[b]POST CONTINUED [/b] [quote]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. That's why Card lays such great stress on Valentine's silly "orders of forgiveness," which give the people in Speaker such a convenient vocabulary for their racism. Says a "brilliant" student in Speaker: "Through these Nordic [!] layers of forgiveness we can see that Ender was not a true Xenocide, for when he destroyed the Buggers, we knew them only as varelse [the truly alien]." To Hitler, of course, Jews, Blacks, and Slavs were equally alien, so by the same argument he is also innocent of genocide! Forgiving Hitler The most offensive thing about Ender is that he goes Hitler one better. Where the Fuhrer would have been content to kill everybody he thought might possibly one day represent a threat to his people, Ender does kill everybody -- and then proceeds to steal their heritage. Ender the Xenocide becomes the first Speaker for the Dead, writing the book that will define what the Buggers are for three thousand years. It is as if Hitler not only exterminated the Jews, he then went on to write his own story of what the state of Israel might have been. If there is anything uglier than silencing the voice of the alien because she is alien, it is then filling in the silence with your own version of what she was. Yet Card represents this act as Ender's redemption. For the reader who isn't convinced that writing a book (no matter how highly acclaimed) makes up for exterminating a race, Card offers an alternative, albeit rather contradictory, excuse for his genocide's actions -- genetic determinism. Although this "science" has been shown to represent such an oversimplification that it's a downright distortion, Card makes it the foundation of the biology of his universe. From the very beginning, authorities can breed geniuses more easily than you or I could establish a strain of purebred blue budgies, and never mind that breeding for color and size involves at most a few genes, while breeding for intelligence would require a total understanding of the complicated interactions between whole chromosomes. In Card's strange world, children can inherit advanced qualities like a talent for xenobiology -- a bizarre combination of genetic determinism and Lamarckianism since these characteristics were presumably artificially acquired at some point in the past. (Or does Card imagine that there is literally a gene for xenobiological talent that we can breed for? How could such a thing evolve? Surely our genes would have to be macroscopic to carry all the information he assumes they do.) In any case, his pseudo-science serves primarily as an excuse for ugly actions running the gamut from genocide to vivisection. At the very beginning of Speaker, Card has the thirteen-year-old Novinha exclaim, "But you can't understand the piggies just by watching the way they behave! [Card's emphasis] They came out of a different evolution. You have to understand their genes, what's going on inside their cells." The reader may chuckle at the idea of understanding a race's psychology from its genes -- but Card plots later events so that Novinha's odd statement is entirely borne out. Environment (except for childhood traumas aimed at garnering reader sympathy) is nothing. Inheritance is all. So what does this have to do with Ender/Hitler? Everything. Hitler, of course, believed in precisely this kind of oversimplified pseudo-scientific mishmash, and that's why he thought that applying the methods of the budgie breeder to human beings would work. Since there are no pet stores to accept your culls when you're breeding people, he built the death camps. And if the world really worked that way, I suppose you could say he was justified. If intelligence and moral character were actually reducible to a couple of recessive genes just waiting to be cultivated, then you could breed a race of Supermen using Hitler's methods. Indeed, short of genetic manipulation on a level we haven't mastered yet, his methods would probably be the only way to breed Supermen. (Perhaps Hitler should have asked some budgie breeders first. They could have told him that the culls often turn out to be the smartest, most personable birds -- because they're taken into people's homes and given personal attention. Beautiful show budgies who do nothing but preen and sire young don't say, "Look at the pretty bird." But Hitler -- and Card -- already know that intelligence is mainly inherited and easily correlated with other desirable traits, so why bother to see what actual breeders say?) Ender, of course, is a Superman -- the greatest one. Breeding, not training, made him what he is. Remember, he brutally murdered a schoolboy for strategic reasons before he was accepted into Battle School. Although his training helped refine his talents as a killer genius, all the pre-arranged trauma and intensive schooling in the galaxy would have gone for naught had it not been for his superior genes. Card therefore Speaks for Ender by saying that the boy killed for the noblest reasons and couldn't have done otherwise anyway. So why should we attach moral meaning to his actions? This interpretation also explains the clunky ending to Ender's Game. Having saved the world just by being what he is, Ender proceeds to demonstrate his innate nobility by wallowing in his own guilt. Sure, he isn't to blame and he knows it -- but why not be a real Superman and prove how sensitive you are while saving the world? Speaker's ending is even more ludicrous. Having spent most of two novels telling us why we can never understand the alien, Card has Ender pull a quick turnaround at the last minute so that Bugger, human, and piggie can live together in harmony. (This in a universe where tolerance is so rare that premarital sex is unthinkable and whole planets are chartered on the basis of narrow religious, racial, and national affiliations!) Just a little understanding and a quickie resurrection by our local Superman are enough to unravel the twisted knot of racially predetermined hatreds. Hitler's made it to Brazil to put what he's learned to use in the interest of racial harmony between European, Indian, and African. He's even brought a few Jews with him to lend the Brazilians a hand! I'm sorry, Card, but it doesn't wash. It's just too cheap. In the real world, the murdered don't rise from the dead when the Great Leader decides that the times are right for tolerance. Shakespeare, speaking of another figure oft-cited as the model Superman, said it better: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones..." So it was with Caesar, so it is with Hitler. All the understanding in the world doesn't change the fact that this man deformed the face of the twentieth century and that all of us are living with his destructive legacy. Perhaps you meant to focus on the good men do rather than their evil when you wrote: "Destroyed everything he touched -- that's a lie, that can't be truthfully said of any human being who ever lived." Perhaps you meant to help us enlarge the sphere of our capacity for forgiveness. No doubt, in any case, that you meant well. But it doesn't really matter, does it? As long as people are struggling against anti-Semitism, misogyny, and all the other ways of oppressing the different, it seems inappropriate to focus overmuch on the delicate feelings of the oppressor. Look at the fact that the Fuhrer was sincere and re-define his life as dedicated rather than evil? Forgive Hitler? Card, from your privileged position as a white male American Christian, you have no right to ask us that.[/quote]