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

  • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    4 months ago

    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