George Washington – A Terrorist?!?!?!

George Washington – A Terrorist?!?!?!

So the other day I was working in my office, minding my own business, when I received a text from my 16 year old son. It said, “So apparently George Washington was a terrorist…Screw world civ!” He later said his teacher believed Washington was amazing but, “If you look at the definition of terrorism, the American Revolutionary war would fall into that definition.”

I’m telling you. It is crap like that which makes me wish I was born with just middle fingers.

I text him a short list of the reasons why the American Revolution is nothing like terrorism.   Later that night he said he was the only one in his class who defended Washington, and he believed, was the only one who had a brain in his head. He said he could tell the other students were sucking it up.

Yoda

For fun I went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and typed “Define: Terrorist.” Google defines it as, “a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims.” That obviously didn’t clear anything up so I asked for the definition of terrorism, which read, “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” I’m not sure how anyone with half a brain stem could lump George Washington, or any of the founding fathers into that category.

But then again, I’m not a liberal.

If I try to look at the history of the Revolutionary War through the paradigm of a whiny liberal – the word “paradigm” here is a fancy way of saying “the warped lens in which you view the world,” – (also, for my liberal friends, in the word paradigm, the “g” is silent) the ONLY incident that could vaguely have a terroristic line drawn in comparison is the Boston Tea party. But even that is a HUGE stretch.

If you’re like most American’s, everything you know about the Boston Tea party you probably learned, as a child, from watching “Mary Poppins.” Here is a recap:

Mr. Dawes Jr: In 1773, an official of this bank unwisely loaned a large sum of money to finance a shipment of tea to the American colonies. Do you know what happened?

George W. Banks: Yes, sir. Yes, I think I do. As the ship lay anchored in Boston Harbor, a party of the colonists dressed as red Indians boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking. Even for Americans.

“Behaved very rudely” and talking a seventeen year old to strap a bomb to himself and detonating it in a crowded market place are two entirely different things.

Most of the Founding Fathers condemned the Boston Tea party. George Washington disapproved. Benjamin Franklin demanded the “India Tea Company” be reimbursed for the destruction of the tea. Both American and British supporters of American independence, such as Edmund Burke, thought the Tea Party set back the cause.

Meric on three

Even the Founders who defended the raid had class. Paul Revere, who led the raid, exclusively to protest a new British tea tax, made sure to replace a broken lock on one of the ships. The British sailors from the ships confirmed, none of them were hurt, nothing was vandalized, and the protesters even swept the decks clean after the tea was destroyed.

Still, the raid was considered such an embarrassment to many of our founding fathers, it wasn’t celebrated for another 50 years.

Like I said…It’s a stretch.

“But Danny,” you whine, “what about George Washington?”

Washington was a hero and a patriot. The only negative title you could put on him that might stick is he was a traitor to the crown of England. As a young man he fought with distinction and honor in the Battle of Monongahela where he was so exposed to enemy fire his coat was pierced by four musket balls and he had two horses shot from underneath him. It’s hard to imagine the same person hiding behind a tree, detonating a bomb and then fleeing the crime scene.

One of the examples my son gave me of the “evidence” regarding Washington’s terrorism is when he crossed the Delaware  and surprised, and defeated the Hessian forces. So I guess if an army attacks another army it terrorism?

Seriously?

The Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking Up Arms states, “We, for ten years, incessantly and ineffectually besieged the Throne as supplicants; we reasoned, we remonstrated with Parliament, in the most mild and decent language.” For ten years. TEN. Then when the Founders did the truly revolutionary thing, three years after the Boston Tea Party, they signed the Declaration of Independence. In this document they describe with logic and reason, and in blindingly clear terms, their complaints against the Crown, the rights that had been infringed upon, their earlier attempts for resolution and an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world for independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

Those are Jefferson’s words, but Washington embraced them whole-heartedly. Are they the words or beliefs of a terrorist?

Hardly.

 

LIFEZILLA: Where else can I go to spew my nonsensical diatribe and dumbassery?  My wife and kids stopped listening to me YEARS ago!

isisRights Reagan Quote - Find Young People

Thor

 

 

 

8 responses to “George Washington – A Terrorist?!?!?!

  1. Danny, It’s difficult to believe your post when it starts with lies. “Working in my office” and “minding my own business” about you in one sentence? Hardly.

    The rest of the post is brilliant! Terrorism…..pffft

  2. What el Jefe said …

  3. Please run for president. Please write more articles. Please continue to educate your kids(and us) whoot whoot for you

  4. And to think I’ve been saying paradigm wrong for all these years!

    So grateful the educated Conservatives are looking out for me. Sw❤️❤️n!

  5. Terrorist: Someone who uses violence, mayhem and destruction- or the threat of those things- to coerce people or countries into taking a certain action.

    I’m sure the perpetrators of the Boston tea party were only trying to produce laughter & giggles by steeping tea in the ocean followed by some ship-shape cleaning and restoration. Those silly kids!!!

    Also, a shout out to all the abducted & enslaved Africans and slaughtered Native Americans for not misinterpreting the meaning of terrorism by the white founding fathers. (AKA: Freedom Fighters)

  6. War is an act of violence to compel others to do one’s will, as the German military theorist Clausewitz aptly wrote. According to the definition of terrorism you found, all war is therefore terrorism. This is absurd. Washington, et al. certainly engaged in war against the British. Terrorism, however, uses acts of war AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILIANS in order to terrorize them and show their government’s inability to secure their lives and property. The purposeful targeting of innocent life is the salient distinguishing feature of terrorism,

    According to the law of nations, the meaning of the word innocent is conveyed by its Latin root “innocere” which means “not harmful”. The most obvious illustration is unarmed civilians, who lack the weapons to do immediate harm themselves, but are also not part of the military infrastructure that allows a military force (regular or irregular) to harm its targets. In contemporary international law the term “non-combatant” is often used to convey this more nuanced sense of the term “innocent”.

    But given the realities of 20th and now 21st century warfare, the means of producing what the military uses to achieve its objectives (munitions and aircraft factories for example, but also information processing facilities) are legitimate targets, including the people who work in them. So there are rules about taking care to locate them away from areas where collateral damage must include people who are not actively engaged in production, especially hospitals, schools and the like.

    So in addition to targeting civilians in their attacks another feature of terrorism is to locate their command, control, communications and production facilities close to hospitals, schools, etc. effectively using non-combatants as shields.

    One has to ignore all these distinguishing features of terrorism is order to assert that Washington, et al. were “terrorists”. To be sure, he strategized effectively in order to use his numerically inferior forces to strike fear and confusion into British forces, seeking to demoralize both their troops and their commanders. The British did accuse American forces of burning areas of New York City as they retreated from it in September, 1776, but that accusation seems to have failed even their own investigation into the fires, since no charges of arson were ever brought against anyone. (Nathan Hale, arrested and subsequently hanged in the context of the fires, was not charged in connect with any arson.)

    So both in law and fact, the charge of terrorism against America’s Revolutionary forces falls flat. However, the forces seeking to overturn the republican form of government established in that generation blow smoke where there is no fire in order to discredit the character of the Founders, thereby weakening public attachment to the institutions they inaugurated. In its own way, this is an insidious form of warfare against whole generations of unsuspecting or ignorant Americans, innocent of any harm except their contribution to the blessings of liberty endowed by God and their own determination to do right by the responsibilities His natural law entails upon them.

    Does depriving people in this way of the moral understanding that might arm them to defend their moral heritage as a people constitute an act of war against the innocent? It’s worth pondering.

  7. G. Washington was a terrorist, not necessarily him personally, but his allies. Well what would you call someone that holds the country hostage?