We are now come to the service of red wine for true. Up to this point, Oliver has been introducing the players and summarizing the individual events he found insightful or necessary to build his argument, which I will summarize thus:
The American Rebellion is1 the unfortunate consequence of the schemes & scams of a pack of unscrupulous and low traitors to the King whose only real goal was self-enrichment and whose preferred methods were deceit, spite, and hatred underpinned by cowardice. With this goal and these methods, these poltroons ignited a firestorm that engulfed the continent and destroyed something beautiful.
Oliver is biased. He is representative of not just the Loyalist faction2, but the Elite of New England in the nascent American Society. To paraphrase the editors of Origin & Progress, Oliver is reacting, emotionally and spitefully at times, to the coordinated and intentional destruction of his World. And this was a world in which he and his kin were doing quite well.
So, Of Course! you might say, Of course this powdered wig of a man sees our legendary forefathers and their noble & patriotic struggle as a base violation of culture & custom! The losers always cry foul in the final analysis, and indeed, this is most often the case. The Royalists lost and were banished, their lands seized and their lives threatened3.
Ad victoria spolia; vae victus.
And yet… one cannot just blindly accept that the good guys always win. Of course, as a Heritage American, I am happy when “we” win. What is more, I don’t believe for one second that my team is the bad team just because they are brutal, cunning, or vengeful. I want my team, my kind, my country to win. Everything else is secondary. But blindly accepting myth as fact is a dangerous path to tread. Braindead progressives have a “Hollywood” framework for interpreting conflict which instills the laughable notion that winning is an act of malicious discrimination against the noble losers, and this frame taints so much of the analysis and commentary we encounter. Their ends and their means are spiritually degrading, but the impulse to challenge narratives is not wholly bad.
Within the confines of controlled thought-space, maintaining our immuno-memetic defenses against entryism and adversarial mindvirii4, we should be willing and able to assess, address, and explore the components of Myth. Last week, I made a rather brash statement: the rebellious colonists were the “Antifa” of their day. I believe I went some of the way towards qualifying that statement. Not content to let that anti-mythical breach of propaganda stand in isolation, I have a next comparison to add, which may be equally or even more insulting to the memory of our national fore- and founding fathers.
“A [British] soldier seeing an old Man, with a Musket, who had been in the Battle, much wounded & leaning against a Wall; he went up to him, tore off the Lining of his own Coat & bound up his Wounds, with it, desiring him to go out of Harm’s Way. The Soldier had scarcely turned from him, when the old Man fired at his deliverer: human Passion could not bear such Ingratitude, & the Man lost his Life by it.”5
Does that sound familiar in any way, maybe a parallel to modern stories of wartime conduct? Another pillar for the platform I plan to hoist:
“…from one particular House the [British] Troops were much annoyed; a Capt. Evelyn rush’d in; but finding no Body below, he ran up Stairs, & a Woman in Bed begged her Life: he told her she was safe, & asked where her Husband was? She said that he was gone out of the Room; upon which Capt. Evelyn returning to the Door, the Man, who was under the Bed, fired at him: Capt. Evelyn then put the Man to death.”6
I have encountered many versions of this kind of story, both in person and on the silver screen. Here is one more, and I ask you take note of how titillated the patrons of modern audiences might be with it:
“There was a remarkable Heroine7, who stood at an House Door firing at the King’s Troops; there being Men within who loaded Guns for her to fire. She was desired to withdraw, but she answered, only by Insults from her own Mouth, & by Balls from the Mouths of her Muskets. This brought on her own Death, & the Deaths of those who were within Doors.”
I have been an avid student of the Global War On Terror from beginning to end. My own political as well as social identities shifted dramatically over the course of its 20 odd years, and not necessarily in a linear fashion. Regardless of my sentiments towards the American military, American soldiers, the technical aspects of tactics & strategy, and my perceptions of geopolitics and the attendant necessities, I have always found the suicidal & brutal methods of Arab civilians and militants off-putting. I will not say they are evil, or even uncalled-for, for my home has yet to be invaded and occupied by a superior force of conquerors8.
Injured combatants using the sympathy of their adversary to attack; civilians hiding behind noble conduct to assist in ambush; guerillas deploying females to spiritually punish their adversaries and gain a miniscule tactical advantage. These tactics are not new, they are not artifacts of the 20th century. They are not innovations of postmodern moral ambiguity or genderblindness. The travails of occupation warfare that many of my peers & frens experienced were shared by the British soldiers 250 years ago.
Within the confines of this subjective information source, I cannot help but identify with the Crown’s forces. There are many more passages within this text, and other texts for that matter, that clearly demonstrate the nobility, compassion, and restraint in the conduct of the British soldiery. On the other side, the guerilla brutality of the rebels is not only acknowledged, it is celebrated. Suspending my nationalistic impulse, I still empathize with this championing. But I also reject the “any means necessary” premise as universally excusable. Winning is sufficient, but proper methods are necessary, and how one wins does have an impact on how one carries forward after victory.
My goal with this book is not to change minds, nor is it to argue that the rebels were the bad guys. It definitely has changed my mind on many things, and I personally view the brain trust of the revolution as a collection of nefarious spiritual leftists, but this is all contained within academic analysis. I sincerely believe we, the United States and it’s true children, are on the cusp of dissolution and disaster. I think the ascension of Trump has forestalled the dissolution in addition to reconfigure the components of the disaster, but as I explained here, the terminal trajectory continues, altered but unabated.
We need not plunge blindly into the coming Troubles. We have so much history to inform us, so many now-departed men of wisdom and strength to instruct us, and plethora of shareable Faiths to guide us; we need not let the vicious, the arrogant, or the clumsy set the tone, tenor, and tempo of the breaking or the rebuilding. We owe it to both ancestors and descendants to exploit inevitable disaster productively.
Oliver wrote this before the rebellion had ended. Let that color your perspective. For me, it’s melancholy and fascinating, as I find myself currently in the process of trying to document the lunacy and hope of an era of national transition.
My inclination towards objectivity in documentation is an insult to the man’s memory. He resolutely refers to the rebels as the Faction, demonstrating their purely political maneuvering while strongly implying that he and his like kind are merely the Regular Folk, good subjects of the Crown and the rightful denizens of His Majesty’s colonies. What we postmoderns see as the birth of our nation, Oliver experienced as the death of his.
This is such a fascinating essay. Longtime readers of TOMstack might recall the author from a while back; he and I crossed rapiers.
This is neoLatin and you can’t stop me, Grandpa.
Oliver, Origin & Progress, pg 119
Oliver, Origin & Progress, pg 120
This is an aside, but this is a good example of how many terms in the English language have been imbued with a permanent moral valence that entrains a raft of presumptions. Heroine, in modern parlance, is always good as a precursor to brave. Here, Oliver deploys the term to fit the element of undoubted bravery while entraining no moral implication or assumption. Indeed, the hussy got exactly what she had coming, in Oliver’s eyes, but he still paid her last act the courtesy of appropriate and precise labeling it deserved. Queer, and, for me, melancholic. Homesick for linguistics I’ve never known.
We have been invaded, and we suffer under an occupation government, but neither the occupiers nor their cat’s paw invaders are superior, and we have not been conquered. God of Nature willing, we will eject the brown horde from our homeland and cast down the vile occupiers that would see us humiliated and erased. Deus Lo Vult.
