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.