Pacifism, radicalism, and the "good terrorist"

Here’s a really interesting post by Caleb McDaniel on the rehabilitation of John Brown‘s reputation, slavery, and violence vs. non-violence.

McDaniel notes that a new book seeking to refurbish Brown’s stature has met with several laudatory reviews from folks like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hitchens that favorably compare Brown’s “more radical” willingness to deploy violence with the supposed weakness and ineffectiveness of pacifist abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.

(Incidentally, why is it that Hitchens always seems willing to advocate other people’s deployment of violence in the service of causes he considers just? Oops! Cheap shot!)

McDaniel comments that, contrary to accusations that pacifists are cowards or that it is a privilege of literary types who don’t have to live in the “real world,” Garrison, for one, was nearly lynched and lived much of his life with a price on his head.

As Frederica Mathewes-Green once said about her opposition to the first Gulf War, anti-pacifists seemed to assume that “it took more courage to stand before your enemy holding a gun than it took to stand there empty-handed.”

Anyway, McDaniel also points out that the pacifism of Garrison, et al. was not just a means to ending slavery (a particularly ineffective one, their opponents would say), but was integral to their entire worldview:

[N]nonviolence was not merely an instrumental strategy for many radical abolitionists; for many of them, it was integral to their most radical ideologies. If we view their pacifism as nothing more than a strategy or personal trait, then it is easier to portray that pacifism as a sign of whimsy or weakness. But in fact, for many Garrisonians, a commitment to “nonresistance” was much more than a mere strategy, and certainly more than a simple sign of courage or its lack. It was at the core of their critique of slavery, government, and much else. According to nonresistants, any exercise of violence was an unjust usurpation of God’s authority, an immoral abuse of power. From their perspective, that was a large reason why slavery was wrong–it assigned to the master violent power that did not belong to him or her. For many Garrisonians, then, their renunciation of violence was of a piece with their renunciation of slavery. To call their pacifism a mere lack of spine ignores how it shaped their posture towards slavery and other violent abuses of power–like the treatment of Native Americans, the hawkish expansionism that sparked the Mexican War, and unequal marriages.