Monday, February 8, 2010

George III Defended

Taking on some of the myths behind the "Tea Party" movement, Jonathan M. Kolkey questions whether King George III's government was as bad as the American revolutionaries made it out to be. I disagree with the inclusion of Kaiser Wilhelm II in his list of genuine tyrants, but otherwise his article is a valuable and interesting contribution to revisionist analysis of a Revolution too often uncritically celebrated by "conservatives," even those across the Atlantic who ought to know better.

(H/T: Roman Christendom)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, enlisting Kaiser Wilhelm II. together with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin clearly shows that Mr. Kolkey has no clue about (european) history. Half a year ago I dug out from an antique book shop a text published in 1920 by german monarchists whose title is human(itarian) justification of Wilhelm II..

As a matter of course it contains also some argumentation that can be seen as precursor of "Dolchstoßlegende" i.e. the legend that german army had triumphed, if there had been no revolution.

Yet more interesting is the political analysis. A short snippet:

"But actually we fought too bloody and too long against our natural back-shield, against Russia. We missed to make peace with the Tsar, because we 'had to' fight a socialist-campaign against the despot, because the liberation of the Poles, the Lithuanians and the Jews from the tsarist yoke had become more important to us, than protecting our own skin. Brest-Litowsk was just the natural end-point on the way of a necessarily wrong policy. Upon the persuasion of our socialists we exported the bolshevik poison to Russia just like plague or cholera cultures. This kind of violation of political hygiene retaliated logically ourselves.

Since we fought an intense socialist and democrat war against Russia, the time came up with inevitable necessity, on which the monarchy officially had to come to terms with democracy and socialism."

Here is a short illustration, why the german socialists were so keen on fighting against Russia when the war broke out in 1914:

Russian Tsar: Stop your cruel oppression of the Jews

Historical truth is, that some oppression did exist, but already this picture shows, that it was fairly blown up propaganda, for the reason that hardly anybody in Briton, US or Germany did really care for adequate assessment of the politics in pre-war Russia.