“I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something he is willing to die for – he is not fit to live.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You don’t want to know about the men who crashed United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 77 into the World Trade Center Towers on the morning of September 11th.

Really know about them.

You don’t want to hear about their families. Or about what they were like when they were growing up, when they could still be called kids and not monsters. You think there’s no reason to laugh at the stories of the times they shared together. You don’t want to understand who they were, what they went through, where they came from. The lives they touched but didn’t destroy.

But the thing is, you can’t possibly understand what they did if you don’t know who they were. What brought them to their fate. Because, for us, their fate was not the death of a son or a husband or a lover – it was the death of thousands.

So you don’t want to understand them. But maybe, if not them – you might want to understand the man who brought them together.

Because without him, they never would’ve become who they are to us now. And yet, understanding that man is at best wrought with cultural barriers and complications – so it’s probably better to start somewhere a little closer to home. With a man who acted as the catalyst for the most brutal and lethal wave of violence ever to sweep across American soil. But it was a wave that not only swept away hundreds of thousands of lives, but with them the most vile and oppressive institution to ever take root in our soil.

Despite being separated by so many generations and such a wide cultural divide, there’s surprisingly little on the ledger of revolution that Osama bin Ladin and John Brown don’t share

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John Brown, you’ll likely remember from your bespectacled high school history teacher’s monotone, was the batshit insane abolitionist who attacked Harpers Ferry in a harebrained assault that only ended up getting him lynched like one of the negroes he was trying to free. At most, he seems a nutty footnote in the epic struggle for the soul of our nation that was the Civil War.

But like a lot you learned in high school history, this characterization is inaccurate. The deeper you dig in history, the more truth you’ll find in beliefs that at first might seem heretical. One example is the untarnished characterization we got of Christopher Columbus – who, when he wasn’t intrepidly exploring the New World, may have overseen a vast and brutal genocide of tens of thousands of Native Americans.^.5 However our communal oversight of Christopher Columbus at least standing by as a whole lot of one-sided killing went on, and the continued celebration of a federal holiday bearing his name doesn’t bring much to the discussion of Political Terrorism.

John Brown most certainly does. Because John Brown is the greatest Political Terrorist ever to have called our shores his home.

Great in both senses of the word – in terms of raw power and in impact, and in terms of achieving a commendable moral goal. Without John Brown, it’s questionable if the Civil War would have occurred at all. And certainly without him it would not have occurred precisely when it did or gone down in anything close to the same manner.