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Benedict Arnold
(67.33.227.15) on 4/3/2004 - 10:06 a.m. says: ( 7 views
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"DON'T QUESTION MY PATRIOTISM!"
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(EDITED BY AUTHOR: 4/3/2004 - 11:26 a.m.) 
Revolutionary Veterans Against the War Statement by Benedict Arnold, 1781 to the Royal Ministry of Foreign Relations April 23, 1781.
I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in London we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in the former colonies. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in London - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in the Colonies. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable Franklin kites to human genitals in the middle of thunderstorms, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of the Southern colonies in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of the Colonials.
We call this investigation the Summer Soldier Investigation. The term Summer Soldier is a mockery of that traitor Thomas Paine when he spoke of the "Sunshine Patriots" and "summertime soldiers" who defected from Valley Forge because they realized their obligation to the Crown.
We who have come here to London have come here because we feel we have to be summer soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in the Colonies, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the redcoats, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....
In our opinion and from our experience, there is everything in the Colonies which could happen that realistically threatens the United Kingdom. And to attempt to justify the desertion of one Loyalist life in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or Virginia by linking such loss to the preservation of Republican anarchy, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Colonists whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between Loyalism and treason. They only wanted to work in tobacco fields without Rebel rabble shooting at them them and bombs with gunpowder burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this ugly presence of the Rebel rabble, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it the Crown, the Continential Congress, the French, whatever.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those fields for want of support from their allies the French. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime of the Continential Congress. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw the Colonies ravaged equally by Loyalist bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Patriotic terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the King's Army.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw the Colonies lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a Bunker Hill and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out Salt Pork and Maple sticks.
We learned the meaning of firing behind trees, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while the Rebels placed a cheapness on the lives of Loyal Colonists.
We watched the Colonial rabble's falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "Loyalist human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the King's Army. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Bunker Hills and Harlem Heights and Brandywines and Montreals, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while Colonists' lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Americanizing the Americans.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the "United Colonies" washes her hands of the American Revolution someone has to give up his life so that the "United Colonies" don't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Hanson wouldn't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in the Revolution? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in London to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of sifting brandy which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the European Rules of War and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those European Rules; in the use of shooting behind trees, not lining up in formation in open fields, and the shooting of officers, all accepted policy by many units in the Colonial Army. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Ohio put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on the his ancient hunting grounds he had watched traveling shows and he used to cheer the settlers when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Virginia and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of that country? Where is that leadership? We're here to ask where are the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adams, Hancocks, Paines and any others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have finished? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Continential marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as their administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "King George's American Colonies" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning it back to the Mother Country where it belongs.
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