To those trying to use my post to say Terry Pratchett would have been for the racist right wing rhetoric that resulted in Brexit…what’s it like being Lord Rust?
“You can’t put words in an author’s mouth”
Okay but, and I’m going to go out on a limb here, *steeples fingers in front of face and takes a deep breath* when you spend the entirety of 41+ books telling people to fight back against the evils in society, which he perceived and portrayed to be racism, sexism, classicism, ageism, greed, neglect, war and the every day small minded acts of bigotry that make society sick as a whole, I’m going to go ahead and say Terry wouldn’t be to happy with people chanting “Make Britain White Again” while firebombing the local kebab shop. Just a hunch.
One of his books was literally called Jingo and featured a kebab shop being firebombed. And the protagonists were outraged by this and did everything they could to help the owner. The words were already in Pterry’s mouth back in 1997.
“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”
Jingo– Terry Pratchett (1997)
Discworld was a deeply progressive book universe, where diversity was always a strength, where kindness was the great problem solver. How coukd anyone read any of his books and think he was ever conservative in any way?
God bless how can you get PTerry so blessedly wrong?
By not actually reading the books? Honestly, I don’t get how you can read over 40 novels worth of books and NOT GET THE BASIC PREMISE?
And just in case you aren’t paying attention, or need things spelled out for you, Pratchett’s villain in Going Postal, a character named Reacher Gilt, was a blatant con artist who would tell you that he was going to rob you as he was doing it, and whose office was located in a build called Tump Tower, for fuck’s sake.
Seriously.
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