Totally unjustifiable
2d 6h ago by discuss.online/u/bytesonbike in politicalmemes from discuss.online
Yeah, actually this is a bad meme. From a recent comment of mine:
9 officers were surrounded by like 300 angry Bostonians who were wielding clubs and other weapons and goading them to fire their weapons while throwing shit at them. The fact that the only punishment for the officers who killed five people following their trial (in colonial court defended by John Adams) was that two had their thumbs branded indicated how two-sided the situation was.
Paul Revere’s famous engraving depicting the incident was intentional anti-British propaganda used to advance the cause of the revolution.
Actually...
The reason they dumped tea is they were smugglers (mostly thugs paid by smugglers).
Brits had just started enforcing taxation, and requiring all shipments go thru England. It was more expensive for American smugglers, and the giant established trade companies would dominate the market.
So when the Brits seized a bunch of smuggled shipments, the smugglers destroyed as much of the legal tea as possible.
This resulted in colonists barely being able to afford it, but the smugglers could charge enough to remain in operation.
Colonists could have paid for taxed tea cheaper than they had been paying, it's just the "new money" in American didn't want to give up the market.
It was the wealthy fucking over the poor and it's embarrassing so many adults don't understand what really happened.
For bonus points, they dressed as natives in the hopes that any revenge would be against the innocent locals. Which is extra fucked up that people try to twist that into a political statement too.
Stop blindly believing what we learned in grade school public education
Source?
Just skimming the Wiki article on this and linked article on the Sons of Liberty, while they sound like shitbags, nothing mentions smuggling or trying to make money off of selling smuggled goods.
Boston Tea Party wasn't about taxes, rather than the fact that the British East India Company found a way of importing tea cheaper than John Hancock could smuggle it in to Boston and it was ruining John Hancock's smuggling business.
http://www.boston-tea-party.org/smuggling/organized-smuggling.html
Smuggling was rampant in the colonies, because England wanted to see them build up more than make a small amount of money that bled the colony dry. Once it was established, the corpos moved in.
Solid source. Thanks! Interesting read too.
This country has always been the rich fighting the rich to see who can fuck over the poor harder.
Yeah, dumb take.
The Americans at the time were way worse than the British. The Boston Massacre was a great example of propaganda that was pushed by the wealthy's news outlets to divide the colonists.
The founding father's were manipulative fucks that used terror and lies to take control of the colonies for their own interests.
Washington was on his way to becoming the first billionaire adjusted for inflation. This just reinforces there are no good guys.
The colonists, especially frontier colonist, were deeply reactionary and uniquely bloodthirsty for native land in the way Israeli settlers in the west bank are today (when contrasted with their more liberal but just as complicit counterparts in the established urban centers) The British were not by any means good but the Indigenous groups of North America might have stood a better chance. Honestly I fuck with Waweyapiersenwaw (Blue Jacket) and Hokolesqua (Cornstalk) of the Shawnee a lot more than any American or British figure during the revolutionary period. The Haudenosaunee federation was also objectively better than US colonial democracy imo.
Also, the British freed colonial slaves.
George Washington himself lost some of his slaves to the British army