There are a LOT of young, white leftists who canonize John Brown without internalizing a shred of what he fought & died for
Just today I saw a “John Brown stan account” on Bluesky condemning nonviolent usamerican protestors for “supporting Hamas”
When all number of people attacked him for his display of deeply ironic hypocrisy, he invoked Brown’s name as a shield in a way that reminded me of how neoliberals invoke MLK Jr to argue against black power (which is no less absurd)
It’s not the first time I’ve seen Brown’s name abused this way, and it likely won’t be the last
I believe that for many, John Brown serves as their non-problematic white saviour, an idol to project themselves onto
We must oppose this juvenile power fantasy, but even that is not enough
We must also recognize that even as we discard the rubbish of Great Man theory, John Brown still has an important place in our historical memory
I’m at the point today where I tend to invoke his name alongside the names of Helen Keller, Naim Ateek, Des Wilson, Malcolm X etc, all notable figures in liberation theology
We must seek not to canonize him into some secular sainthood, but rather understand and analyze his place in the extensive, often overlooked history of liberation theology
That “John Brown stan account” is easily one of the worst pieces of trash on bluesky.
The good news is, if we hook a generator up to John Brown’s corpse we have a new source of renewable energy, because every time that lib speaks, a great man is spinning in his grave.
Liberation Theology refers to a Cristian movement. Malcolm X was Muslim.
Just today I saw a “John Brown stan account” on Bluesky
let me stop you right there is this about one Twitter 2 account
There is very much a problem with people treating leftism as a whole as some sort of secular religion. Not only canonizing figures and falling into great man theory and uncritical reverence without understanding their place in history. But also treating revolution as a sort of rapture that happens at a random interval and serves as a personal power fantasy. This seems similar to the John Brown fetish.
Nor was it just the right-wingers that looked forward to getting rid of “The Negro Problem” (as all whites referred to it). All tendencies of the Abolitionists contained not only those who defended the human rights of Afrikans, but also those who publicly or privately agreed that Afrikans must go. Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the major abolitionist journal National Era, promised his white readers that after slavery was ended all Afrikans would leave the U.S. The North’s most prominent theologian, Rev. Horace Bushnell, wrote in 1839 that emancipation would be “one bright spot” to console Afrikans, who were “doomed to spin their brutish existence downward into extinction…” That extinction, he told his followers, was only Divine Will, and all for the good. Rev. Theodore Parker was one of the leading spokesmen of radical abolitionism, one who helped finance John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry, and who afterwards defended him from the pulpit. Yet even Parker believed in an all-white Amerika; he firmly believed that: “The strong replaces the weak. Thus, the white man kills out the red man and the black man. When slavery is abolished the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton and Lexington.
From Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, from Mayflower to Modern section 4.2: The Popular Appeal of Genocide
there’s nothing redeemable about the Great SatanDeath to America
all notable figures in liberation theology
theology
This is not a John Brown fetish… this is called co-optation, recuperation, or blunting
After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Counterpoint: John Brown was v cool
God forbid we have heroes.
OP isn’t saying “Don’t have heroes” though. They’re saying we shouldn’t engage in hero worship.
Just because they did good doesn’t mean we get to put them up on a pedestal and treat them as untouchable. John Brown’s actions were cool and good and inspirational, but he himself was human like the rest of us. He had quirks and foibles and viewpoints some (maybe even all) of us would find reprehensible.
Exactly
never forget he swung a mean swordWhat is your definition of liberation theology?
I spent a lot of time editing this pfp in gimp, okay. It was a good bit and I stand by it.
I only invoke John Brown when I’m having a truly marg bar time, so as not to trivialize
To me John Brown is heroic for being able and willing to live the life, such that at a time when the dominant liberal view was one to sit back and hope for the best w/r/t an end to slavery, he was willing to actually take up arms and attempt to take meaningful action against an entrenched slave state.
That his uprising failed almost doesn’t matter. It happened at the exact moment it needed to in order to galvanize the involved parties into escalating to a war that led to, at least partial emancipation. The way I’ve had that history shown to me, with the caveat i’m not a fucking historian and that I’m massively paraphrasing my own unspoken understanding: I don’t think we’d have had a civil war if things like bleeding kansas and Harper’s Ferry weren’t happening.
But that’s a really narrow thing for me. I exalt him sure, as an example of how to comport one’s personal beliefs to useful praxis, and how helpful, principled praxis carried out in the face of failure can lead to larger successes downstream, but I think he gets touted as some kind of Leftist Lincoln-type figure whose ideology and place in history is blurry outside of “a white guy tried, and died, doing something kinda useful about slavery on the eve of the civil war” - I think making sure the scope of these things is in check is a solid first line defense on it being blunted and turned into semi-meaningless Great Man History garbage in the minds of the average person.
People are very cynical and narcissistic, especially liberals. If anti-communism wasn’t basically the state religion of the US, there would be even more libs pretending to be socialists.
