Please don’t rely on “The Good Lord Bird” in either book or movie form if you want to learn anything about John Brown. Look for David S. Reynolds’ “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.” Movie and tv representations of John Brown have been insulting to the historical record and to his descendants. Fictionalizations are fiction, and what the Old Man did deserves better than that.
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Because the show wasn’t looking at George Washington through that lens, but through the lens of a general in the war for independence from England. They ignored or didn’t even think about other aspects of his life.
But had he lost, he would have been labeled a traitor and possibly a terrorist with some of the Colonial Army’s uncivilized guerilla tactics
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Ditto “war criminal.”
Robert McNamara himself said of his role in WWII:
LeMay said, if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.
Pity he never went quite that far in acknowledging his responsibility for the war in Vietnam.
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Unfortunately, violence has been used unrelentingly in the colonization of this country. Least not forget the violence perpetrated against “freed” slaves before and after Jim Crow. Current gun laws, sweeping the country, that give people the right to “open carry” sends chills up my back. There are a lot of haters for “the other,” inflamed by conservative rhetoric, therefore, violent rebuff might be our only means back to repressed civility?
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Personal favorite:
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I’ve wondered if this novel is any good. So far, its length has kept me away.
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John Brown Ale will be back. It’s a seasonal beer that gets put into rotation every year. I think it usually appears around autumn.
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As a Brit, the first I heard of John Brown and Harper’s Ferry was from Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which, despite being fictional, does seem to paint a pretty even-handed view of Brown.
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Modern takes on the guy are more fair.
He doesn’t generally seem to have been considered insane, a zealot or a terrorist in his own time. That seems to come during the post-reconstruction era, and from the way Lost Cause Ideology influenced almost all discussion of the Civil War.
He was definitely kind of an asshole, and deeply religious. But he was not a madman. And he didn’t single handedly introduce violence to the pre-Civil War situation.
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