RIOTS AND UNREST - Letter to the Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune

[LAS14]

No link - the whole thing was e-mailed to me.

Other examples abound

Disrespect of law enforcement, vandalism of public buildings, destruction of private property, toppling of beautiful monuments — enough of this anarchy that I have been reading about.

Here are a few examples: A governor’s home was ransacked by rioters because they disagreed with his policies. Then, an incident in the Boston Commons area where mobs berated law enforcement, threw dangerous objects, and the officers, fearing for their lives, justifiably shot into the mob and some were killed. In still another incident, a mob disguised themselves and then destroyed more than $1 million of private property. Then, in Bowling Green Park in New York City, rioters pulled down and destroyed a large monument. All of this lawlessness just because the mobsters disagreed with the authorities.

To clarify, the first incident is vandalism to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, British lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, on Aug. 26, 1765. Next, the rioting and berating of law enforcement: Today we call that the Boston Massacre and we call the dead rioters martyrs (March 5, 1770). The third incident, with a modern-day equivalent of $1 million lost in private property, is today called the Boston Tea Party and those miscreants are heroes (Dec. 16, 1773). The monument was a statue of King George III on a horse, destroyed in the aftermath of a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, and those who tugged on the rope were patriots (July 9, 1776).

So, this little overview of events in American history illustrates that how we view what people have done and what we call what they have done has a lot to do with the lens through which we look at it.

DAVID HAUSCHILD, Blaine

[Hotler]

1. .....

[Klaralven]

2. Dark violence and atrocities of the Revolutionary War

Holger Hoock’s grimly detailed “history of violence” in the conflict between Great Britain and its rebellious colonies across the Atlantic offers a sobering corrective to the sanitized version of the American Revolution passed down through generations by the victorious United States. He paints a disturbing picture of what was in many ways a civil war, with both sides committing atrocities. He also provides a fascinating case study in the power of myth-making — and it seems only fitting that even at the birth of their nation, the Americans had a better grasp of the need for good publicity.

Perhaps it takes a German-born professor of British history, currently at the University of Pittsburgh, to treat this highly charged subject so evenhandedly. His first chapter, “Tory Hunting,” begins with a grisly description of the tarring and feathering of an unpopular customs official in 1774. This was one of the myriad ways Colonial vigilantes “debased and defiled, humiliated and dehumanized, their Loyalist neighbors,” Hoock comments. Persecution became official after the Declaration of Independence, when Congress and the states passed confiscation and banishment acts.

Britain responded with “desolation warfare.” British warships bombarded coastal towns; Falmouth, for one, was reduced to a smoking ruin. The redcoats looted indiscriminately, seizing crops and property of rebels and Loyalists alike; plunder was often accompanied by rape. Some British commanders instructed their men to take no prisoners; wounded and defeated American soldiers were killed on the field. When they were made prisoners, American soldiers suffered in conditions so terrible that mortality rates ran as high as 70 percent.

Hoock coolly reminds us that the looting and appalling prison conditions were consequences of the limited resources available to an army engaged in war thousands of miles from home, while the abuse of civilians and execution of defeated soldiers were rooted in the view that colonials were traitorous rebels to be suppressed by any means necessary.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/05/18/dark-violence-and-atrocities-revolutionary-war/X4Kr4EzUUrNeVmnrNeSh2N/story.html

[crickets]

3. K&R for visibility.