Libs Are More Right Than They Know About Hamas Being Like Nat Turner - His Rebels Were Baby Killers Too
Over the last two weeks, the ghastly slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists — scenes unrivaled in barbarism against Jews since the Holocaust — called our attention to the relationship between professed resistance to oppression on one hand and unspeakable violence on the other.
Palestinians and their global allies have branded Israel an oppressor. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that their branding has merit, what would this mean? How would it affect the way we view recent events?
For answers, we might begin by recalling the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history: the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion.
Born a slave in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1800, Turner acquired a reputation as an intelligent child with prophetic abilities.
He explained this, along with other parts of his background, in “Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of his life and of the rebellion that bore his name. Turner related these details from his jail cell in November 1831, more than two months after the revolt.
As a young man, Turner came to believe that God sent him visions. The most relevant of these visions — or at least the one he recalled from his jail cell — involved black and white spirits fighting one another.
Armed with faith and convinced that God had destined him to do something great, Turner won followers from among his fellow slaves and quietly persuaded them to strike a blow against slavery.
Thus, on the evening of Aug. 21, 1831, Turner and a small band of followers set out to secure freedom.
“[N]either age nor sex was to be spared,” he recalled.
Turner began by killing his master and his master’s family. Then, the rebels marched from one farm to another and murdered every white person they found.
When they came upon the Travis home, they slaughtered their victims but soon afterward made a discovery: They had accidentally left someone alive.
“The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it,” Turner recalled.
Later, they descended upon the home of a Mrs. Whitehead. They killed the woman with an ax but could not at first find her daughter Margaret.
“Miss Margaret, when I discovered her, had concealed herself in the corner, formed by the projection of the cellar cap from the house; on my approach she fled, but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head, with a fence rail,” Turner wrote.
In the end, he and his men slaughtered 55 white people. As promised, they spared no one. Child and infant alike perished.
Today, the town of Courtland serves as the Southampton County seat. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion, the same town served that same purpose, but contemporaries did not yet call it “Courtland.”
In 1831, it went by the name “Jerusalem.”
Since Oct. 7, some people on social media have drawn comparisons between Hamas’ atrocities and the Nat Turner rebellion. In both cases, they suggested, we must consider the underlying context of oppression.
“I don’t think people get that posting about the deaths of Israelis while having said nothing about the systemic killing of Palestinians is like posting about the deaths of Nat Turner’s victims while having said nothing about the violence of slavery,” Katie Halper of the “Useful Idiots” podcast posted Oct. 10.
I don’t think people get that posting about the deaths of Israelis while having said nothing about the systemic killing of Palestinians is like posting about the deaths of Nat Turner’s victims while having said nothing about the violence of slavery.
— Katie Halper (@kthalps) October 10, 2023
Political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein agreed.
“Before passing judgment on The Slave Revolt in Gaza, it might be useful to read about the most honored slave revolt in American history,” he said, adding a link to the Nat Turner rebellion Wikipedia page.
Before passing judgment on The Slave Revolt in Gaza, it might be useful to read about the most honored slave revolt in American history: https://t.co/QRu5o88G5y
— Norman Finkelstein (@normfinkelstein) October 10, 2023
What should we make of such comparisons?
Well, for one thing, if anyone ever had cause to think themselves oppressed, Nat Turner and his allies did.
Notice what happens, however, when you close your eyes and imagine not the broader context but the murderous acts. Do not picture Turner or his men using axes and swords to slaughter children.
Picture yourself doing it.
How much time passes before you finally force your imagination to finish the act? Does it ever? How long before you ask yourself, “At what cost my own life and freedom?”
Slavery did not cause Turner and his men to slaughter children. Oppression does not do that. Killing those innocents bore no relation to the goal of freedom.
Consider, for instance, the only other comparable slave revolt in the history of the U.S. or its colonial antecedent: the Stono rebellion.
On Sept. 9, 1739, a group of about 20 slaves near the Stono River in South Carolina gathered arms and began a Turner-like revolt. The Stono rebels also killed white people, 21 in all, as they marched toward Spanish Florida and their hoped-for freedom.
At one point, however, the Stono rebels made a judgment.
“They passed Mr. Wallace’s Tavern towards daybreak, and said they would not hurt him, for he was a good Man and kind to his Slaves,” according to one contemporary account written by a white official. The mere fact of Wallace’s survival lends much credibility to the report of mercy.
Oppression drove the Stono men to rebel, but oppression did not prompt them to murder indiscriminately.
For another illustration, imagine a European Jew who, having seen the inside of an extermination camp, miraculously escaped Nazi clutches.
A few miles away, the frightened and traumatized Jew, fresh from escape, encountered two German children at play.
Might that Jew have slaughtered the children?
These questions have profound relevance. After all, the present moral argument involves the assertion that Israeli oppression at least to some extent explains Hamas’ atrocities.
Rejecting that assertion does not even require wrestling with the question of whether, or to what extent, Israel oppresses Palestinians.
Grant all that oppression — grant everything Nat Turner and his allies experienced — and you neither explain the atrocities nor alter the moral argument.
Some might ask about Israel’s response to those atrocities. What about the bombing of civilian areas as in Gaza?
That raises moral questions of its own, but they are not the same questions. The Nazi Luftwaffe rained terror from the skies, but so did the Allies. Innocents perished in both cases.
I do not know enough about the Israel-Palestine conflict to write as an authority. I only claim to know as much as the next person knows about human history.
On that basis, I am inclined to think that no matter the atrocities that prompted this current outbreak of hostilities, in 500 years the smoldering ruins of Gaza will still reverberate in the songs of verses of that region, and more innocents will perish at the hands of perpetrators raised on those stories.
To unpack all that would require another essay and involve far deeper complexities.
Furthermore, on those broader questions — on all questions, really — I have learned never to believe the Western media. When the people who told me to support billions of dollars for Ukraine, wear a mask and denounce former President Donald Trump as a Russian asset tell me to believe anything new, I do not.
Indeed, too often the people who profit from war and tyranny have lied us into both.
Hamas’ Gestapo-like rampage, however, requires no such context. It stands on its own. And words like “oppression” cannot sanitize it.
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