Can I quote you on that?

Mormon pioneers conducted basically a guerrilla war against Johnston’s army.

The only reason the Church is so passive about opposing bad government is because the Church is not threatened by government at present. You’d hear a different tune if government was actually threatening our core mission and purpose.

And yes. I would blow up Big Ben if commanded by God. So there.

Mark,
Depends. :)

Well, are we happy the Revolutionary War came out the way it did, or are we not?

Anyway, I think that marching to Parliament in a mask & cape (and cool Pilgrimish hat) is probably okay insofar as the Gospel is concerned, but pulling the lever on the train probably isn’t and holding up a store while wearing the mask definitely isn’t. I’m not sure I can say why. I don’t think the Church would have been cool with what my grandfather (at the time, a very lapsed Jew) did in 1936: fly to France, cross the border with Spain in the dead of night, and join the doomed fight against Franco. But I don’t see how what he did was incompatible with the Gospel (though we can talk about selected actions of Republican and international forces…)

If I were in charge, I’d have said, in reference to all the demonstrations: “Leave your children at home. Stay home if you dying is going to leave vulnerable family members in a terrible position, or risk having them arrested or killed for your decision. But the cause is just, and any morally upstanding, non-injurious to your family, actions you care to take, are not in and of themselves incompatible with what we teach.” Then again, I don’t have to worry about our missionaries being rounded up and shot, because it’s all a theoretical exercise, right?

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

(and there was a lot of terrorism in the sense of “violent actions taken in whole or part to influence or frighten a class or social group” in the French Revolution of 1789… as Jefferson put it, in 1813:

“An insurrection has consequently begun, of science, talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in it’s first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for it’s accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action.”)

The answer is, of course John Brown was a terrorist. Same as those who engage in forms of eco-terrorism like tree spiking or those who blow up abortion clinics.

But commenters here seem to be supposing that you can’t have organized rebellion without some kind of terrorism. Surely, there are places where the line gets blurred, but not every revolutionary is a terrorist. For example, Jefferson Davis was the leader of a (more or less) organized rebellion. His side lost, of course, but I don’t think that he’s a terrorist in any reasonable analysis. (Same thing for Oliver Cromwell.)

With Al Queda that’s not the case because their audience are Muslims, especially in the Middle East. If they were interested in overthrowing the US government then they would behave more like the Weathermen or the Red Brigades.

So I think that RT got terrorism basically right. I am not convinced though that terrorism is a necessary step on the road to revolution. There certainly was a lot of anarchist terrorism before World War I, which might have contributed to the overthrow of the tsarist regime (probably not, the loss of World War I would have been sufficient). On the other hand, I am not aware of terrorism playing a big in France, be it 1789, 1832 or 1848.

Another way to look at RT’s question is to ask whether John Brown was a terrorist.