Originally Posted by
Doombot
That's an interesting take. I can understand how you could see that in some of the events of the Silver Age or scenes in the Golden Age books, like Namor and his cousins wanting to play "Atlanteans vs Americans" as children, which is an obvious take on American kids playing "Cowboys and Indians", but in their game the "white Americans" are the foil. This was literally all I feel Everett was doing, and not making the Atlanteans stand-ins for indigenous peoples in America. He was in no way able to see the age of identity politics coming nearly a century after he made it. You can (and have) easily make a case for it though, and I like reading other takes.
For myself though, I have a hard time meshing that view with the idea of Atlantis being this highly advanced, technological society, one that had no contact with the surface world until the 20th century. They have laser weapons, tank like machines and amphibious fighter craft, that was ahead of anything in the 1940s. They're not victims of colonization, they are victims of carelessness and apathy from humans who, for the most part, don't even know they are there. Atlantis has the ability to take western power head on, unlike the Aztec or the already declining Maya did. To me Atlantis was the original source of the great mediterranean cultures of antiquity. Greece, Italy, Egypt, the Near East, all are descendants of that original society, it's the missing or lost piece of out history, one that the west has forgotten and turned into myth. After the cataclysm the survivors went through their own dark ages, learning to live in the oceans and slowly rebuilding who they were, eventually remaking their great culture, which grew in isolation from the surface until the 20th century.