It
comes as no shock that the Brits are none too happy with current
movie "The Patriot." Let's examine some of their complaints.
The city of
Liverpool was home to the true persona of the film's ultra bad
guy, Banastre Tarleton. Never mind that this British soldier has
been continuously vilified in the southern United States since
the Revolution. Now we have the Liverpool City Council passing
a solemn resolution declaring that he was a hero, and Mayor Edwina
Clein stating that there is "no real evidence" that
he was such a bad sort.
Of course,
on a certain level this is true. Ultimately, it is not possible
to prove anything, since all communication requires that the parties
accept certain assumptions and definitions. But, I don't think
that this is what the mayor had in mind.
As if it were
still necessary to pile up evidence on Tarleton, we can refer
to an article in the February/March 1997 issue of American Heritage
magazine, in which historian Robert A. Selig describes the vicious
partisan warfare in the Revolution's southern theater of operations:
"Not
only did both sides engage in forms of battle fit only for bandits
and robbers, but the British in particular committed what could
only be described as criminal acts. . . . And the British officer
Banastre Tarleton outdid them all. Near Portsmouth, Virginia,
he hanged a pregnant woman under a sign reading, 'You will not
bear any more rebels.' "
The mayor
probably didn't mention that upon his return to Liverpool, after
the war, Tarleton got back into the family business, that included,
among other things, slave trading. Sounds like a hero to me.
Joanna Coles,
of The Times of London, takes a different tack.
"Every
nation," she writes, "has trouble dealing with its past,
but America's attitude to her own bloodthirsty background is particularly
egregious." She then attacks Christopher Columbus, and continues
by praising various politically correct iconoclastic historians,
whose actual contribution to scholarship is dubious at best.
For an Englishwoman,
a product of the all-time champ colonial subjugator country, to
prattle on like this is quite hilarious. If you want "egregious,"
Sir Ian Hamilton's willing sacrifice of his ANZAC troops at Gallipoli
in 1915 immediately comes to mind, and we're barely scratching
the surface.
But, why worry
about history? The results of their brutal policy toward the Irish
are visible to this day!
New York Post
film critic Jonathan Foreman wrote a special article for The Guardian,
headlined "How Mel Gibson Helped Turn Us Into Nazis."
Foreman goes
way off the deep end, ridiculously talking about "unusually
Aryan looking heroes, and "Third Reich boy-soldiers."
He asserts that execution of POW's never occurred in the Revolution,
but DID in WWII. One wonders how the term "Tarleton's Quarter,"
referring to his policy of doing just that, ever got started.
For good measure,
he savages the admittedly fictional scene depicting a church set
afire with people inside. As described by the director, this scene
was put in for dramatic effect. Since the arson detail was led
by a Loyalist, the scene was meant to convey the violent, sometimes
lethal confrontations between American patriots and tories.
Sadly, there
was a historical incident that closely resembles this, but it
occurred in 1944, and was perpetrated by the Germans in the French
village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Somehow, in
Foreman's fantasy world, the movie scene becomes an act of "Holocaust
revisionism" and "implicitly rehabilitates the Nazis."
With Foreman
writing for the Brits, we have the nexus of a PC hack very uncomfortable
with his own history, and a crumbling former empire both wary
of its future, and unable to confront its past.