Searching for his own 19th-century
historical analogy, Stallman summons the figure of John
Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on
one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.
John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during
his subsequent trial he effectively roused national
demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John Brown
was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s,
history textbooks taught that he was crazy. During the
era of legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless,
the US partly accepted the story that the South wanted
to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many
untrue things about the Civil War and related events.
Such comparisons document both the self-perceived
peripheral nature of Stallman's current work and the
binary nature of his current reputation. Although it's
hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the level
of infamy as Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction
period-Stallman, despite his occasional war-like
analogies, has done little to inspire violence-it's
easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas
wind up on the ash-heap.
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