed, them that they considered women and children fair game in their style of warfare.
o A major Indian “war” might end with less than a dozen casualties on both sides. Often, when the arrows had been expended the “war” would be halted. The European practice of wiping out whole nations in bloody massacres was incomprehensible to the Indian.
According to one scholar, “The most notable feature of Indian warfare was its relative innocuity.” European observers of Indian wars often expressed surprise at how little harm they actually inflicted. “Their wars are far less bloody and devouring than the cruel wars of Europe,” commented settler Roger Williams in 1643. Even Puritan warmonger and professional soldier Capt. John Mason scoffed at Indian warfare: “[Their] feeble manner…did hardly deserve the name of fighting.” Fellow warmonger John Underhill spoke of the Narragansetts, after having spent a day “burning and spoiling” their country: “no Indians would come near us, but run from us, as the deer from the dogs.” He concluded that the Indians might fight seven years and not kill seven men. Their fighting style, he wrote, “is more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.”
All this describes a people for whom war is a deeply regrettable last resort. An agrarian people, the American Indians had devised a civilization that provided dozens of options all designed to avoid conflict–the very opposite of Europeans, for whom all-out war, a ferocious bloodlust, and systematic genocide are their apparent life force. Thomas Jefferson–who himself advocated the physical extermination of the American Indian–said of Europe, “They [Europeans] are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of labor, property and lives of their people.”
Puritan Holocaust
By the mid 1630s, a new group of 700 even holier Europeans calling themselves Puritans had arrived on 11 ships and settled in Boston-which only served to accelerate the brutality against the Indians.
In one incident around 1637, a force of whites trapped some seven hundred Pequot Indians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, near the mouth of the Mystic River. Englishman John Mason attacked the Indian camp with “fire, sword, blunderbuss, and tomahawk.” Only a handful escaped and few prisoners were taken-to the apparent delight of the Europeans:
To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.
This event marked the first actual Thanksgiving. In just 10 years 12,000 whites had invaded New England, and as their numbers grew they pressed for all-out extermination of the Indian. Euro-diseases had reduced the population of the Massachusett nation from over 24,000 to less than 750; meanwhile, the number of European settlers in Massachusetts rose to more than 20,000 by 1646.
By 1675, the Massachusetts Englishmen were in a full-scale war with the great Indian chief of the Wampanoags, Metacomet. Renamed “King Philip” by the white man, Metacomet watched the steady erosion of the lifestyle and culture of his people as European-imposed laws and values engulfed them.
In 1671, the white man had ordered Metacomet to come to Plymouth to enforce upon him a new treaty, which included the humiliating rule that he could no longer sell his own land without prior approval from whites. They also demanded that he turn in his community’s firearms. Marked for extermination by the merciless power of a distant king and his ruthless subjects, Metacomet retaliated in 1675 with raids on several isolated frontier towns. Eventually, the Indians attacked 52 of the 90 New England towns, destroying 13 of them. The Englishmen ultimately regrouped, and after much bloodletting defeated the great Indian nation, just half a century after their arrival on Massachusetts soil. Historian Douglas Edward Leach describes the bitter end:
The ruthless executions, the cruel sentences…were all aimed at the same goal-unchallengeable white supremacy in southern New England. That the program succeeded is convincingly demonstrated by the almost complete docility of the local native ever since.
When Captain Benjamin Church tracked down and murdered Metacomet in 1676, his body was quartered and parts were “left for the wolves.” The great Indian chief’s hands were cut off and sent to Boston and his head went to Plymouth, where it was set upon a pole on the real first “day of public Thanksgiving for the beginning of revenge upon the enemy.” Metacomet’s nine-year-old son was destined for execution because, the whites reasoned, the offspring of the devil must pay for the sins of their father. The child was instead shipped to the Caribbean to spend his life in slavery.
As the Holocaust continued, several official Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed. Governor Joseph Dudley declared in 1704 a “General Thanksgiving”-not in celebration of the brotherhood of man-but for [God’s] infinite Goodness to extend His Favors…In defeating and disappointing… the Expeditions of the Enemy [Indians] against us, And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands…
Just two years later one could reap a ££50 reward in Massachusetts for the scalp of an Indian-demonstrating that the practice of scalping was a European tradition. According to one scholar, “Hunting redskins became…a popular sport in New England, especially since prisoners were worth good money…”
After the Crash 