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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001

Column: Black-Red View by John Alan

Nat Turner's legacy

If they knew more, it would be hard for them to find any similarity between Nat Turner and bin Laden. Nat Turner was an African American slave who organized and led a rebellion in 1831, in Southampton, Va., to liberate the slaves. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, is a wealthy scion of the Saudi Arabia ruling class and an Islamic fundamentalist, who never fought for the freedom of the masses living under the authoritarian domination of the Saudi ruling class.

Clearly, what some so-called leftists are vainly attempting to do is to give a stamp of legitimacy to bin Laden's Al Qaeda destruction of the World Trade Center and the killing of thousands of ordinary workers, women and racial minorities, by arbitrarily relating this wanton act of terrorism to the Nat Turner rebellion.

Nat Turner's insurrection was an open rebellion against slavery and terror. It lasted only two days and  Turner became a hunted fugitive. Hundreds of peaceful African-American slaves were killed by whites seeking vengeance. Within a month Turner was captured, put on trial, found guilty and hanged. But his brief tragic revolt universalized itself in William Lloyd Garrison's THE LIBERATOR and the Abolitionist movement.

The Nat Turner Rebellion was profoundly different from the wanton, egocentric terrorism of bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. In their terrorism there is no concept of how the idea of freedom is immanent in the activity of the masses. Nat Turner was conscious of how deeply the idea that drove him was in the Black masses. Or, as he said in his confession: "I see, sir, you doubt my word [about not conspiring in a slave insurrection in another county]. But cannot you think that the same idea [freedom] prompted others as well as myself to this undertaking?"

In the nineteenth century U. S., the Black revolt was the fulcrum of the unfolding of the idea of freedom, including the first women's movement that emerged out of Garrison's Abolitionist Movement.

The conspiratorial terrorism of bin Laden's Al Qaeda is akin to what Hegel called the struggle of the "pure heart" which rationalizes any means to attack from outside what it perceives to be the corrupt "way of the world." The "way of the world" for Hegel was the modern capitalist world. The purity of the "pure heart" as embodied by bin Laden includes the hatred of women and the need to eradicate any who disagree with its narrow constrictions on behavior. Today some so-called leftists claim that the Al Qaeda terrorists are "freedom fighters" because they, too, have a conspiratorial view of how the world changes.

They claim that the violence of Al Qaeda is caused by U. S. imperialism in Third World countries. Yes, U.S. imperialism conducts its own state terrorism and plays a major role in dominating the economy and the politics of the Arab and other Third World nations. But the road toward the ending of that domination begins with mass action against one's own home grown oppressors, not by the mass murder of innocent people thousands of miles away. Indeed, the Islamic fundamentalist regimes with which U.S. imperialism peacefully coexists, like Saudi Arabia, are opposed by bin Laden because, if anything, they are not oppressive and restrictive enough toward all sorts of individual freedoms. Bin Laden's fundamentalism is a new element of that oppression.

Rather than extolling terrorism that creates no new freedom but only death, we need to return to a philosophy of freedom that captures what Marx called "the quest for universality" among ordinary workers who want to overcome alienation from within "the way of the world."

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