Enob
Golden Knight of the Realm
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- 112
Man, why the immediate backlash to that essay? It is "a great book, period," and the essay certainly isn't calling that into question, although it does question the endings of the 1st and 2nd books. It just brings up some interesting parallels between Ender and Hitler. With the subject matter being what it was (genocide) it isn't too big of a stretch that Card was making a social commentary on Hitler. The essay talks of a lot of smaller parallels between the two that just reinforce the comparison. About the genocide though Ender definitely didn't "save mankind from an intergalactic alien race." He thought he was but he wasn't. Many of the details come from the later books and not just Ender's Game so if you've only read the first you might have missed how he wasn't the savior and actually the aggressor. To summarize the main point though, Ender and Hitler both committed genocide against what they saw as a threat to the good of humanity that wasn't actually a threat. The relevant three paragraphs from the essay:
Anyway, it is a somewhat pointless derail in a thread about the movie. More of a Book House discussion.
The Necessity of Genocide
The most explicit parallel between Hitler and Ender is that they're both genocides. Hitler, of course, ordered the death of millions of Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped persons, and so on. Ender exterminated an entire intelligent species. Most people, I hope, agree that mass murder, much less genocide, is quite indefensible. Yet, as we follow Ender's life after he wipes out the Buggers, we're invited to understand and forgive his actions.
Why? How? Here are two answers. "I would prefer not to see anyone suffer, not to do harm to anyone. But then I realize that the species is in danger..." "I thought I was playing a game. I didn't know it was the real thing. But...if I had known the battle was real, I would have done the same thing. We thought they wanted to kill us." The first words are Hitler's, the second Ender's. But the idea is the same, an appeal to good intentions. To save our people, we had to eliminate the threat presented by the existence of the stranger.
And that's a valid argument, if you're still a child and no one has ever told you what the road to Hell is paved with. It's a matter of historical record that Hitler honestly believed that the people he defined as human were in terrible danger from "inferior races." He did not merely use the threat to Nordic racial purity to become Fuhrer. Rather, he became Fuhrer because there was simply no other way to institute the sweeping racial programs his beliefs required. As Waite writes in The Psychopathic God: "The horror of Hitler was this: he meant what he said, he lived by his ideals, he practiced what he preached." And this, precisely, is the horror of Ender the Xenocide.
The most explicit parallel between Hitler and Ender is that they're both genocides. Hitler, of course, ordered the death of millions of Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped persons, and so on. Ender exterminated an entire intelligent species. Most people, I hope, agree that mass murder, much less genocide, is quite indefensible. Yet, as we follow Ender's life after he wipes out the Buggers, we're invited to understand and forgive his actions.
Why? How? Here are two answers. "I would prefer not to see anyone suffer, not to do harm to anyone. But then I realize that the species is in danger..." "I thought I was playing a game. I didn't know it was the real thing. But...if I had known the battle was real, I would have done the same thing. We thought they wanted to kill us." The first words are Hitler's, the second Ender's. But the idea is the same, an appeal to good intentions. To save our people, we had to eliminate the threat presented by the existence of the stranger.
And that's a valid argument, if you're still a child and no one has ever told you what the road to Hell is paved with. It's a matter of historical record that Hitler honestly believed that the people he defined as human were in terrible danger from "inferior races." He did not merely use the threat to Nordic racial purity to become Fuhrer. Rather, he became Fuhrer because there was simply no other way to institute the sweeping racial programs his beliefs required. As Waite writes in The Psychopathic God: "The horror of Hitler was this: he meant what he said, he lived by his ideals, he practiced what he preached." And this, precisely, is the horror of Ender the Xenocide.
Anyway, it is a somewhat pointless derail in a thread about the movie. More of a Book House discussion.
