Was John Brown an agent of liberation, or was he a terrorist? That is an unfair question because it does what so often happens in discussions of controversial subjects. The “or” produces the unfairness. Brown’s actions were brutal, deliberately so. In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown and a group of his followers dragged five men and boys from their homes and killed them. Surely that is a terroristic act. But then the motivation for the act remains within the realm of liberation. The people he killed—at Pottawatomie Creek and then later in Missouri and in Virginia, Harper’s Ferry—were active proponents of slavery, slave owners, fierce defenders of their “right” to own other human beings as chattel property. In Brown’s religious fervor, and in any morally righteous universe, such men represented evil. His actions worked towards the liberation of all the enslaved people of the United States.
Change the “or” to “and,” then.
According to the OED “terrorist” as a political epithet doesn’t come into English usage until well after our Tea Party, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, when a British newspaper of 1794 called “terrorists” those radical Jacobins who ignited the Terror. In usage not associated with the Terror, the word doesn’t appear until 1806 when another British newspaper refers to Irish freedom fighters as “terrorists.” As a religious epithet, “terrorist” appears at the same time as in political discourse to describe the hell fire and damnation sermons of radical sectarians.
Destructive as they were, even the Jacobins are both/and—terrorists to be sure, but also patriots seeking the radical liberation of the people of France. So too the Irish “terrorists” seeking freedom from British domination and the radical sectarians who wished to terrorize their audience into salvation.
And so the categories of patriotic hero and terrorist come trailing clouds or perspective. The savage white men disguised as Native Americans who threw British tea into Boston Harbor are our heroes, but their terrorists.
Not as violent as the Jacobins, the participants in the Tea Party nonetheless had in mind the same sort of goal as did the Jacobins. The OED, again, defines the more general sense of “terrorist” as follows: “A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” The tea-partiers to a T.
Nowhere is the coincidence of terrorism and patriotism clearer than in the Middle East. From the perspective of Israelis every one of the Palestinian groups, from the PLO and Fatah through Hezbollah and Hamas, is a terrorist organization. There is no doubt about the truth of that designation. Random shooting, coordinated attacks, constant subversion of the Israeli state add up to the use of “violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” The political aims are themselves terroristic insofar as one articulated goal of the groups, some of them at any rate, is the destruction of Israel itself. The rallying cry, “from the mountains to the sea,” means erasing Israel in order to establish a comprehensive Palestinian state.
From the Palestinian perspective the political goal of the terrorism is necessary, essential to freeing the people of Palestine. They note that the state of Israel is itself founded at least in part because of the terrorism of Jewish groups like the Irgun. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, located in the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate, in 1946. Many Jewish groups in the 1940s condemned the terrorism, which was in effect part of a comprehensive militant campaign against the British mandate, ultimately seeking the establishment of a new state, Israel, as the homeland of all Jews.
Britain and the US had moved towards founding a new state regardless of the Jewish militancy, and in 1948 the UN agreed. Israel became a new country. Israel would have been born without the terrorism. Whether the terrorism worked to hasten the birth is arguable. It may be worth noting, however, that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ultimately became prime minister of Israel. Also of note is the current prime minister’s opinion that the bombers of the King David Hotel were “heroes.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument? It is “very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action.”
So too would Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah argue. After all, the British mandate in Palestine happens to coincide almost exactly with the borders of Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#/media/File:Map_of_Mandatory_Palestine_in_1946_with_major_cities_(in_English).svg
The Palestinian terrorists’ political goal is to recuperate what the Jewish terrorists accomplished. Currently Israel is responding to that goal as ruthlessly as possible. The attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct 7th 2023 has given the Israeli government license systematically to destroy Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip. That approach to “solving” the Palestinian problem has also empowered Israeli “settlers” to attack piecemeal Palestinian households and communities in the West Bank. In any other context those “settlers” would be labelled “terrorists” because their tactics come straight from the terrorists’ handbook, to “use violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” Whether the government’s approach to Gaza is also terroristic, state-sponsored terrorism, is a live question. Much of the world seems to think so, at any rate.
In any morally reasonable universe there ought to be a clear dividing line between terrorism and patriotism. Unfortunately we do not live in a morally reasonable universe. We’re stuck with perspective and point of view. To be sure, most people—I have no idea what percentage of humans, but suspect a very large majority—respond with revulsion to acts of violence and intimidation. Until self-interest of some sort enters the question, that is. Once that happens, terrorism becomes justified by the political goal of the terrorists.
John Brown is not unique in this regard. Hamas justifies the October 7th attack as a step towards “freeing” Palestine. Netanyahu thinks the bombers at the King David Hotel are heroes in the “freeing” of Jews.
Early Modern revenge tragedies tell us the result. An endless cycle of violence, all of it justified on the basis of some grand political objective. Simply put, there is no balm in Gilead.
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