Americans rewriting history

[eroticartist]

Warren you have hi jacked my thread again and digressed into an unrelated subject. You can send round who you want. Why do cowards, like you obviously are, are always send other people to do their dirty work and don't pretend that it was not a threat? You are revealed again by your semantics.

To sum up this thread I noticed no hardly anyone agreed that the distortion of history was very important although it was obvious that the same audince watching Th Patriot and Schindlers List would accept both as true.

This being the case it is obvious that the British Army and the Nation is maliciously and deliberately accused of atrocities that it did not commit and furthermore that these slanderous images could be used by the enemies of Britain for propaganda purposes.

I therefore suggest again that a law should be passed and where such lies are depicted as historical fact there should be a statement admitting that they bear no relation to history or the truth, on the front credits
Mike Freeman.

[Sam Slater]

Mike,

While I agreed with you, in that if you decide to make a film about actual real events, then you have a small moral duty to show those events as accurately as possible; I do not think laws should be brought in that would suppress a director, or writers talent in being creative and exaggerating to capture an audience.

If the director wanted to show these fictitious events as they were, then he should have that right; just like we have the right to criticise the film.

Laws being changed goes a little too far I feel!

[Pervert]

Since I haven't seen The Patriot (and given who made it, I wouldn't), there's no way I can comment on the alleged atrocities portrayed. But are you saying that the British Army has never committed atrocities? I can think of at least three in Northern Ireland (the most recent of which was Bloody Sunday), the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, various events in colonial countries (who invented concentration camps again?), and Culloden and its aftermath.

[jj]

Fair enough, up to a point- but you seem to have forgotten the overriding
[and rightly so, IMO] tenet of most advanced democracies that freedom of
expression, however biased or crassly stupid, is the foremost basic human
right.

[Sam Slater]

Every nation has been involved with atrocities at some time or other, lets not forget that, but I think Mike is aggrieved with the making of an atrocity where there was none.

Being a Scot, you'll probably already know -though I didn't till a book I read last year- that the battle of Culloden was more or less a Highlander v Lowlander battle, and their were more Lowlander Scots in Cumberland's army than Englishmen.

[Pervert]

If the Jacobites had won, they would have dragged us back into the middle ages. However, Cumberland's army committed terrible atrocities after the battle, and his place in history is as a butcher rather than a successful general.

[jj]

Whatever the merits of each individual case, there is one simple truth: the
strict discipline imposed by the British Army over the years since about
1720 has meant that we have significantly fewer unlaid ghosts than most
other armies.

[Pervert]

Not disputing that, JJ. I am grateful for what our army has done throughout the centuries. But there have been incidents, and we cannot claim to be completely clean.

[jj]

Indeed.
My point was merely meant to reinforce the fact that the British Army is
one of the few that have a STRICT and [usually rigidly-enforced] policy of
punishmnent [up to and including summary execution] for rape/looting.
For example, Max Hastings has pointed out that some British squaddies
were executed for looting in Berlin, long after hostilities had ceased.
As an aside, it is my opinion that those US soldiers involved in, and found
guilty of, the Iraq gang-rape should have faced a firing-squad. IMO the last
shred of US credibility therein died ignominiously at that point.
Hearts and minds? Don't make me laugh...............