this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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That's not hard evidence of what they thought, any more than Trump's claims about the 2020 election and the 2021 coup are hard evidence of what he thought, let alone hard evidence of what actually happened.
Nobody launching a coup or a revolution admits that they're doing it because they want to seize power. They always use some kind of justification. That's all these people were doing. Washington's illegal purchases of land in the Indian territory are pretty clear evidence that he had an economic incentive to overthrow the British so he could claim that land.
When the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected president in 2013, they justified it by saying that he failed to meet the demands of the people. Does that make that true? Or could it be that they were grabbing power for a different reason? If you're only going to trust what people write to justify coups or revolutions, you'll discover that every single coup or revolution is fully justified and done for the most noble of reasons. But, actual historians who study these things look at the receipts, often literally. They follow the money and use that to understand why people were acting the way they were.
Again, you are speculating or citing sources that are speculating. I'm referencing actual evidence. It's clear that we have an ideological difference so I'm just going to stop now.
You're not citing evidence for what happened, you're citing propaganda that was used to justify it.
Again, do you 100% believe everything Trump said about the 2020 election and 2021 coup attempt? If he said it it must be true, right?
Historians can only speculate, because nobody is going to be 100% honest about their reasons for a coup or revolution. In particular, if their reasons are selfish they're almost always going to keep those reasons private, and try to justify with public statements that make it seem justified. You can look at their public statements, but you have to compare those public statements to their actions.
If I'm looking for the motivations of the coup and the rioters, I'm going to look at what they and their propaganda said. And it says they wanted to delay accepting the electors. Trump said that explicitly. He specifically called in Pence to reject the electors. The rioters believed the election was fraudulent; that's also apparent from their statements, posts, and media.
We have been talking about motivations, so what people said is absolutely relevant. We were never taking about the validity of the facts.
So, you fully believe that the reason that the democratically elected government of Egypt was overthrown because "The president's speech last night failed to meet and conform with the demands [of the people]"? Couldn't possibly because the military wanted to seize power, could it?
Maybe, maybe they just didn't want to admit they lost. Do you think Trump believed the election was fraudulent? That's what he said, so it must be true, right? Everyone's justifications have to be taken at face value, and there can't be any other possible reasons for what they do. All coups are launched for fully benevolent and altruistic reasons, just as they claim!
Again, we're talking about motivations. I don't have things like letters between Egyptian military leaders, large treatises, etc., like I do from the American revolution.
I think there's a difference between motivations and justifications. I said Trump's motivations were clear and conspicuous. Were his justifications valid? I believe not. Did he believe them? I think I'm his convoluted way, he did/does. He thinks everything is a game. It's apparent from his demand on the Georgia Secretary of State that he invent the numbers he needed to make up the difference. I'm sure Trump believes that's how it works and the he other side is doing the same, but--as I said earlier--we were never taking about validity. Were those 2 dozen reasons started in the Declaration of Independence all true? I don't know, but it doesn't really matter if we're talking about motivations. And, yes, I think everyone who showed up for the coup believed there was fraud. Many Republicans accepted they had lost, but those weren't showing up in Washington that day
It doesn't matter what you have. What you have is the things they chose to publish.
Put it this way. If the rebels had lost the war and the British had won, do you think that the British history books would give the same reasons for the attempted rebellion?
If those are the actual reasons, there's not going to be any case of "history is written by the winners". Boy would the British history books look grim, they crushed an attempted rebellion where the rebels had such lofty ideals!
Or, do you think the alt-history British would look deeper and say something like "While George Washington publicly claimed to be rebelling because he objected to the lack of representation, in reality he had purchased a lot of land illegally and was trying to justify the revolution so that he could make a profit on that investment."
You seem to be hung up on this idea that people who write about their justification for rebellions and coups are being honest, for some reason. They aren't. The public reasons they give are the ones that make them look good. You need leaked recordings or investigations to uncover the reasons that they don't list in public.
In this case, historians have dug into the actual reasons for the rebellion. Sure, to some extent the rebels may have felt these lofty ideals, but they were also trying to get rich. They wanted access to all the wealth of the American continent without having to share it with the people of mainland Britain.
George Washington was not a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. You like to bring him up but I'm not even considering him. I'm talking about the fanatics who drive the movement. We do have their correspondence. We do know their thoughts. They wrote philosophically about the issues. There were debates, schisms, etc. They were baking arguments on thinkers like Hume and Locke.
You want a simplistic, crass, dismissive explanation. Sure, money was a motivation for some, but not for the 2 million regular citizens and I'd say many of the drafters of the Declaration. I think someone like Franklin was ideological. He was heavily involved in advising France in a way that demonstrates a level of benevolence