Just watched the movie "The Patriot," and out of curiosity looked up a British view of

[grantcart]

1. The fundamental myth of the American Revolution is an absurd distortion mixed with

creative amnesia.

To understand the British point of view you have to start in the 1740's when North America looked like this



Starting in the last 1740s and early 1750s the French started building up an extensive fort system and joined in alliances with the different Indian tribes to cut off expansion by the American colonies.

In the mid 1750s colonialists (including Washington) formed into British corp to fight the French/Indian forces.

The British started sending more reinforcements but the French had a commanding advantage by 1757. In 1758 the British started landing what would amount to 50,000 troops ( a huge amount to transport from Europe) at great expense and by 1760 had largely defeated the French, and an Armistice would be signed in 1763. The British continued to house a large body of troops in NA to maintain defense.

In 1763 support among the colonialists was 100% pro British.

In time the threat lessened and eventually forgotten. The British didn't forget and felt that it was time that the colonialists start contributing financially to the costs of their own defense, a reasonable point of view.

The main problem, really, was that the colonies were just to vital and London too far away.

Little events and misunderstandings would blow up and the Crown couldn't respond until time had passed.

See Boston Massacre, for example, where the British troops only fired upon after they were assaulted and were genuinely afraid for their lives.

BTW British historians have assaulted "The Patriot" as one of the worst examples of jingoistic propaganda ever crafted with none of the criminal acts by the British commanders ever happening.

http://entertainment.time.com/2011/01/26/top-10-historically-misleading-films/

“Truth is the first casualty in Hollywood’s war,” read the headline of the London Telegraph‘s take on The Patriot. Principal among the movie’s gross inaccuracies is the portrayal of British soldiers as evil, bloodthirsty sadists. In one scene, redcoats are seen rounding up a village of screaming women, children and old men, locking them in a church and setting the building ablaze. No such thing ever happened in the Revolutionary War. What’s worse? An almost identical crime — one of World War II’s most notorious atrocities — was carried out by Nazi soldiers in France in 1944. Meaning not only did the film paint a portrait of the British as cruel killers, it compared them to history’s worst: the Nazis. As Stephen Hunter, a film critic and historian told the Telegraph, “Any image of the American Revolution which represents you Brits as Nazis and us as gentle folk is almost certainly wrong.”

Another of the film’s egregious oversights lies with lead character Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), based on several real-life players in the American Revolution, including Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, a militia leader from South Carolina. The movie depicts Martin as a family man and hero who single-handedly defeats countless hostile Brits. According to the Guardian, however, evidence suggests the Swamp Fox was a man who actively persecuted Cherokee Indians (killing them for fun) and regularly raped his female slaves. In fact, The Patriot turns a blind eye to slavery altogether, a decision that received much attention from critics including director Spike Lee. “For three hours The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery,” Lee wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Reporter. “The Patriot is pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda. A complete whitewashing of history.”


Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2011/01/26/top-10-historically-misleading-films/#ixzz2ispEofHv