The Wars of 1812 & 2022
Guy Christopher Carter
Historical Theologian | Worker in Refugee Resettlement #WomanLifeFreedom
Sadistic Terror--Generic Label
It has been painful, even embarrassing, to see a never great but once powerful army that served both Czars and Commissars disintegrate into a pathetic rabble, a process of degeneration likely to become even more evident with the Ukrainian encirclement of the Russians in the Donetsk Region over the next few days. Every man and woman in the Ukrainian Armed Forces know what they have been fighting for and will fight for until every last enemy is driven from the Cossack lands.?But what has the rage and the bestiality of the Russians been for, why their horrendous losses, their betrayal by their commanders, treating them like expendable garbage even in death, refusing even to accept back their mortal remains, and then, it is rumored, trucking those garbage bags full of young men’s bones to industrial incineration in Belarus.?Why not take their rage out on the butchers that sent them into the meat grinder in the first place??But no, rape, pillage, torture, sexual mutilation, especially of the manhood of the enemy, and cold-blooded mass murder of their first cousins has been the Russian order of the day.?
The world has seen this before, minions of a former great empire taking out revenge for heir fathers’ generation on the ‘enemy’ children and grandchildren of today.?How dare they live so well?!?How dare they not want to fly and salute our flag and speak our language?!?How dare they practice their faith?!?And the question of every mass murderer not of but about his victims, How dare they breathe? ?And then, when confronted not with children, women, the elderly, household pets and farm animals that don’t know to flee the butchers, but now with a real army, they crumble, they cry, they soil themselves while fleeing.?It has all happened before, and here, in the United States.
The War of 1812 was like all wars, a complicated and bloody mess.?Mother England having been beaten by France and the US Continental Army and Navy was nursing her wounded pride.?She needed cannon fodder to fight Napoleon on land and able-bodied seamen to man the greatest naval power the world had ever seen, and what Perfidious Albion needed and wanted she simply took.?Families here in New England were used to not seeing their fathers and sons, husbands and sweethearts return from sea because Almighty God had gathered them to Davy Jones’ Locker, but they were not used to receiving reports eventually that they had been indefinitely detained by His Majesty’s Admiralty because their ships had been boarded and either sunk or stolen and their men press-ganged into service that was in every respect servitude without indenture.?New England and American had had a gut full, and so they went to war to grossly oversimplify the story.
But the causes and consequences of that war or this one, of the War of 1812, or the War of 2022, is not the point that demands to be written about here.?It is neither the beginning nor the end but the stinking middle of that war and this one that seem so uncannily similar.?It came down to some great battles on land and sea, but also to countless indignities and sheer nastiness intended to hurt and to terrify the ‘Colonials’ who would have proven absolutely ungovernable had the British had the bad luck to actually win the Thirteen American colonies back.?
You have to talk to people descended from those who had to take what the Red Coats dished out.?Maryland is a good place for that, and the Battle Creek where timbers were harvested and ships were built for John Paul Jones’ US Navy.?The British made a beeline for those places, most of which they never found, and at places like Havre de Grace, Patuxent and Chaptico they made asses of themselves, rather along contemporary Russian lines today.?But these needed no tutelage from a foreign power, for this land and those ‘subjects’ who dared to breathe freely belonged to them, and so they and their lands and their churches and their homes could be used and abused in anyway the occupiers saw fit.?Just ask the folk of Christ Church Anglican Parish in Chaptico.?There the mayor and a warden of the church, had just buried his wife the day before the proto-orcs arrived.?The atmosphere in Chaptico must have been oppressively sorrowful, and now officers and men of His Majesty’s forces were billeted all around, into the stores of food and drink and ready to have some fun, allowed to and encouraged to by their gentleman officers.?
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Assessing the suitability of the Church of Saint Mary as a horse barn, their attention was drawn to the fresh grave in the churchyard.?On learning that a prominent citizen had just been buried there, and speculating on the value of any jewelry she might still be wearing, the regimental fife and drum corps were assembled while the mayor was forced to unearth his wife’s body, remove it from the casket and dance a hornpipe or two with her remains for entertainment of the troops, forced also to show affection with cuddles and kisses.?Not to be compared with the outrages in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, the Bucha massacre, the E40 highway shooting (Kyiv), the executions in Staryi Bykiv, the killings and torture in Trostianets, the torture and executions in Kharkiv Oblast, to be sure, but still, at a little place one day on Maryland’s Western Shore, it was the same sadistic glee.???
--Guy Christopher Carter, ?2022
Historical Theologian | Worker in Refugee Resettlement #WomanLifeFreedom
2 年TO MY BRITISH DETRACTORS: The British Army on the North American Continent had no record of being 'careful to avoid atrocities' in either the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812, any more than after the Battle of Culloden Moor when William 'Stinking Billy' Duke of Cumberland let his butcher boys loose on the Scottish Highland capital of Inverness. During the War of American Independence, the British offer of manumission to the enslaved Africans was a cynical military gambit, those poor souls being told to escape and flee to Norfolk, Virginia, to report for duty in His Majesty's Forces as the price of their freedom with the catch that only the men were to be afforded the protection of the Crown. Their women and children could just shift for themselves or go back to their plantations and the tender mercies of their masters. In cases of war crimes, genocide and ethnic cleansing, there is documentation and there is national memory. It is the job of historians to establish the correlation and dissonance between these. For the outrage at Chaptico, there is the State Archive of Maryland, the parish register of Christ Church, Chaptico, and there is memory, and the memory of victims deserves to be believed.