Thanksgiving Is Ruined

The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

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February 11, 2017
 

refugees [6/7]

are us


or rather, like slavery, were an essential functional component of the foundational project of inventing the USA:


The loyalists of the American Revolution, that is, those who remained loyal to the British crown during the Revolutionary War, have not gotten much of a fair shake from historians. They were, after all, the losers in the Revolution, and history is usually not kind to losers, especially exiles or refugees from a lost war. . . .  Although the loyalists had been raised to consider Britain as “home,” most of the refugees, even those who were privileged, soon discovered that they were strangers in a strange land. . . . . Like the other things the British government provided the loyalists -- land grants, free passages, rations and supplies -- awarding compensation for losses was truly remarkable, all part of the British government’s Atlantic-wide program of refugee relief. The government never believed that the loyalists had a right to reparations; instead, it assumed that Britain had a moral and paternalistic responsibility to provide aid to its loyal subjects.



from Gordon S. Wood's "Good Losers," review of Maya Jasanoff 's Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World