Posted on 11/22/2023 3:22:26 PM PST by FreedomPoster
Each year at this time, schoolchildren all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.
It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.
The official story has the Pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America, and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620–21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.
The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.
The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hard-working or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years because they refused to work in the field. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."
In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.
But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.
What happened? After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.
This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take only what he needed.
This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that were most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.
To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with markets, and that was the end of the famines.
Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609–10, called "The Starving Time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty. Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a relatively free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth.
Ponce de León
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Ponce-de-Leon
Born into a noble family, Ponce de León was a page in the royal court of Aragon and later fought in a campaign against the Moors in Granada. It is possible that he began his career of exploration in 1493 as part of Christopher Columbus’s second expedition to the New World.
Historically speaking, it was the Mass and feast celebrating the founding of St Augustine Fla-in 1565.
There is always the Scandanavian legend of Leif Erikson.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leif-Erikson
Leif Erikson, (flourished 11th century), Norse explorer widely held to have been the first European to reach the shores of North America. The 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic accounts of his life show that he was a member of an early voyage to eastern North America, although he may not have been the first to sight its coast.
The second of the three sons of Erik the Red, the first colonizer of Greenland, Leif sailed from Greenland to Norway shortly before 1000 to serve among the retainers at the court of Olaf I Tryggvason, who converted him to Christianity and commissioned him to urge that religion upon the Greenland settlers. According to Eiríks saga rauða (“Erik the Red’s Saga”), while returning to Greenland in about 1000, Leif was blown off course and landed on the North American continent, where he observed forests with excellent building timber and grapes, which led him to call the new region Vinland (“Land of Wine”). On his return to Greenland, he proselytized for Christianity and converted his mother, who built the first church in Greenland, at Brattahild, Erik the Red’s estate.
Buzz Aldrin. Apollo 11. Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin Aldrin, photographed July 20, 1969, during the first manned mission to the Moon’s surface. Reflected in Aldrin’s faceplate is the Lunar Module and astronaut Neil Armstrong, who took the picture.
Britannica Quiz
Exploration and Discovery
According to the Grænlendinga saga (“Saga of the Greenlanders”) in the Flateyjarbók (“Book of the Flat Islands”), considered by many scholars to be more reliable in some aspects than Eiríks saga rauða, Leif learned of the new land to the west from the Icelander Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had been storm-driven there en route to Greenland about 15 years earlier. The saga pictures Leif equipping an expedition to the new land shortly after 1000. He named the new areas according to their qualities: Helluland (“Land of Flat Rocks”), the Frobisher Bay area in the north (or possibly Cape Chidley on the northern tip of Labrador); Markland (“Land of Forests”), most likely the central coast of Labrador; and, farthest south, Vinland, possibly the area surrounding the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Further expeditions to Vinland were later made by Leif’s siblings, Thorstein (whom weather forced to turn back before he reached Vinland), Thorvald, and Freydis, as well as by the Icelander Thorfinn Karlsefni.
I am thankful that sometime early on in my fourth decade I read the pertinent sections of William Bradford’s journal on Thanksgiving morning.
Shortly thereafter I determined, like Ronald Reagan, that the Democratic party had left me.
Texans also claim that their state is the home of the first Thanksgiving. In 1598, Juan de Oñate led an expedition of Spaniards northward from Mexico through the Chihuahua Desert. They were running low on water and food when they stumbled into the Rio Grande valley, where they found water as well as plenty of ducks, geese and fish, but no turkeys. Nonetheless, they celebrated a Thanksgiving service.
In the 21st century, Juan de Oñate fell out of favor with the Wokesters, so his statue, which stood in Alcalde, NM was removed.
So how is TG a hoax?
It’s the celebration of the colonists discovering capitalism!
The Spaniards weren’t tainted with socialism in 1565, either-maybe that is why St. Augustine thrived and is the oldest continuously occupied city in the USA. If the Plymouth bunch had been less into that stuff, Plymouth might have become a city 400 years ago...
There was another “first Thanksgiving” in Florida in 1564, celebrated by French Huguenot settlers about a year before the one held by the Spaniards in St. Augustine. However, the Spaniards quickly overran this Protestant enclave and expelled its inhabitants.
Being raised on a little ranch in W. Texas, I can see how anyone not familiar with the desert and the surrounding areas finally getting out of the Chihuahua Desert and seeing water and green plants would say a mass, shoot game, and go fishing for food and celebrate...
A great book about America’s founding entitled The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall, deals with all that’s posted here and much more. If you’ve never read it and you like American history it’s a really interesting read. Hard times can produce men of character - if their hearts are yielded to their Creator.
False. Jamestown (actually James Fort and then James City during this time) was a "company town" and everything in it was the property of a corporation. It was occupied by employees of the Virginia Company. And "propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God" is the mission statement given by James I in the companies royal charter.
The "Pilgrims" were the shallowest so-called Christians to ever give lip service to the cause. Their little cult hijacked a ship bound for Jamestown and marooned their hostages in a remote location to evade authorities and established an insular and militant religious commune.
Puritans perpetrated some of the largest mass murders of the seventeenth century, and EVERY ONE of their victims was a Christian. That makes it kind of hard to call them Christians.
Yes. I like Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrams.
Why? Nothing changes. I’m sure there were just as many creeps then per capita as we see today.
Bump
Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:
Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path:
The IQ at FR has been declining for years, but that comment stands out all the same.
Thanksgiving is a celebration of the end of communism in the United States.
Conditions were so bad they were forced to eat lobster (lobster was so plentiful then it was considered a trash food).
"In 1622, Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation apologized to guests that the only dish he “could presente their friends with was a lobster…"
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