In a vitriolic piece in the National
Post of Canada the author notes:
The Declaration of Independence places sole
responsibility on Britain’s George III for establishing what Americans called
“an absolute tyranny over these states.” But George III wasn’t an autocrat.
While his power was much greater than the current Queen’s, he had an elected
House of Commons and a prime minister to check him. Parliamentarians were free
to heckle British war plans, and members of the British press (the freest in
the world at the time) openly sided with the colonists. British democracy was far
from universal, of course, with voting barred to women, Catholics and the lower
classes….Of all the countries to obtain independence from Britain, only the
U.S. and Ireland chose to do it violently
Let me start with Ireland. First, I suggest that this author
read De Tocqueville and his book on his journey in Ireland before the famine
killed almost 50% of the population. The Irish were an occupied territory,
initially placed in the hands of the maniacal Prince John. Then for almost 800
years occupied, tortured, slaughtered, and suppressed by the English Crown. It
took 800 years of fighting to obtain freedom, to move from subjects to
citizens. Ireland during the famine saw its roads strewn with the bodies of
dead babies and mothers, rotting on the road side while the English landlords
went back to England to avoid the stench! Perhaps the author also forgets about
the oppression in India and the other colonies suppressed by the British
Empire!
Second, King George was a monarch, German in ancestry, and
most likely ill with porphyria. Was he a mad king? One may never really know.
As for Parliament, many laud Burke, but he was an outlier and even he was not
to support any form of individual rights. As for an English Constitution,
frankly folks, there is none, it is some ethereal collection of laws including
the Magna Carta, written only to secure the rights of the nobles while
suppressing all others.
This is one of the most jingoistic writings I have ever seen
in my opinion and is a classic example of revisionism.
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