The ugly spillages of war are to be avoided at most, but certainly not all costs. I dare say that the world would be much darker today if Hitler’s hideous regime were left alone. Accordingly, it could well be argued that American isolationism grew more unjust and irresponsible with each fascist encroachment upon free society.
America is so fond of war that we happily pervert its rare utility to precipitate it where it doesn’t belong. For instance, one cannot help but recall the unforgivable genocide against poor Vietnamese rice-farmers to defend them from their own right to self-determination.
However, no thinking person can study the Civil War and not reflect that Northern “aggression” was a necessary and just component of smothering the southern slaveocracy. Partisans of this horrid system made it clear that we would have to pry slavery from their cold, dead hands. John Brown attempted to do just that.
Slandered by craven abolitionists as fanatical and deranged, Brown was in fact quite brilliant and exceedingly brave. His infamous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was considered futile and foredoomed, but by catalyzing the Civil War, it was rather a seminal victory than a singular defeat. Brown knew this. Upon his capture, he prophesized: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” The history of the subsequent six years can very much be considered the fulfillment of Brown’s prophesy.
Paradoxically, old Abe himself—remembered as the hero of that bloody effort to subdue the South—denounced Brown’s microcosm of that same effort as violative of law, and cutely declared that no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime. Apparently, Lincoln never met a southern slaveowner. I suppose whiteness has a tendency to confine moral consistency.
Despite invertebrate Lincolnians framing slavery as a simple political “question,” Brown saw quite plainly that it was an act of war waged everyday by slaveowners against our black brothers and sisters and children, which everyday was left unanswered by the anti-slavery camp.
Seeing slavery expand, and impatient with the bootless Republican defensive, Brown understood that offense was the need of the hour. As a last resort, he deployed violence in the name of liberty, while his victims daily deployed it for personal profit. Thus, Brown forfeited his life to fight the murderous villains and free their human chattel.
Yet, any mention of John Brown today induces the same trembling antipathy and cringey dissociation as it did to the mongrel slaveowners he sought to exterminate. Astonishingly, we condemn John Brown just as much, if not more, than they. It would be like equating the Inglourious Bastards with the Nazis they slew.
Those who denounce and reject Brown’s actions must concede that, by spilling blood to end slavery, the spirit of the Civil War is just as unacceptable as that of John Brown. Of course, no civilized person now thinks that the Civil War was wrong. In fact, we praise it as a necessary deliverance from the evils of slavery. So why malign Brown for doing then what we now deem right and just?
Therefore, by opposing Brown’s emancipatory violence, one inherently condones the continuation of slavery under the false pretense of peace. This pacifist stance amounts to a form of white supremacy, wherein our abstract notions of peace and anti-violence outweigh the actual violence and miseries suffered by slaves each and every day.
Contrary to popular prejudice, John Brown was a hero who had the courage to do what clearly had to be done, and what should have been done long before. For this he is vilified as a terrorist and crackpot, while the real terrorists are shruggingly dismissed as “products of their time.” Simultaneously, we deify chinless “abolitionists” like Lincoln who tamely submitted to the existence of slavery and who, through compromise and capitulation, extended its rancid duration.
Alas, America prefers to remember those who, like Lincoln, worked on behalf of slaves rather than those who, like Brown, worked with them. I venture to say that we are, to some degree, still captive to pro-slavery sentiments demonizing anyone with courage enough to truly empower people of color and combat the white supremacy at the core of our state apparatus.
John Brown made it his life to eradicate the tyranny of slavery as well as its tyrants. To those who protest his sanguinary methods, it’s worth remembering that slaveowners slaughtered and tortured slaves everyday with impunity. Had it not been for men like John Brown, they would have happily done so till the crack of doom.
So whimper all you want. I, for one, will shed no tears over the slain carcasses of man-stealers. But my eyes might moisten with admiration for the brave few who take human rights seriously and banish from existence those who don’t.