I normally do not reply to my critics on the Internet. Readers deserve not to be exposed to personal rants and rejoinders, except on forums, which I recommend avoiding. This is not a forum. But this time, I am making an exception, for it proves my original point: the English expect Americans to forgive and forget – literally forget – what they did to us on two occasions: 1776-1783 and 1812-15. It was basically our fault.
Mel Gibson has violated this rule, and the English don’t like it one little bit!
On Monday, July 17, my article on “Britain’s Prison Ships, 1776-1783” appeared on lewrockwell.com. It was immediately picked up by a forum on freerepublic.com. The first response to it was from a man so typical of the English snobocracy that he ought to apply at central casting. He wrote:
Mr North is a poor advert for your American education system if he has a PhD in colonial history and doesn’t know about prison ships.
My ignorance related to the death rate on board those ships, and to the systematic policy of establishing this murderous rate. Here I cite Hamilton Fish’s essay, which I referred to in my original essay: “If we estimate 1,000 were exchanged, 100 escaped, and 200 more permitted to go free through bribery or parole, the percentage of death amounted to 75 percent, as compared with Andersonville and Elmira prisons of 33 percent in our Civil War. The death rate of French and British prisoners of war in German prison camps was not more than 15 percent, and actually less for American prisoners. The estimated death rate on the Jersey was 85 percent.”
Before you all go off into the usual anti-British patriotic frenzy, bear in mind that this was two hundred plus years ago. Neither the use of prison ships nor deaths in custody were specially reserved for “American patriots” by the British. Unfortunately, they were all too common – read John Prebble’s “Culloden” to find out what happened to the prisoners of the ’45 rebellion – very similar if on a smaller scale.
I see. We should let bygones be bygones because the English did the same thing to all of their enemies. There was no discrimination involved.
If you can manage to remain open-minded for a few seconds before descending into your patriotic froth, try to use your imaginations and see things from the other side for a minute. Your “patriots” were traitors, as far as the British authorities were concerned. I hardly think you can pretend that the US government of the 18th Century would have been any more humane in similar circumstances towards traitors – particularly in view of some of the goings on in prison camps in your Civil War.
The loyalists (Tories) were not subject to such atrocities as the prison ships during the war or after the war. They lost their property in a lot of cases after the war. But the supposed one-third of the population who supposedly opposed the war did not leave, nor were they driven out.
All this is not to justify in any way the horrific treatment of those prisoners (or many other prisoners, criminal or political – the difference was not so clear-cut then – in the 18th Century). But in many ways we have moved on since then, and to indulge in a froth of anti-British fervor today over this kind of thing is exactly equivalent to those on the left who try to whip up guilt over what was done to American Indians over the century or so after these events.
There, I’ve had my say. Now you can all go off and get all excited watching false pretend-history in Braveheart and Patriot. But better not think about the fact that if the British had granted Parliamentary seats to American landowners and taxed them a bit less, your “patriots” might still be “British.”
Well, so what? They refused to grant Parliamentary seats or reduce colonial taxes because, in terms of their famous unwritten Constitution, they did not have to, that is, they figured we couldn’t do anything about it. They were wrong. They were, as always, too clever by half.
My critic says that Americans should let bygones be bygones, also as usual. (They have been saying this since about 1816.) “Why dredge up ancient history?” he asks. “We aren’t like that any more.” No, they aren’t, mainly because they got the snot kicked out of them by the Germans, twice, and both times had to call on us to beat up the nasty brutes. Then a bald guy in a loin cloth, who drank a cup of his own urine every morning, took India away from them. (In my more bizarre moods, I envision Anita Bryant doing an ad campaign for Gandhi’s favorite morning beverage: “Put a little sunshine in your life!” By far, the best book on Gandhi is Richard Grenier’s The Gandhi Nobody Knows.) Pretty soon, all that the English had left to kick around was Northern Ireland.
One very good reason to dredge up all this “old history” is because Americans have forgotten most of it. This includes Mr. Clinton’s ambassador to London, who, on the day I submitted my prison ships essay to lewrockwell.com, publicly begged forgiveness by the English for the supposedly overly harsh message of The Patriot. This was reported by the electronic Telegraph.
We bailed out the English twice in this century, at enormous cost in dead Americans, swollen budget deficits, grotesque income tax rates, and the loss of our liberties.
What did we get in response? Imported cars like the Hillman Minx. (English cars are to the automotive world what English cooking is to the culinary world.) We got Peter Sellers and John Clease. This was good, but they weren’t worth two world wars. We got Sean Connery, but he’s a Scot, so I don’t think he really counts. Had it not been for those Alec Guinness movies, 1951-58, the English would not be even close to even.
July 19, 2000
Gary North is the author of Conspiracy: A Biblical View, which discusses the 20th century’s Anglo-American alliance. Download a free copy at www.freebooks.com.
