And that’s a point I agree with, but likewise when somebody confides that they’ve been assraped you don’t say “I know how you feel because I got hit by a car once”; you just say “I’m very sorry to hear that, it must have been truly awful… but I’d still like the corn-on-the-cob with my number three combo and a medium diet Coke”. I get irked by any comparison of slavery to the Holocaust and slaveowners to Nazis. A comparison of slaveowners and southerners to ordinary Germans (i.e. not the Final Solution policy makers and implementers) during the Hitler regime is perhaps more valid, but owning slaves- an idea far less barbaric to most people in 1859 than it is today and purposefully deliberately working them to the point of death by exhaustion or just killing them outright- concepts as monstrously horrifying in 1940 as they are now- are miles apart on the spectrum of inhumanity. Not all indignities are created equal; they’re not even all created.
Only because you’re going by the denotation, not the connotation. By the denotation, plenty of people are terrorist that we wouldn’t otherwise think of.
But even if we go by your definition, I don’t think Brown qualifies, because he did not attempt the systematic use of terror. He killed specific people who were terrorists by your definition (those who burned printing presses of abolitionists), attempting to remove their influence; and he attempted to start a revolution by arming slaves. That’s not terrorism, that’s revolutionism.
There have been people in this thread who have talked about how we shouldn’t be too harsh on slavers because slavery was, what were the words? “legal and socially acceptable,” I believe. The only reason for posting that, AFAICT, is to undermine the thesis that slavery was evil. SO yeah, people have attacked that thesis.
Of the articles I read on Harper’s Ferry, the closest I could find to describing Shepherd’s role is to say that he “confronted” Brown’s raiders when they tried to board a train that would otherwise (and did end up) carrying word of the raid to military reinforcements. Do you have details of what sort of confronting Shepherd did? It could’ve ranged from saying, “C’mon, guys, stop!” to throwing baggage at them to prevent them from boarding the train as it pulled away.
At one end of the spectrum, killing him was pure brutality. At the other end, killing him may have been essential to achieving their military objectives.
See, this is the sort of thing that’s just awful. If someone else is enslaving you, and you buy their contract and say, “I’m just going to enslave you until I die,” you’re not a good guy. That’s not benevolent. You know what is benevolent under those circumstances? Freeing the goddamn slave immediately.
Imagine modern circumstances: someone finds a prostitute being held in sexual slavery. They purchase her from the pimp, and then they just fuck her for a month (not even until they die, just a month) before letting her go. Benevolent?
Imagine if his raid had succeeded, if it had led to a general slave uprising across the South. Imagine if the power structure of the South–made up generally of wealthy slavers–had been scoured from the earth. Things might have gone worse than currently, a la Haiti, sure. On the other hand, the evils of the 1880s and 1890s might never have happened; Jim Crow might never have existed; lynchings might not have terrorized southern blacks for decades.
Brown would have been a hero for the ages.
What kept him from heroism, I maintain, is not that his methods were immoral. It’s that his methods were unsuccessful.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Of the articles I read on Harper’s Ferry, the closest I could find to describing Shepherd’s role is to say that he “confronted” Brown’s raiders when they tried to board a train that would otherwise (and did end up) carrying word of the raid to military reinforcements. Do you have details of what sort of confronting Shepherd did? It could’ve ranged from saying, “C’mon, guys, stop!” to throwing baggage at them to prevent them from boarding the train as it pulled away.
At one end of the spectrum, killing him was pure brutality. At the other end, killing him may have been essential to achieving their military objectives.
[/QUOTE]
They weren’t a military unit- they were more comparable to a militia group by today’s meaning of militia than by the 19th century definition. Under what circumstances today can you imagine a militia group of today willfully, knowingly and fatally shooting an unarmed man in the head and it NOT being considered murder?
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
See, this is the sort of thing that’s just awful. If someone else is enslaving you, and you buy their contract and say, “I’m just going to enslave you until I die,” you’re not a good guy. That’s not benevolent. You know what is benevolent under those circumstances? Freeing the goddamn slave immediately.
Imagine modern circumstances: someone finds a prostitute being held in sexual slavery. They purchase her from the pimp, and then they just fuck her for a month (not even until they die, just a month) before letting her go. Benevolent?
[/QUOTE]
You don’t know the details of the arrangement. Obviously he intended to free them- it was in his will. They had very possibly been used as collateral to secure a loan to buy them from their previous owner- this is very possible and it in fact happened in Harper’s Ferry (cite- same document as before). Perhaps there were legal ramifications to a free wife/children and an enslaved father; some slave codes were bizarre. Whatever the case, he was doing this as a favor to a slave, which says a lot about the guy in and of itself- and John Brown’s gang had no idea whether the man started each morning by raping a slave or whether he was Maryland’s foremost abolitionist- they shot him through the head when he was examining the body of the luggage handler you seem to feel deserved to die.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Imagine if his raid had succeeded, if it had led to a general slave uprising across the South. Imagine if the power structure of the South–made up generally of wealthy slavers–had been scoured from the earth. Things might have gone worse than currently, a la Haiti, sure. On the other hand, the evils of the 1880s and 1890s might never have happened; Jim Crow might never have existed; lynchings might not have terrorized southern blacks for decades.
Brown would have been a hero for the ages.
[/QUOTE]
Imagine if Helter Skelter had succeeded- Manson would have been considered the greatest man who ever lived. The odds of Helter Skelter succeeding were about as great.
In the history of the western hemisphere there have been two (2) slave uprisings that could be considered successful. The first and largest was Haiti, and that one was undertaken in an atmosphere completely different than the 1859 U.S. to begin with (among other things slaves were by far the majority of St. Domingue’s population, there was a large [compared to the U.S.] class of well educated and wealthy people of color to lead the revolts, and the French reinforcements were thousands of miles away in the first place and embroiled in a revolution and then a Continental war in the second). The other was the revolt by John Horse and his ‘success’ was that some of the Black Seminoles got to accompany the Seminoles in the removals rather than be returned to slavery. All others were thwarted and there was no reason to believe this would be different.
While Robert E. Lee was the officer in charge of the armed forces it’s important to remember he was a U.S. officer- the Confederacy wasn’t a glint in Jeff Davis’s eye yet. Had Brown managed to seize the arms and arm the slaves- and keep in mind it wouldn’t have been that many that he could arm- every U.S. regular and volunteer unit and militia would have come up and it would have been a bloodbath that would at best for Brown have ended with lots of corpses and then a U.S. victory, probably very quickly.
No matter how huge, a sporadically armed mob simply isn’t a longterm match for a well supplied and well trained military. Spartacus, Boudicca, Wat Tyler, Perkin Warbeck, and Yemelyan Pugachev, all names that well read people of the 1850s would have known, were the more successful of the revolutionary types like Brown and all proved that the most mobs with weapons can win against trained and equipped military forces are battles, they can’t win wars. If you’re thinking of George Washington remember that he had a Congress working to equip him and would have been utterly destroyed had it not been for the French. Brown never had a prayer of success, so pondering him victorious is as nonsensical as pondering a victorious Symbionese Liberation Army.
Them doing it in Sudan in an effort to free slaves there, maybe–or a group freeing child prostitutes from slavery in Hong Kong, maybe. (I’m assuming you’re using a moral, not legal, definition of murder–otherwise you know well there’s no debate). If, say, a street gang in Sudan attacked a house of slavery to free a bunch of slaves, and in the process shot the person who was trying to bar the door to prevent their entry, I wouldn’t classify that as terrorism.
If you can show me that his arrangement was that they were slaves only legally–that they were free to come and go as they pleased as far as he was concerned, that he paid them for any work they did, that they could choose not to work for him at all, that he made it clear he would not alert authorities if they left, etc.–then I’ll retract what I said. Otherwise, however, the fact remains that he was enslaving them, and whatever niceties he put around the arrangement, while somewhat significant, in no way erase the tremendous evil of that fact of enslavement.
So are you agreeing with me, then? I don’t dispute that his strategy was foolish.
And I would argue that a zealot who leads a small band in modern day Sudan on a half-assed attempt to cause insurrection that any sane person would know can’t possibly succeed is guilty of murder when they kill unarmed innocent people.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorness]
If you can show me that his arrangement was that they were slaves only legally–that they were free to come and go as they pleased as far as he was concerned, that he paid them for any work they did, that they could choose not to work for him at all, that he made it clear he would not alert authorities if they left, etc.–then I’ll retract what I said. Otherwise, however, the fact remains that he was enslaving them, and whatever niceties he put around the arrangement, while somewhat significant, in no way erase the tremendous evil of that fact of enslavement.
[/QUOTE]
I can show you in that same cite the notion of using your family as collateral when purchasing their freedom. (Do a search for Philip Coons on that National Park Service page.) And again, they shot a 71 year old man through the head knowing nothing about his deal with Gilbert.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
So are you agreeing with me, then? I don’t dispute that his strategy was foolish.
[/QUOTE]
I agree that there’s some merit to “victors write history” but I disagree with your notions that the means justify the end. To accept he had a chance of victory as a premise is as ridiculous as accepting there are whales on the moon, and I don’t agree that taking up guns for a righteous cause makes killing innocent people morally okay when there’s absolutely not a snowball’s chance in hell of it succeeding; collateral damage is horrible in the most just of wars but in a fool’s journey like Brown’s it’s just senseless murder.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Darkness]
There have been people in this thread who have talked about how we shouldn’t be too harsh on slavers because slavery was, what were the words? “legal and socially acceptable,” I believe. The only reason for posting that, AFAICT, is to undermine the thesis that slavery was evil. SO yeah, people have attacked that thesis.
[/quote]
There’s a HUGE difference in saying that slavery was legally and socially acceptable to most people in 1859 and saying that it’s moral by the standards of 2010. Not allowing women to vote was legally and socially acceptable, few would argue its wisdom or morality today.
Out of curiosity, do you feel the Romans and Greeks were evil because they allowed slavery and also counted all outsiders as barbarians?
Thank you. I felt that Qin was trying the whole “Happy darkies in the field, singing while pickin’ cotton” angle. Yes, if you held a gun to my head, I’d definitely chose to be a slave over going to Auschwitz. But slavery was NOT the picture our good friend Curtis is painting.
FWIW, I consider Brown a terrorist – his ideals were right, but he definitely picked the wrong way of going about them. He wasn’t going to end slavery doing what he did. The terrorist angle is debatable, perhaps. But no way I could consider him a hero.
I really hope you have the option of a walk-on role on GLEE to either one.
In the long run, Auschwitz. After twenty, thirty years of hard labor, brutalization and degradation I expect that death would look like a better alternative.
Not having watched GLEE, I really can’t comment.
Um… yeah. I’ve heard some wildly horrible Holocaust jokes over the years, but that might be more disrespectful to the realities of it than any of them.
If you will repent now and begin watching the DVDs and back episodes, there’s still a chance God will forgive you.
As posted some days ago, a good case can be made that Brown’s actions did in fact hasten the end of slavery, albeit not according to his plan. His righteousness did make him a hero. And he did not indulge in the deliberate large-scale attacks on innocents that define terrorism.
Oh, please. Over the course of a few years they suffered and died, which is better than suffering and suffering and suffering for decades, and your children suffering and suffering and suffering, and their children suffering and suffering and suffering.
As bad as it was, the Holocaust was not some apex of human evil. It wasn’t all that unusual in terms of behavior; America for example is founded on the near-annihilation of the Native Americans who lived here first. What makes it unusual is how the Jews and their allies managed to keep people from pretending it never happened or didn’t matter, and that the Germans have actually accepted that they were in the wrong.
Not all slaves were brutalized and degraded. The experience of slavery differed from individual to individual and from society to society, and black slaves in the antebellum south did develop a society and culture, albeit one constrained by the realities of slave life.
As to the question of whether slavery was worse than death, we know that for most slaves, it wasn’t. And we know this for a very simple reason; that most slaves did not kill themselves or attempt to kill themselves. The vast majority of slaves in the antebellum South were farm laborers, with access to agricultural tools. . .sharp agricultural tools. It would have been easy for most slaves to slit their wrists or otherwise commit suicide. A slave with a more vindictive state of mind would simply have to attack his master, which he would have to know would mean immediate death.
But as a whole, slaves didn’t do that. They found what pleasures they could, they bettered themselves within the limitation of their station, and they developed social relationships with other slaves and even with their owners. Slaves endured, and the history of slavery shows that for most people, slavery is preferable to death.
Righteousness is a religious term. One man’s righteousness is another’s lunacy and another’s blasphemy and yet another’s eye roll. I can accept perhaps that his cause was righteous, I’m not sure if I can accept that any individual is.
[QUOTE=septimus]
And he did not indulge in the deliberate large-scale attacks on innocents that define terrorism
[/QUOTE]
Only because he wasn’t successful. Besides, I wasn’t aware it was quantifiable; how many innocents can you kill needlessly without being labeled a terrorist?
I don’t know if I’d call John Brown’s actions at Harpers Ferry terrorism, exactly, though. The raid on Harper’s Ferry was, if anything, a robbery gone bad. Their intention was to steal the weapons of the arsenal, then distribute them to slaves on local plantations to start a massive slave revolt that Brown hoped would spread throughout the south. The shooting of Shepherd seems to have been a panic reaction by Brown’s men. He ran into them, they ordered him not to move, he turned and started running, and they shot him in the back.
The rest of the civilian deaths seemed to happen either when the Brown group was trying to take hostages after they were discovered (Thomas Boerly), or when they were skirimishing with the county militia (the mayor and the other civilians).
So what? They no doubt had a “society and culture” at Auschwitz too. Unless you permanently lock everyone up into little isolation cells you are going to have that.
And yes, they were all terrorized at the very least. That’s how slavery was enforced and maintained, by a society-wide permanent campaign of terror. Without that slavery simply won’t work; you wouldn’t even need a rebellion, the slaves would just walk away. They were constantly subjected to torture or the threat of torture, they saw it inflicted on any who resisted or failed to perform well.
So? People will often irrationally refuse to kill themselves even when their condition is much worse than death; look at all the people who struggle to stay live while dying of agonizing terminal diseases. And of course those slaves were all descended from the people who didn’t kill themselves when or after being captured; the ones culturally more inclined to die did so. And of course they were all brought up in a religion designed to prevent suicide and encourage submission.
No, it would have meant death by torture.
So now he’s a terrorist because he would have been if he was successful? That’s not the standard you applied just a couple of posts ago to the question of whether he’s a hero because he would have been if he was successful.
And you can kill millions of innocents without being labeled a terrorist: just ask Stalin or Hitler. They were a lot of things, but not terrorists.
19th century terrorists lobbed bombs into crowded cafes. They were in tactics very different from Brown.
I wouldn’t call it heroism either. It was certainly brave and even self-sacrificing, but the Oscar Wilde adage that “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it” can I think be tweaked into “A man dying for something doesn’t make his death heroic” without losing its truth value.
And that I think could well be the answer to the OP if there is one: Brown was neither terrorist nor hero. He was a zealot who espoused a noble cause with great bravery and little sense. His overreliance on supernatural providence doomed his enterprise to one “filled with sound and fury” [and more than a sprinkling of blood] that signified, if not nothing, then not enough to warrant its costs.
Der Trihs meanwhile sounds like an armchair Jim Jones (as opposed to the deck chair Jim Jones) arguing that disenfranchised black folks committing mass suicide as a revolutionary act rather than live in an unjust world cowed by white Christian dogma would have been far more virtuous and effective.
Not what I said but there’s no reason to argue with you as you’re too willfully disengenous for debate.
Not remotely true–it’s almost an exact quote of what you said–but you’ve certainly found an excellent refuge when you’re finding your points dismantled and your contradictions exposed: attack the poster, not the post. Whatever gets you through the night.