sidewaystime:

flintsredhair:

So – in thinking about it, I really truly do not get where this idea of pacifist!Thomas is coming from.

I mean – I get it in theory. I get where the idea comes from, I suppose, but I don’t agree, because the Thomas that I saw wasn’t a pacifist so much as he was a proponent of mercy for people who had been pushed to criminal acts by an unforgiving and autocratic society. Thomas, as Flint notes, wanted to change England and he wanted to do so by taking the people that it had deemed undesirable and giving them a second chance. He was attempting to demonstrate that the poor were not, by nature, criminals or destined to become criminals but people who had been treated unfairly by their government and by the upper classes – Thomas’ own class. I don’t know that that necessarily translates into being a pacifist so much as it indicates an ability to see people as people regardless of their class. Furthermore, his attitude toward Israel Hands and the other pirates who killed the Governor’s family and something he says to his father indicates to me that Thomas Hamilton is not a pacifist. He believes in forgiveness, yes – for those who would seek it. Those who, on the other hand, are dedicated to chaos and violence when offered an alternative and do not want anything else, he was not proposing to pardon. 

As to what he would think of James and his war – I like to think he would understand that it was not about chaos. It was not about violence. It was about trying to change the world in the only way that had been left to him. James had demonstrated willingness to turn away from that war several times. He had tried to end it in a peaceful fashion, and every time he was turned on by the same civilization he attempted to make terms with. By the time Rogers offered him a pardon, he had, as he himself noted, come to the end of his willingness to trust in civilization, and who could blame him? I think it’s important to note that the war he was fighting wasn’t just for himself, either – it was for millions of people like him that were going to continue to be savaged by that civilization. That’s something that I don’t think Thomas would have wanted him to ignore – he hated injustice, and slavery and England’s treatment of queer people was very definitely that. Also – Thomas at the end of canon had had eleven years of being tortured and enslaved. He had seen the results of trying to change things peacefully – do we really think that he wouldn’t be both angry at the people and the system that had done that to him and his loved ones and ready to try more drastic methods?

The thing that always kind of gets me about Thomas-the-pacifist is that Thomas, the wealthy titled son and heir of the Earl of Ashbourne, has the space to pursue his ends in a way that uses the system instead of overthrowing it. The resources available to him include politics and the law and money and contacts. He can pull together the 3+ ships and carpenters and farmers and ministers to populate Nassau. He uses every resource at his disposal to see to a) making nassau stable and profitable and b) making sure that people like him and his family can’t fuck it up the way they have the old world. Thomas the ex-prisoner does not have the same set of resources. James McGraw/Flint never had them. Miranda didn’t have them. The thing we see consistently across all characters on all sides of the war is the attempt to utilize the resources available to them to change the world in whatever way they see fit.

So Flint wages war because his ability to wage war is the tool at his disposal to accomplish his aims. Miranda uses soft contacts. Eleanor uses trade. Max uses secrets and money. Silver uses people’s emotions. Woodes Rogers uses money/politics/influence/war. I keep feeling like the questions to ask about post-series Thomas are 1) what does he want and 2) what are the resources available to him to get it?

Whatever the answer to number 1 is, the answer to number 2 is he has his own mind and he has James.

So do I think he’d be pro The War? If I’m being honest? Probably, but only if he’d satisfied himself that there was no other way to achieve their aims. Do I think he’d retire to the interior and become a farmer? No. Do i think he’s a pacifist? Not…entirely. I think he is a person who would recognize that the peaceful achievement of change is a luxury and that not everyone has that as an option. And I think he would recognize that peace and security and comfort is a tool wielded by the powers that be to discourage a disruption of the status quo. Ultimately I guess it depends on what his relationship to the status quo is and how pissed off he is about it.