From: "William Shannon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>The Nazis, er, the Redcoats are coming!
>
>The savage soldiers in "The Patriot" act more like the Waffen SS than
>actual British troops. Does this movie have an ulterior motive?
Can't speak for any potential 'ulterior motive', but the British in the
southern campaign, especially "Butcher" Tarleton, were especially
savage, so much so they began to alienate their loyalist supporters...
>July 03, 2000 | The week before "The Patriot" opened in the United
>States, the British press lit up with furious headlines. "Truth is first
>casualty in Hollywood's War," read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another
>story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson's character was titled,
>"The Secret Shame of Mel's New Hero." The accompanying articles complained
>that the new Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as
>"bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers" and "bloodthirsty
>child-killers."
Well, the PC element in Great Britain may not like the depiction, but
it doesn't change the FACT that that is exactly how the British troop
acted in the Carolinas...
>The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the
>film "racist" in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the
>latest in a series of films like "Titanic," "Michael Collins" and "The
>Jungle Book" remake that have depicted the British as "treacherous,
>cowardly, evil [and] sadistic." Roberts had a theory: "With their own
>record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for
>four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project
>their historical guilt onto someone
>else."
Perhaps...but the historical FACT is that the British troops in the
Revolutionary War utilized native Americans, most notably the Iroquois
nation, in its campaign against the American forces...and the troops
containing the native Americans perpetrated some God-awful
atrocities....
Of course, so did the Americans...that was the way it was, each side
committed atrocities, and that was true whether it was between Great
Britain and its troublesome colonists to the west, or a war between
neighboring Indian tribes or one between neighboring European
nations...
It wasn't until after WWI that nations considered anything along the
lines of a "Geneva Convention" delineating 'rules of war'...before
that, anything went, and usually did...
>I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street's pundits will be
>after they have actually seen the movie. "The Patriot" will not open in
>England until August, but when it does, Brits will see a supposedly
>authentic historical epic that radically rewrites the known history of the
>Revolutionary War. It does so by casting George III's redcoats as
>cartoonish paragons of evil who commit one monstrous -- but wholly invented
>-- atrocity after another. In one scene, the most harrowing of the film,
>redcoats round up a village of screaming women and children and old men,
>lock them in a church and set the
>whole chapel on fire. If you didn't know anything about the
>Revolution, you might actually believe the British army in North America
>was made up of astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do
>this kind of thing -- as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the
>Nazi SS. Yet no action of the sort ever happened during the war for
>independence, but an eerily identical war crime -- one of the most
>notorious atrocities of World
>War II -- was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944.
Perhaps not...but "Butcher" Tarleton got his nickname when, after
roaming the Carolina countryside with his troops, setting fire to
various rebel establishments, they came upon a band of rebels who
sought to surrender. Instead of accepting their surrender like a
gentleman, he and his troops set upon their victims with their
bayonets, and continued the slaughter for over a quarter of an hour,
circling back and repeatedly stabbing those they'd already downed,
making sure no one was left alive...
The British in the northern campaign were relatively more civilized...
>"The Patriot" is a movie that doesn't "get" patriotism -- in either a
>modern or the 18th century sense of the word. The only memorable, explicit
>political sentiment voiced comes when Gibson's character makes the rather
>Tory comment that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man
>3,000 miles away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away. The
>deliberate lacuna demonstrates a total lack of understanding of, or even a
>kind of hostility to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding
>fathers.
But it DOES portray the sentiment of the majority of colonists...
>"The Patriot" presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts
>unusually Aryan-looking heroes
Considering the majority of whites living in the colonies at the time
were of English, Scots, Irish, and French extraction, this 'Aryan' look
is not surprising...
Is the 'pc' view now that we should show the typical American colonist
of the late 1770s as a latino?
>and avoids any democratic or political context
>in its portrayal of the Revolutionary War.
Well, as an ex-history major (and American colonial history at that), I
would also be glad to see 'any democratic or political context in its
portrayal of the Revolutionary War'...but I also realize that if the
movie DID, it would be a real snoozer for the majority of the viewing
public...
Think about it...how much did YOU pay attention to the statistics of
the causes of the war when YOU were in history class in school? ;-)
>In one scene towheaded preteens are armed by their father and turned
>into the equivalent of the Werwolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was
>thought to have recruited from the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla
>attacks against the invading Allies.
This review is obviously written by someone firmly in the 'pc' camp...
No one had to 'turn' colonial youths into anything...it was SOP for
boys (and not uncommonly girls also) to learn to shoot a gun almost as
soon as they could walk. Not only was it expected that they would do
their part to help put food on the family's table, but it was also
expected that they would take part in defending their family and
community, often partaking in the local militia...
Almost half of the militia that faced the British troops on the Concord
town green in April, 1775, were below the age of 18....many were no
older than 12 or 13...
As were many of the soldiers in the American army during the 8 years of
the ensuing war...
>In the film's most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the
>foreigner
The British were hardly considered foreigners at the time, since the
colonists also considered themselves British...it is only over the span
of time that the conflict has been turned into one of 'those foreign
British', but at the time it was more a civil war between colonists who
were British citizens and fellow British citizens who remained loyal to
the crown...
>In one scene in "The Patriot," the British regulars murder wounded
>American POWs.
As I described above, this is indeed historical FACT.
>In another, they order the execution of an American soldier captured
>in uniform. Both were common occurrences on the Eastern Front of World
>War II, but such war crimes by regular troops "never happened" in the
>Revolutionary War, says American Heritage magazine editor Richard Snow.
Strange, the History Channel has been showing "The Revolutionary War"
marathon all day, where such atrocities were discussed as fact.
>Snow says he understands the outrage in the British press. "I think
>that [they] should be upset. I would be pretty sore if I saw a British
>production of Shaw's 'Devil's Disciple' and it had Americans >bayonetting
>the wounded after the Battle of Bennington."
Since it didn't happen, it wouldn't be historical fact. But it IS fact
that Tarleton bayonetted wounded American soldiers who COULD be
describeds as POWs, since they DID surrender...
>There was one major case of British regulars burning a town during
>the Revolution. It was Groton, Conn., and the troops were under the
>command of Benedict Arnold.
Gee...I guess the victims of the burned Connecticut towns of New Haven
and Ridgefield may have felt the burning of their burgs was
'irregular', but they were burnt by the British nonetheless...well
before Arnold joined their ranks.
And point of FACT...Groton did not exist during the Revolutionary War.
Benedict Arnold burnt nearby New London...
>But the houses they burned were empty.
Only because the residents fled with only the shirts on their backs a
few moments before...
June
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