Taking Up Arms Against Slavery by John Brown - Essay Example

ality and exclusion from the political system there may sometimes be no other way to change things. I believe that modern observers would agree with John Brown’s message if he meant the blood of soldiers, but disagree if the blood of civilians was involved. One of the major influences that would affect a modern observer’s view on whether blood should or should not be spent in a political cause is terrorism. The world changed on September 11, 2001, when a group of terrorists who saw themselves as freedom fighters trying to strike a blow against a country that was, in their views, making the world a less holy place, crashed two planes into the Twin Towers and killed thousands of people who were civilians that were, as much as one could be, completely disassociated with Western-Arab conflict.

Since then suicide tactics have risen to prominence as a tool for radical Islamists everywhere, much to the distaste of observers everywhere else, who now find knowing killing one’s self to kill others despicable. This Event also brought into the American mind how truly awful it is when civilians are killed in conflict, which is an inevitable consequence of most wars, which has led to massive discontent in America and around the rest of the world when Western governments take actions that could and do cause civilian casualties.

This has led those countries to develop new technologies and completely change the way they conduct warfare to reduce civilian casualties. This, coupled with a largely negative view of the decade long war in Iraq, means that people today tend to have a more negative view of warfare generally – they recognize better that in any war civilians will suffer and die, which usually just escalates a conflict, causing things to get worse. In this light, a modern observer would probably disagree with Brown’s words – they would say that people should find a way other than killing and being killed to achieve their ends.

On the other hand, modern people do recognize that sometimes there may be no other way to change an unjust political system than through violence, and sometimes people who are unwilling to use violence will simply continue to be the victims of it, like what probably would have occurred in Libya had the population not armed themselves. The Arab Spring, as it is called, has been hailed as an amazing demonstration of a people’s willingness to fight for their freedom, even when the fight turns bloody, and indicates that modern people still can understand fighting and dying for a cause.

There are several factors that help these uprisings overcome the reservations that people have about warfare that were outlined above. The first, and probably most important, is that the people were acting largely in self defense. They were an unarmed populace being brutalized by an armed body, and had to take up arms to defend themselves. The second is