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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Especially for Ducky

Rush Limbaugh Tells ‘The True Story of Thanksgiving’

Posted by Warren

 Partial transcript follows:


“The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century… The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority.
“Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.  A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World,” across the Atlantic Ocean, “where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.
“On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.  The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments,” the Bible. The Pilgrims were religious, and they came here to establish freedom of religion; they fled across an entire ocean to escape religious persecution.


“They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.  But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one.   And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning.
“During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.” Many of them lived on the Mayflower while houses and shelter were being built. “When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but” even with all this “they did not yet prosper!  This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end.
“Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.” The Bible. The original Thanksgiving was a thanks to God.  It was not a thanks to the Indians.  This is not to disparage the Indians or the Native Americans.  The Pilgrims did not.  But it was not a thanks to the Indians for saving the Pilgrims.  The Pilgrims thanked God.  But it’s more detailed than this.
“Here is the part that has been omitted.” Here’s the part that the Huffing and Puffington Post either doesn’t know or omitted today. “The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors…” They didn’t have the money to do this.  They were beholden to the people who funded them, and they entered into contracts with these “merchant-sponsors in London [that] called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.
“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.  They were going to distribute it equally.” Everybody was going to get an equal share of what everybody combined produced. “All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks.” And it was this way by contract, by design.  It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California — and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.”
They could grow no other than organic. “Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.” It just wasn’t working. There wasn’t any prosperity. From his own journal, “He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and whatever they produced was theirs. The overages they could sell or share or do whatever they wanted with.  But what happened essentially was that Bradford was “thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.”
If you’re saying it to yourself, you’re right. The Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism, and it fails.  It did not work.  “What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!” If everybody got the same no matter what the end result was and if everybody got the same no matter how hard they worked, they were all essentially members of a union, and all socialized.
“But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims decided early on,” it didn’t take them long to realize it didn’t work and “to scrap it permanently.” You’re not taught this!  Nobody is taught this.  Even today in the true story of Thanksgiving, it was an epic failure of socialism.  “What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.”
Remember, this book is written 23 years ago, or maybe 24 years ago. It’s 1992.
This is Bradford writing: “‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing — as if they were wiser than God,’  Bradford wrote. ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,” without being paid for it, “that was thought injustice.’
Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself?  What’s the point?  Bradford was saying, “It’s not working here.  There’s no personal incentive,” and there were sloths.  Not all these people were cream of the crop.  Some of them sat around, didn’t do anything while others did everything.  “The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next?” Free enterprise. “They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.
“Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products,” sell whatever overages they had. “And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford [in his journal], ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.'” It’s an amazing story what happened. “In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves.”  This is where it gets really good, folks.  If you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, that I was taught in school. “So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians.”
They produced what they needed for themselves and they started doing business with the Indians. They “exchanged goods.  The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.'” It was a rousing economic success after an attempt to establish themselves under socialism. It was not the name they knew.  They used “commune,” “communal,” and so forth. But it did not work.  And they had such great success that it began a migration of others who heard about it and wanted in on the action.
And the first Thanksgiving was the Pilgrims indeed getting together with the Indians, with whom they were trading.  There’s no question the Indians assisted them when they landed, but it’s not true that the Pilgrims then took advantage of ’em, conquered them, killed them, and took their land.  They ended up trading with them. All of this, this whole story is written about in a way that eight to 10-year-olds understand it and are taken right to it in the first Rush Revere book: Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims. I was never taught this.  I didn’t know it, until I started researching that book back 1992. That was the first I had heard of why the Pilgrims were really thankful.  It was thanks to God.  It was the virtue of gratitude, which is all through George Washington’s inaugural Thanksgiving address.
Happy Thanksgiving
Warren

29 comments:

  1. Yup, and interestingly enough, the area that the pilgrims landed on was originally held by a rather vicious tribe who amazingly enough ALL DIED the year or so before the pilgrims arrived. Ya don't think, G-D had anything to do with that, do ya?
    My late husband's family were also pilgrims who came to Massachusetts in 1635, with the Cahill's and the Lincoln's. 2 brothers from the family went to the Cherokee as missionaries, married Cherokee wives and went to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
    Intrinsically entwined in the history of this country...

    tmw

    ReplyDelete
  2. _________ On Thanksgiving _________

    Of all events parading through the year
    Not one can to this humble feast compare.
    To feel or offer thanks today is rare ––
    However well our lives remain in gear.

    As ease became the norm, we soon forgot
    None of Plymouth’s Pilgrims felt regret.
    Knowing death and cruel privation’s threat
    Spoiled not their faith, or made them curse their lot.

    Given much yet now we seem to crave
    Immeasurable bounty we don’t need ––
    Voluptuous excess revealing Greed ––
    Indifference to the noble, fine and brave.

    No pilgrim, pioneer or great tycoon
    Grew up as a self-indulgent goon.


    ~ FreeThinke

    I hope everyone has a beautifulThanksgiving Day, and remembers always to count their blessings –– even in the midst of stress and turmoil.

    O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good
    For His mercy endureth forever ...


    ~ Psalms

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh my, where to start.

    1. Limbaugh and "truth" in the same statement is a little dicey.

    2. Freedom of religion is never mentioned in the Compact and the Pilgrims would have had none of it.

    3. Thanksgiving was initiated by Lincoln and had nothing to do with the Pilgrims.

    4. What he describes is communism not socialism. Democratic socialism is not opposed to a market economy.

    5. The initial failures of the colon should blame the colonists attempts to use Old World plants in New England.

    6. Initial refusal to use local foods such as lobster and oysters.

    7. You'd have to move in pretty mysterious ways to name prominent Englishmen who were capitalists at the time of Plymouth Colony.

    8. Survival of the colony probably had more to do with an influx from England of settlers wanting to get in on the fur and tobacco trade which stabilized the population.

    9. Their model may well have been early Christian groups who shared property.

    10. Maybe what Rush meant to say is that a Christian form of social organization was tried, and it didn't work.


    Anyway, it's an interesting topic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Nostradumbass
      "1. Limbaugh and "truth" in the same statement is a little dicey."

      Kind of like mentioning you and educated in the same statement.

      "2. Freedom of religion is never mentioned in the Compact and the Pilgrims would have had none of it."

      Time for a real history lesson, oh ignorant one. Only 41 of the 102 original passengers were "Pilgrims". The passengers on the Mayflower were divided into two groups, Pilgrims, who had fled England for Holland and the rest of the passengers, called "strangers" by the Pilgrims. The strangers included merchants, craftsmen, skilled workers, indentured servants, and several young orphans. No royalty, they were common people. About one-third of them were children.

      William Brewster and the other Pilgrim leaders had secured the right to settle on land claimed by the Virginia Company near the mouth of the Hudson River. To raise money for the voyage the Pilgrims signed a contract with a group of London stockholders. In return the stockholders would share in the profits of the colony. The Pilgrims had rounded up the strangers to increase the chances of success.

      (If you don't know anything about how Chartered British Companies worked, research it yourself. I have little patience for the intellectually lazy.)

      William Bradford wrote, that 'several strangers made discontented and mutinous speeches'. They argued that, since the Cape Cod area was outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, its rules and regulations no longer applied. Some of the strangers threatened to do as they pleased "for none had power to command them".

      I'll pick up from here later, a turkey is calling me.

      Delete
    2. The Pilgrims decided that they needed a temporary government authority as Britain was 3000 miles away and such authority could only come from the people themselves.

      Aboard the Mayflower, by necessity, the Pilgrims and strangers made a written compact among themselves. It bound the signers into a "Civil Body Politic" for the purpose of passing "just and equal Laws for the general good of the Colony."

      So freedom of religion isn't mentioned but the entire enterprise was organized by the Pilgrims to attain freedom of their own religion and attempt to isolate themselves from what they saw as a corrupting influence on their posterity. Which has little or nothing to do with the point of the story.

      "3. Thanksgiving was initiated by Lincoln and had nothing to do with the Pilgrims."

      Really Nostradumbass?
      Have a look at what Wikipedia has to say about it.
      Thanksgiving Day, is a public holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States. It originated as a harvest festival. Thanksgiving has been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789, after a proclamation by George Washington. It has been celebrated as a federal holiday every year since 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens," to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.

      Not my favorite source but when you're right you're right.

      "4. What he describes is communism not socialism. Democratic socialism is not opposed to a market economy."

      I'm not up for any verbal fencing with you, you bring a Nerf ball to a gunfight. There is no difference at all between Communism, Socialism and so-called Democratic Socialism to those whose lives are ruined or destroyed by them.

      Practically, by definition it was "Democratic Socialism". Only men voted (at that time only men voted anywhere) and almost all of the men, both Pilgrims and strangers and including 2 of the indentured servants, voted for it. They voted by signing the Mayflower Compact.

      And now another break for me. The turkey is screaming to be stuffed.

      Delete
    3. "5. The initial failures of the colon should blame the colonists attempts to use Old World plants in New England."

      That's not what William Bradford wrote:

      "The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them."

      Do you understand his prose?

      Proceeding this in Bradford's writings was the solution:
      "All this while no supply {i.e. of food} was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

      Delete
    4. Warren,
      And now another break for me. The turkey is screaming to be stuffed.

      LOL!

      May your family gathering be a time of rejoicing -- in spite of certain circumstances.

      Wish that Mr. AOW and I were there to enjoy Master Chef Warren's Thanksgiving Feast!

      Delete
    5. The turkey is done but I am not. The potatoes are petitioning for justice and I shall deliver!

      And to all, and especially you my Lady, Happy Thanksgiving.

      Delete
    6. Warren,
      I think that I might be able to eat small portions this evening.

      Our fridge is bursting with food from the homeschool group. I'm eyeing the turkey bird and the stuffing in particular.

      Delete
    7. Wow Warren. That was some rebuttal solidly stated. IOW, I think you've already stuffed the turkey or in this case the Duck.

      Good to see you back, AOW..

      Delete
    8. Waylon,
      Nobody can do a rebuttal like Warren!

      I'm trying to get back into my normal routine, although I won't be up and running at full speed for a while. Next week, Warren will have the keys. But I'll be around as my health allows me.

      Delete
    9. I'm not going further with the frisking. AOW's link below answers any unfinished points.

      Delete
  4. ... oh, were any farmers or tradesmen on the original ship's manifest?

    That might inform the cause of the original failures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I will answer this being that I don't believe that AOW's link addresses the subject.

      Some of the strangers were tradesmen and recruited for that reason some of the Pilgrims were also tradesmen. The occupations I have seen mentioned were farmers, ironsmith, carpenter, cobbler, baker and one military man (Miles Standish a stranger) who was the leader of the Plymouth Colony's militia. Practically all of the Pilgrims were, at least, familiar with rudimentary/subsistence farming or they would have starved in England or Holland.

      They weren't familiar with using a dead fish as fertilizer under a corn plant but the Indians showed them that trick. Corn uses much more fertilizer than low energy crops which they also planted.

      They were to live off their ships stores the first year but were forced to use up many of their ships stores before they landed.

      The reason for that is HERE!

      Delete
  5. I'm astonished to hear that Rush (?) had not heard why the pilgrims gave thanks growing up. So many lessons here. The Virginia colony faced the same issue: getting lazy people to work, and had a similar solution. How many times do we have to do this??

    Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And I hope AOW is recovering in good hands.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Baysider,
      How many times do we have to do this??

      Until "we" get the reality through thick, utopian heads.

      Delete
  6. Happy Thanksgiving, Warren...I'll be thinking about you; I know this won't be the easiest of holidays...

    terrific post...made my day.
    Now if we can only get Americans to UNDERSTAND.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brunnen Hochwissenschaft said

      As long as you continue to allow foul minded perverts, snide dissidents, morons and merchants of malice to pee in your punchbowl, fewer and fewer decent people will want to attend your parties.

      Delete
    2. Brunnen,
      I'm not so sure that decent people don't attend the parties.

      And these snide dissidents, morons and merchants of malice have both educational and entertainment value. I say, "Let the Left show their tails and thereby turn off people to the Leftist ideology." It happens.

      Delete
  7. Thanksgiving starts with thanks for mere survival,
    
Just to have made it through another year
    
With everyone still breathing. But we share

    So much beyond the outer roads we travel;

    Our interweavings on a deeper level,

    The modes of life that souls alone can share,

    The unguessed blessings of our being here,

    The warp and weft that no one can unravel.
    So I give thanks for our deep coinherence
    
Inwoven in the web of Gods own grace,

    Pulling us through the grave and gate of death.

    I thank Him for the truth behind appearance,
    
I thank Him for his light in every face,

    I thank Him for you all, with every breath!


    ~ Malcolm Quite

    ReplyDelete
  8. Happy Thanksgiving AOW to you and the Mr.!!! xoxox

    ReplyDelete
  9. Replies
    1. I wish I would have found that link!
      :^)

      Delete
    2. Warren,
      I lucked out. The essay popped into one of my email accounts -- from Patriot Post.

      Delete
  10. _______ On Giving Thanks _______

    Once upon a time, we knew that life
    Never guarantees us anything,
    Given that, why not just plunge a knife
    Into your heart? No form of nannying
    Vitiates vicissitude, and yet
    Imagination hopes to set aside
    Natural Law which says w’re all in debt.
    God, the Source of Life, can just provide
    The chance to be whatever we can be.
    Happiness is found along the way ––
    Achieving what we can with Charity.
    No panacea can this truth gainsay.
    Kings and Vassals –– equal in God’s sight ––
    Should each give thanks as they fight the good fight.


    ~ FreeThinke

    ReplyDelete

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