Happy Independence Day weekend a construct of the White wealthy to transfer colonists’ anger from local elites to the British.

With regard to the American Revolution, Howard Zinn considers it a contrived product of the colonial elites, a series of hostile responses to British policy, trade and taxation that exaggerated the dangers of these things.

The aim of the revolution, Zinn argues, was to divert colonial class anger of the 1760s, shifting it away from colonial assemblies and onto the British government.

In doing this, the revolutionary elite was able to seize control of part of the British Empire and rule it as their own. They convinced ordinary Americans to support them, using manufactured political ideologies, anti-British paranoia and American nationalism. The revolution, its leaders and its core documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – were later reinvented as sacred artefacts and became immune from criticism or challenge.

According to A People’s History, the Constitution was an advanced means of law, control and coercion, rather than a brilliant gift from benevolent ‘Founding Fathers’.