You are welcome as always Haruna and surely i will join you next 4th
november.

Imokende.
Fye Niamo.

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Haruna Darbo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  Thanx Nyamorkono for sharing. Mitchel Cohen skillfully synthesized the
> various contemporaneous acts of terrorism, theft, and sacrilege (crimes
> committed in the name of religion) to share his disgust of Thanksgiving Day
> celebration. Similar stories abound for the purveyors of Islam. Check it
> out. The trick would be to presume you are yourself not Muslim as you
> consider the expeditions of earlier Muslims. In other words, take your own
> interest out of the stories. Then insert yourself in it on the side of
> Islam. That process itself affords you greater awe.
>
> I encourage you and our friends here to consider HarunaSilo. Where everyday
> is Thanksgiving Day and a focused celebration on the day of the birth of
> Amadou Toumani Toure - 4th November of each year. A day of focused
> Thanksgiving, Prayer, and sharing with the less fortunate of our communities
> and the world.
>
> Thanx again Nyamorkono for sharing. Haruna.
>   -----Original Message-----
> From: Fye samateh <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Sat, Nov 28, 2009 3:43 pm
> Subject: 'Why I Hate Thanksgiving'
>
>   *'Why I Hate Thanksgiving'*
> By Mitchel Cohen with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh
> and others whose names have over the years been lost
> 11-26-3
>
>    The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered
> Christopher Columbus on their beach.   Historian Howard Zinn tells us how
> Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their
> villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the
> strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying
> swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food,
> water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he
> wrote:   "They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many
> other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.
> They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good
> bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them,
> for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out
> of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They
> would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make
> them do whatever we want."   And so the conquest began, and the
> Thanotocracy -- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the
> Indians called "Turtle Island."   You probably already know a good piece
> of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and
> insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in
> tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty,
> Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and
> the Pinta -- the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola
> (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken
> prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina
> and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage,
> many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen
> Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:   "The Indians are so naive and so
> free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would
> believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the
> contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus concluded his report by
> asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would
> bring them "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."   Columbus
> returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships
> and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went
> from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word
> spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the
> Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left behind on the last
> voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking
> children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of
> the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians
> began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even
> though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's men
> murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves
> in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the
> Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered
> between 1494 and 1508.   What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas
> and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro
> to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts
> to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were
> slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe,
> to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl
> Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These
> were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business,
> politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five
> centuries.   All of this were the preconditions for the first
> Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set
> early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before
> there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville
> landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when
> one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole
> Indian village.   The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in
> 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief,
> Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did
> not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined
> the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial
> times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from
> Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian
> communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.   In the summer
> of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the
> runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice
> to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown
> then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community,
> killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around
> the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into
> boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their
> brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and
> stabbed to death.   By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had
> grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought
> back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to
> enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
> And then the Pilgrims arrived.   When the Pilgrims came to New England
> they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes
> of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the
> Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled
> England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower,
> where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.   Religious
> persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize
> their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, 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." To justify their use of
> force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore
> resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist
> shall receive to themselves damnation."   The Puritans lived in uneasy
> truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut
> and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their
> land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over
> Connecticut settlers in that area.   In 1636 an armed expedition left
> Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English
> landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the
> island and the English went from one deserted village to the next,
> destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot
> villages along the coast, destroying crops again.   The English went on
> setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to
> the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather
> put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought
> down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the
> English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.   Three
> hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few
> years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this
> war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals
> like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists
> joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England.
> It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for
> power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in
> North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million.   The
> way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually, making
> decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different
> sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were
> practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's
> Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything,
> whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose
> the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it was the
> women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The
> Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously
> absent in Iroquois society.   There were many other cultural differences:
> The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist
> on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child
> to learn to care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of
> land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was
> ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the
> spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything --
> even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John
> Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all
> children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride,
> which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the
> foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness,
> other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.   One
> colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a
> combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the
> Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His
> People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves
> for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons.
> Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the
> Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native
> Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who began
> the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted
> scalps.   "What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was
> asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think
> it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of
> Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more
> threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so
> slaughtered them.   These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and
> whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as
> Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake
> Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and,
> having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the
> hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive
> their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate the
> waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out
> poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He
> also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head
> chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the
> Indians nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is
> celebrated as the First Thanksgiving.   My own feeling? The Indians should
> have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity made
> them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human,
> loving connection they -- and those of us who are not Indian as well -- paid
> a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island,
> what is now America.   Let's look at one example of the Puritan values --
> which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class values
> that we "give thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and
> Mayday.   In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas,
> the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the
> guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants
> from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the
> guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and
> military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist
> nation-state.   The young workers of London took their revenge upon the
> merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal
> society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the
> nobility and the landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords
> got frightened -- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys
> didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were
> arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails,
> throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French
> capitalist's house was trashed.   Then came the repression: Cannons were
> fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the
> streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet
> together, and that all men should "keep their wives in their houses." The
> prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were
> children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were
> hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.   Thus
> the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to
> proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were
> caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they
> had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs,
> as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers and
> healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism -- were burned at
> the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged
> the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put their
> Maypole.   Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550
> Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam
> war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as
> it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National
> Liberation Front).   In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against
> the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether.
> They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the
> growing proletarian insurgency at home as well.   Although translators of
> the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an
> anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world
> upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers,
> Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry
> Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first Maypole
> in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.   The Puritans destroyed it,
> exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton
> had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who
> came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who founded the
> communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic
> dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.   The story of the Maypole
> as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through
> the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle,
> "with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of
> cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns,
> all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't call it a Maypole and they
> danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the
> expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but
> otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!   Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute,
> started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars
> to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound
> Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking alcohol, became
> entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their
> land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All
> Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine
> took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull
> advanced the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet
> from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it
> was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the
> Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were
> dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.   On December 29
> 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells
> at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300
> men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the
> bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The
> Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet
> Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the
> engagement."   In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as
> it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There
> are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of
> Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at
> Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to
> electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the
> Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a
> speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the
> first Thanksgiving.   Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But
> before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to
> the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had
> written, they would not allow him to read it.   First, the genocide. Then,
> the suppression of all discussion about it.   What do Indian people find
> to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for
> in the genocide of the Indians, that this "holyday commemorates? As we sit
> with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out
> of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we
> realize that all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all
> to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and
> everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian
> peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of
> privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.   Yes, I am an
> American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known
> as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of
> being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back
> in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god
> was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery,
> their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But
> that is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the
> apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the people, not the beautiful
> land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all
> that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children
> with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians.   Mitchel Cohen is
> co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of the Greens/Green
> Party USA, www.greenparty.org, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition,
> www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn Greens.     In memorium. Lest we forget.
> The First Thanksgiving   From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995,
> as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996     The first official
> Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather
> a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an
> anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks
> about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he
> discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two
> universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at
> the University of Connecticut.        "Thanksgiving Day was first
> officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
> 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were
> celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their
> own house," Newell said.   "Gathered in this place of meeting they were
> attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from
> the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were
> burned alive in the building," he said.   Newell based his research on
> studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History,
> both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their
> superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William
> Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the
> mid-1600s.   "My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell
> said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first
> hand. It is not hearsay."   Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings
> commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of
> a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the
> image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate
> Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the
> first settlers.       *Comment*
> From Redwing
> 11-27-3   Seems an appropriate time to voice my most sincere appreciation
> for your site.   As unsettling as it may be for some, it's articles like
> 'Why I Hate Thanksgiving' that so provoke real reflection. Being a product
> of public schooling, I was unknowingly denied truth, like so many million
> others.   Manufactured Reality. However, I was vaguely suspicious of the
> machinations of the "system" from a young age. I wouldn't have been able to
> describe at the time what I thought were "holes" in history. To keep ths
> brief I want to say "Thank YOU!" I've been personally patching those holes
> (with Rense.com) for nearly 3 years.
>
>
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