That's me, but clowning around at the ripe age of 18. I had to crop the whole picture so you lose the whole effect, but my friend had a 1940s Chrysler, and he lived on an old southern plantation. We posed with the props and shot in black and white for vintage look.
Now I wear hats to keep the sun off that thin section.

QM, you can blame the state of Africa today on the colonial powers. It was the Belgians who created the "Hutu" and "Tutsi" designations. Hugely discriminating between the two groups and instilling the kind of resentment that would end in blood spilling. Seriously, the Belgians (and others) were absolutely savage in their colonies, cutting off limbs with machetes for not working hard enough was routine on their rubber plantations. So the locals were no strangers to ultra violence.

The colonial powers drew borders on maps all over the world, paying no heed to what religous, ethnic or tribal groups were forced together, look at the middle east, the balkans, ireland. They left such a mess behind them, even appointing corrupt dictators before they left, I dont think you can blame the Africans for not being able to clean up such a massive mess of a continent.

I know people who watch the news and they have never even heard of Ron Paul. If Ron Paul were to be elected, he'd still have to tow the line of the owners of the Great American Plantation or he'd have an accident, or perhaps be suicided.

The owner's of the Great American Plantation had very much to gain by the events of September 11, 2001. Namely, more power, more control and more money. Keep the people in constant fear, and they'll pray to their gods in government to protect them. So, sad! Too much TV and they cannot think for themselves. I saw Superman fly around the sun on TV. Many people still believe that man has walked on the moon. If you believe that, I have some ocean front property in Nebraska you need to see!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'disney, brer, rabbit, fox, bear, uncle, remus, georgia, plantation, banned' to '40s, 1946, disney, brer, rabbit, fox, bear, uncle, remus, georgia, plantation, banned' - edited by swampgirl

* Beginning with Columbus (a former slave trader and would-be Holy Crusader) the conquest of the New World began, as usual understood as a means to propagate Christianity.
* Within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island he encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six native people who, he said, "ought to be good servants ... [and] would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion."
While Columbus described the Indians as "idolators" and "slaves, as many as [the Crown] shall order," his pal Michele de Cuneo, Italian nobleman, referred to the natives as "beasts" because "they eat when they are hungry," and made love "openly whenever they feel like it."
* On every island he set foot on, Columbus planted a cross, "making the declarations that are required" - the requerimiento - to claim the ownership for his Catholic patrons in Spain. And "nobody objected." If the Indians refused or delayed their acceptance (or understanding), the requerimiento continued:

I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter in your country and shall make war against you ... and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church ... and shall do you all mischief that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him."

* Likewise in the words of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "justifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England ... to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, ... and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of the Ante-Christ."
* In average two thirds of the native population were killed by colonist-imported smallpox before violence began. This was a great sign of "the marvelous goodness and providence of God" to the Christians of course, e.g. the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, as "for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess."
* On Hispaniola alone, on Columbus visits, the native population (Arawak), a rather harmless and happy people living on an island of abundant natural resources, a literal paradise, soon mourned 50,000 dead.
* The surviving Indians fell victim to rape, murder, enslavement and spanish raids.
* As one of the culprits wrote: "So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous."
* The indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As "they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell."
* What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness:
"The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive."
Or, on another occasion:
"The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts...Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs."
* The "island's population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out." Eventually all the island's natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were "forced" to import slaves from other caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus "the Caribbean's millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century". "In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated."
* "And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitln [Mexico city] was next."
* Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other spanish conquistadors likewise sacked southern and mesoamerican civilizations in the name of Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida).
* "When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead."

Hey Ant, have you seen the movie Naked Jungle staring Charlton Heston? His whole plantation gets eaten by ants.

May issue of Scientific American has a relevant bit on US farming -- farming now uses less land, produces more food and degrades the soil less than 50 years ago. The arable land used for farming dropped 25% in the last 56 years, the total farm production increased by 166%, and the rate of soil erosion small enough that at 1982 erosion rates, after 100 years, the yields on the same land would drop only 2-4%

A monoculture has a risk of becoming easy prey to parasites (as Ford learned in his ill-fated attempt to start rubber tree plantation in Brazil), but the risk of parasites is not a worry for consumers since it's the farmer that takes the risk.

If current practices are undesirable, we should blame not the corporations, but the consumers. It's the consumer ravenous demand for lower prices that favors the streamlining that mom-and-pop farms can't provide.

The colonists were originally friends with the Indians here. Then it turned bad.

Classic. And Noah put dinosaurs and the Ark with all the other animals. Let me guess, you made a pilgrim hat and construction paper turkey every November. Yep, the colonist were friends. Just like the Spanish were friends to the Incas. Just like Southern Plantation owners (and US Presidents) were friends with African slaves. Sure, put it in a coloring book and it must be true. I'm glad to see what kind of simplistic Moran you are.

(I thought he had things bad with QM, but at least he stuck to approved wingnut talking points, this guy is going off his own script...)

Great post!

I have friends who helped with their legal fight for return. The case really exposed a very nasty, cruel and uncaring side of the British government.

Paradise Cleansed by John Pilger 10/11/04 - 'The Guardian'

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory" that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried."

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.

In the first months of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did not cover their debts.

The behavior of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart, a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities; the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they are "unbelievable".

In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation, with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we" as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize his illegal attack on Iraq.

Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win." "


Finally in 2006 Lord Justice Hooper and Mr Justice Cresswell ruled that orders made under the royal prerogative to prevent the return of the Chagos islanders to their homes were unlawful. They described as "repugnant" the action to exile the population of the islands. "The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said.

But the government are appealing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6333223.stm) and the right of return is still being denied!

(sorry for long post - but this one really gets to me!)

LOL, you and I might be the only ones that remember this though.

Anyone remember the miniseries North and South? It was the first time I noticed Patrick Swayze.

Would James Roe know that Boone Hall Plantation over in Mt. Pleasant was used as "Mount Royale" in the movie?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scQeWuWg2g8

the plantation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJx61dyaJw

Apocalypse Now (1979) Redux (2001)

Twenty-two years after its original release, a longer, expanded and restored version of the film - at three hours and about 20 minutes - was released and titled Apocalypse Now Redux. "Redux" means "returned," as from battle or exile. The new Apocalypse Now edit added 49 minutes to the original, which, depending on whether it was shown in 35mm or 70mm, with or without credits, has been clocked as running from 139 to 153 minutes. (According to Miramax, which released the new version, this new cut totals 197 minutes.)

The vibrant film with a remastered, fuller soundtrack used original material and reintegrated scenes excised from the 1979 version (to include greater character detail for Willard, his crew, and Colonel Kurtz (in a scene where he reads from an actual Time Magazine and shows how the American public was lied to), an expanded Playboy Playmates sequence after their helicopter is downed, and an additional French colonial plantation sequence). Consensus was mixed about the reworked version, although most critics felt that the additional material did only a little to enhance the film's themes or expand upon the plot. The best scenes of the film are still those found in the original version.