Posted on 06/04/2020 9:21:22 AM PDT by spankalib
On Tuesday, December 3, 1940, Winston Churchill read a memorandum by the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart that advocated making peace with Nazi Germany. It argued, in a summary written by Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, that otherwise Britain would soon see “Western Europe racked by warfare and economic hardship; the legacy of centuries, in art and culture, swept away; the health of the nation dangerously impaired by malnutrition, nervous strains and epidemics; Russia . . . profiting from our exhaustion.” Colville admitted it was “a terrible glimpse of the future,” but nonetheless courageously concluded that “we should be wrong to hesitate” in rejecting any negotiation with Adolf Hitler.
But Jamestown was lost. Its only historical value is as a marker that settlements were never guaranteed.
Jamestown is sometimes confused with Roanoke, but it served as the capital and legal port of entry for everything called "Virginia" (which was pretty open-ended, back then) for almost a century. It was abandoned when Williamsburg replaced it as the seat of government. Plymouth functioned as none of these things. Most ethnically English whites from the "Upper South" who were part of that trans-Mississippian migration that runs in a belt from the Piedmont through to North Texas likely will have some ancestor who entered the new country through Jamestown. Not even a large number of people currently living in proximity to the old Plymouth colony today are derived from the original population of it. Not only was Plymouth not a seed that grew, but murdering Miles Standish would even lead little armies to exterminate near-by settlements that the Pilgrims saw as competition.
The friendship between Squanto and the pilgrims certainly had influence on the formation and meaning of Thanksgiving.
My original point is that the Pilgrims didn't really start our Thanksgiving tradition, but I have found that the falsehood that they did is, perhaps, the most indestructible object in the universe.
Detecting your sour, cynical, hostility to American historical accuracy, I can understand the drive to get it correct but I don’t agree that it’s not worth reading.
When is a good time for telling the truth if now is not convenient to the narrative?
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