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One common form of satirizing or commenting on contemporary events and attitudes is by projecting them backwards in time onto a familiar historical setting, or by doing the reverse and recasting a historical event in a modern setting. Such a technique is often used to demonstrate the supposed folly of a current political viewpoint by highlighting how impractical, absurd, or out-of-touch it would have seemed to persons of an earlier time. For example, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001, Victor Davis Hanson penned a speculative piece dated 8 December 1941 which had the most renowned newsman of the World War II era, Edward R. Murrow, speculating that President Franklin Roosevelt's address to Congress in response to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous day would be a call for understanding and cautious diplomacy rather than a declaration of war. At the time it was published, Hanson's piece was often mistaken for a reproduction of a genuine 1941 news report by readers who didn't recognize it as a modern commentary on a current event. This technique often falls flat when the audience doesn't recognize the historical event being referenced, which has led many readers to inquire of us about the veracity of an article reproduced on multiple websites under headlines such as Seventy-two killed resisting gun confiscation in Boston! and BOSTON — NATIONAL GUARD SHOOTOUT, 72 KILLED, reporting that 72 National Guard troops were killed in an ambush while attempting to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons: In fact, as Thomas R. Eddlem told us, this piece originated as an article he collaborated on which was first published in the 6 February 1995 edition of The New American magazine under the title Scores Killed, Hundreds Injured As Para-Military Extremists Riot: The incident referenced in this article is of course not something that recently took place in the Boston area, but rather a recasting of a centuries-old event that is widely regarded as marking the beginning of the American Revolutionary War: the military clashes at Lexington and Concord which took place between British troops (commonly known as redcoats or regulars) and Massachusetts militia (commonly known as Minutemen) on April 18-19 in 1775. The National Guard troops in this encounter were British soldiers, the paramilitary extremist faction was rebellious colonials, Thomas Gage was the military governor of Massachusetts and the commander-in-chief of British forces who had been sent to occupy Boston in response to the Boston Tea Party and other colonial acts of protest, and the law enforcement group was British troops dispatched to Concord (about 26 miles northwest of Boston) on the night of April 18 in order to destroy military supplies that were reportedly being stored there by colonial rebels. The colonists learned of the British plans in advance, and William Dawes, Paul Revere, and others famously spread an alarm throughout the area that night warning that British regulars were about to embark in boats from Boston bound for Cambridge and the road to Lexington and Concord. Those early warnings allowed colonial militia to assemble in sufficient numbers to surprise the British troops at Lexington and confront them again at Concord. Those two skirmishes, as well as additional attacks on the British troops as they returned to Boston, left 72 redcoats dead. The colonial militia continued to grow as neighboring colonies sent additional men and supplies, and eventually formed the beginning of the Continental Army that would contest the British in the Revolutionary War. This article is therefore not a contemporary news report, but rather a form of satire that seeks to criticize modern calls for additional gun ownership restrictions (such as bans on assault weapons) and the potential for stripping citizens of weapons they might need to protect themselves against government depredations.
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