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Posted on 03/08/2007 5:24:52 AM PST by SJackson
'Celebration' banned for Jamestown's 400th
Events marking settlement's anniversary condemn its 'holocaust'
By Bob Unruh
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
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This year is the 400th anniversary of the arrival of settlers in Jamestown, 13 years before the Plymouth Pilgrims appeared on America's shores. And there will be discussions on the environmental impact of the settlement and its impact on African-Americans and Native Americans. But there will be no celebration.
"You can't celebrate an invasion," Mary Wade, a member of Jamestown 2007 organizing committee, has stated. After all, Indian tribes "were pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes were annihilated. A lot of people carry that oral history with them, and that's why they use the word 'invasion,' because it truly was an invasion, and I'm sure some of the Indian people will probably want to tell that as a part of the story of 400 years."
And that has some experts in history upset, since the advent of Jamestown provided what later became the United States with important introductions to Christian common law, a republican representative government, the first Protestant Christian worship service, and its first interracial marriage.
Wade's comments came in an interview with Voice of America, and highlighted the revisions that are going on regarding the history of Jamestown – and America. It also left a message about how important are the disputes over the political perspective now being applied retroactively to America's history.
"I believe this is one of the most significant battles of our day," said Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum Ministries and the founder of the Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America's Providential History, Vision Forum's own series of events to celebrate the quadracentennial. "It is the battle for our history."
He cited the fact that the Jamestown settlers arrived with not only an economic commission from England, but orders to spread the Good News of Jesus, noting one of the founders of Jamestown, Richard Hakluyt, wrote, "Wee shall by plantinge there inlarge the glory of the gospel, and from England plante sincere religion, and provide a safe and a sure place to receave people from all partes of the worlds that are forced to flee for the truthe of Gods worde."
And he said the Bible, in Psalm 78, tells readers, "If we don't tell the great deeds of God, our children will lose hope." But he said the secular perspectives that are the focal point of the contemporary events miss that Christian perspective, and that will end up being costly.
"We are destroying our children's generation by robbing them of history. They don't know who they are or where they came from," he told WND in an interview.
Phillips said America is known world-wide for its celebration, from the millions of dollars worth of fireworks ignited each 4th of July to the major festivities launched for other events, such as the 1976 Bicentennial.
But now, for the first time ever, the nation is ashamed of itself, so ashamed, he noted, Jamestown 2007 officials have banned the use of the word "celebration" in their materials.
On the other hand, they still are interested in attracting paying visitors to the region to fund their various activities, so they have turned this year's acknowledgment of the history into a bashfest.
"For America's 400th birthday, what should be a celebration of gratitude to the Lord is fast becoming an homage to revisionist historiography and political correctness," Phillips said.
For example, an event called, "State of the Black Union 2007: America's 400th Anniversary: The African American Imprint on America," already has been held. Its goal was a conversation about "how African Americans have made this nation great and how we must continue to fight to make the state of Black America a more perfect union."
Two other discussion headlines have included: "A Concentrated Diversity: The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860," and "The Ecology of Jamestown – Origin of Environmental Injustice in America."
Said one commentary by Ken Adams, a tribal leader: "The British government finally sent enough people to take over all the land, which the Indians owned, and in the process of the wars that followed, 90 percent of an entire human race of people died."
"Yet, by God's grace, grateful Christians have an opportunity to officially celebrate America's great heritage on her 400th birthday," Phillips said.
His Vision Forum Ministries will be rallying Americans "from shore to shore to Jamestown" to the "Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America's Providential History."
Those events will be June 11-16, and will highlight the significant role Jamestown played in creating the United States and its freedoms. There is a fourfold vision for Vision Forum's plans: to leave a witness for future generations that America did not forget the providential hand of God and Americans are a thankful people willing to honor the faith of their fathers, to create an exciting event that gives families an unforgettable experience, to leave a record of poetry and literature for following generations, and to leave "rocks of remembrance and Ebenezers of hope" that will provide vision for children of today.
A featured guest will be Harrison Tyler, the man whose father called for the Tercentenary 100 years ago and whose grandfather, the nation's 10th president, John Tyler, Jr., keynoted the 250th celebration.
Kevin Crossett, a spokesman for the formal Jamestown 2007 organization, said the historians decided to highlight free enterprise, representative government and cultural diversity in this year's "commemoration."
"That's not to say that other legacies are not important. These are the three that … are the most well-known," he told WND. Besides, other organizations are marking the Christian legacy, he said. "It's not being promoted as such from our office."
He said the use of the "commemoration" was changed from "celebration," as the events have been known for the last 200 years, because of objections from blacks and Native Americans.
"When we started planning the culturally diverse aspects of the Jamestown story, the African-American and Indian communities said, 'This isn't necessary a celebration for us,'" he said. "Those words struck home."
While that may have happened, Phillips notes that the actions resulting from those words actually is changing the history, since the settlers in Jamestown were commissioned to carry the message of Christianity, and did that in many ways.
"America's first published author was Captain John Smith, who described the arrival of the Jamestown settlers in 1607 as an act of providential goodness. America's spiritual 'first family,' the Mathers of New England, authored numerous works on Providence. America's first charter as an independent nation, the Declaration of Independence, announced that our ability to persevere as a nation rested in our 'firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.' Just weeks before the Declaration was signed, America's first great political mentor, the Rev. John Witherspoon (himself a signer of the Declaration and the tutor to one sixth of the members of our Constitutional Convention) authored 'The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.' Even America's first president regularly invoked the God of providence in his writings," he said.
"Thus, gratitude to the sovereign God for His many providential blessings is not only biblical, it is richly American," Phillips said.
"In 1807 for the two hundredth, 1957 for the 250th, 1907 for the three hundredth, and then again in 1957 for the 350th anniversary celebration of America's birthday at Jamestown, our nation was enthusiastically reminded of these glorious acts of Divine Providence," Phillips noted.
For example, in 1857, former President John Tyler, Jr. gave a three-hour keynote oration tracing 250 years of providence, perseverance, and blessing.
Here amid the graves of our ancestors, we renew our pledges to those principles of self-government, which have been consecrated by their examples through two-hundred and fifty years; and implore that great Being who so often and signally preserved them through trials and difficulties, to continue to our country His protecting guardianship and care.
Phillips said the more liberal members of the media have joined the secularization and diminution of Jamestown's contributions. "A town which disappeared into the mud," is from the New York Times while the Virginia Gazette said Jamestown was "not worth it."
"For a whole year or more we shall celebrate the fact that a bunch of British buffoons who knew nothing of what they were doing colonized a swamp for the sake of Christianizing Indians," the paper said.
If such efforts are successful, "ours will be the first generation in the history of America at the time of a landmark historical celebration to officially and publicly despise our birthright and the providential hand of God in the life of our people," Phillips noted.
The event planning has been going on for years, and it was in 2000 when Congress passed the Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission Act, setting up the organizing structure for the events now going on.
The official propaganda from that group carries it even further. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine told an early event that those previous celebrations "did not tell the whole story," and he introduced a panel including Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Otis Moss. Moss said this nation should be required to fix "the propaganda of history," and those Jamestown settlers were guilty of mass "holocaust" and "lynchings."
The reality is that the Jamestown settlers were people, Phillips said. "The true record includes warts, bumps, and bruises … What makes this story so compelling is that God worked through remarkable but flawed men to advance a mission that was based on a prime directive of New Testament Christianity. The result – a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."
Vikings?
Waging war on others, invading others. I think they're the native culture for at least the last couple thousand years.
Arabs solely in Saudi Arabia as well.
Isn't that Apache Territory?
...which makes my point even better than I did. The vast vast majority of the continent was unused, and therefore rightfully unclaimed.
Hell, We celebrate D-Day !!!! These people are out of control. It is TIME to cull the herd .
Shades of the hand-wringing we saw in 1992, which was the 500th year after Columbus' 1492 discovery.
The native indian tribes had their own culture of warring against each other for territories. They took land from each other...killing, etc. along the way.
But, they are viewed as peaceable victims...innocent of any such behavior until the big bad 'invaders' came to grab their land and kill them.
FAct is fact, history is history. Corruption and twisting of facts and history is criminal.
It wasn't an invasion. It was a settlement. Yes, it is unfortunate that the partially hunter/gather, partially agricultural inhabitants were essentially pushed out over time by the newly established agricultural civilization, but Jamestown is a founding act of our society and is worth commemorating in a positive way, even if we can at the same time recall the unfortunate things that happened to the Indians. This unadulterated negativism is the typical self-loathing hatred of Liberals for their own Western civilization.
Poppycock.
Yeh, why CAN't you celebrate an invasion? I'd go there if they were doing it right. But NO, they have to self-flagellate about it. GAG.
OK, I contacted them on their website and told them that I, for one, would NEVER come to their stupid Quadricentennial if all they were going to do was self-flaggelate. You can do the same.
THESE moronic liberals do not own our history. It is not theirs to remake. They need to hear from EVERY Freeper.
I'm thinking the Vikings would still be a-raping and a-pillaging if it were not for Christianity. And I may be wrong, but I just suspect those who enjoyed the former ways were not subdued by tea parties (speaking of MY heritage, by the way).
Folks, we have got to start fighting back agains this type of thinking. Right now we are like the frog in the frying pan.
I am sick to death of the loony left cutting off all debate and discussion on any particular issue. I am sick of the left criminalizing "thought crimes".
Thnink about it: in our lifetimes, the left has mainstreamed (not to equal status, but actually favored status) a mental disorder of same sex attraction.
'They took land from each other' -- and all etcetera. Don't forget the skinning victims alive stuff and all the really barbarian things they did.
When I visited my great-grandmother's hometown in Kansas, there was a display in the museum of graphic pictures of what the Indians had done to the settlers, with a sign explaining it all in great detail, "SO THAT WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET." I loved that museum.
Scottish Shortbread, please.
Interesting argument...does that mean that any unused land here in the US is up for grabs by foreign "colonists?"
The Left has been scrubbing history for decades. They won't be happy until any memory of the Creator or those who have served Him, is gone from all records and all minds.
Although prior to contact with the Europeans the Indians were illiterate and left no written records, much is known about their history of constant and savage warfare beginning with the writings of early European explorers such as Jacque Cartier in the first half of the 1500s, who described the wars then going on as well as oral traditions of what had gone on before.
Indian wars were shockingly brutal and bloody affiars, and there was little of what the British colonists would recognize as honor or decency involved. In Indian attacks such as in the French and Indian War and Pontiac's rebellion, atrocities that would be labeled as war crimes by any objective observer (were not the fact that Indians were the perpetrators) were the rule, not the exception, in the manner of Indian attacks. Modern psychologists, if told of the details of a typical Indian attack on settlers, but not the identity of the perpetrators, would no doubt conclude that the persons carrying it out must necessarily be demented psychopaths, because of the nature of the violence perpetrated.
As one writer described: "Typically, a group of five to twenty warriors would kill the husband while he labored in the fields, then rush the house. The family would be gathered together; the women were taken for slaves; old people were immediately tomahawked and scalped, as were infants, unless their mother could expeditiously carry them. If time permitted, teenagers, children, and women were raped or sodomized, the house plundered of all useful items, then burnt, along with the barn and other outbuildings. All of the livestock would be slaughtered. While the main body moved on to the next farm, a couple of warriors led the captives back to the Indian towns as quickly as possible. Anyone who delayed the march was immediately killed and scalped." Cruelty was the rule, not the exception, for the Indians.
Historians try to excuse or justify the violence against innocent people, on the grounds that the treaties entered into the by leaders of the Indians in which they surrendered various tracts of land were not good bargains for their side. Perhaps not in some cases, but nevertheless historians breezily dismiss the value of goods offered to the Indians as if they had no value. To a people who lived by hunting and had no manufacturing ability, the value of a musket or a high quality steel knife is enormous. What a vast improvement it was to the Indian to be able to hunt buffalo and deer using a firearm instead of a hand-made bow and arrow or a wooden spear. How much easier to skin an animal using a steel knife instead of a sharp rock. These types of items had enormous utility to the Indians, who placed great value on them, as well as on manufactured clothing.
The Indians were actually far fewer in number than most people commonly believe, and the biggest factor in their demise was disease, not casualties in their wars against the colonists. Just as much of Europe had been wiped out by plague, smallpox and other diseases in earlier centuries, so it happened to the Indians. It was inevitable that sooner or later the dwellers in North America would come into contact with people of other continents and be exposed to new diseases. This was not the "fault" of the settlers.
This country was built by white men with guns get over it.
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