What do you see as worth dying for? What are you willing to kill for?
I'm asking about causes-- I'm sure everybody would reply and say their family (whether they would or not) but that is a lot less interesting than what I want to discuss here.
The man who killed abortion doctor George Tiller, known as "Tiller the baby killer" to detractors, was sentenced to a half century in prison today, which is a life sentence unless he lives to be 104.
This question occurred to me as I listened to Rachel Maddow run down a list of abortion extremists turned murderers:
Maddow describes the actions of Tiller's killer as terrorism, which seems a fair label to me:
However, what distinguishes a terrorist from a freedom fighter has, historically, always been a matter of perspective.
Some see Scott Roeder as a hero who saved thousands of innocents. Others see him as a dangerous loon.
Similar sentiments could be expressed for and against "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans," my favorite terrorist, John Brown.
Abraham Lincoln called Brown "insane" and a "misguided fanatic." However, Professor David A. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, offers a very different portrayal:
"Lincoln was not nearly as progressive on race and slavery as John Brown... [who] in contrast, wanted to stamp out slavery immediately. He had no racial prejudice. He called for the complete integration of blacks into society. As his contemporary Frederick Douglass remarked, Brown felt that the black person was 'entitled to all the rights claimed by the whitest man on earth.' Brown was a white man descended from the Mayflower, but he chose to live among fugitive slaves who had formed an African American colony in upstate New York.
When in 1859 he led 21 devoted followers (five of them black) in an attack on Harpers Ferry and liberated slaves in the area, he planned to lead them into the mountains and trigger other slave rebellions that he believed would cause the downfall of slavery. In the short run, his effort failed; he was captured, brought to trial, convicted of treason, and hanged on December 2, 1859. But he soon came to be seen as a martyr for freedom. Emerson and Thoreau compared him to Jesus Christ. By the time of the Civil War, thousands of Northerners revered Brown's memory, which the Union troops kept alive as they tramped south singing, 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,/But his soul keeps marching on.'
John Brown's reputation suffered during the decades of Jim Crow and racism that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1876. His vision of racial togetherness was shrugged off, and he came to be seen as a violent fanatic. He has made a modest comeback since the civil rights agitation of the 60s, but even today most Americans tend to forget or ignore him. Now is the time to make his comeback complete. Let's put John Brown back where he belongs: on the national pedestal, along with other freedom-fighters in our history."
What was radical in 1850 was close to conventional wisdom by 1950. I don't agree with Scott Roeder but I won't dismiss him simply because he is a radical by modern appraisals. Who knows how history will judge men such as him?
The question may seem insane to some but I am asking anyway-- Is there a cause you believe in so strongly that you are willing to kill for or die for it?
I'm asking about causes-- I'm sure everybody would reply and say their family (whether they would or not) but that is a lot less interesting than what I want to discuss here.
The man who killed abortion doctor George Tiller, known as "Tiller the baby killer" to detractors, was sentenced to a half century in prison today, which is a life sentence unless he lives to be 104.
This question occurred to me as I listened to Rachel Maddow run down a list of abortion extremists turned murderers:
Maddow describes the actions of Tiller's killer as terrorism, which seems a fair label to me:
However, what distinguishes a terrorist from a freedom fighter has, historically, always been a matter of perspective.
Some see Scott Roeder as a hero who saved thousands of innocents. Others see him as a dangerous loon.
Similar sentiments could be expressed for and against "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans," my favorite terrorist, John Brown.
Abraham Lincoln called Brown "insane" and a "misguided fanatic." However, Professor David A. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, offers a very different portrayal:
"Lincoln was not nearly as progressive on race and slavery as John Brown... [who] in contrast, wanted to stamp out slavery immediately. He had no racial prejudice. He called for the complete integration of blacks into society. As his contemporary Frederick Douglass remarked, Brown felt that the black person was 'entitled to all the rights claimed by the whitest man on earth.' Brown was a white man descended from the Mayflower, but he chose to live among fugitive slaves who had formed an African American colony in upstate New York.
When in 1859 he led 21 devoted followers (five of them black) in an attack on Harpers Ferry and liberated slaves in the area, he planned to lead them into the mountains and trigger other slave rebellions that he believed would cause the downfall of slavery. In the short run, his effort failed; he was captured, brought to trial, convicted of treason, and hanged on December 2, 1859. But he soon came to be seen as a martyr for freedom. Emerson and Thoreau compared him to Jesus Christ. By the time of the Civil War, thousands of Northerners revered Brown's memory, which the Union troops kept alive as they tramped south singing, 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,/But his soul keeps marching on.'
John Brown's reputation suffered during the decades of Jim Crow and racism that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1876. His vision of racial togetherness was shrugged off, and he came to be seen as a violent fanatic. He has made a modest comeback since the civil rights agitation of the 60s, but even today most Americans tend to forget or ignore him. Now is the time to make his comeback complete. Let's put John Brown back where he belongs: on the national pedestal, along with other freedom-fighters in our history."
What was radical in 1850 was close to conventional wisdom by 1950. I don't agree with Scott Roeder but I won't dismiss him simply because he is a radical by modern appraisals. Who knows how history will judge men such as him?
The question may seem insane to some but I am asking anyway-- Is there a cause you believe in so strongly that you are willing to kill for or die for it?
