A patriot of a new born nation and a traitor of an old one. Where do you put the iraqi in this example? Is he Washington the traitor of Iraq or Washington the patriot of US?
"Had he not become the most famous turncoat in U.S. history,"
"Patriot" and "traitor" are quite nuanced notions. At the time, a (US) patriot would of course have been considered a traitor (by Britain) because they were all British citizens.
Here we have a patriot who is a turncoat (ie a traitor).
I never understand why USAians refer to Benedict Arnold as a "traitor". It's a really stupid word to bandy about in a civil war. The country was governed by Britain. Everyone who fought against the government was, by definition, a traitor. Using a word with such a definite negative connotation in such a complex environment is either disingenuous or obtuse.
For similar reasons, using the word "traitor" is also stupid in the case of Snowden. Against whom / what was he a traitor? - The government? A branch of the government? The constitution? The people?
" Traitors who fought their country for slavery weren't heroes. The Founding Fathers were"
Someone said a few years ago:
"On the one hand, we had people who fought with gun and sword to murder, rape, and otherwise exploit my people. On the other hand we had people who fought with pen and parchment to murder, rape, and otherwise exploit my people."
So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America?
This is an impossible question to answer. It depends too much on the definitions of "deep" and "patriotic"... words which are fuzzy enough to span continents. "Patriot", in particular, is almost impossible to define objectively... you start out with some reasonable definition, and ten minutes later you discover -- possibly to your horror -- that the word has shifted to mean "someone who supports my position on Issue X". Everyone agrees that George Washington was, objectively, a patriot -- except for his Tory contemporaries.
But, if we insist on trying to answer this unanswerable question, my answer would have to be "yes". Give me one or another popularly-accepted definition of "happy-go-lucky patriot" and "intellectual" and I'll bet you we can find plenty of people who fit both categories.
Depending on how the US War of Independence turned out, Washington would have been a traitor or a patriot. While either might be literally true depending on the outcome, it dodges the issue of how you view his actions. Do you think he was a traitor?
> America had declared its independence years before his betrayal,
That's not enough to make it a "country" in practice any more than joining a startup makes someone a company man. America isn't some mythic entity that sprung out of the head of Zeus with devoted followers.
> Sure he joined the revolution, but not everyone who joined the American Revolution was aligned with its goals.
Given the disparity and ignorance between the population about independence, it's very likely the philosophical derivations were innumerable but aligned somewhere along "for it", "against it", "indifferent while it still suits me". This is basically the plot for The Patriot - ie it would follow that if the Americans had won a battle and executed wounded British soldiers, then conscripted/shot his sons, the protagonist's motivations would be the same for the opposing side he ended up on.
People despise traitors because they pretend to be on one side while actually working for another. That's why Benedict Arnold is despised and Lee is not. Lee may turned against the Federal government, but he never pretended to be on a different side then he was.
They did an amazing job of describing him as a patriot - the references to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine were brilliant. I hope the U.S. government actually realizes what they've unleashed.
On an unrelated topic, how can the AP claim copyright to this?
I don’t feel your metaphor quite fits, and there is no one definition of a country - especially not for the time period.
You can play semantic games about whether the nation was a nation at the point Arnold betrayed it, but he made a conscious decision to betray the Continental Army so really this is just splitting semantic hairs. The man is the quintessential turncoat.
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