Could the American Revolution ever be justified?

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PolarGuy said:
I knew it was only a matter of time before this thread degenerated into Americans saying, proverbially, “everything my country has done is immoral…”

…while failing to recognize all the good it’s done, like saving the world from Nazism, Communism, and the Japanese warlords; the despotic and narcissistic Kaiser Wilhelm; and slavers like Jefferson Davis…

…and while ignoring aggressive wars started by Europeans; Asian Communists; and Islamic radicals.

Happy now, Johnnt3000? 😃
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if you really want balance, when will you think about the good that the Nazis, Communists, and Kaisers and Japanese and Asians and Europeans have done? I mean…there IS some good. Even with Hitler. Does that make him even remotely acceptable?
 
JewishCatholic said:
Why do we always forget the American Indians?
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Because “American” is a European title and “Indian” is an Asian title.

If somebody asks you to be more historically accurate by including the “Indians”, how do we respond? Hmmm…
 
twf said:
Really? America simply extended the vote to white Protestant landlords…a step in the right direction…but it would take another 150 years or so before women, blacks, Indians, etc. have equal rights. Britain was hardly an absolute monarchy at this time. A certain segment of the British population (the elite) voted and were represented in Parliament. Both Britain and America were oligarchies ruled by white men - before and after the Revolution.

Regarding Britain’s status as a monarchy, even late 18th century Britain was far from an absolute monarchy. The king ruled with Parliament. Actually, I’ve seen professional historians argue that the Constitution gave the US President more power than what the King had in practice. (Even by the 1790s the ministers in Parliament really ran the show).
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Why is monarchy seen as absolute evil or justification for war in it of itself? The Church has a history of defending monarchies.
 
JackVk said:
What I want to know is the Church’s reasoning behind such hatred for republics. Did they really have theological basis against it, or was is simply because the Church was so deeply in league with monarchs?
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Because most political Republic movements were founded by people who wanted to overthrow both the Pope and the King.

And the King settled moral matters in submission to the Church more easily than a Republic.
 
twf said:
I think it was more a hatred of the French Republic. The French revolutionaries slaughtered priests and were pretty antagonistic against the faith. Yes, the Church has a long history of backing monarchies. Theologically one could argue that monarchies better reflect the heavenly order, but there is nothing intrinsically immoral about a republic in and of itself. (Though I for one am happy to live in a constitutional monarchy). St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the ideal form of government is an elected monarchy in which a king is elected by the “most virtuous men” of the land (not by the general populace). This is the model the Catholic Church itself strives for in that the Pope is elected for life by the cardinals - ideally the “cream of the crop” among the clergy.
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ALL of what you just said is excellent!!! 👍👍👍
 
PolarGuy said:
Jeffrey, I call bunk on that 3 million murders claims.

Heck, it’s not just bunk, it’s a fabrication. If your position was so correct you wouldn’t have to resort to these sorts of tactics.

It’s also false to call it “murder.”

Now if you want murder, how about we talk about real murders, like those committed by Europeans like hitler or Stalin? You know, the ones Americans shed their own blood to prevent more of?

Some sense of perspective or moral equivalency would be appreciated.

Plus if the US is so awful…why don’t you leave?
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What about the good Hitler did? He resurrected the global economy got people into work ASAP and resurrected the German currency.
ALSO he threw off the Soviet Communists for awhile while the United States SUPPORTED them. Huh. Funny. Now does any of this make you LIKE Hitler? Hopefully not. So why ought your war stories of the US make me like the US?

America threw off the Nazis, who threw off the communists, who threw off the Tsar, who threw off whatever despot came before. And you think that just because America is the CURRENT despot means it is a good country?
 
I love how this thread seems to think that the American founding fathers didn’t know nothin’ 'bout no natural law.

Meanwhile, the usual contemporary accusations against Burke, Locke, and the Founding Fathers were that their ideas of liberty and justice were infested with those horrible papist natural law things that St. Robert Bellarmine and the Spanish canon lawyers kept saying, instead of going with the king having all power and the law coming strictly from his government’s say-so.

It’s saddening, really.

But following the conventional oikophobia is always easier than cracking open a book, so these days it’s a popular choice.
 
Yes, read the following few reason’s amongst many more, with “He” being King George III.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

I would say that those reasons were more than enough to justify the breaking of our bonds with England.
 
No, ialsop, the nazis were all bad. 1000% bad, as in awful. There was nothing good about them. NOTHING.

If we’re at the stage where someone is calling america a despot but saying the nazis did good, we are long, LONG past the point of reasonable discourse.
 
PolarGuy said:
Jeffrey, I call bunk on that 3 million murders claims.
Heck, it’s not just bunk, it’s a fabrication. If your position was so correct you wouldn’t have to resort to these sorts of tactics.
Plus if the US is so awful…why don’t you leave?
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

**Ok. Three and one half million deaths is the high end of the estimates. 15. million, the low end, and 2.5 million the middle. So my 3 million statement is towards the high end, but it is not a “fabrication.”

I feel that the US military adventures were a result of the personal political ambitions of Presidents Truman and Johnson and had nothing to do with the much ballyhooed propaganda about the “freedom and self-determination” of the Vietnamese.
So I regard all these deaths as illegitimate, and that qualifies them as murder in my mind.

It’s a childish response to a person’s legitimate criticism of their country to suggest that they should leave. **
 
PolarGuy said:
No, ialsop, the nazis were all bad. 1000% bad, as in awful. There was nothing good about them. NOTHING.

If we’re at the stage where someone is calling america a despot but saying the nazis did good, we are long, LONG past the point of reasonable discourse.
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So which is the WORSE crime, fighting communism or revitalizing the economy? Hmm?

And a consideration. Why is fighting communism GOOD when the US does it? But BAD when Hitler did it?

I am NOT trying to say the Nazis are good, I am trying to prove that your black and white view of entire nations is not accurate to reality.
 
pnewton said:
This is my thought. I do not think the Revolutionary War meets the current standard of Just War Doctrine. However, the standard is not retroactive.
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Well, it kind of is. Judging by this article, you are right that the grounds I chose are not necessarily in step with JWD as we know it today.

However, it still looks like the American War fails to meet the criteria of a just war, even in medieval times. It does not meet any of these criteria:
(1) Legitimate authority must declare war, not private citizens or groups;
Strike one, obviously.
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(2) The cause must be just;
Again, representation is not necessary so much as a good, just, and wise ruler. Representation can be a means to that, but it is not so necessarily - as we’ve seen recently.
(3) The war must be waged with a right intention (“so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil,” as Thomas says), which excludes acts of war done out of vengeance, hatred, and other like motives.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It is good they wished to react against an abuse of authority. But rebellion against legitimate authority, even when abused, with the intention of breaking from the abusive one is not a right intention. Strike three.
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I do not think the American War for Independence was a just war even by Aquinas’s standards. Moreover, even barring just war doctrine, it was a reaction vastly out of proportion with its cause. The violence done by the Sons of Liberty to Britons enforcing the Stamp Act is appallingly unjust in proportion to the nature of that Act. I don’t care whether the British Empire had neglected the American colonies for 200 or more years or not. The Americans did not ask. They did not have a referendum. They did not seek sovereignty, or even autonomy, by peaceful channels. The Revolutionaries were wrong.

Only by the grace of King George III, who agreed to the Treaty of Paris and ceded authority to the American Congress, are we, really, a sovereign nation.
BTW - I also do not think the [American] Civil War would meet today’s criteria, but it seems to be a moral war.
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The morality of that war is a subject that could probably fill volumes.
 
jeffrey_erwin said:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

**Ok. Three and one half million deaths is the high end of the estimates. 15. million, the low end, and 2.5 million the middle. So my 3 million statement is towards the high end, but it is not a “fabrication.”

I feel that the US military adventures were a result of the personal political ambitions of Presidents Truman and Johnson and had nothing to do with the much ballyhooed propaganda about the “freedom and self-determination” of the Vietnamese.
So I regard all these deaths as illegitimate, and that qualifies them as murder in my mind.

It’s a childish response to a person’s legitimate criticism of their country to suggest that they should leave. **
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For an alternative view, you may want to read Michael Lind’s book “Vietnam, the Necessary War.”
 
JewishCatholic said:
The Declaration of Independence outlines the reasons we went to war. If we had taxtation w/o representation today many people would be very upset.
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Im not so sure about that, from what Ive seen the US govt try to do in recent times and generally majority of people just sit down and eventually accept it, makes me wonder how truly patriotic we are today.

People today are not as willing to throw their lives away for patriotism, in the sense, they are more concerned with their own quality of life, their freedom, their jobs, income, comfort level, etc, so the most they will do is protest, write letters to lawmakers, maybe boycott, but thats where it ends, I dont know many people who would be willing to risk arrest and prison to fight for something in the Constitution.

Taxation w/o representation is such an old idea anyway, besides they have found so many new ways to take advantage of the people today, many times with the public believing its in their best interest, so I guess we can say the Govt has been very successful at ‘conditioning’ people over the years to submit to more and more control, giving up more and more freedoms.

I truly think our founding fathers would be ashamed what has become of the US today.

**Thomas Jefferson said it best…" When a people fear their govt there is tyranny, when a govt fears its people, there is liberty"…
**
now, tell me, which is taking place in the US today?
 
Americans had every right to expect to be treated as full English subjects of the Crown, with all the usual rights and representation. The colonists were (for the most part) already subjects when they came, or became subjects voluntarily when they emigrated to the Colonies.

But thanks to the mercantilism system, Americans who grew up with English rights suddenly found themselves being treated a lot like the Irish, and a lot worse than the Scots.

And even the Irish had their own Parliament, so that really stunk.

The UK idea of the American colonies was that the colonists would only produce raw materials and ship them to the UK. All finished goods would be bought exclusively from the UK. Preferably, the situation would be like the one in Virginia plantations: everybody would be heavily in debt to the UK company store, and therefore all raw materials would have to be provided at something close to cost.

But from the very beginning, American colonists were primarily interested in improving the land, making finished goods, and selling their finished goods throughout the world. They didn’t want to be in perpetual debt; they wanted to pay off their debts and make some money. They didn’t want to be in the situation of Ireland, except with American sharecroppers working hard for absentee English landlords.

And you know, the Church explicitly said many times that Ireland would be justified in rebelling. Not just because of the horrible religious laws, either.

All the UK laws like the Stamp Act were basically designed to funnel all American colonial trade into the preferred mercantilism trap. All American protests and boycotts were basically attempting to find a peaceful way to get out of the trap, and persuade Parliament to treat them like Englishmen. It didn’t work.

And you know, the Church didn’t usually like republics (except all the medieval Italian ones, not exactly mentioned in this thread), but it was awfully nice about the American Revolution. Awfully nice, especially considering it was a bunch of Protestants running the place, and the whole slavery thing. Almost like it thought the whole thing was a just war… and that all the just war criteria had been explicitly checked off…

Sigh. I’m really starting to think we need more translations into English of the great St. Robert Bellarmine.
 
mikekle said:
Im not so sure about that, from what Ive seen the US govt try to do in recent times and generally majority of people just sit down and eventually accept it, makes me wonder how truly patriotic we are today.

People today are not as willing to throw their lives away for patriotism, in the sense, they are more concerned with their own quality of life, their freedom, their jobs, income, comfort level, etc, so the most they will do is protest, write letters to lawmakers, maybe boycott, but thats where it ends, I dont know many people who would be willing to risk arrest and prison to fight for something in the Constitution.

Taxation w/o representation is such an old idea anyway, besides they have found so many new ways to take advantage of the people today, many times with the public believing its in their best interest, so I guess we can say the Govt has been very successful at ‘conditioning’ people over the years to submit to more and more control, giving up more and more freedoms.

I truly think our founding fathers would be ashamed what has become of the US today.

**Thomas Jefferson said it best…" When a people fear their govt there is tyranny, when a govt fears its people, there is liberty"…
**
now, tell me, which is taking place in the US today?
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We either have to accept that
a) The Revolution was unjustified
or…
b) a SECOND revolution would be justified today
 
ialsop said:
We either have to accept that
a) The Revolution was unjustified
or…
b) a SECOND revolution would be justified today
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I’m in favour of /b/. Particularly if it were a Revolution to become part of the United Kingdom again.
 
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