Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> Murder of the British is a strange take on the events of Lexington and Concord.

The outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 can fairly be called an act of violence. The American colonies in the early days of the conflict were pretty evenly split between loyalists and revolutionaries. The latter ultimately won the day in large part by burning down loyalists’ houses or tarring and feathering them, sending some of the loyalists into exile in Canada or the Caribbean and encouraging others to stay low lest they be attacked, too.

These facts don’t get talked about much in the American school system, because like in most countries the public school system seeks to perpetuate a national mythology for the sake of civic unity. However, revolutions anywhere in the world tend to initially play out as a civil war of sorts among the country’s own people, and the American Revolution was no exception.

View on HN

Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts.

I got history from american public education, and while half of it was garbage, and half of it was dull internal politics of isolationism, there was no ambiguity that the revolutionary war was a bloody conflict.

I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.

The British troops had set out to disarm the local militia. I have a hard time seeing how something that began with armed infantry units confronting each other at Lexington was not a war.

And by the way, when the British seized a Spanish fleet--which had imagined itself to be neutral--during the Napoleonic wars, their government stated that the United Kingdom had never been in the habit of starting wars with a declaration.

This is just semantics, but I think not. If you're attacking a military unit to achieve a military objective, murder feels inappropriate. In my opinion, murder tends:

* to be done by an individual, not a group

* tends to happen to one, or a few victims. It's odd to describe someone as murdering 70 people at once.

* tends to imply the victim was not professionally engaged in such a way that their death in those circumstances is not a plausible concern

* the motive is not political, else it is an assassination

You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.

What's the danger in "opening that can of worms"? IMHO the world might be a better place if there were a lot less killing, whether it's in the context of a war or not. Some killings throughout history are certainly justifiable or excusable, but it seems far more dangerous to me to stick one's head in the sand and avoid reflecting on whether each killing really needed to happen, or if the victim could reasonably have been spared without significant risk of harm or jeopardizing the larger cause (presuming the cause itself is just). "Murder" doesn't seem like an unreasonable label in the latter case. (Whether and how the killer should be punished in such situations is a separate question that I'm not taking a position on here.)

The danger is there are plenty of rebellions, revolutions and other "positive" conflicts where wars were never declared. You're basically going to be painting the people that took part in conflicts like the American revolution, Irish War of Independence, Indian War of Independence, Cuban Revolution, etc as "murders".

Well, back in the day wars did usually start with a declaration of war.

> It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts.

That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Not only did the british call the revolutionaries murderers, they also called them terrorists since the revolutionaries were attacking and terrorizing the loyalists. Ironic huh? One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

As strange as it sounds, in an alternate universe where the brits won, the history books probably describe the revolutionaries as murderers and terrorists. Can you imagine how odd it would be to view Benedict Arnold as a hero and George Washington as the villain?

> there was no ambiguity that the revolutionary war was a bloody conflict.

And there certainly was no ambuigity about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

History is just one part of nation building propaganda. The people in charge ( usually the winners ) get to write it. Fundamentally, there are no good guys or bad guys, just winners and losers in history.

> That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Perhaps this is just an American thing, but I wouldn't call the Nazi soldiers killing American soldiers murderers either. The holocaust is murder, if not superceded by the term genocide. Something can be an unjust killing and still not be murder.

As a Canadian: A tar and feather illustration is among the most memorable from my childhood.

Yes, important to keep in mind that revolutions always have their roots in civil war, and that's always brutal.

They were presented in my education, though mine wasn't a public education.

They were presented in mine, though New York being the center of Loyalist America probably had something to do with it.

Interesting! I wonder how it has influenced political parties etc. to the present?

I don't think it has influenced political parties per se, because New York has had so much immigration that descendants of the original colonial population is a negligible percentage. (That, and many Loyalists fled to other British colonies to escape persecution.)

Where this shows up is maybe general political philosophy. New York has a strong tradition of concentrated government, with Alexander Hamilton behind proposals for a US Senate with lifetime appointment and a central bank. And the state executive is unusually strong and the most celebrated figures in state government, elected or otherwise, are known for wielding their powers in nearly dictatorial ways. (Andrew Cuomo is currently trying to emulate this, invoking the images of former members of government like Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller. And yes, that Rockefeller.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com