The Myth of the Freedom-Fighter

[BornInMarch]

The difference being, for those of us who accept the truth of Scripture in any case, that God is sovereign over human life and gets to choose in every case how and at what point it ends. The “Exodusters” were acting in the name of God, scripturally. Full stop.

Those acting for “social change” or “national freedom” do not per se act in the name of God.

ICXC NIKA

No not full stop. You can’t just shut down a discussion by saying a variety of “this discussion is now closed” as that answers no question.

“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[c] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?** Far be it from you to do such a thing**—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

But personally, I think that the scripture needs to be taken with some grains of salt because many parts were written centuries after they occurred and were based on oral traditions (a notoriously unreliable source). The conquests might have been less bloody than scripture suggests, or maybe God wanted them to plead for their enemies in the same way that Abraham did (and subsequent hardships were the punishment for failing to do so), or maybe the Hebrews acted without God’s approval in this instance and retroactively added it in (in every other Old Testament instance in which God is displeased with a people group, he causes a natural disaster (fire rain, plagues, tumor growths, flooding, etc) so it seems out of place for him to suddenly need the Hebrews to act as a proxy.

In any case, I wouldn’t murder a child even if God told me to. If he ever did order me to then I’d plead with him by repeating something along the lines of what Abraham said when learning of Sodom’s imminent doom. (Seen in the quotations above).

 

[Regular_Atheist]

We’ll have to agree to disagree then. My argument on this thread (that people who commit atrocities should not get statues or praise) is based on the idea morality is objective regardless of culture or time period (something not dependant upon religious belief - many Secular Humanists also follow objective morality).

Yeah, I accept this is the position of those condemning such people. I just think it’s a hard position to defend - even the Catholic Church itself had different teaching depending on the economic mode of production and social conditions of the past. The church was obviously a strong defender of institutions such as serfdom and slavery at times.

Of course the people who build statues of Boudica aren’t saying “it was a harsher time”, they think she was just according to modern standards. But I digress.

I’m not simply saying that they didn’t know any better or that “it was a harsher time” either. I’m saying that what they did then was the right thing to do then, although it would be wrong now. There was a time when serfdom and slavery had a progressive role in history, and were historically necessary institutions and social relations to exist. The conditions had not yet risen for new relations of production to replace them, conditions that would be based on the development of the means of production and division of labour. For example, until such a time as factory production and mechanized farming could come to replace it, serfdom was the most progressive form of production and the correct one.

In a similar way, figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Robespierre, although they did some detestable things, they played a crucial historical role in advancing relations of production in society. What they did was to some extent historically necessary, and came out of social antagonisms that came from the development of the

While the debate you are bringing up (whether or not morality is objective, subjective, etc) is an interesting one to have, I think it could only be adequately explored if discussed in its own thread.

It’s very relevant to this discussion though. People who respect figures like Robespierre generally aren’t simply saying that revolutionary terror and murder is a good thing in itself.

Truth be told, I don’t think the French Revolution did any good. It killed a lot of people (most of whom were innocent), replaced a King with a murderous Rebel Leader, replaced said Rebel Leader with an Emperor, and finally put the King’s brother back on the throne. It seems like a waste.

But it shaped French society in a much broader way, and the Ancien Regime was never properly restored. It was ultimately an expression of the conflict between the old French social relations and the newly developing bourgeois class, and it certainly helped to shape the development and growth of capitalism in France.

 

[Exiled_Child]

What do Che Guevara, Boudica, Vladimir Lenin, Nat Turner, Nana Sahib, and Maximilien Robespierre all have in common? If you answered that “they all fought in open rebellion against unfair governments and are now idolized for this” then you would be correct. But you would also be correct if you answered that “they all ordered or sanctioned the murder of children and other innocent civilians”.

There seems to be a double-standard in how we apply our ethics to the past. Most often we judge people from the past in the same way we would judge people from the present; murder of civilians is evil, murder of children is evil, rape is evil, and people who engage in these activities are condemned as monsters. And this is the way it should be; the majority of religions and philosophies followed today run on the premise that morality is objective and that things evil today were just as evil yesterday or 1,000 years ago.

Yet when a “rebel” from the past commits a heinous atrocity, a disturbing number of people are more than willing to justify and defend the person and their act. If an Emperor orders his soldiers to kill every man, woman, and child in a city whose mayor refused to surrender then it is considered the epitome of sadism and a clear example of the evils that humanity commits against itself.
But replace “Emperor” with “Rebel Leader” and suddenly murdering children becomes acceptable. People laud it as justified, or even praiseworthy. In Colchester and Londinium, two cities Boudica massacred in her rebellion, the present day population has built statues of her to honor her war-crimes. In Bibighar (a place where a member of the Sepoy Rebellion paid butchers to murder and dismember a hundred women and children), the Indian Government actually tore down an existing memorial and replaced it with statues of that rebellion’s leader (people who at best sanctioned the Bibighar Massacre and who at worst ordered it). Both of these are the equivalent of building a statue of William Calley in My Lai with the words “Hero” inscribed underneath.

When questioned on this, many will either ignore the rebel atrocities (often refusing to acknowledge the atrocities in their rebuttals), will accuse the enemies of the rebels as being worse (forgetting that your enemies sins do not exonerate your own), or stating that the murdered civilians and children deserved to die for the transgressions of their parents or their government (forgetting Ezekiel 18, specifically “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.”).

We as a species need to stop doing this. We need to stop applying ethical double standards and exonerating monsters simply because they make a convenient symbol for our nationalistic tendencies or because they fit an ideological narrative we like. We need to stop glorifying and excusing monsters, we need to admit that sometimes in a conflict both sides are evil, and we need to stop dishonoring the victims of atrocities by building statues of their murderer over their graves. If we don’t than there will just be more mass murders and more dead children.

Wow, I’m genuinely impressed by this post, BornInMarch. It’s quite brilliant and insightful.

 

[BornInMarch]

Wow, I’m genuinely impressed by this post, BornInMarch. It’s quite brilliant and insightful.

Thank you!

I was honestly afraid that this post would be poo-pooed, as it is all too common for people to cling to their Heroic Liberator narratives regardless of logic or morality. It is good to know that there is still sanity in the world.

 

[Latias]

Thank you!

I was honestly afraid that this post would be poo-pooed, as it is all too common for people to cling to their Heroic Liberator narratives regardless of logic or morality. It is good to know that there is still sanity in the world.

Boudica was heroic and in a sense she was a liberator. It is hard to deny that.

And Che Guevara was not a mass murderer due to the lack of evidence supporting it. At least, he executed people based on summary judgments, but that does not mean that most of the executed are innocent of torture and murder.

In Bibighar (a place where a member of the Sepoy Rebellion paid butchers to murder and dismember a hundred women and children), the Indian Government actually tore down an existing memorial and replaced it with statues of that rebellion’s leader (people who at best sanctioned the Bibighar Massacre and who at worst ordered it). Both of these are the equivalent of building a statue of William Calley in My Lai with the words “Hero” inscribed underneath.

The monument was installed by the British. Getting rid of it is a means of expunging the presence of British imperialism.

 

[Qoeleth]

Yes- they’re are very few people whom are true ‘heroes’- most of them (including ‘the good guys’) also committed a lot of murders, etc. On the other hand, we possibly can’t know if God will treat them mercifully- because they may have sincerely believed in what they were doing. But they can’t be admired.

Even someone like John F. Kennedy- he was an adulterer, same as Bill Clinton. And George W. Bush was probably a nice guy as an person- but his bad decisions cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.

I think if humanity is looking for heroes, look towards the saints, also perhaps poets and philosophers, but certainly not revolutionaries or politicians.