:smack:
I don’t know. I don’t think of Bomber Harris as a villain, and he has crap loads more “innocent” blood on his hands than John Brown does.
I don’t think there is an exact number we can say. But slaughtering slave owners doesn’t rank very highly on my list of bad things to do, especially when those slave owners made it absolutely clear they were not going to accept restrictions on slavery, let alone its abolition. Bloody Kansas wasn’t a one-way street, you know. And this same group of slave owners in the very near future were willing to plunge America into its most costly war.
John Brown was a crazy, fucked up in the head, tyrant to his own family, hating anyone who disagreed with him, nutjob. The fact that he embraced a worthy cause is a mere coincidence. All the efforts he made to bring about the end of slavery were pointless, screwed up and cruel except for the martyrdom part. Apparently he was good at that.
He may have pushed a few fence-sitters one way or the other and he scared the shit out of slave owners with visions of crack-pots arming slaves. So, I would have to rank him as a terrorist, because terror was the tool he used. I suppose if I was a slave that would make him a hero.
I personally find Christian evangelism as morally repugnant as slaveowning, but I can’t just go around shooting evangelists willy-nilly, no matter how much I think they deserve it. At least, not in most countries.
James Loewen devotes half a chapter to Brown in his book Lies my Teacher Told me, and makes the interesting observation that what you think about Brown depends upon when you lived. His contemporaries didn’t think of him as insane, but after Reconstruction to the 1960s it was pretty much taken for granted. We’ve been seeing a re-evaluation.
Regardless of your views of Loewen (himself a polarizing figure), he does make the case for a not-crazy Brown. And, having been raised in a “crazy Brown World”. I know that that has colored my initial picture of the man (and, I suspect, of Fraser when he started out writing his book). There’s other fiction about Brown that has him as more rational.
As for Pottawatomie Creek – it wasn’t as if this was an isolated event of violence by one side (this was “Bloody Kansas”), and Brown denied any involvement (although he approved). His own sons were later massacred.
The problem with that is that the idea of mental illness changed so radically in the 20th century. It’s not that mental illnesses didn’t exist before the 20th century, it’s just that people of those times lacked the awareness to recognize them. It’s like arguing that people in 1st century Rome didn’t get viral infections because nobody around them thought they were infected.
Yea, just flipping through his wikipedia entry, I don’t see a whole lot of evidence for the people saying he’s crazy. What specifically did he do that makes him crazy or unstable? The morality of using violence to end slavery is open for debate, but
And again, he was successful. Kansas became a free state, and his actions at Harper Ferry did help start a war that ended slavery, albeit a somewhat different war then he was planning on. Crazy people don’t usually have that sort of success rate.
The Pottawatomie Creek massacre seems to have been the act of his that most resembles unjustified terrorism. But as Cal says, its not clear how involved he was in the killings and it was just one of several escalating acts of violence from both sides during the Bleeding Kansas fracas. Plus, it appears it was fairly isolated, I can’t find mention of any similar acts by Brown. The rest of the violence he was involved in seem to have been defensive (replling attacks by pro-slavery forces in Kansas) or in Harper’s Ferry, a legitimate, if not particularly successful, attempt to spark a military insurrection.
I vote Hero. Slavery is disgusting and the violent means used to ensure it’s survival were common. Not only are there no concrete accounts of Brown killing innocents, three of the five victims at The Pottawatomie Massacre were slave hunters so calling them innocent is laughable. I’d say that history has vindicated the man, but even as a contemporary I’d identify with anyone who’d stop at nothing to ensure the safety of his family.
Sherman was too. A hero that is. These were times of monstrous evil. While the ends don’t justify the means all the time, they do define somewhat the degree to which we can go to erradicate the evil. And the evil of slavery wasn’t going away without blood and the sword.
You’re incorrect here. Unless you can pull out a cite in which he said exactly this, I call nonsense.
For example–and it’s absurd that I need to provide such an example–I seriously doubt that John Brown would advocate killing a slaver who had repented and who planned to release his slaves, giving the lion’s share of his wealth to the people who had created it.
Again, nonsense. Else he’d be perfectly willing to blow up a slaver with his slave, not caring about the slave; and he wouldn’t have been willing to spare the life of little children of slavers.
Gosh, I think they began as racist white people who used violence and intimidation to control their neighbors of a different race or ethnicity, that’s how I think they began.
If you want to name some names of people who began as vigilante revolutionaries, I can help you out: George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson. Are you calling them Nazis?
…Charles Manson…The Unabomber…Timothy McVeigh…
Yes, yes, yes. I’m not making the claim that all violent revolutionaries are heroic, by any means. Rather, I’m challenging the rather ridiculous implication that, since John Brown was a vigilante revolutionary and so were the Nazis, John Brown was therefore like the Nazis.
I’m showing that members of the group aren’t Nazis, not that members of the group are heroes.
When was Manson a vigilante?
John Brown was to the abolitionist movement what Timothy McVeigh was to the militia movement. A loon who took the heated rhetoric fully to heart. Now in Brown’s case, we can agree with his ultimate goal of ending slavery. But I don’t think that makes him any less of a loon.
Really, spoke? Because while the ends don’t entirely justify the means, neither are the ends wholly irrelevant. Someone using violence in an effort to subjugate a racial minority is significantly different from someone who uses violence in an effort to end the subjugation of a racial minority. Do you disagree?
This is splitting hairs. No one has argued that Brown may have had some until-recently unrecognized mental ailment – people who say that Brown was insane argue that he was clearly and obviously mad, not suffering from some obscure malady. His contemporaries who interacted with him didn’t think so at all
Have you heard of a little thing called the Pottowatomie Massacre?
Perhaps not - but those wouldn’t be slaveholders anymore. But he would have no problem killing them if they lived in a slaveholding society, or if they were even related to someone Brown thought was evil. Yes, Brown killed people just because their sinlings were proponents of slavery.
Just because he spared them when they had no interest does not mean he cared about them. I would point out how many people he kileld in Harper’s Ferry who had nothing to so with his plan, and were killed just because they were in the way. This included poor free blacks just trying to make a living.
You have just admitted they were vigilantes and revolutionaries. Thank you.
Spoke was entirely and completely correct in his listing of twisted vigilante revolutionaries. It is a bad combination.
None of them were vigilantes, which you ought to understand. They sought to create a new law, but did not consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner of that law.
Well, that’s at least one step towards being a decent person. Nut much of one, since it implies you are a borderline psychotic, but something.
I just read about it. Bringing it up is an absolute non-sequitur. That massacre was a revenge attack prompted by a vigilante guerilla pro-slavery raid on Lawrence. It in no way, shape, or form proves that Brown saw no limit on the killing of slavers.
No, he didn’t. In fact, he let the houseguests of the aforementioned guerillas go free unharmed.
Huh. Surely you’re not suggesting that if a person engaged in an armed struggle accidentally kills a civilian, they’re therefore a terrorist?
You’re welcome, although I didn’t admit that, although I’m glad to admit that now. It has nothing to do with the point at hand, though.
How ridiculous! On the battlefield, I’m certain they never held trials. Brown saw it as a military struggle, and it’s frankly hard to think of a more deserving cause for military struggle than fighting a dictatorship that treats its subjects with terror and suffering. Certainly his cause was tremendously more just than Washington’s cause.
The better distinction between Brown and Washington is that the latter justified his going outside the bounds of the law and political change with an argument for why that government was void (i.e., the Declaration of Independence). I’m not sure Brown had an argument along these lines.
Brown could more closely be analogized to civil disobedients, but then the obvious problem with that analogy is that those men and women professed non-violence.
So I think you can craft a coherent value-neutral typology of resistance, in which violence justified by true systemic break-down (e.g., American Revolution) or non-violent resistance even in the absence of such breakdown does not constitute terrorism or vigilantism, but violence merely when you think the current law is wrong or evil is terrorism or vigilantism.
I wonder, then, if you think that the French Resistance qualified as terrorism or vigilantism? Again, I don’t think this qualifies as Godwinization, since the brutality of the American South really was among the worst injustices of the last 200 years. But if you don’t like that example, would native Congolese who killed Belgium slavedrivers have qualified as terrorists?
I disagree that one needs a coherent political ideology to justify armed resistance to an evil government. There’s nothing special about someone calling themselves “government” that makes their evil violence sacrosanct.