Early Virginians, Cannibalism, and Chemical Warfare

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

Profit was the primary reason most Mayflower colonist made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.”

In 1623 the British indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River. The British offered a toast “symbolizing eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison.

Textbooks omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. The Early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting themselves out to Indian families as servants – hardly heroic founders that a great nation requires.

Pocahontas [Disney], The Virginia Company Song, 1995

On the beaches of Virginy

There's diamonds like debris

There's silver rivers flow

And gold you pick right off a tree

With a nugget for my Winnie

And another one for me

And all the rest'll go

To The Virginia Company

It's glory, God, and gold

And The Virginia Company

The Pilgrims Arrive

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

“Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonist made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.” The Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch” in a “wilderness.” Throughout New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a park like environment. They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor and “brook of fresh water.”

Throughout New England, colonist appropriated Indian corn fields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock. This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region – Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield – end in field.

In their first year the Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of them died. They did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers. For at least a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of the meaning of the plague for New England pulpits.

Henry A. Bacon 1877: The Landing of the Pilgrims

The New England Plague - Early 1600s

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

The inhabitants of North and South America were “a remarkably healthy race” before Columbus. Ironically, their very health proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to them.

In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the plague started in southern New England. For decades, British and French fisherman had fished off the Massachusetts coast. It is likely that these fishermen transmitted some illness to the people they met. The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale in comparison. Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies lay devastated.

Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the infestation with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, mostly smallpox, struck repeatedly. These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century. Their net result was that the British, for their first fifty years in New England, would face no real Indian challenge. Indeed the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoag Indians.

Atrocity Propaganda

Public Opinion Series

Atrocity Propaganda

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda

By establishing a baseline lie and painting the enemy as a monster, atrocity propaganda serves as an intelligence function, since it wastes the time and resources of the enemy's counterintelligence services to defend itself. The propagandists' goal is to influence perceptions, attitudes, opinions, and policies; often targeting officials at all levels of government. Atrocity propaganda is violent, gloomy, and portrays doom to help rile up and get the public excited. It dehumanizes the enemy, making them easier to kill. Wars have become more serious, and less gentlemanly; the enemy must now be taken into account not merely as a man, but as a fanatic.

CNN Headlines – 28 Oct thru 07 Nov, 2014.

28 Oct 2014

ISIS allegedly using poison gas

29 Oct 2014

ISIS executes 45 prisoners

30 Oct 2014

ISIS executes 400 tribesmen in 48 hours

30 Oct 2014

Yazidi Women Sold, Raped, Enslaved by ISIS

30 Oct 2014

'Treated like cattle': Yazidi women sold, raped, enslaved by ISIS

03 Nov 2014

ISIS brainwashing children into killers?

04 Nov 2014

Report: Children say ISIS captured, beat them on way home from exams

06 Nov 2014

Video shows ISIS fighters trading women

07 Nov 2014

Freed prisoners describe ISIS torture

Poison gas, executions, rape, enslaving, brainwashing children, trading women, torture. Searched BBC news, did not find similar headlines of such atrocity veracity.

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpt

The selling of America on the Persian Gulf War was a public relations triumph. Its leading man, Saddam Hussein, was cast as pure villain complete with menacing leer and malevolent mustache. It had Iraqi soldiers snatching infants from hospital incubators and leaving them on the floor to die while Iraqi helicopters hovered over Kuwait City and Iraqi tanks rolled down the streets. One detail was left out of that version of the war, however: the fact that it was crafted by one of America’s biggest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, in a campaign bought and paid for by rich Kuwaitis who were Saddam’s archenemies. Hill and Knowlton’s war against Iraq was hardly a PR first.

Nayirah testimony later discovered to be a fabrication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony)

On October 10, 1990 Nayirah was the last to testify at the Caucus. In her oral testimony, which lasted 4 minutes, she stated:

I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital with twelve other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The other women were from twenty to thirty years old. While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. [crying] It was horrifying.

That night, portions of the testimony aired on ABC's Nightline and NBC Nightly News reaching an estimated audience between 35 and 53 million Americans. Seven senators cited Nayirah's testimony in their speeches backing the use of force. President George Bush repeated the story at least ten times in the following weeks. Her account of the atrocities helped to stir American opinion in favor of participation in the Gulf War.

Hill & Knowlton - It is unclear how much of Nayirah's testimony was coached. Though the firm was supposed to provide only stylistic help, it was reported that H&K "provided witnesses, wrote testimony, and coached the witnesses for effectiveness."

Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002, Excerpts

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform “Peace Without Victory.” That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. There was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, such as Belgian babies with their arms torn off.

It Is What It Is