Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean the future ? I hail my Ted as a hero on the right side of history now .
What's your threshold? How many innocent people does he have to kill and/or maim before you no longer are willing to consider him a hero? And yes, they were innocent. The one I met personally was a tech at the store where I bought my first computer. (And if you consider that enough to make him "not innocent", well, you're using a computer to read and comment here, so...) To me, he is condemned by his methods. If you'…
Every one of those people killed far more than Ted ever ever dreamed of or imagined.
One of them fought personally in wars of colonization and was responsible for the death of countless original inhabitants of the land his country stole, before leading the fighting in a war that, besides killing a hundred thousand person (in an era before humanity hit its first billion, 0.01% of the all humans dead in a single war), set in motion the ignition system for one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolution the world had seen at the time.
The second one ignited the first industrial war in history, and brought a wave of destruction and death upon his own country so terrible its effects was felt, is felt, a century later and beyond.
The third pair, among their many achievements, had developed a weapon of indescribable power, and unleashed it on a bunch of civilians to own a geopolitical enemy. That weapon remains a permanent guillotine over the head of civilization, patiently waiting for an executioner who will release it.
If you hold any one of those people as a heros, no, if you hold any one of those people as anything less than the devil himself personified, then you already understand the fundamentals of what Ted had in mind when he did what he did, you merely disagree with his premises.
Ted killed a measly sum of 3 people (according to my rusty memory of the wiki article I'm too lazy to re-read), this is laughable by the standards of a hero. Look at your own superhero movies, look at the sheer amount of destruction and mayhem that the hero releases on his own city to rid it of bad guys. How can the culture that produces these movies, that idolizes Washington and Lincoln and Truman, that is responsible for Korea and Vietnam and Iraq, how can it not forgive a man for an honest-but-misguided effort to steer humanity away from the slavery it inflicted upon itself ?
I'm not saying those 3 people or the 20-or-so he injured are not important and significant moral costs, I'm just amazed by the standards you impose on Ted, standards that you reserve only for Ted.
You already accept far far more than what Ted did, you already accept hundreds of methods that put his methods to childish innocent shame, you just accept them in contexts that you are told\brainwashed are worthy.
>If you're willing to deliberately, actively, persistently attempt to blow up innocent people
The good\bad thing about civilization is that its a distributed system, a massive distributed system based on tyranny, slavery and suffering. You can't disable a distributed system without damaging at least some of the nodes. Your statement applies perfectly to every single war hero americans (and every people on the planet with their own war heros) idol, go ahead, see how many of your heros blew up to shreds innocent people and killed and maimed. Count the bodies honestly and fairly.
Humans kill 70 billion animal a year, every day a human spends not killing or blowing up humans is a sin, a day lived by an immoral coward who doesn't deserve to live. That includes me and you. There is no species on earth that kills its own number 7x+ times each year. Every single innocent soul of those animals slaughtered and cannibalized is blood all over your hands, your body, your mind, your conscience. You live in blood, you thrive on it, you build your life and that of your loved ones on suffering that makes Hitler a Saint and Stalin a harmless Grandpa.
Ted is the best and most moral of us. May he rest in peace and love.