A riposte to my comparison of John Brown and Richard Trumka. Admittedly, it was sloppy and general. Blogging is a very imperfect art. John Brown is a very weird hero of mine. I'm convinced he was kind of crazy. He also did some things--that in the abstract--are hard to defend. But I've always admired him as a man who was out of his time. It wasn't just his opposition to slavery but the fact that he was a feminist who made he sons do housework.
He was also, as the poster noted in the deleted comment, a terrorist. But I must be honest with you--that word doesn't mean much to me. I've basically defined terrorism as killing innocents to affect some sort of change in a country's policies. I say this with some trepidation because I'm not a World War II historian, but I've never understood why Hiroshima (necessary as it may well have been) wasn't an act of terrorism. It's not so much that I'm an apologist for the murder of innocents. I just don't there are very many moral wars. John Brown was at war with slavery. And while so many simply lived their ordinary lives, he handed his over to end a truly evil practice. It's very difficult to not admire that courage, to not see a kind of love in a white man who would willingly die in such a way.
Anyway, I hope I'm not simplifying here. I'm actually still working some of this out in my head. I mean seriously, what are we, as black people, supposed to make of Nat Turner? Of Robert Charles? Of Gabriel Prosser?
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
You might enjoy reading the chapter on strategic bombing in Max Boot's "War Made New".
Heros are hard to come by...
Can you talk some about that Tony?
I recall the response to slave rebellions was to leave the rebels' heads impaled on a pike outside town. It's not clear to me that 'terrorist' or 'terrorism' has the same meaning in the United States in 1859 that it does today -- not least because of the transparent use of terror to keep slaves enslaved.
There is no question that John Brown was a killer, probably a murderer. And perhaps he (and abolitionists who funded him) deserves credit and blame for lighting the last fuse before Ft. Sumter. He may well deserve whatever damnation he suffers. But I am not at all sure he doesn't deserve our thanks as well.
The bombing of Hiroshima was necessary for unquestionable victory and domination accompanied by complete and total shame and humiliation for the enemy. If that's not moral, what is?
There has been an argument that strategic bombing in WWII was largely ineffective, and that suggests that hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of Allied fliers lost their lives for little or no strategic gain. (A personal aside, a HS history teacher had been a B24 bombadeer. He was the sweetest, most affable man you'd ever want to meet. Hard to fancy him a mass-murderer.) The argument goes something like this:
*By targeting factories, factory works, infra-structure, etc, strategic bombing was intented to crush German industry, and cripple the German war machine.
In fact, German industrial output rose though-out the war, almost to the very end (soda pop)
Ergo, strategic bombing did not work.
Booth makes a reasonable case that: Yes, production did rise, but it would have risen much much more if the Allies had not employed strategic bombing.
This is not a trivial argument.
If you'll remember from The Dykes chapter in Band of Bros., even in '44, as the Germans were being pushed back they were so well supplied that they could fire on a single allied soilder in the open with an 88mm artilery piece, while the advancing Allies, with the full weight of America's undamaged industry behind them, we conserving ammunition.
But,( and this is the big but) in a chilling couple of sentences at the end of the chapter, Booth conceded that strategic bombing targeted civilians with a horrific furry on a scale never before witnessed in war.
His account of the reasons and effects of Curtis Lamay's decision to switch to mass incendiary bombing of Japan is also a good read. (According to Booth, more money was spent developing the B29 than developing than on the Manhattan project.)
So much for my short-lived career as the most dyspeptic analogy-trasher in these threads...
It was fun while it lasted.
John Brown was, it's true, a bit crazy. But he was crazy in the right way, at the right time. One can argue about how complicit any American alive today is in the legacy of slavery (mostly: very) but in that time, it was difficult to ignore the fact that every American was directly complicit in the actual fact of slavery (to say nothing of genocide). He did not just what he thought was right but, I think, what was right. He did many bad things getting there, but he did the right thing.
Speaking not of Hiroshima but of other parts of the Pacific campaign, I'm reminded of that incredibly compelling segment of The Fog of War where absolutely-a-war-criminal Robert McNamara relates his conversation with Curtis LeMay on the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er2xCn3_QcQ
The relevant quote: "LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He - and I'd say I - were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought of as immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose but not if you win?"
From his Wikipedia page, "Mr. Trumka encouraged non-violent civil disobedience to confront the company in the spirit of Martin Luther King". That would make the comparison to John Brown, who advocated violence, particularly inapt.
JKD,
That was absolutely gripping. I remember that scene. It was incredible. That whole movie really brought the whole war and morality thing into great context. It's interesting you call McNamara a war criminal. I don't so much disagree as I'm just not sure what it means, given the context of the greater war.
Speaking of the Pacific Theater, in the last few years a bunch of new footage has been released from archive. (Really tough stuff is held until the chance of any living relative is slim to none.)
Much of this recently release footage is really really really really savage stuff, not the sanitized version of WWII we think we know from watching the history channel. There's no civilized way to make war.
sorry.. delete the double if you get a chance.
I also admire Brown's forwardness of ethics. But his terrorism was simply wrong. It only hurt his own cause.
Well, first, terrorism's wrong because it generally hurts innocents. 9/11 was certainly like that. And usually for little advance to The Cause, whatever it is. Brown achieved utterly and completely nothing except personal satisfaction.
In a democracy, it's particularly bad, because the basis of our democracy is peaceful revolt, strictly via election, and terrorism undermines that. Since the South had already brought revolt into the equation, I guess this's a rare exception to that rule.
History suggests that it's likelier to set populations against whatever you're trying to achieve (after decades of civilian casualties on both side in Israel, both sides are still set in stone. John Brown made it harder for Lincoln to deal with the Border States because it made the possibility of eventual abolition represented by Lincoln and Union less popular. Virginia, home of the Confederates' famous commander, Lee, was slow to rebel; would they have stayed in the Union like Maryland if the rebellion hadn't been in Virginia, keeping Lee in the Union Army?
Why in the world would it be weird for a black man to call John Brown a hero? I don't know any black people who don't love John Brown. Hell, even Malcolm X loved John Brown. Don't ever be embarrassed for admiring a true warrior for freedom.
I can't be an apologist for the acts of John Brown. For his principles, yes. For his level of commitment to it, somewhat.
True commitment to a principle is measured by your willingness to suffer for that principle, not by your willingness to make others suffer for it.
John Brown said famously, "These men are all talk - what we need is action! Action!"
These are my least favorite words from a political leader. They are the words of someone intemperate, impulsive and rash.
In the Potowamie Massacre, Brown killed 5 pro-slavery southerners. Did that advance his cause, abolition, at all? Or did it just make things more difficult?
I understand that he was an inspiring and charismatic figure. It's just that such figures I regard with suspicion and distrust. Particularly when they promise Action!
As Malcolm X once said, “John Brown . . . was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts.”
@Tony Comstock:
A nice synopsis of an interesting argument... The argument against strat bombing in Germany was authored by John Kenneth Galbraith, by the way.
There are two ironic twist to the argument about German production, however: the first, when Hamburg was flattened, the city's war production went up _because workers who had worked in the city's service economy (the center of the city had been the epicenter of the bombing) were forced to take work with the arms industries outside of town__. Arguably, a similar dynamic occurred nationally -- the ongoing bombardment allowed Albert Speer the political clout to cut through the Nazi party's corruption and move (at least partially) to a wartime economy.
The Potowamie Massacre, as brutal as it was, certainly advanced the cause of Free Kansas. Showing the pro-slavery forces--who had been acting with violent impunity--that they would be dying too, changed everything in Kansas.
Dwhite,
I'm not embarrassed--in the slightest. There's nothing embarrassing about interrogating your own beliefs.
you're right to be suspicious of the t-word: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter--nice post!
Speaking of strategic destruction and terrorism, what do we think of W.T. Sherman?
TNC,
You should read John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Right by David S. Reynolds.
Brown didn't just set out to commit acts of terror to oppose slavery - there was a war on in the Kansas territory and the Missouri border that was initiated by pro-slavery forces bent on extending slavery west. Probably by most of our standards he was a zealot and maybe even "crazy" in some sense, but what was happening in the mid-west in the late 1850s was akin to the Spanish Civil War vis WWII - a precursor. I see Brown in almost Biblical terms - a prophetic figure. Of course, I'd hate to have him as a next-door neighbor.
Hiroshima was chosen because it was one of the few cities left. Many more people died in the fire bombing of Tokyo and many other cities were firebombed before they got to Hiroshima.
The allies experience in island hopping showed them they could expect unprecedented casualties and mass suicides. I've seen interviews with Japanese who were children then who were instructed not only in fighting but also in suicide. I haven't studied it so I don't really know how accurate the allied assessment was but it was certainly not reasonable.
So do you massively kill Japanese to force them to surrender, or do you incur massive casualties in an invasion and possibly have as many Japanese kill themselves anyway?
I think it was justified, particularly since we didn't know the long term effects of radiation.
I'm interested in responses to TNC's question about Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser. In Brown's actions were unjustified, what about theirs? What about Denmark Vesey, who was a free black man who was hanged for planning a slave revolt?
I wrote something on my blog a few months ago about why I keep a framed photo of John Brown on my bookshelf. Here's the core of that post:
In 1856 John Brown went to Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery whites were fighting. He wanted to intervene on the side of righteousness, and he did. He went to Kansas and he killed a bunch of white people. He killed white people who were standing in the way of racial justice.
Three years later, with the Civil War looming, he acted again. This time he raided a federal arsenal to try to liberate weapons for a slave uprising. He was caught, and hanged.
The photo I have is of the John Brown of 1856. (By 1859 he had a huge flowing beard.) The Brown in my photo was the Brown who saw racism and went to Kansas.
Now, I'm not big on killing people. Not at all. Not even in my most ludicrous fantasies of radical action am I big on killing people. It's never been the killing people part that attracted me to Brown.
What it is, I think, is that he went into the white community first. It sounds weird, phrased like that, since his work with white people consisted of murdering them, but that's what he did. He took his whiteness and he used it in the service of racial justice, used it to do what a black person couldn't have done, used it in his own community.
When I look at that photo in that frame, I'm reminded that I'm white. I'm reminded that whiteness is an identity, one among many. I'm reminded that whiteness is specific, not generic. And I'm reminded that as a white man, I've got important work to do.
Of course Turner, Prossey and Vesey were justified. Whether a particular action is pragmatically justified might be subject of discussion - but morally, any act of revolt or violence against slavery was/is inherently justified. I don't really see that as a matter of debate among decent people.
And, we wouldn't have been the only ones there either.
The Soviet Union would have undoubtedly invaded Japan along with us and would have left an occupying force there just as they did in Eastern Europe.
That would have greatly changed the political complexion of post-war Asia and greatly raised the stakes in the Korean War (and greatly reduced the margin for error). Good Lord.
Still pondering this. Thanks for the perspective.
Brooklynite,
That is what I mean and the comparison I saw in that video. John Brown aggressively used his whiteness (a black man would have never made it out Kansas) and reversed it, used it in the war against racism. That is powerful stuff.
Likewise, no black man could have made that union speech. It's Trumka's very whiteness that gives him the power to say what he says. That's the link for me.
The second step of the Hiroshima argument, of course, is Nagasaki -- if Hiroshima was to force the Japanese to the negotiating table, shouldn't we have given them just a little more time before obliterating a second (third) city.
The bigger issue, of course, is that Hiroshima seems to have been more effective at convincing US that they were ready to surrender than it was at convincing them: pre-Hiroshima, they wanted guarantees that the Emperor would remain. Post-Hiroshima, we gave guarantees that the emperor would remain. (And covered up his complicity in Japanese war crimes...)
Exactly, TNC. And I had the same response to Trumka's speech that you did. My wife forwarded it to me last night, with the subject "brought a tear," and it did for me too.
I think brucds's point above is particularly important. John Brown wasn't exactly running off disturbing the peace with his acts of terrorism--there was a war on.
The fight over slavery involved armed conflict long before the south seceded, and whites would continue to deploy terrorism to support white supremacy long after it ended. Hell, there were private armies invading central America as part of the fight over slavery!
So John Brown using violence wasn't exactly out of the ordinary in terms of the then-prevailing mode of political discourse on the subject.
"what do we think of W.T. Sherman?"
He did what was necessary to destroy the capacity of the Confederacy to continue to wage war. I believe he's highly regarded by military historians.
So does Trumka get to be the TNC-approved spokesperson for white people ?
I agree, but I'd say the same thing about Brown's actions. Since some people here seem to disagree, I wonder what they'd say about Turner et al.
Hundreds of thousands of union soldiers marched to battle singing John Brown's Body. You are in good company, T.
There is a real slippery slope here- I'm not sure there is much difference, morally speaking, between Brown at Pottawatomie, and someone who shoots an abortion provider. Both would say they were at "war", and both would feel they were fighting- and killing- for a greater good. "Ends justify the means" always gets us into trouble, I think.
Harper's Ferry, on the other hand, seems to me to be more justifiable, though he may have wanted to think more clearly about the possible consequences of his actions- a lot of innocent blacks, both slave and free, were murdered across the nation afterwards.
By the way, if I was to recommend a book about Brown, it would be "Patriotic Treason" by Evan Carton, and T. J. Stiles' book "Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War" gives a good account of the war on the western border before, during, and after the Civil War.
re: " I've never understood why Hiroshima (necessary as it may well have been) wasn't an act of terrorism." and "There's no civilized way to make war." and "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
This is a subject I have had to confront because I am a Marine. I have been all my adult life. I have served in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2005-6), as well as Haiti (2004) and more than sixty other countries across the globe. I am writing this from Japan, where the US military has been since we conquered the place. Think of the word, conquer. We didn't conquer this country by being nice or civil, we brutalized them terrorized them, caused the most severe hardship and pain, before they surrendered. That is simply what war is. The subject of war and how to wage it is more than a preoccupation with me, it is my occupation.
First, I have learned that is always easy in hindsight to second guess the actions of those who served in combat years before. So some perspective is necessary.
My grandfather was in the battle of Okinawa along with his brother (who left his right leg on the island). Afterward, he was set to invade mainland Japan where he would most certainly die, when the bomb was dropped. He credited the bomb with saving his life. My mother vividly remembers, as a six year old, saying goodbye to her Dad with the certain knowledge that he would never return. That was the world as they knew it.
I have walked the battlefields of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Saipan and studied the events there closely. We should all remember the ever escalating brutality with which the war was waged. Certainly Americans had racist vews of the Japanese, but the opposite was also true. Almost certainly, the need to dehumanize the other side is neceassary to generate the will to kill in the human animal. Believe it or not, there is generally found in humans a natural reluctance to commit violence on other human beings. That's why it is very often done in a ritualized or a severe social context.
In WW II specifically, as one side committed atrocities against the other, the viciousness increased all around. On Tarawa, U.S. platoon positions were marked by stakes with Japanese heads stuck on them. But also, Americans captured by the Japanese were mutilated and tortured all night before they died. Just thirty or forty feet away, their fellow Marines had to listen as their genitals were cut off, they were skinned, and disemboweled, slowly. There is no mercy after enduring such a thing. This is the nature of war. As the famed military historian and theorist, John Keegan, notes, whatever the initial reasons for war, once begun they take on a logic and momentum of their own that often become completely disconnected from the original reasons for the war.
So, having said that, let's remember what war is, one side seeks to bend the other to its will. There are alot of fancy definitions but they all come down to simply that - a battle of wills. In a total war, such as World War II, where entire civilizations are battling for supremacy and even survival, one can expect the battle of wills to extend to every aspect of life. Of course Hiroshima was an act of terrorism, because it was intended to cause terror in the other side's population, causing them to lose the will to fight. That is what war is all about, producing terror and causing the other side to exhaust themselves, to give up, to decide that the horror can be endured no longer.
So, that is a long post to say that all those quotes are true. War is terror. Freedom fighters are terrorists. It only depends on your perspective.
Think of the examples from history, our founding fathers were terrorists to the British King. People like Yizhak Rabin and the other founders of Israel were hunted as terrorists by the British before they were ever accepted as diplomats. Leaders of the IRA now sit in chambers of democracy in Europe. And, yes, Ahmadinejad is now the President of Iran. It is all a matter of perspective.
Semper Fi,
PTR
Patrick,
Thanks for that post.
"War is terror. Freedom fighters are terrorists. It only depends on your perspective."
I think that, as they say, nails it. My point wasn't that Hiroshima was particularly brutal--but that it basically was war. And, particularly at that point in history, what war could exist without terror?
Oy... apples, oranges... and aardvarks.
John Brown wasn't about WW2.
The best insight into John Brown for someone who isn't a specialist is the Flashman novel "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord", by George MacDonald Fraser. (I know, I know.)
The thing about Brown is -- well, by any ordinary measure, he WAS nuts. Not because he was a true abolitionist: it's a measure of sanity to have been ready to destroy slavery.
But Brown's nuttiness is plain even if (as any serious student of history must) you righteously purge any projection of modern sentiment into the past. Do that, and some slaveholders actually come off better than others -- Washington, for example, more than Jefferson.
Brown does not.
Golly, just look at John Brown not just as an abolitionist, but also as a potential revolutionary, and you gotta conclude: this guy had NO clue.
He took Harper's Ferry in about an hour -- AND DID NOTHING WITH IT. It had never occurred to him that having a plan AFTER he took the guns just might, ya know, be a good idea. (He ordered BREAKFAST -- I rest my case.)
The idea that somehow slaves all over the South would run away to the Blue Ridge to be trained with the guns he'd seized.... well, even if you figure they'd somehow hear about it, wouldn't, um, getting out of town seem like a good idea?
Contrast Denmark Vesey, who had an actual plan to kill every white man, woman and child in Charleston, and then escape on ships to the Caribbean. (The truly telling thing about Vesey is that -- he was a free man with some money. He could have left at any time, if escape was all he wanted.) His plan to kill the white people of Charleston was only betrayed when one of his guys tried to warn a slave owner whom he actually liked (and thus, didn't want killed) -- otherwise, Vesey might have pulled it off.
But don't doubt the sheer brutality of slavery, INCLUDING the reaction to it that Brown epitomized: at the Vesey trial, a slave named Horry said on the witness stand, when his former owner (it's important to recognize that he WAS a 'former' owner) refused to believe that the guy he'd literally been raised with would have killed him in his sleep: "I would have cut your guts out and thrown them in your face."
I bet that convinced him.
And that's where Brown was coming from.
But what Brown did wasn't "terrorism", if the word has any meaning. Nor was it "war".
Brown really did believe that slavery was wrong, so wrong that he was willing to kill, and die (and what's even more, sacrifice his children) to kill it.
It's not nuts to take a moral cause of that magnitude, that seriously.
But it IS nuts to have no bloody clue how to do it -- and then try to carry it out, anyway.
Good points, anonymous....
Except that there's a strong argument that the Harper's Ferry raid helped convince the South that they couldn't trust a Northern (or Western) President, such as Lincoln.
John Brown probably had a martyr complex (and, frankly, any plan he made wouldn't have had much success anyway -- he might as well have had a good breakfast). On the other hand, he had the sense to know that American politics at the time were so inflamed that it would only take a martyr or two for Civil War to spread nationally from Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.
As an agitator and provocateur, he shared with Gavrilo Princip the luck of being at the right place at the right time...
Ta-Nehisi,
You may want to check out Russel Banks's historical novel about John Brown, Cloudsplitter.
The John Brown raid could be justified by the Right of Revolution, a right conceded by every democrat. It is the right to revolt violently against oppression.
However, Brown had an earlier terrorist career in Kansas. He and his sons butchered some Southern neighbours with cleavers as retaliation for an attack on the town of Lawrence by pro-slavery ruffians.
The Harpers Ferry raid was a complete fiasco. The slaves did not rise, and Brown was more potent as a martyr than as a revolutionary leader.
TN, you seem to be looking for black military heroes. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are heroes to blacks and whites of a type more important than just battle courage, as will (I trust) Barack Obama. For the military angle you could look no further than Colin Powell, though his talents were probably more cerebral than raw grit. Incidentally, when is he going to endorse Obama?
Personally, I admire the 54th Massachusetts Infantry from the Civil War (who got a fitting tribute in the film Glory) and the Tuskegee Squadron from WWII. But I could not name a single one of them.
I can't resist recommending a film about the Tuskegees with Lawrence Fishburne. Its not a great film, but there is a terrific scene where he and his buddy have to land on a country road while in training somewhere in the Southern US. There's a road gang of black men working with white supervisors, and the stupification all round when the pilots climb out of their planes and reveal themselves as blacks is worth the entire film.
Toby,
The two aren't in opposition. I love--LOVE--Frederick Douglass, and greatly look up to MLK. I have a different sort of admiration for JB. As a poster here suggested, it is something to see someone use their very whiteness in the war against racism. There are just certain things that we can't say--or do.
Re: One can argue about how complicit any American alive today is in the legacy of slavery (mostly: very)
That's BS of a high order. How can anyone be complicit in things that happened before they were born? If we accept that cookoo logic then let's just go whole hog and proclaim that every human being is complicit in every historical atrocity and injustice ever committed. After all, in some abstract sense we benefit from the Roman Empire, the Mongol conquests, and all the rest.
Re: Don't ever be embarrassed for admiring a true warrior for freedom.
Brown was a terrorist and just because we all agree with his ends doesn't mean we should give him a pass on his means. By the way, I would allow that Nat Turner and other slave rebels did have some justification for violence (though not excessive or wanton violence) since they had no other recourse-- though I would prefer to adnmire Harriet Tubman and others who actually helped real slaves to real freedom, mainly by non-violent means. Brown was white and the option of working peacefully within the system to achieve his goals was readily available to him.
Re: Speaking of strategic destruction and terrorism, what do we think of W.T. Sherman?
By 20th century standards Sherman was pretty mild.
There is a similar pattern of 'revolutionary' thought which is common to Brown and Timothy McVeigh -- they thought that all they had to do was to instigate some dramatic form of violence and they would unleash revolution across the country. Thus, there is little planning beyond the originating act of violence. They convinced themselves in the pure righteousness of their cause, with limited appreciation for their own moral and organizational failings.
The desire to create and uncontrollable force of destruction would be the hallmark of the terrorist. It is telling that Douglass, who never repudiated Brown, advised people to steer clear of Brown and to avoid getting mixed up with him.
Brown was white and the option of working peacefully within the system to achieve his goals was readily available to him.
Yes, he was white, and yes, he did have that option. And I honor the white abolitionists who took that path.
But here's the thing. For for most of this country's history the murder of a person of color in the service of white supremacy was an utterly unremarkable event. It was an event that was not considered worthy of note in a newspaper, much less punishment in a court of law, much less discussion in a history book. It was an ordinary occurrence, quickly forgotten by all but the friends and family of the dead.
And yet here we are, a hundred and fifty years after John Brown went to Kansas, and all of us know his name. Why?
Because he was a white man who was willing to kill white people to help make black people free.
He was a white man who saw white men killing black people and set off to kill and to die to stop it. Not in the uniform of a soldier or a police officer, not because a white politician or a white boss told him to do it, but because his conscience called him to the task.
He was a white man who was willing to spill white blood to make black people's lives better. That bare fact makes him virtually unique in American history. It is why he is remembered today, and it is why I honor his memory.
John Brown was deranged, but he was most certainly a hero. I don't know if it is possible to deny that without relativizing the evil of slavery.
There is no difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter outside of perspective. None.
Harriet Tubman helped Brown plan his attack, tried to recruit former slaves living in Canada to participate, and was planning on participating herself.
Moreover, the great story about Harriet Tubman is she was known for pointing a rifle at slaves who wanted to go back and threatening to kill them. There was nothing nonviolent about her.
PatricktheRogue:
Patrick a very interesting post (and for a second when reading your description I actually thought you might be my brother who is also a marine who was until last week stationed in Japan and has been in Iraq, etc).
My question to you, if you don't mind giving more of your thoughts, is do you believe in War Crimes? Where do we make a distinction between Hitler, Stalin. etc and the brutality that always occurs in war? Obviously not an easy question but it sounds like you have thought about this a lot.
Gully
"I've basically defined terrorism as killing innocents to affect some sort of change in a country's policies. I say this with some trepidation because I'm not a World War II historian, but I've never understood why Hiroshima (necessary as it may well have been) wasn't an act of terrorism."
The root issue in this, or fallacy even, is the trope that civilians are innocent. You can only either be an innocent civilian, with no complicity in your country's heinous actions, or a full citizen, fully complicit. So which is it? In the case of Imperial Japan, the common people had absolutely no direct say in any national decisons, yet their implict support was absolute, as someone pointed out above.
The same was true in Nazi Germany. Resistance to Hitler was minial even while there was still a chance it might have succeeded, and on the whole most of his policies and decisons were popular. The ones that might not have been popular; it didn't take much effort to hide them from people who were more than willing to look the other way.
As for the question above concerning the inevitable brutality of war and war crimes, the line I was familiar from the Army is rigorously utilitarian. Atrocities license and pander to the animal side of human nature and so they erode good order and discipline in the force. And that's what makes them bad. A soldier will also hear that atrocities erode a soldier's personal honor and so on, which is really just a reformaulation. In other words, the victims of these atrocities, and their moral standing, don't enter the question at all. That may sound cold, but it is the opposite; it is in fact a form of grace to these victims, that their deservingness is not an issue.
The simple fact of the matter is that people will rationalize whatever their side has done and condemn whatever the other side has done. Thus many of the comments here. If we do it, it's good; if they do it, it's bad; and there's no need for any more nuance than that, in the minds of many. Sad but true.
The American revolutionaries, by almost any definition, were terrorists. British loyalists had their homes and businesses burned to the ground; they were routinely tortured; they were often murdered. In what meaningful sense is this not terrorism? Well, it's not terrorism for most people because the American revolutionaries were "the good guys". And that's as deep an analysis as they'll allow.
John Brown is, and always has been one of my heros.
I have no time for those who believe there was a "peaceful" solution. Really? So while you sit in shackles and I rape your sister, let me know how your "peaceful" solution goes.
There was only one way to end slavery and that was war. Plain and simple. And just as fighting Hilter and killing Germans in the process was just, so were the deaths of anyone complicit in the slave trade.
I believe the true character of a man is his willingness to stand up for principal when shit isn't popular. There couldn't have been a much less popular position to be in than a staunch abolitionist in Kansas in the 1850s.
So if you are asking me to hold John Brown in contempt for the deaths of some white slaveholders or their families, I say go F yourself.
All my sympathy is reserved for the 5-10 million dead Africans who died making this Country the economic power it is today.
"I have no time for those who believe there was a "peaceful" solution."
If there had been, it would have worked some time during the years when the abolition debate was raging. The simple fact is that in the political discourse of that time abolitionist arguments were not conclusive for those who had the power to abolish slavery, namely the slaveholders and their legislatures. The simple fact is that slaveholders and their legislatures were immune to the moral arguments of the abolitionists; they had contorted their religion to justify slavery.
As for Sherman and his brutal tactics, he was carrying war to those who had started the Woa. He is specifically quoted as saying that if was waging war on civilians, so what; civilians had started this war and they should suffer from it as much as any soldier.
Freddie,
"There is no difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter outside of perspective. None."
There's a very simple difference. A terrorist deliberately targets civilians. Why is that difficult for you to grasp?
That's a good defintion, Fred, except that it makes Sherman a terrorist by his own declaration, and it also happens to be a distinction without a difference if you consider civilians to have any agency in the actions of their governments - in other words, if you consider civilians to be citizens.
Re: I have no time for those who believe there was a "peaceful" solution...There was only one way to end slavery and that was war.
No other Western (or Latin American) nation needed violence to abolish slavery. That alone would seem to prove the case that the Civil War was a disastrous mistake not a necessary measure. Trying to claim otherwise is rather like the rightwing argument that universal healthcare (or abolishing the death penalty, or...) may be all well and good for others but the United States is somehow different-- as if we were inhabited by Klingons not human beings.
Re: John Brown was deranged, but he was most certainly a hero. I don't know if it is possible to deny that without relativizing the evil of slavery.
Beware the black-and-white logic of moral absolutism. By that standard anyone who calls the firebombing of Dresden or the atom-bombing of Hiroshima an atrocity is somehow relativizing Auschwitz and the rape of Nanjing. As others have pointed out, there is indeed a "right to Revolution", but that right only becomes active when no other solutions are available, and even then strict moral limits apply to the behvior of revolutionaries. Sadly, revolutions have generally tended ignore those limits so we end up with Reigns of Terror and sundry genocides that are worse than what they replaced. Brown at Harpers Ferry may fall under this right, but that doesn't excuse cold-blooded murder in Kansas. (Note on Harriet Tubman: I never claimed she was a pacifist, and I am not one either. But the fact is she didn't carry out a campaign of wanton violence and only threatened those who threatened her and her "passengers". And unlike Brown, she actually freed people.)
Re: And yet here we are, a hundred and fifty years after John Brown went to Kansas, and all of us know his name. Why?
Here we are almost two millennia after Nero and just about everyone knows his name too. With a very few exceptions the people history remembers best tend to be those who blood-stained hands.
"No other Western (or Latin American) nation needed violence to abolish slavery. That alone would seem to prove the case that the Civil War was a disastrous mistake not a necessary measure. "
Historical analogies are very slippery and here is a perfect example. This one is bogus.
Let's look at these other "Western (or Latin American) nation"s you are comparing the US with:
1. Russia -(I know, about as western as Iran or Turkey, but they abolished serfdom about the same time). Well, Russia had an autocrat who could decide whatever he wanted, issue and edict, and that would be that. Well, one day the Little Father decided serfdom was an embarrasment in a modernizing nation and that was that. No protracted legislative struggle, no civil war when the legislature struggle fialed to resolve the issue; just pack any (traitorous) dissenters off to Siberia.
2. UK - slavery had never been central to any aspect of Britain's economy, and by the time the issue became an issue in politics or the country was transitioning to the nationalized slavery of peasants swarming into new factories and collieries that Dickens spent a lifetime writing about, where workers had absolutely no escape and conditions were so bad in comparison to those of slaves in the South that workers could embarrass Parliament by drawing the comparison.
3. France - combination of the situation in both Russia and Britain. Let's be honest about the state of French democracy in that era.
4. Bolivia, Peru, Mexico etc - why do you need jails when the whole country is a prison, why do you need slavery when every Indian............
The unique problem in the US was that the Southern states had political equality in Congress and the rights of Southerners as citizens, including their "property rights" were respected. That was the central problem.
Brown worked on the Underground Railroad and helped many runaways make it to freedom. He also led a famous raid in Missouri that freed many slaves.
Ta-Nehisi, i love your posts.
i wonder what a modern-day John Brown would be up to? I have recently stumbled upon some writings by Peter Singer in The Guardian, who's utilitarianism i do not necessarily agree with as a libertarian... still, it reminded me of John (without the intention to equate non-human life with human etc we know the debate too well?):
When do the innocent victims get a vote? You guys (mostly or all men, from what I can see) tend to forget in your philosophical discussions about what is war and what is terrorism and what is violence that your decisions and philosophies usually have a detrimental effect on the people who get very little say in life: women and children. Men always say, oh we're doing this to protect our womenfolk, but I think the womenfolk would just rather be left alone all together.
I don't know why this thread is making me so angry. I can't really put my finger on it. I think it might that i get so infuriated when men start to talk in some high-falutin philosophical way about violence of any kind. It's the kind of thrill men get from watching movies like Pulp Fiction or Deliverance. Every man I know, including my close-to-perfect husband, loves those movies. Is it because of some kind of vestigal savagery?
I know that men have suffered from violence throughout the ages, but considering the violence that women and children suffer even today from the men in their own homes and communities,... I don't know, but this thread is making me sick to my stomach.
I read a book recently, can't find the reference, that looked at the WW II bombing campaigns from the perspective of whether they were justifiable.
The author compared the British night area bombing of Germany, the American daylight raids, and the American firebombing of Japan. The only one the author thought legitimate was the daylight raids. The others were attacks on civilians, which were violations of the laws of war.
The justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they were military targets. Considering the civilian casualties, they appear to be more like the firebombing of Tokyo.
"That's a good defintion, Fred, except that it makes Sherman a terrorist by his own declaration, and it also happens to be a distinction without a difference if you consider civilians to have any agency in the actions of their governments - in other words, if you consider civilians to be citizens."
Who am I to argue with Sherman? He deliberately terrorized civilians, so he was a terrorist too.
Similarly, I think nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, to some extent, an act of terrorism. Yes, there were military targets in both cities, but we leveled the whole cities. Despite our conventional justifications for this, the way we've conducted bombing campaigns over the last 25 years -- trying strenuously to avoid hitting civilians -- implies that our leaders acknowledge implicitly the wrongness of the WWII approach.
It's the kind of thrill men get from watching movies like Pulp Fiction or Deliverance. Every man I know, including my close-to-perfect husband, loves those movies. Is it because of some kind of vestigal savagery?
The state of nature is one of war. I'm a man, and yes there is something in us dudes that thrills to violence. Any honest guy would admit that he loved smashing/burning things as a kid(and probably still does). This is our nature. Scorpions sting, sharks swim, humans fight. Vestigial savagery is an apt a term as any. Thankfully we have movies and such as a safety valve.
I'm reading these posts with an eye on a UFC match and I had to laugh at guineapigfury.
"There is no difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter outside of perspective. None."
Of course there is a difference. I would suggest that MLK, Fred Douglass and Gandhi were all freedom fighters, who would not be terrorists. Terror is a tactic(a most effective one) and terrorism is the strategic use of it. The Hiroshima bomb was a terrorist act. Nagasaki was genocide.
Since u want to talk about strategic bombing: the US effort over Germany was largely a waste of resources (and brave aircrew) The Brits spent about a year experimenting with daylight "precision" bombing until Cherwell, Churchhill's scientific advisor, concluded that it was best to use the target's "inherent capacity to self destruct" Ie. to set it on fire. This was first achieved at Lubeck. but it was in August 43 that Hamburg (German 2 city ) was virtually destroyed, with more casualties than Nagasaki. Yes, US did some bombing at Hamburg also but no serious student attributes destruction to USAAF.
The fundamental problem was the Flying Fortress concept, implying a machine that can sustain enemy fire with impunity ( like a Fortress)
This absurd notion was dispelled on August 17 1943, when 60 of 363 planes were lost over Schweinfurt, A second raid fared worse, and deep raids over Germany had to be suspended until the Mustang escort arrived in 44. But the defeat of the unescorted daylight bomber ( for the third time, both Germans and Brits having tried it) freed up immense resources to counter the real enemy: the Avro Lancaster dropping real bombs, not five hundred pounders, and the plane that could have shortened the war by six months, the Mosquito, that could carry a Liberators bomb load at 400 miles an hour.
Ironically, the British deveopment of airborne radar (H2S) made their night bombing very accurate.
As for the "Fortress" concept, it was abandoned (except in name) over Japan when the B29 Superfortress was stripped of most armour and guns, with a vast improvment in performance. The raids were switched (mainly) to night and precision bombing was abandoned in favour of incendiary raids which caused the largest fire in history ( Toyko) The city wasn't worth an A-bomb afterwards.
A similar approach over Germany would have saved many US and Commonwealth aircrew.
John Brown fought slavery by any means necessary. there was no chance slavery would be ended peacefully. he was and is one of our greatest American heroes. in my opinion, of course, as a white person who is very disturbed by those whites who refuse to acknowlege that he was fighting the greatest evil possible, in the only manner that would work.
Remember, the Civil War only ended after Sherman burned his way through the South: these hateful racists were NEVER going down without a viscious, brutal fight.
On Hiroshima as terrorism. I've always been bothered by the use of terrorism in a very broad way. I think your definition is right, except it should only apply to non-military/police violence. Massacre seems like a much better word to define Hiroshima than as an act of terrorism. Massacre not only captures the state-directed nature of the attack, but it's wide, indiscriminate scope as well. Violence against innocents has a different character when it's done by the military as opposed to armed citizens, and I think we should use words that acknowledge that.