Given all the reading I do, it's not very often an article strikes me as so poignant that I feel the need to add it to my category of must-reads here on the blog (on the left sidebar). But I just finished one that's going on the list: Jonathan Kolkey's "Did King George III Deserve to Be Overthrown?"
Considering I'm an anarcho-capitalist, I believe all statist regimes deserve to be overthrown on grounds that they are criminal in nature. However, what struck me the most about Kolkey's piece was how noticeably more despotic the U.S. went on to become compared to its British rulers in 1775. Here's one of my favorite passages:
Interesting enough, even if the Boston Massacre had been an egregious case of cold-blooded murder, it remained the only such incident in a decade-long period of intense political agitation – a remarkable demonstration of restraint on the part of the supposed British "oppressors." Forget for the moment the 1989 Chinese Community crackdown of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. How many innocent bystanders have been "mistakenly" killed by rogue cops in any number of big American cities in just the past year alone?
Meanwhile, the allegedly unresponsive British Government immediately withdrew its troops from Boston proper for the next three-plus years until the Boston Tea Party forced them to return.
Elsewhere, speaking of British troops, only about 8,000 men were ever stationed permanently in the American colonies during peacetime prior to 1775. And many of those soldiers were stationed on the frontier primarily to prevent the White settlers from encroaching on Native American lands. Look at your map. How much repression could 8,000 men inflict on the American mainland which north to south stretched 2,000 miles? By comparison, roughly 40,000 cops patrol New York City and you still can’t ride the subway without being mugged.
Trevor,
You might want to look at the writings of Mencius Moldbug ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ), arch-Royalist of the era.
Most of what was said by Mr Kolkey has been said by Moldbug, in many hundreds of thousands of words, many times over the last few years.
Moldbug, even more radically, is also the progenitor of the theory (as I discuss at http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/02/moldbug-rand-jacobs-and-me.html , and Isegoria discusses at http://www.isegoria.net/2010/02/unitarian-vatican.htm ) that Harvard is STILL a seminary, and that the church it serves (Reformed Godless Unitarian) has only made the rather minor change of dropping the word God from its teachings.
Very worth looking into.
Posted by: aretae | February 22, 2010 at 06:09 PM
Sorry to post twice, but I found the Moldbug article that I should refer you to:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/06/short-history-of-ultracalvinism.html
He's even longer-winded than me, so be warned, but it's an interesting approach.
Posted by: aretae | February 22, 2010 at 06:15 PM
Aretae - many thanks! I will indeed check these out.
Posted by: trevor | February 22, 2010 at 08:03 PM