A Tribute to John Brown and the War Against Slavery in 1859 and 2022

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When John Brown was led from his cell to be hanged by the neck until dead on December 2, 1859, he passed a scrap of folded paper to his guard.

John Brown had been convicted of treason by the state of Virginia, the first such conviction in American history, in a show trial. Treason referred to how Brown organized a group of armed citizens who raided the federal armory at Harper Ferry, Virginia, with the intention of starting a mass uprising against the institution of slavery, and, by extension, the entire political economic system that defined the United States.

The hand-written note asserted that the guilt was not his, but that rather guilt permeated the entire nation, corrupted by the filthy institution of slavery.

The note read,

 “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

His words were prescient in a sense that few understood. His contemporaries, and future historians, bent over backwards to describe him as a mad man, and to dismiss his raid as a folly.

Now that we see before our eyes the employment of COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, quarantine camps, vaccine mandates and other institutions that are intended to reduce all, but a handful of the rich—the planter class of our age, to slavery, we must ask ourselves exactly what did John Brown do and why was the reaction of the establishment to him so severe?

For those who are absolute pacifists, pass over John Brown. The rest of you, listen closely.

John Brown had been fighting against slavery since 1848 and his activities in Kansas included explicit violence in opposition to the institution of slavery.

He spent two years preparing for the uprising that would start and end at Harpers Ferry. His invitation to action was turned down by most everyone, including leading anti-slavery figures like Frederick Douglass, who considered it too dangerous and too provocative.

That raid, that decision resolve the issue of slavery by force—no matter how small the numbers of people in the group, made Brown an extremist because he undermined the progressive cause of ending slavery through negotiation and compromise.

But John Brown’s logic was impeccable and his contemporaries had to ignore what he wrote in order to dismiss him. Frederick Douglass himself would come to agree with Brown’s position.

The true nature of slavery, just like the true nature of lockdowns, masks and vaccines, had been intentionally suppressed by progressive politicians and intellectuals who wanted to debate heatedly the policy process, but not the nature of slavery.

Slavery, according to Brown, was not a mistaken policy, not a “peculiar institution” distinctive to the South, not a matter of state’s rights, or property rights, and not an issue that could be worked out through comprise. No, John Brown made it clear in his writings that slavery, like vaccines, was a war against the people and that the people must respond to this assault in kind, as they would respond to a war.

His actions were attacked by Democrat and Republican alike, but he galvanized the nation when he revealed a hidden horrid truth by charging madly into the horns of common sense.

Frances Ellen Watkins, a freed slave and abolitionist, sent a letter to John Brown in prison reading,

“Dear friend: Although the hands of slavery throw a barrier between you and me, and it may not be my privilege to see you in the prison house, Virginia has no bolts or bars through which I dread to send you my sympathy. In the name of the young girl sold from the warm clasp of a mother’s arms to the clutches of a libertine or profligate- in the name of the slave mother, her heart rocked to and fro by the agony of her mournful separations — I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race.

Your martyr grave will be a sacred altar upon which men will record their vows of undying hatred to that system which tramples on man and bids defiance to God.”

Brown did what the other anti-slavery forces, the Robert Malones and the Naomi Kleins of that era, were afraid to do. He insisted that words alone, protests alone, would not work. It was a war and dedicated organizations of men ready to die for the cause were the only means of resistance.

Brown drafted in 1858 a “Declaration of Liberty” that extended the “Declaration of Independence” to its full logical conclusion of freedom for all Americans.

The Declaration of Liberty rewrote the Declaration of Independence to cover all races, men and women, without exception.

“That when any form of Government, becomes destructive to these ends, It is the right of the People, to alter, Amend, or Remodel it, Laying its foundation on Such Principles, & organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect the safety, & happiness” of the Human Race, To secure equal rights, privileges, & justice to all; Irrespective of Sex; or Nation; To Secure Fraternal Kindness to all Friends of Equal Moral privileges, to all who honestly abandon their Despotic oppressive rule.”

He and his followers also drafted a Provisional Constitution for the United States that laid down the logical, ethical and legal justifications for the raid at Harpers Ferry.

He explained that the cancer of slavery had rendered the United States so corrupt, and its policies so distant from the word and the spirit of the Constitution, that it lacked legitimacy. This new constitution presented a blue print for the rule by law, and his actions were entirely and just from the point of view of the position articulated.

We watch today the horrific final stages of the decay of civilization and the rule of law in the United States, a decay that has allowed COVID-19 to fester and to blossom. COVID-19 has taken the place of slavery as the weapon, a weapon that cowardly intellectuals cannot name, that is deployed in the war on citizens.

COVID-19 regulations, cooked up in secret by consulting firms funded by the rich, are fed through a shadowy network to the pathetic politicians who rubber stamp them and then appear on television to justify them.

This COVID-19 regime, has entirely replaced the constitution in same sense that the radical expansion of slavery in the 1850s gutted constitutional guarantees and opened the door for transformation of all working-class Americans into slaves.

Brown’s provisional constitution identified the true nature of slavery as “none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.”

The war against the people today, the campaign to make us into slaves, is made possible by denial and by the embrace of falsehood, by the treason of the intellectuals who value their status more than the pursuit of truth.

The false, limited-hangout, critics of COVID-19 suggest that posting something witty in social media sources like Facebook, Twitter, etc. is an act of defiance. But these sources, as well as Wikipedia and YouTube, are not even public platforms, but rather controlled by multinational corporations whose ultimate purpose is to allow you, and to encourage you, to complain to your friends, but to take no actions that could lead to fundamental institutional, financial or ideological change

We must not enter the dead-end tunnel of moral outrage for the like-minded aimed not at painful change through sacrifice, but rather at self-importance.

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As Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk put it, we observe today,

“Egotism hidden under the mask of humanity and nobility in mind; cowardice passing itself off as fortitude; sophistry deceiving the sensible and wise.”

John Brown may not be the appropriate model for us at this historical juncture, but his decision to act, rather than to debate, speaks volumes.

As the billionaires use supercomputers and complex algorithms to induce mass psychosis, fear and passivity, narcissistic obsessions with image, sex and food, as the first steps are taken to create a permanent slave class at home and abroad, we must see the actions of John Brown, or of Spartacus (who led the slave revolt in Rome of the 1st century A.D.), with new eyes.

It may be far worse this time.

While the trashy media continues to suggest that the COVID pandemic will be over in a few months, we need to consider the other possibility.

Plato wrote “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Perhaps the proper revision should be,

“Only the dead have seen the end of this pandemic.”

Once you put it that way, the solution becomes crystal clear.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is licensed under Public Domain


Articles by: Emanuel Pastreich

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