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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The article is trash, and fails to connect the motivations of the treasonous and ambitious Arnold with the revisionist babble dumped into the article.

It’s bizzare to me that the author would attribute the woeful ignorance of Benedict Arnold to our achieving some sort of enlightenment about the “dark and sordid” truth of the revolution. I’m actually somewhat gobsmacked at the ignorance and lack of perspective demonstrated... we’re talking about breaking away from the British Empire, who spent the next hundred years or more oppressing millions in India, China, Africa and Ireland.

If this is a demonstration of the rigor of Ivy League academia, that’s the real story here.

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> we’re talking about breaking away from the British Empire, who spent the next hundred years or more oppressing millions in India, China, Africa and Ireland.

And America has oppressed millions of _its own people_ for ~200 years. I don’t see what your point is.

America has been way more benevolent even under its darkest years than the British Empire ever was. Ask Indians and most African countries what it was like to live under the British Crown.

What’s benevolent about slavery, Jim Crow, and attempted genocide?

It's not like slavery was abolished in all parts around the world before the US. And several states in the US abolished slavery in a few years after the independence war - it became a matter of state policy.

No, but Britain fought against slavery far earlier and more effectively than other countries, including the US. It saw ridding the world of slavery as its civilising mission. There's a reason why the underground railroad went north to British territories, and why a slave of the mid 19th century would see the Union Flag as the flag of freedom much more than the Stars and Stripes, in contradiction to your statements about the USA being "way more benevolent even in its darkest years".

Britain as benevolent is so ridiculous when you know they enforced discrimination by race, i.e. segregation in many of their colonies. so lets avoid going preachy against the US please.

At least we got rid of segregation before the 1950s. Nobody is claiming that Britain is perfect, but to make out the US has some sort of moral high ground on race is ludicrous. Britain's record is a thousand times better, there.

I think the difference between the historical US and the British Empire is not so much the type of oppression as the scale. The US is currently under 8% of the world's land area. The British Empire was close to a quarter at its largest, and there has never been a larger.

Guam, the Phillipines, the Spanish American War, The Monroe Doctrine, 200+ years of meddling in Latin American affairs as a result.

Good grief, why are we even having such a conversation?

"but your genocide was worse than our genocide"

Learn to separate rhetorical devices, propaganda for the working classes via the free public education system, and actual historical facts and context.

Let's just say that altruism and moral purity haven't been high on the political values pile anywhere that power relations are exercised. A little less "my precious" will help in a dispassionate and accurate analysis.

This article is a book report written by an old crank who doesn't like that modern scholarship focuses on what we can best tell what happened instead of some fairy-tale to make flag-wavers feel good about themselves. It's in a publication that generally hates intellectuals, especially those in academia.

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