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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 10/22/21

King George Was More Democratic Than American Revolutionaries

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King George III of England by Johann Zoffany.
King George III of England by Johann Zoffany.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given)
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According to the Smithsonian Magazine brought to you by the folks with museums up and down the National Mall in Washington D.C. King George III was the democrat and humanitarian in 1776.

I'd hate for this to really feel like a bite in the ass, coming right on the heels of the dying of Colin Powell, who did so much for the idea that a war can be based on solid facts. It's fortunate, perhaps, that World War II has largely replaced the American Revolution as an origin myth in U.S. nationalism (as long as most of the basic facts about WWII are scrupulously avoided).

Still, there's a childhood romanticism, a glorious fairy tale that's rather viciously eaten away at every time we discover that George Washington didn't have wooden teeth or always tell the truth, or that Paul Revere didn't ride alone, or that slave-owning Patrick Henry's speech about liberty was written decades after he died, or that Molly Pitcher didn't exist. It's enough to make me almost want to either cry or grow up.

And now here comes the Smithsonian Magazine to rob us even of the perfect enemy, the white guy in the Hamilton musical, the lunatic in Hollywood movies, His Royal Highness of the blue piss, the accused and convicted in the Declaration of Independence. If it weren't for Hitler, I honestly don't know what we would have left to live for.

Actually, what the Smithsonian has printed, with apparently no review whatsoever by the Intelligence Community, is adapted from a book called The Last King of America by future Espionage Act defendant Andrew Roberts. Daniel Hale is in solitary confinement for the next four years merely for telling us what the U.S. government does with drones and missiles. Compare that to this from Mr. Roberts, quoting King George on the evils of slavery:

"'The pretexts used by the Spaniards for enslaving the New World were extremely curious,' George notes; 'the propagation of the Christian religion was the first reason, the next was the [Indigenous] Americans differing from them in colour, manners, and customs, all of which are too absurd to take the trouble of refuting.' As for the European practice of enslaving Africans, he wrote, 'the very reasons urged for it will be perhaps sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration.' George never owned slaves himself, and he gave his assent to the legislation that abolished the slave trade in England in 1807. By contrast, no fewer than 41 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were slave owners."

Now that's just not fair. The American Revolutionaries talked about "slavery" and "freedom" but those were never meant to be compared with actual, you know, slavery and freedom. They were rhetorical devices meant to indicate the rule of England over its colonies and the ending thereof. In fact, many of the American Revolutionaries were motivated at least in part by the desire to protect slavery from abolition under English rule. So, the fact that King George didn't own slaves while Thomas Jefferson couldn't get enough of them is hardly relevant to the indictment against the king set forth in the Declaration of Independence, which Andrew Roberts (if that's his real name) describes as generating myth.

"It was the Declaration that established the myth that George III was a tyrant. Yet George was the epitome of a constitutional monarch, deeply conscientious about the limits of his power. He never vetoed a single Act of Parliament, nor did he have any hopes or plans to establish anything approaching tyranny over his American colonies, which were among the freest societies in the world at the time of the Revolution: Newspapers were uncensored, there were rarely troops in the streets and the subjects of the 13 colonies enjoyed greater rights and liberties under the law than any comparable European country of the day."

I admit that doesn't sound good. Still, some of the charges in the Declaration must have been true, even if many of them basically amounted to "he's in charge and shouldn't be," but the ultimate climactic charge in the document was this:

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

It's odd that the freedom lovers should have had people domestically among them who could threaten insurrections. I wonder who those people could have been. And where did the merciless savages come from who invited them into an English country in the first place?

The American revolutionaries, through their revolution for freedom, opened up the West to expansion and wars against the Native Americans, and in fact waged genocidal war on the Native Americans during the American Revolution, followed swiftly by wars launched into Florida and Canada. Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark said that he would have liked to "see the whole race of Indians extirpated" and that he would "never spare Man woman or child of them on whom he could lay his hands." Clark wrote a statement to the various Indian nations in which he threatened "Your Women & Children given to the Dogs to eat." He followed through on his words.

So, perhaps the Revolutionaries had flaws, and perhaps in some contexts King George was a decent guy for his time, but he was still a bitter nasty enemy toward the freedom loving patriots, er, I mean terrorists, or whatever they were, right? Well, according to Roberts:

"George III's generosity of spirit came as a surprise to me as I researched in the Royal Archives, which are housed in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle. Even after George Washington defeated George's armies in the War of Independence, the king referred to Washington in March 1797 as 'the greatest character of the age,' and when George met John Adams in London in June 1785, he told him, 'I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation [between England and the colonies]; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, and I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.' (The encounter was very different from the one depicted in the miniseries 'John Adams,' in which Adams, played by Paul Giamatti, is treated dismissively.) As these voluminous papers make clear, neither the American Revolution nor Britain's defeat can be blamed on George, who acted throughout as a restrained constitutional monarch, closely following the advice of his ministers and generals."

But then, what was really the point of the bloody murderous war? Many nations including Canada as the nearest example have gained their independence without wars. In the United States, people claim that the "founding fathers" fought a war for independence, but if we could have had all the same advantages without the war, would that not have been better than killing tens of thousands of people?

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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