The lessons of this three hour film should not be lost to man or child. There is minor romantic exaggeration and emotional pain in this traditional, but historically reasonable, account of good versus evil. Mel Gibson, as the Patriarch of a large motherless family, is torn between staying home to protect the family and defending his freedom. The story artfully explains he is reluctant to go to war because he understands terrorism, having once been guilty of it while fighting in the French and Indian Wars. His instincts are to stay home and protect his family. He was eventually forced to do otherwise.
While the real life patriots won the glorious victory over great odds, the movie also clearly explains how terror works in war, something we need to know. Providentially, the British were reluctant to apply terror in the full measure. If they had done so, it is unlikely the patriots could have withstood the horrible pressure on their spirit, and we would probably have no Fourth of July to celebrate.
This in no way detracts from the unique and brilliant bravery and wisdom of the forefathers. They possessed the God given quality of knowing when to fight. Any pause or delay would certainly have perpetuated a British colony, as Thomas Paine and others proclaimed.
A clear lesson of the film is that terror is used as a tool of governments and armies against citizens. It is not an invention of small and weak men with suitcase bombs or poison vials, as we want to believe. Terrorism against families, depicted so clearly in the film, is a tool to control free men. Britain failed to conquer the untrained and under gunned farmers who fought with spirit alone. King George and the Redcoats were, with few exceptions, English gentlemen fighting with a code of honor. The villain of the movie, historically infamous British Colonel Tarleton, became known as “Bloody Tarleton.” He advocated unlimited terrorism to win.
The British may have lost because they were unwilling to employ unlimited brutality and ruthlessness, as Tarleton advocated. He urged the ritual slaughter of women and children, as a lesson to the farmers to make the price of resistance high. Farmers must learn to stay home and mind their crops and family, else they will find their families dead and rotting at the burned down farm sites.
In The Patriot, Col. Toleton (sic) burned the entire population of a village in a church as a reprisal for supporting the Militia. However, the gentlemanly and stuffy General Cornwallis, whose war protocols did not include terrorism, limited reprisals and brutality. The Americans Patriots won because a fair number of them refused to quit, go home, and mind their families in the face of the threat of unforeseeable brutality.
History tells us the British lost their squeamishness about killing women in the 19th century and became the undisputed ugly terrorist model to the world. They committed violence against civilians in campaign after campaign against natives around the world. Perhaps the worst example of this was the incredibly brutal Boer Wars (Dutch farmers). There, in 1905, the British prevailed and conquered the farmers, who fought with determination and killed over 20,000 British soldiers in a losing cause. The difference was not lack of will on the part of the Boers, but that the British applied unlimited terrorism as depicted in The Patriots.
The English army captured and interned the wives and children of almost every farmer who was not at home to protect them, and burned their farms to the ground. By their own record, 25,000 Boers died in the war. More than half were women and children deliberately starved in unprotected camps, a brutal deterrent to those who chose to take up arms. In 1905, the Boers capitulated to save the lives of the remaining families. England captured the world’s greatest gold camps, but at a terrible moral cost. The Boer war broke the back of what had become an evil empire.
The Patriot does not attempt to tell us who the world terrorists are today. We enter the 21st Century in the midst of world bloodshed that dwarfs anything King George could have imagined. Sadly, the decaying and depraved government of our great empire, the United States of America, is the only world power this July 4, 2000.
In only 226 years, we have squandered most of the decency our forefathers fought for, and we have largely forgotten their lesson. The “Redcoats” of today are in Washington, not London. The few scattered patriots of the world, fighting for tiny and obscure blocks of territorial independence, are scattered in other lands. They are beset by terrorism from our government. Are we to be the successor to Great Britain as the world’s most terrorist state?
History is clear that a nation that terrorizes others will eventually turn to terror at home. We American patriots, if we dare call ourselves such, are sleeping victims of future enemies. The “Redcoats” are within our gates. Who will identify them, and who will expose them? Our future is in our own hands, as it was with the patriot farmers in 1776. God has no reason to help us if we do not help ourselves.
