They did have the mercantilist policy prior to rebellion. You are fundamentally not represented by Parliament if the system allows for 100% of the vote to come from the mainland and zero to come from the colony. That just does not make for representation. Parliamentary seats are assigned to represent each district. They represent the interests of the districts that elect them. They fundamentally cannot then as a whole represent the colonies if they are designed to represent each the specific interests of their district. That structure, combined with the total destruction of the previous system of self-autonomy that the colonists had in exchange for no voice in the national politic renders them all second class citizens compared to a mainland brit. That is what is unjustified there. You have the colonists experiencing exactly what gave a British Citizen the right to vote, being
On top of that, the shooting started when Britain set out to deprive the citizens who had committed no crimes of their means of self-defense and protection. That forces the hand because if they allowed that then mainland Britain could do literally whatever they wanted. Mind you that was 1775. The continental congress was set on reconciliation and compromise up until then. The demand for revolution was not even remotely the majority opinion until 1776. This is the British response to an attempt to reconcile.
King George, however, did not even read the Olive Branch Petition when it was delivered.
King George III could not have foreseen that ignoring the Olive Branch Petition would cost him all his land in the America. Find out more facts.
revolutionary-war.net
That's the second one. So one side was trying to avoid a full scale war and deescalate, while the position of the other was to escalate.
By 1775, the rebellion was in the full swing of things, my dude. From the King's perspective, the colonists threw a violent fit and then sent him a letter asking for him to basically back down. He had no reason to accept it.
Again, America was a colony of Britain, so it was represented by the whole of Parliament. That is how colonization works, and the Americans were no different from Britain's other colonies in that regard.
And, again, Britain, at no point, "deprived the citizens who had committed no crimes of their means of self-defense and protection." The colonists believed this was the case, but that was an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, as
Bernard Bailyn pointed out. You can read some of the story in
Mencius Moldbug's essay on libertarianism.
But all of this - the conspiracy theory, the misunderstanding of how the English constitution works, - all obfuscates a single point:
There's no such thing as a right to be represented by your government. That's the root of our argument. You assume "no taxation without representation" is a given, and I don't. I suggest you actually focus on this if you want to actually get through to me this argument. Because, again, this is the core of our disagreement.
They couldn't possibly do that without getting war, and they weren't traitors. Yes, it produced a further demand to go back to status quo or, if not, to be treated equally to a mainland British citizen. Your talking about "producing a further demand." If I steal your entire cake, and then give you back half of that cake, and you tell me I had no right to steal it in the first place and I should have the whole thing back, that's not exactly producing a further demand is it?
Shay's Rebellion? Harsh? Did you even read that? Literally everyone who rebelled except two men, including freaking Shay, received amnesty. The two men in question were also looters. Their act not only helped to overturn the unjust laws they were rebelling against, thereby satisfying them, but helped to spark further reform in the form of the constitutional convention. That was quite literally the worst example you could have pulled.
But yes, The British certainly believed in harsh. Hence the somewhere between gulag and holocaust like conditions for American POWs. This is to contrast with America's, who's treatment was so good for the time that roughly 1/5th of the Hessian mercenaries brought to fight Americans stayed in America, whom Washington gave order that all POWs be treated well even as Americans were put through absolute hell worse than if they had just been mass executed by the bayonet. They were put in rotting ships, given extremely little food, water, zero medical treatment, and left to slowly die of starvation and disease.
You're a traitor if you go against your government. Objectively speaking, the Founding Fathers were traitors and rebels, and I'd say that even if I thought their Revolution was justified. And yes, the "cake stealing" example is producing further demands.
Shay's Rebellion was put down through violent military insurrection and led to the establishment of a stronger, more centralized state. Shay and his supporters got off easily, yes, but to say that Congress conceded to them was kind of missing the wider context, which is running theme for you.
Okay, first of all, on the British mistreating American POWs while the latter was fair and good to them: that's neglecting the context. Because the British thought of the Americans as traitors to their own people, they were not treated well (though your claim of MUH HOLOCAUST is hysterical; word to the wise: comparing anything to the Holocaust or the Gulag will not tug at my heartstrings and will actually make me laugh at you). Americans treated British soldiers well for the most part because they saw themselves as a separate people fighting against the British. They treated Loyalists about the same as the British treated Patriots (i.e. not very well).
Respect of natural rights and natural law, their structure that is, in essence, beholden entirely to popular will with no real constitution to speak of. Just a couple years ago one man killing 40 people in New Zealand gave the government the ability deprive its citizens of property en masse and sentence them up to a decade for the crime of watching and sharing a video. They operate on a system of pure moral relativism and popular will. By contrast, we enshrine things like freedom of speech and the right to self-defense, which hardly exists outside the US. All government is at best a necessary evil. Some are more evil than others.
Yes, because
America has never done anything like that in its history.
I would say total refusal to actually compromise, treatment as a second class citizen, attempt to remove the right to self-defense, completely violating the right to property, complete destruction of the previous 200 sum years of status quo and attempt to go entirely against the culture of the people within a decade, all the while refusing to come to a compromise is fairly immoral.
All things that either never happened or were totally justified.
>Was it moral?
The attitude that England had in subsequent centuries shows "yes".
LOL No. No, it wasn't.
Neither the British nor Americans were predominantly Catholic. They were both officially Anglican(though of course the situation in the US was far less simple). That aside, thank you for clarifying.
Well there's your problem them. Silly Protestants and their multiple denominations.
Rebellions and wars are often interrelated if not connected. So you think rebellions against foreign rule are legitimate? Then again, Vichy France was legitimate. Soviet governments in the Baltic States and Poland were legitimate. Established and recognized. They might be puppet governments but they were still rebellions. The Soviets took the Baltic states in their move towards Germany, after having been invaded. Was this not a just war?
They are "related" in that they both involve fighting and bloodshed. But stating that "because they both involve bloodshed, they are the same thing, and therefore Vichy France must submit to Nazi Germany" is not a valid argument.
Again, no rebellion is a just war because no rebellion can be a war, period. To say "war of rebellion" is like saying "square circle" or "married bachelor." The
Just War Theory as Catholics have understood it always involves public authorities of foreign powers.
The Puritans didn't just consider themselves "British" or English. But a "shining city on a hill" with the explicit intention of serving as an example to reform the Church of England. So they considered themselves English, but they also separated themselves willingly. Also are you familiar with the Dominion of New England? It failed. Largely because the Puritans didn't wish to be docile and homogenized into servility. In the South-cavaliers and nobles came and brought their plantations. Their connection to England was stronger, economically yet even in the colonial era-the first embers of a "southern" identity began to emerge. Not to mention the Mennonites, Dutch and other non English colonists in these colonies. British North America was culturally distinct if ethnically the same from the mainland. This cultural distinctiveness is both a product of settlement patterns and the logistics of the time.
Culturally distinct they may be, they were British whether they considered themselves to be such or not. They existed under the crown, and there was never a time where they did not do so.
These rights are inalienable in that they can not be violated simply because a king's whims change day to day. In the US, these rights are innate and absolute. Else their just privileges the government can take away when it inconveniences them. Fried referenced NZ-a model of a good colony. Where watching a video or sharing a manifesto can get you a decade in prison.
Right now, the entirety of the United States is on quarantine lockdown. Do you think that, if Hillary Clinton was elected in 2016, she wouldn't have done the same thing NZ did?
These rights weren't just BSed out of thin air. Montesquieu, Locke, and other enlightenment thinkers had developed these ideas with reference to ancient custom for over a hundred if not more years.
Where's this argument for the right to be represented in your government if you're a taxpayer? I don't recall a single Enlightenment thinker arguing for such a thing, so could you refresh my memory?
Treat your citizens poorly
Make it impossible for them to do profitable buisness
Ignore their requests to be treated like citizens
Try to intimidate them with the military
Seek no compromise
Give them no say in how they are governed
Do this from across the ocean while surrounded by your continental rivals.
You get what you fucking deserve.
Mencius Moldbug said:
"[The American Patriots] can fairly be classed as unscrupulous or deluded mob leaders—regardless of any classification in the scruples department, a historical task which often verges on the impossible."
