More than thousand of people (S3 Madi: “There are 1,000 men and women here”) gathered on Maroon island. Sailed there from all over the New World (“They came from other islands, the colonies, maroons from camps like this one, pirates from as far away as Massachusetts”). All to join the revoltion. One John Silver decided he knows better…

comtessedebussy:

I couldn’t have phrased it better myself. John Silver made the decision to end this war on behalf of thousands upon thousands of people, as if he was actually a king who had that right. 

Also: Silver justifies this by saying that Flint’s war is a nightmare that he’s ending. I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve come to this conclusion: he doesn’t end a nightmare. He chooses one nightmare over another. Because you know what else is a nightmare? Slavery. Colonialism. Anti-Sodomy laws. “Hospitals” like Bethlem for disabled and mentally ill people. People who speak out against the status quo being made to disappear. Young children being kidnapped because their parents are agitators and sold into indentured servitude. 

Silver might be ending the particular nightmare of Flint’s war, but he’s not actually saving “lives” or “loves” with it. He’s just condemning them to death and suffering in a different way. They might not die in literal battle, but they will spend their lives toiling for an empire that treats them like property. They’ll continue to be killed in accidents on sugarcane plantations. They’ll die from injury and overwork and from being punished. Families and lives and loves will be separated, lost to the nightmare of imperliasm and slavery, as slaves are sold for profit, ripping apart families. 

The idea that silver was saving lives and ending a nightmare rests on the premise that ending the war returns everything to some kind of neutral position, but there is no neutral position. To give up the war is to stand by and allow the horrors of civilization to be perpetuated. 

And yes, I don’t think Flint was fighting this war because he somehow believed in freeing everyone for the sake of equality; I think he just wanted to stick it to England. That doesn’t actually matter, because the end result would have been the same: the kind of emancipation that, in history, mostly happened 200 years later, but which was possible within the canon of black sails at that point in time. Within the canon, Flint’s war had a chance, and Silver made the choice to end it and to allow things to return to the way they had been – even though every single character on the show, himself included, probably, has suffered due to the way that things are. Jack, Anne, Max, Eleanor, James, Thomas, Vane, Billy – every single one of them has suffered at the hands of civilization as an oppressed individual in some way. We’re told their backstories, and they’re all the same – civilization screwed them over – and Silver makes the choice to allow that to continue.