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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The novel was a dark satire of other contemporary novels.

In those, "civilized" white kids basically brought modernity to the natives after getting shipwrecked in what was essentially colonialist propaganda.

So it's a bit like The Boys surviving in history and Marvel being lost from memory and people thinking that superheroes are violent psychopaths.

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I hadn't heard that explanation for the novel before, but it makes me think of how Blazing Saddles has already become a bit de-contextualized from what preceded it: A constant TV. show storm--possibly worse than superhero movies today--depicting the "Wild West" as a wholesome and family-friendly place where society was kinda-great for everyone. (Largely due to the television industry regulations and internal standards.)

The movie, in contrast, showed an imperfect Wild West where there was injustice, government corruption, blatant racism, vice, all-round stupidity, etc. It wasn't just transgressive shock value for its own sake.

Yes, here in Canada, we had the 'Residential Schools scandal', the impetus was to educate aboriginal children up to 14 or 16 with de-facto prisons run by cadres of religious zealots, (in the male buildings) who often became predatory homosexuals with a captive student body. In the female buildings there was a huge amount of whipping. These kids were murdered and the bodies buried in significant numbers and when the truth was exposed litigation bankrupted almost all on Canadian soil. They went to a policy of small band schools for each reservation with indigenous educators for the most part with a core of Teacher's School graduates to administer. Seems to have worked. The populace left organised religion in droves, and most churches went broke and the land sold. In Quebec the entire structure almost collapsed and if were not for $$ from Rome - it would have. Seminaries attracted no students = no priests, they even air dropped priests from Haiti - this did not go well in rural Quebec. I long for the holy grail = all religion gone and forgotten

And now nobody cares anymore about the context. Today colonisation is alive and well by those exclaiming to be humiliated and colonized in the past. skin color is out of the picture, its just power asymmetry due to history and tech. So all that remains is a parabel about societal decay.

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