09/19/2021
From: “Ratline” [Gab him]
The Portland [Maine] Press Herald details the horrible deeds of Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, for whom the county and possibly the town in Maine are named.
Across the ocean, pedestals and columns dedicated to the man for whom this town and Maine’s largest county are named stand empty, the statues having long since been carted away.
…Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was for a quarter-century in the mid-1700s one of England’s greatest heroes: military champion, defender of Protestant England against alleged Catholic conspiracies and Scots barbarism, and the power behind the throne of his young nephew, the child king George III. Statues rose glorifying “Sweet William” in English and Irish cities, and British colonial officials from North Carolina to Nova Scotia named towns, counties and forts after him.
A painting of Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Then he wasn’t.
Monuments to notorious people are coming down and being renamed. What about Cumberland?
In Britain they’ve removed statues of 'the Butcher,' the reviled 18th century English prince for whom Cumberland County and the town of Cumberland are named.
By Colin Woodard, September 19, 2021
This seems like a slightly new twist on anti-European-American iconoclasm: the alleged villain’s deeds aren’t known in Maine, or more widely in the U.S.
(In fact, the article points out that most residents of Maine don’t realize that York, Scarborough, and Falmouth in the Pine Tree State were so named as humiliating reminders of Protestant victory in England against Catholic and Celtic forces.)
"Cumberland then oversaw the suppression of the defeated Scots Highlanders, who were forbidden from wearing their tartans, speaking their language or playing the bagpipe."https://t.co/EBbxgZAGcR @MisneachdAlba
— Cumann Uí Chléirigh (@BrooklynGaelic) September 19, 2021
I hope I’m wrong, but I expect to see more of this here and in the other 49 states, especially on the East Coast, and especially in New England — placenames will carry unwoke baggage among some — often descendants of those consolidated into the British realm.
Since most Americans — even local historians and the like, as the Portland paper describes — have no dog in the fight, a noisy minority will likely win whenever name changes go to a vote.
Like this example, it will probably not involve crimes against Amerinds or Africans, but against those on the borders of old England. Let’s hope that as we witness the appalling tragedy of statues of heroes of Legacy Americans toppled, and placenames changed, in the wake of woke-ism and antiwhite sentiment, pockets of AWFL awareness won’t begin to change placenames honoring imperfect men who battled Gaels and Papists in the Old World in the service of Britannia.
By James Fulford writes: What we're dealing with, in respect to sentimentality about Bonnie Prince Charlie and Highland rebels of 1745, is the same thing we see with sentimentality about the American Indians — you know, the people Thomas Jefferson called "the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." People got sentimental when they could get sentimental, when they were out of danger, and there was no danger of being scalped or beheaded by a Hignlander with a claymore.
Steve Sailer explained this in 2012 in a post called Diversity before Diversity: Thomas Babington Macaulay on the Scottish Highlanders.
Macaulay, an English historian, wrote in 1848 that in the early 18th century, the Highlanders were regarded as savages, because, frankly, they acted like savages, and
This contemptuous loathing lasted till the year 1745 [when Bonnie Prince Charlie, Pretender to the throne lost by the Stuarts in 1688, led an invading Highland army to within 100 miles of London], and was then for a moment succeeded by intense fear and rage. England, thoroughly alarmed, put forth her whole strength. The Highlands were subjugated rapidly, completely, and for ever. During a short time the English nation, still heated by the recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. The slaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was not sufficient to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of the tartan inflamed the populace of London with hatred, which showed itself by unmanly outrages to defenceless captives. A political and social revolution took place through the whole Celtic region. The power of the chiefs was destroyed: the people were disarmed: the use of the old national garb was interdicted: the old predatory habits were effectually broken; and scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of public feeling began.
Pity succeeded to aversion. The nation execrated the cruelties which had been committed on the Highlanders, and forgot that for those cruelties it was itself answerable. Those very Londoners, who, while the memory of the march to Derby was still fresh, had thronged to hoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the prince who had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher. Those barbarous institutions and usages, which, while they were in full force, no Saxon had thought worthy of serious examination, or had mentioned except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration.
The British Isles became a United Kingdom under Protestant kings after Cumberland beat the Highlanders, and created the British Empire (minus America). The U.S. also created a great nation once there was less chance of being scalped or having your settlement burned by wild Indians. All this sentimentality is misplaced.
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