Observations, rewatching Season 1 for first time in a while

If the writer had a direct, specific allegory in mind, the only things I can think of would be extremely controversial, but it's probably just a general allegory to revisionist history and maybe atrocity propaganda.

 

It's an allegory for any time history has been written by the victors and selectively edited to make their own guys into heroes, another race into villains and savages, and then used that history to justify modern oppression. The US treatment of Native Americans is one huge example of that, glossing over the genocide bit and writing stories that portray them as savages so noone sympathizes with them on the Trail of Tears. Or any other time in history somebody has used stories to justify racial oppression.

 

I'd agree, but they aren't the victors, and some of them, like the woman on the council, claim to be oppressed.

 

True, I just don't want to raise any examples of art made by minorities casting white people as historical villains, lest risk being perceived as calling them lies and sounding like I am in the camp of the very worst Americans.

You could say, whatever happened when Voyager came by, it created a situation where one race was politically more powerful. And contention over what really happened has been a sticking point that entrenches otherwise reasonable people in their positions. When they started questioning it and talking about it they started seeing each other more empathetically.

 

Thanks for your reply. But I think you have it backwards. In the case of the episode, history was written by the violent aggressors, who inevitably lost their battles, and then saw themselves as victims of oppression and discrimination from the target of their violence, and the crew of Voyager.

 

The minorities cast white people as "historical villains" because they live in a fantasy land of entitlement.

Every culture has waged war and expanded into the territories of other cultures since time began. I'm not going to cite every example (You know them), but suffice it to say that it was not evil that drove the homo-sapiens into neanderthal territory which led to their extinction. It was necessity. And everyone conveniently forgets whites did not go into sub-Saharan Africa and round up natives. It was called the "slave trade". The majority of Africans taken from Africa were sold by other Africans into slavery all over the new world, not just the southern United States. Maybe the African Americans can direct some of their hatred where it belongs... towards Africa. And, in no way shape or form does the United States need to be a welfare check for central and south Americans. Lack of a toilet, toilet paper, and running water and profound incompetence isn't a good enough excuse to bring your family to the border to seek asylum and the white man's cash.

Just saying.

 

Unless I misread the episode, here the aggressors lost their battles, and then painted themselves as victims, oppressed and discriminated against, going so far as to re-interpret history to conform to their profoundly biased view of events.

I'd really like to hear your take on it... Be extremely controversial. It's why we're here.

 

They were the aggressors, but even then they're portrayed as a minority engaging in terrorism.

There are some things that are too controversial for the forum.

 

Wow, this is why I didn’t want to mention any examples, didn’t mean to draw out the white supremacists.

The takeaway from the episode is that seven hundred year old conflicts shouldn’t be invoked as excuses for modern racial conflict. People are individuals and whatever happened in the past is no excuse for social inequalities of today. We have no power over the past, we have power over the present.

Your arguments are absurd that because white people are not the only people to do bad things in all of history somehow calling out historical fictions that painted mass murderers as heroes is some sort of entitled cash grab and even more absurd to suggest that absolving those mass murderers who happened to share our skin tone somehow entities us to horde all our generational privilege, increased opportunity and better access to safety and justice we received as a result.

Please take your tiki torch out of my thread.

 

Jmidnight placed on ignore.