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Comment by camdenlock | Hacker News Reader

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Never really understood what draws people to Cory Doctorow. Over-the-top polemics aren't really good for much except making you angrier about something you're already angry about.

I mean its posted to jacobin.com -> go look up who the jacobins were and the time of terror and you realize the point of the site is over the top polemics. They named themselves after a group that slaughtered their political enemies. It's basically a more obscure older equivalent of khmer-rouge.com - naming yourself after historical political mass murderers.

But Doctorow's fiction is better than his opinion pieces.

The site got its name from, "The Black Jacobins". The history of the enslaved Africans in Haiti casting off their European Christian oppressors by force (Haitian formerly enslaved people were the first to defeat Napoleon-- many had been trained as soldiers in Africa before being kidnapped by the European Christians).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins

If you ever have a chance to attend a lecture or listen to an interview with Jacobin Magazine's founder, it will be worth your time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#:~:text=Jac...

Oh so he's idolizing the perpetrators of the 1804 massacre of the white population by the haitian revolutionaries on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who then enacted racist policies in 1805?

You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.

>They named themselves after a group that slaughtered their political enemies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...

Oh so he's idolizing the perpetrators of the 1804 massacre of the white population by the haitian revolutionaries on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who then enacted racist policies in 1805?

You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.

No, by 1804 the "Black Jacobins" were mostly deported with Toussaint L'Ouverture already dead.

That other Hatians committed atrocities does not detract from L'Ouverture's legacy.

> No, by 1804 the "Black Jacobins" were mostly deported with Toussaint L'Ouverture already dead.

Except Dessalines, who was previously one of his Black Jacobin generals, but then turned on him, then rejoined him, then turned on him once again when L'Overture declared a ceasefire with the french but then went back on it, and Dessalines went on to massacre the white population of hiati, so exactly L'Ouverture's legacy. It's just that L'Ouverture lost internal power struggles in the revolution.

>It's just that L'Ouverture lost internal power struggles in the revolution.

He lost to someone who clearly did not share his ideology, the ideology that the Jacobin took it's name from.

I find much of the rest of your post strange, but it's already getting way off topic.

Dessalines was L'Ouverture's principle lieutenant and general. It wasn't until after the Battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, where Dessalines forces kicked the french out of fort Crete-a-Pierrot, then massacred the french civilians, and then themselves were forced out of the fort due to heavy losses on Leclerc's counterattack, that Dessalines switched alliegences. Dessalines than switched sides which led to the surrender of L'Ouverture. The massacre of french civilians there still happened under L'Ouverture.

He didn't have a different ideology, he was literally L'Ouverture's primary supporter and ally, until defeated militarily.

it's what the people want

hey, congrats! You succeeded.

that's the fate of all lecturing and politicized fiction and I think Nabokov summed up very well what is wrong with it:

[...] I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster [...]

Doctorow and quite a few contemporary sci-fi writers are very strong offenders on this front.

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