Pimping a new book that he will hope you will buy, Andrew Roberts (the Book's author) writes this glowing piece for The Smithsonian about you know, George III, he wasn't all that bad of a guy!
Hey I have an idea. Maybe we should've stayed under monarchism. That whole "liberty thing"? Perhaps that's overrated. Sarcasm aside, take a look at paragraph number 2:
We can now see, for example, George’s fervent denunciation of slavery in an essay he wrote as Prince of Wales in the late 1750s, after reading Charles de Montesquieu’s classic enlightenment text, The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
This is historical malpractice. So George wrote some paper some time for some people to read, so what. When the pedal was down against the metal, what did King George actually do? Actions speak louder than words. When King George III had the opportunity, he sided with slave traders over abolitionists. Here's the actual text of the King's veto:
it hath been represented to us that so considerable an increase upon the duties of slaves imported into our colony of Virginia will have the effect to prejudice and obstruct as well the commerce of this kingdom as the cultivation and improvement of the said colony; whereupon we have thought fit to disallow the first mentioned of the laws, leaving the other, which is of short duration, to expire by its own limitation. It is therefore our will and pleasure that you do not upon pain of our highest displeasure give your assent for the future, without our royal permission first obtained, to any law or laws by which the additional duty of five per cent upon slaves imported, imposed by the last mentioned law, shall be further continued or to any laws whatever by which the duties of ten per cent upon slaves imported into our said colony, payable by laws passed antecedent to the seventh day of November, 1769, shall upon any pretense be increased or by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.
The text of this is quite clear. Increasing the duties are going to reduce slave imports, and that's going to hurt the empire. Oh woe is me, we can't have that!
How different would this Smithsonian article look if it had included the fact that the King actively stood against abolitionism? Laws such as the one which was vetoed, referenced above, this was happening all over the colonies in the 1770s. This wasn't a one time thing.
I can see I'm going to have to record this veto into audio that everybody can listen to and throw it up on YouTube, since so many historians can't find the time to write the truth. What a bunch of flagrant liars. It isn't just this one guy, the Smithsonian is in on it. What a disgrace. What a historical disgrace this whole thing is. But that's where we are with the state of the "historical profession" in America these days. The article concludes this way:
The time has therefore come for objective Americans to take a fresh look at their last king. It was right for the colonies to break away from the British Empire in 1776 because they were ready by then to found their own nation-state, but despite the rhetoric of their founding document, they were not escaping tyranny, so much as bravely grasping their sovereign independence from a good-natured, cultured, enlightened and benevolent monarch.
Historians will always side against the American Revolution and cling to any whataboutism they can in order to make America look bad, meanwhile anything else must be preferred. "Rhetoric", "rhetoric"??? That's all the declaration is? It's no big deal? Reading the Declaration makes it quite clear that it is just as applicable today as it was back then.
We need new historians just as badly as we need new journalists. None of them are interested in being honest. None of them.
I have repeatedly said that we are now in the Battle of the Bulge moment of the 3rd American Civil War, a conflict which perennially pits revanchist elites against freedom seekers. The first Civil War was the fight of the Whigs against the Loyalists (along with their Hessian and British allies). The second Civil War was the revanchist elites fostered by Calhoun, Jackson etc. to forestall the end of Slavery after the 1807 compromise against the Republicans. The Third Civil War is a hot and cold war that has aligned the same forces of control under the auspices of domestic "progressives" and other flavors of national and international socialism against the forces of freedom. We won the first and second round of this war against Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism, both of whom had no small number of domestic *progressive* allies, but now we face a resurgence of progressives who align in no small part with the enemies of freedom. Same sh... Different century. Efforts to recast the American Revolution as an effort to defend and preserve slavery in contrast to its historical meaning as a step along the road to freedom are part of this Cold War.
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