The country has long grown used to the ideas that before the Civil War slaves had a moral right to rebel and whites not only a duty to free their own slaves and politically support abolition but also a right to free the slaves of others, or help them escape to freedom, using violence if need be.
Though he was a terrorist, murderer, and fanatic, John Brown is today regarded as Thoreau regarded him, as a hero, for example.
[He was all those things.]
And the rights of revolution, violent rebellion, and violent resistance to injustice are native to the American political heritage - a heritage of revolution, after all.
But even so we do not recognize the moral right of persons unjustly punished to resist with necessary force.
We sympathize with Richard Kimble enough to countenance his escape only grudgingly, and only because he never used violence against any official or anyone else but the one-armed man.
I, for one, would support a change in our moral view of this matter to recognize as morally legitimate self-defense necessary violence against officials in such a case.
And to recognize it as lawful self-defense if innocence is later established.
Law and order types and especially law enforcement officials will object this puts them at risk, as indeed it does.
But the rights of innocent citizens are not to be trimmed merely to make the world safer for officials whose job, after all, is to make the world safer for them.
For us, that is.
And have we not all known for many years that the machinery of justice in this country is horribly unreliable, incompetent, and even vicious?
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