Ankh- Morpok on Nostr: "We know what the law is, Mister Po-leess-maan. The law is the land. You say, 'This ...

"We know what the law is, Mister Po-leess-maan. The law is the land. You say, 'This is my land', but you did not make the land. You did not make your sheep, you did not make the rabbits on which we live, you did not make the cows, or the horses, but you say, 'These things are mine'. This cannot be a truth. I make my axe, my pots, and these are mine. What I wear is mine. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. I think you are a good man, Mister Po-leess-maan but we see the turning of the times. Maybe a hundred or two hundred years ago there was in the world what people called 'the wilderness', or 'no man's land', or 'wasteland', and we lived in such places, we are waste people. There was the troll race, the dwarf race, the human race, and I am sorry for the goblin race that we cannot run so fast."

— Terry Pratchett, Snuff

A goblin woman stands in front of the most powerful copper in the world and, instead of demanding anything, apologises — sorry that her whole race can't run fast enough to keep up with the ones who've already claimed the ground they stand on. No bitterness, no threat. Just a quiet statement of fact, and somehow that's more devastating than any rant could be.

The heart of it is the argument about what makes something yours. The landowner says "my land" and it's just accepted, because the law backs him. But she can only claim what she actually made with her own hands: her axe, her pots. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. Property isn't about making — it's about who got there first with the biggest stick and the paperwork to match. Every "wasteland" on the map was somebody's home before it was declared empty.

And it lands harder knowing the context. Snuff was the last full Vimes novel Pratchett wrote while the embuggerance (Alzheimers’s disease) was really taking hold, and it's a book about deciding who counts as people. Goblins are treated as vermin, and the whole novel is one long argument that they aren't — that nobody is. He was staring down his own erasure while writing about a race being erased, and he still chose to give the last word to the goblin, not the cop. That's the whole man, right there.