History is written by the winners…

…and the winners are often right bastards. Even – maybe especially – when they’re the Good Guys.

News of the big vote in Scotland on whether to stay a part of Great Britain was all over the radio and Internet all this past week. It stirred up a recurring news piece about American attitudes toward secession. Seems there was this Reuters poll…

A new Reuters poll which asks Americans if they would want their state to secede from the UNION of the United States has found that 1 in 4 Americans would say “yes.”

Okay, fine, yet another news article about an opinion poll. Who cares? But this particular article, linked by Wendy McElroy, got into the pros and cons of the one serious attempt at secession in American history and included a sentence that had me grinding my teeth before my first cup was dry…

The act of the United States seceding from England is a much less contentious issue, and one that almost all American libertarians agree was done in a manner consistent with individual rights and self determination.

Really? Then ‘almost all American libertarians’ are either historically illiterate, or they’re in favor of terrorism if it’s working for their side. So much for their Non-Aggression Principle.

Not that they’re deliberately lying, probably. You can be honestly wrong, after all, and in this case it would be strange not to be because that’s the way it’s taught in all American public schools – or at least it was when I was a kid. The Patriots were the good guys. The British and Tories were the bad guys. The Boston Tea Party, One-If-By-Land-Two-If-By-Sea, Lexington and Concord, the winter at Valley Forge, and then a bunch of Hessians were murdered in their beds on Christmas. The good guys won, and then there was the Constitution, and we all lived happily ever after. It was all very simple. No moral ambiguities were ever mentioned, even though the Sons of Liberty and the treatment of ‘Tories’ were clearly evident in my childhood lessons. They were just whitewashed like a picket fence.

It was never suggested, as I recall, that the ‘Tories’ not only considered themselves the Good Guys but actually were that, by every conceivable measure except the verdict of history. In contemporary literature such people called themselves ‘Loyalists,’ because that’s precisely what they were. Their crime was remaining loyal to their traditional and duly constituted – if somewhat wooden-headed – government. And for that crime they were threatened, assaulted and mobbed. They saw their property stolen or burned. Their printing presses were smashed, because God forbid people should hear both sides of an argument. They were kidnapped, often forcibly deported, and at least a few were murdered.

Point being, the Sons of Liberty were not the good guys at the time. They were purely and simply terrorists. Oh, sometimes some of them did gutsy things against people who could actually shoot back. The burning of the Gaspée was pretty cool, by all accounts.
But even then their propaganda machine – which was awesome, for the period – cranked up and raised public outrage at the notion that the people who attacked the Gaspée, shot her commander and burned her to the waterline should be arrested, shipped to England, and tried for treason. Outrage! Tyranny!

Think about that for a second. The Gaspée was a government customs schooner. It was basically a Coast Guard cutter, doing what government enforcement vehicles do – which in this case was chasing a bunch of smugglers. Put yourself in an exactly analogous situation: You’re sitting on the beach and watching a Coast Guard cutter as it runs aground chasing a drug runner with a shallower draft. What do you do? Well, if you round up some friends, board a boat, attack the cutter, shoot her commander, loot the cutter and burn and sink it, congratulations. Apparently you’re a Son of Liberty.

That was one of the more ambiguous things they did. Mostly they were just plain mean. Most of what they did was emphatically not ‘done in a manner consistent with individual rights and self determination.’ Don’t get me started on the ethical issues raised by the Boston Tea Party. But none of that matters. Their side won, so now they’re patriotic heroes.

So what am I saying? Do I think we’d be better off as members of the British Commonwealth? Hell no, I like being an American. I’m a nekulturny mutt, son of smugglers and rum-runners, insurrectionists and anti-government slobs. Push me around and I’ll murder your ass in your bed on Christmas and then get Johnny Horton to sing a song about it. One that makes me sound like a hero.

Except I don’t want to be any of that. I often wonder if, had I been there at the time, I’d have approved of the Sons of Liberty. Truth is I’d make a terrible revolutionary because I hate ambiguity, even when I’m wrapped up in it like a hot dog in bacon. I want to be the good guy, and I’m in complete if sometimes eye-rolling sympathy with those libertarians who go on about the Non-Aggression Principle as if anything like that has ever worked in practice, ever, in the entire course of human history.

Because it never has, you know, and it never will. Humans, winners and losers alike, are right bastards much of the time. It’s probably a good thing the Sons of Liberty didn’t have access to Youtube, or they and not Ben Franklin with his folksy aphorisms would be the leading image we have of the American revolution. They didn’t have balaclavas, so they dressed up like indians.

History writing is the art of covering up ambiguities, and making atrocities smell like acts of heroism. And I’m not sure a real good guy has ever won a revolution. That’s why revolutions scare me so much.