by Lord Omlette.
Created 2007-11-22 901 BMT.
Updated 2010-11-25 787 BMT.
THE STORY OF THANKSGIVING used to be up @ maxspeak, but that blog has since disappeared. This mirror was taken from the google cache. Summary: the Puritan Christian fundamentalists, of whom the Pilgrims were a subgroup, were murderous, treacherous swine who made a treaty with the indigenous people around Plymouth until they had enough forces to wipe them out. This they later did with smallpox and guns, unless they were able to sell them into slavery, all of course for the greater glory of God.
Wait a minute. That wasn't right. Here's how it goes.
The Puritans in England were subject to religious persecution, lo unto death. They needed a homeland where they could live in peace and survive as a people. They tried to settle in the Netherlands, but it proved an inhospitable place. Only the possibility of the New World seemed to beckon. It was a land without a people, and they were a people without a land.
Upon settling around Plymouth, the first Puritans (Pilgrims) established peaceful relations with the Wampanoag Nation. The Wampanoag were subject to aggression by other Native American groups, so their alliance with the Puritans became an outpost of peace and freedom in the New World.
As more Puritans arrived, they required more breathing space. The Wampanoag, like other indigenous peoples, lacked a modern system of property rights. They did not see fit to build fences, put up street signs, or establish variable-rate mortgages. The Puritans remedied these defects of indigenous culture. It just happened that the Puritans ended up owning all the property, and native Americans themselves became classified as property.
Taking umbrage at this advance of Judeo-Christian civilization, the indigenous people resorted to terrorism. Some were sufficiently maniacal as to sacrifice their own lives, for the sake or murdering peaceful settlers. There was a virtual cult of death. Underlying this irrationality was a primitive religious belief system that celebrated exterminating one's enemies, as well as the consumption of locoweed and psychodelic mushrooms.
As a matter of self-defense, the Puritans were compelled to rise up and expel both the terrorists and the societies that nurtured them. Those Native Americans that were willing to live in peace were provided with alternative living arrangements, under the protection of the new government. Sadly, they proved unequal to the rigors of modern society and to diseases brought over from Europe and eventually died out.
Today we celebrate Thanksgiving as a tribute to their memory, and to the invaluable assistance they unselfishly provided the Christian entrance into America.
Now please pass the gravy.
The Story of Thanksgiving is NOT copyright Lord Omlette. The code at the bottom of this page is buggy. I gotta fix it.
"The Story of Thanksgiving" is Copyright © 2010 Lord Omlette. If you know otherwise, hollar.
If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
-Bruce Schneier
-added 2003-03-11