Ender will save us
“A child, our ultimate icon of vulnerability, put under almost impossible stress. It was when he decided to give up the enterprise that he won the ultimate victory; and then he became an almost tragic figure when it became clear that his victory made him obsolete, while his childhood training had left him unfit for any other kind of life.”3 Despite his moral preoccupations, in this summary of his novel Card seems less interested in interrogating Ender’s morality than in evoking sympathy for him.”
This is the thesis statement for this essay, written by John Kessel here- . He seeks to explain why Ender, the protagonist of Ender’s Game, is in fact guilty of genocide, that Ender’s guilt is a sign of his acknowledgement that his actions were wrong, and that our own love for the novel is some kind of reflection of our want to hurt people who hurt us. I’m going to go through most of the essay in chunks and provide my own, opposing insights.
Yet, for reasons that are never made clear, Ender never tells his parents; he learns early to hide his fear and hurt. “It was the lying face he presented to Mother and Father, when Peter had been cruel to him and he dared not let it show”(p. 47).
In the real world, the motivation for such secrecy, when it is not fear of retaliation by the abuser, is often shame—the child fears that he or she is somehow responsible for, even deserving of the abuse. It is interesting that the one time that Ender’s father confronts him and asks why Ender did not ask a grown-up for help when he was being bullied, they are interrupted before Ender can answer. The question is never answered. (p. 19).
The primary problem with this argument is that it works under the assumption that Ender is a normal child; he isn’t, and using our own experiences to judge his reactions are inadequate at best. Ender never states that he feels to blame for Peter’s actions; he’s too intelligent and rational for that. Why doesn’t he tell his parents? I don’t know, honestly, since Card didn’t explain it. Possibly, he feels that he can find a way out of the situation himself. Perhaps he hopes Peter will eventually just give up. Or maybe he’s just given up on fighting Peter. Maybe Peter threatened him if he ever told anyone about the way he treated Ender. The point is, we don’t really know anything EXCEPT that Ender isn’t a normal child, so working under assumptions based off the experiences of normal children is inadequate.
Like many scenes of personal violence in this and other Card works, this fight is painfully intense, ending with Ender kicking Bonzo in the crotch, “hard and sure”(p. 231). Though he does not know it at the time, Ender has killed Bonzo. But lest the reader be repulsed by Ender’s pursuing the fight until Bonzo is dead (which an observer might see as vengeful, unwarranted, or vicious), the narrative insists that it is done for entirely rational reasons, not out of a personal desire to lash out. “The only way to end things completely…” Ender thinks, “was to hurt Bonzo enough that his fear was stronger than his hate”(p. 231).
Ender generalizes from this situation that the only rational policy to insure safety in the world is to be ready always to cause excessive pain.
No, his goal isn’t to cause excessive pain, it’s to win that battle and all other battles, as he says. Pain has nothing to do with it, and is misleading in that it implies malice or hatred; Ender has never hated anyone, and says of the Buggers he loves them, because he understands them so well. He doesn’t intend to cause pain, he just wins every fight. And the realizations of “winning every battle” is reached before that, during the Stilson fight. He was attacked by Bonzo, whom he reasonably believed was going to kill him; responding with like force is, in that situation, acceptable both morally AND legally.
Graff’s judgment on the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson clarifies Card’s definition of a killer. Presumably, someone can kill hundreds, thousands, even billions (Ender eventually “kills” an entire race) and not be a killer. A killer is motivated by rage or by selfish motives. To be a killer you must intend to kill someone. And even if you do intend to kill, you are still innocent if you do it for a larger reason, “selflessly,” without personal motives. And if you feel bad about being forced into doing it.
Kate Bonin, in her article “Gay Sex and Death in the Science Fiction of Orson Scott Card”8 points out how the killing of Bonzo prefigures Ender’s eventual destruction of the buggers. The history of the war against the buggers follows the pattern of the fight against Bonzo; in fact, just before the final battle in which Ender exterminates the buggers, he explicitly compares his confrontation with them to the unfair fight in the shower (p. 322). The number of times this scenario of unjustified attack and savage retaliation is repeated, not just in Ender’s Game but in other of Card’s stories and novels, suggests that it falls close to the heart of his vision of moral action in the world.
Not true at all; by the actual legal definition, Ender doesn’t qualify as a murderer for two reasons: number one, you can’t “murder” anything but a human being, and two, is the heart of the argument; intent. Without intent, the Mens Rea requirement for culpability, your actions cannot be illegal. Intent can take several forms, but none of them are met by ender, let alone the fact that he is a minor and cannot be held liable for such crimes. How can self-defense NOT be seen as moral, anyway? He defends himself in the most effective way he can think of, and even THEN doesn’t actually mean to kill anyone.
Though this doctrine is not codified in Ender’s Game, it is everywhere present in the action. And by testing this moral premise in situations of murder, even genocide, Card seems to dare the reader to try to reject it—as if to say, if a morality of intentionality can stand up to this test, it can stand up to any. But at the same time he chooses these difficult examples, Card goes to great lengths to urge the reader not to reject Ender based on the violent reprisals he visits on his enemies. We are told over and over, without irony, that Ender is good. Just after Ender is recruited (soon after he has killed Stilson) Graff tells Anderson, “He’s clean. Right to the heart, he’s good.” (p. 38) Later, Graff insists, “There’s greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit.” (p. 280) Ender himself protests, “I never wanted to kill anybody. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to kill anybody.” (p. 331)
In a long scene between Graff and Valentine, Valentine insists desperately: “Ender is not like Peter!”
…maybe I’m like Peter, but Ender isn’t, he isn’t at all, I used to tell him that when he cried, I told him that lots of times, you’re not like Peter, you never like to hurt people, you’re kind and good and not like Peter at all!”
“And it’s true”
“…Damn right it’s true.” (p. 162)
But it isn’t just stated as fact to be assumed, it is reinforced by Ender’s actions.
Other characters in Ender’s Game are also forced to do things they see as immoral, against their better natures, in the service of saving the world from the buggers. Graff, the orchestrator of Ender’s brutal education, swears that “I am his friend” (p. 38) even though he does nothing to demonstrate that friendship, and in fact does many things that to a neutral observer would indicate a desire to destroy Ender. As with Ender’s goodness, this is a case of the author insisting on a quality in the character that need not be demonstrated by action to be held as true. Goodness is not a matter of acts, but of intentions, an inherent quality independent of what one does. “I don’t really think it’s true that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Card stated in a 2002 interview.9 “Good people trying to do good usually find a way to muddle through. What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good. They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.” The import of this statement is that there are some people who are good before they act, and some others who are bad before they act, and that goodness or badness is exhibited in their actions. These "bad" people can’t do good, and “good” people can’t do bad.
That isn’t what he means. What he is saying is, even if they accomplish their goal of good, the damage and harm they do along the way can outweigh their accomplishments. As for the “morality of intentionality”, I’ll deal with it, piece-by-piece, many times throughout the rest of this article.
So we see that later, when Ender is made a cadet commander, even though his treatment of his subordinate cadet Bean recapitulates in its unfairness and arbitrary harshness Graff’s treatment of Ender, Ender is not doing wrong. As Graff did to Ender, Ender makes the other cadets resent and dislike Bean so that Bean is forced to show his superiority. “That was the only way he could win respect and friendship,”10 Ender says to himself (but not to Bean). “I’m hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way . . . [even if]… I’m making you miserable” (p. 184) Like Graff, Ender insists he is Bean’s (secret) friend.
Whoa, Ender regrets what he did, as he states later. He realizes it is wrong, and tries to make up for it by being his only real friend; unfortunately, his view on normal relationships has been skewed by the Battle School and it’s crazy administrators, so what you see is a reflection of what they have done to him in what he does to Bean. But he does, in fact, regret what he does to Bean, even after his weak attempt at justification.
Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.
The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people. When Stryka, one of the students on Trondheim in Speaker, objects to the morality of intention that the Speakers propound, Ender dismisses her.
“Xenocide is Xenocide,” said Stryka. “Just because Ender didn’t know they [the buggers] were ramen [i.e. human] doesn’t make them any less dead.”
Andrew sighed at Stryka’s unforgiving attitude. It was the fashion among Calvinists11 at Reykjavik to deny any weight human motive in judging the good or evil of an act . . . Andrew did not resent it—he understood the motive behind it. (p. 39)
That’s the point in creating those characters; to create legitimate bad characters with whom Ender’s violence would compare favorably. Faulting Card for creating such narrow characters (although Peter is FAR from narrow and described later in Bean’s series as, in actuality, a good character) is like faulting a carpenter because his knife only cuts things. That’s the point. As for the Calvinists, it’s true that they tried to view the human psyche without including motive, but that was because they felt that it was impossible to measure, and thus, not appropriate for scientists to study; NOT because they thought it was irrelevant. And just because someone is dead doesn’t mean anyone is at fault; it happens all the time.
The possibility that Stryka may have a legitimate reason to object to Ender’s behavior is never considered—her qualms are “fashion.” A page later, Ender identifies Stryka’s real motivation (which Ender knows but she does not) as a fear of the stranger. In this case the stranger is not the aliens exterminated by Ender, but Ender himself. Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
Um, no? I really don’t understand the issue with not considering her opinion; besides the reasoning I just explained behind her opinion’s dismissal, the whole point of the novel is to show how good Ender is, and why his actions are justified. The fact that Card makes that statement at all is the only reason you have the opportunity to examine that side of the issue; thus, does his writing give you the ability to examine the very thing you say he dismisses.
This bait-and-switch stratagem prevails throughout these novels. In the extended ending of Ender’s Game and throughout Speaker for the Dead, Ender is presented as a victim of the extermination of the buggers rather than its perpetrator. Card bases much of Speaker on the irony that this most moral of humans (the founder of a new religion of understanding) is considered to be evil by people who are not as moral as he. Indeed, Ender’s notoriety as “the Xenocide” only works in Speaker for the Dead if he isn’t really guilty of the crime of genocide.
Two things. One, he WAS a victim; he was manipulated by adults into doing the work they couldn’t do. He had no choice in the matter once he left for Battle School, and didn’t even know what he was doing was real. And second, opposing religions hate each other. Well, the occidental ones, anyway, which is what concerns us in the West. So it makes absolute sense that others would hate him for his perceived moral superiority. There’s a long history of this; The Crusades are a great example of one religion thinking itself better than another and this religious conflict ending in many deaths.
As I have suggested, this issue of genocide puts the morality of intention to its ultimate test. We may forgive Ender the killings of Stilson and Bonzo, but can we forgive him the extermination of a race of intelligent creatures?
A good question, one I’d like to rephrase; If you could cure cancer by killing 100 children, would that be moral? What about ten innocent, newly-born children? One? One child, sacrificed on the alter of science to cure cancer; would that be moral?
No, because the number itself is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the intent, and he obviously had none. He had no way of knowing what he was doing, so how could he have intended anything? Besides, he only killed ONE intelligent creature, as I’ll restate later.
Radford’s essay speculates that Card wrote Ender’s Game as an apologia for Adolf Hitler. She points out certain parallels between Ender’s biography and Hitler’s—that they were both third children, that they were virgins until age 37, that they were close to their older sisters, that they were abused by adults, that they both committed genocidal acts.
Card, in the same issue of Fantasy Review,13 denied Radford’s assertions. He said that he had no knowledge of any of the Hitler biographical information that Radford cited. Such parallels were “trivial coincidences.” He said he intended Ender as the moral opposite to Hitler: Hitler knew what he was doing; Ender did not. Hitler intended to exterminate; Ender did not. Hitler felt no moral qualm; Ender spends the rest of his life expiating the guilt he feels for exterminating the buggers.
Let me say very clearly that I do not believe that Orson Scott Card wrote Ender’s Game as an apologia for Hitler. I do not believe the biographical parallels Radford finds to Hitler are evidence that Card intended any parallel with Hitler—other than the parallel that they both commit genocide. Like Card, I take the other points of similarity as coincidences.
I’d have to concur here; I’d only briefly pondered the similarities before dismissing them as coincidences, and it appears to have been the correct course of action. I think the key here, though, is that Hitler committed Genocide; Ender killed a bunch of aliens. Hitler had intent; Ender did not. Hitler incinerated, gassed, and/or shot three million Jews in ovens and camps; Ender killed a bunch of bugs during a time of war, in which the bugs were constantly fighting. They knew what was happening, and it’s only due to their language barriers that an official declaration of war wasn’t given. AND the buggers started it when they attacked Earth; Hitler started his own war. You know when you think about it, the Third Invasion was really custom-designed for Ender. We attack the Buggers because we see the situation as “either them or us” and we need to finish it once and for all. Ender fights battles with that same exact attitude, and it is what leads to the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson. A “War to end all wars” with a commander that ends all future confrontations by winning the current one thoroughly.
The sections in green here are from Card himself in rebuttal to Radford’s essay
On the broadest level, it should be obvious to every reader of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that I do draw one key parallel between historical monstrosities like Hitler, Stalin, and Amin, and my character Ender: they are thought of in the public mind as loathsome mass murderers. Despite their similar public image, however, every other element of Ender’s story is designed to show that in his case the image is not reality—he is not like Hitler or Stalin, exactly the opposite of what Radford claims. Far from using Ender to try to make people approve of Hitler, I use the contrast with Hitler, Stalin, and other genocides to illuminate the character of Ender Wiggin.14 "
“The humans in Ender’s Game never imagined that they were obliterating another species; rather they thought they were destroying an invading species’ ability to make war. Genocide was the result of not understanding the effect on the buggers of the death of the hive queen.” 15
“…Does Radford really believe that I was claiming Hitler’s near extermination of European Jews was an accident? That he and his underlings didn’t know their death camps might kill all the Jews? Yet if I made Ender’s crime so obviously different in intent from Hitler’s deliberate genocide, how can she imagine I meant Ender’s story to be an apologia for Hitler.”16
These paragraphs are full of obfuscation. First, the phrase “destroying an invading species’ ability to make war” is a careful parsing of language that obscures what happens in the novel: the buggers are unable to make war because they are exterminated. Characterizing this as destroying their ability to make war is like characterizing cutting off someone’s head as eliminating his ability to whistle.
Normally true; it would be seen as “Careful parsing”, or rhetoric, given our current political age, to say that the annihilation of an entire species was merely “eliminating their ability to make war.” However, here, they are absolutely synonymous. The humans apparently attempted diplomacy to end the conflict, but they couldn’t communicate with the buggers that way. Therefore, the only way to ensure that the human species wasn’t wiped out by the buggers was to kill them, thus eliminating their ability to harm us. He doesn’t say it in that manner to diminish the seemingly gruesome acts Ender commits; he says it because he wants it to be interpreted literally so that there is no confusion. As Graff or Mazer says, the humans would have been content to leave the Buggers alone had they not attacked AGAIN after the first invasion. The only way to keep the human race safe was to “Eliminate their ability to make war.” And yes, Card obviously failed if intelligent people still misread his intentions.
One thing I’d like to say, since the focus of the essay is on genocide, is the completely different circumstances surrounding the genocides of our own human history, and those committed by Ender. Hitler took a group of people and threw them in ovens. Ender kills a group we are at war with. Ender also doesn’t kill billions, as is suggested; in fact, Card specifically states that, due to the hive-mind mentality and physiology of the buggers, he may have only, in fact, killed one individual. While this is irrelevant in considering his guilt, it IS relevant in the crime he could be accused of. None of the other buggers were individuals, and Card says a few times they are like limbs of the actual mind, and that killing them is like clipping your nails to the Queen. So, in fact, Ender hasn’t even really committed genocide anymore than the guy who shoots the last Bald Eagle has committed genocide; He didn’t kill ALL of them, only the LAST of them.
Second, it is inconceivable that the commanders would not at least suspect that killing the queen would kill the entire race; the buggers in battle always responded as a unit, as if under the direction of a single mind, and in Mazer Rackham’s famous victory decades before, destroying a single ship caused the entire bugger fleet to go dead. (p. 206-07) Rackham explains the nature of the bugger group mind to Ender at length long before the final battle, and Ender uses this knowledge in preparing his strategy. The only reason the commanders would not know this is to make it possible for Card to assert that the final genocide was accidental.
I really don’t want to take a personal shot at Kessel; his opinion is valid and appreciated. However, in saying that ANYTHING should be obvious to a military officer displays a lack of experience in dealing with the military. It should have been obvious that Iraq had no WMDs, but we still invaded them under that pretense anyway. If I’ve learned anything about the military, it’s to never overestimate the intelligence of those in charge of it. As Card (again) says, if they had any brains they’d be life-insurance salesmen.
Third, even this point about the hive queen is an evasion. Ender doesn’t just kill the queen: he disintegrates the entire bugger home world. The “MD Device” is a weapon that destroys matter in an expanding sphere. Ender knows exactly what it does, as do his commanders. When he sets off the MD Device there is nothing left of the buggers’ planet but “a sphere of bright dust”(p. 325). “Where the vast enemy fleet had been, and the planet they protected, there was nothing meaningful”(p. 325). The buggers do not need to have a group mind for this to constitute extermination.
Oh, he does kinda address the issue of the Queen (yes, I’m writing this as I read the article), although not in the way I have. I’m pretty sure blowing up a clump of dirt isn’t a crime or immoral, though.
Fourth, the passages insist that the difference between Hitler’s genocide and Ender’s is that Ender’s was an accident. Ender thought he was playing a simulation whereas Hitler knew the gas chambers were real. This "science fiction element" (remote-directed war) serves in moral terms as yet another evasion; in reality, people do not commit genocide by accident. This is another parallel between the bugger war and the fight scenes where Ender kills Stilson and Bonzo, all three constructed by Card, however improbably, so that Ender never knows he is killing his adversaries. But whether or not Ender’s battle simulations were practice or real, the ultimate purpose of any practice was to enact such destruction in reality. Ender and his commanders were aiming for this battle and they all knew it; thanks to the trick played on Ender it just happened sooner than it would have otherwise.
Again, two points. For starters, there is a very large difference between playing a game that ends up being real, and actually being in a fight where you don’t realize you hurt the other guy as bad as you did. This goes back to the intent issue itself. Ender INTENDED to end those fights however possible, but did not have any intent while playing the game to actually kill anyone. Yes, his whole goal in playing the game was to prepare him to eventually win the war against the buggers, whatever constitutes “Winning”. But to be held criminally liable for a crime, one must not just have the intent to commit a crime, but the specific intent to commit THAT crime at THAT time, or exercise such recklessness or negligence that the action was likely to happen with the actors knowledge or through the actors negligence. Ender may have had the intent to win the war, maybe even to wipe out the buggers entirely, but at the time he was playing the game he did not, COULD NOT, have had such as to constitute the required intent for murder. Not even looking at it through the strictest criminal lens, how could you consider someone guilty of having the intent to commit a crime when, at the time, he couldn’t have possibly known he could be committing that crime? Intent requires knowledge of the situation in regards to one’s potential to commit an act, and Ender had no way of knowing the truth of the situation.
Fifth, Card implies that the humans were appalled by Ender’s success in destroying the buggers. Yet the officers have valued Ender from the beginning precisely because when he resorts to violence, he does so to the extreme, completely eliminating any chance that his enemy may regroup and strike again. Ender destroyed Bonzo and Stilson’s “ability to make war” by killing them. The commanders view Ender’s killing his adversaries not as an unfortunate overreaction, but a valuable trait. They need someone who will go to that extreme, they create Ender to be such a person, and they justify his killings afterward. So the fact that Ender succeeds in winning the war by totally destroying the enemy can hardly be called an unintended consequence. And when the bugger home world is obliterated, the humans in the battle room are not horrified, but relieved, even overjoyed, thanking God for their deliverance (p. 326).
I’m not sure what he is referring to in regards to Card implying anything, since my impression of the situation was the exact opposite. Ender is treated like the biggest war hero in history, because he wasn’t just representing one nation in the war; he was fighting for all of humanity, and the people of earth loved him for it. The rest of the paragraph is true, but irrelevant as far as establishing any element of the “Intent in Morality” theory.
No one charges Graff or the commanders with genocide. When, after the war, the courts charge Graff with "mistreatment of children, negligent homicide" (p. 336) in his running of the battle school, he is exonerated, essentially because of a Nuremberg defense: “I did what I believed was necessary for the preservation of the human race” (p. 336). When Ender’s killing of Bonzo comes up at the trial, “…the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense. . . . Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack. The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane”(p. 340). The only conceivable point of this last line is to assert that Ender is not sick, perverted, or insane. The prosecution of Graff, and through him, of Ender, is misbegotten and unjustified.
So despite the evidence in the book that the extermination of the buggers is at the very least a war crime, Card wants us to believe that Graff and Ender are not guilty. Any attempt to blame them is an injustice.
Nobody in the book blames them of anything in the first place; at least not genocide. Graff is charged in the death of Bonzo, and should have been nailed to the wall. The problem wasn’t the Nuremberg defense, it would have been a jury acquitting him by justification (or jury nullification, I get the two confused). The jury would have heard the evidence and decided that what he did was necessary towards the survival of the species regardless of what defense Graff himself raised. And again considering the current political situation in America of idiots being willing to give up liberty for security, is there any doubt that some would consider the sacrifice of a child a reasonable cost for securing the future of the species as a whole? When the threat of some big, bad, evil thing looms over some people’s heads, some stand up and fight; others crawl in the corner and pray for someone to protect them no matter the cost. I’m ranting on a tangent, so I’ll save that idea for another time. Regardless, a jury would most likely have believed his story given the results of the invasion.
But wait. Despite his heroic reception in the immediate aftermath of the bugger war, and his exoneration by the courts, as time passes isn’t Ender vilified as a mass murderer? Despite Mazer Rackham’s assertion that Ender is blameless, [Mazer says, after the battle, “We aimed you. We’re responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it”(p. 329).], Ender goes down in history as “the Xenocide.” Doesn’t this indicate that Card believes that Ender did something wrong?
Moreover, doesn’t Ender accuse himself even more than others do? After brutally beating up Stilson, and after virtually every incident of violence he performs, Ender accuses himself of being a sadist like Peter.
Feeling guilt isn’t the same thing as being guilty. One is an emotional response to a situation none of us are really able to comprehend; the other is actual, criminal liability based on a bad act and the intent to commit the act. Of course he FEELS bad, and may even feel that he is responsible; it doesn’t mean he IS responsible, anymore that a victim of child abuse is actually at fault because he/she feels that way. Emotional responses are just that; chemical imbalances created by situation and circumstance, and have nothing to do with the rules of law that govern man.
Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.”17 I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game.
Wow, I find this paragraph to be very cold-hearted, though very relevant in digging at one of the core issues of the theory. I believe, as does Card, that Ender IS a victim in the situations crafted by the Battle School administrators. He doesn’t choose to fight anyone; The fight with Stilson happens because of the monitor being removed, and is admitted by the administrators to have been a test. His abuse from Bonzo is again set up by the administrators, and even though they had the power to stop it they didn’t. Especially in the fight with Bonzo, Ender only acts in self-defense; if he had actually wanted to hurt Bonzo, he wouldn’t have begged for mercy in an attempt to make himself appear less important or powerful to Bonzo. Yes, Bonzo and Stilson are victims too, although Stilson less so; he picked the fight of his own volition. Bonzo was in the care of Graff and Co., and they let him die to help harden Ender for what he had to do. But there can be victims on both sides of a confrontation, as also there are different types of victims. Bonzo and Stilson become victims to their own nature pitted against one of superior intellect and survival instinct. Ender is a victim of both circumstance (being born a Third with little rights and practically being handed to the government at birth), and of the adults who hold all the power over him and use it to make him commit their horrible acts. How can he not be seen as a victim? He didn’t pick the fights with Stilson or Bonzo, and he didn’t even know he WAS fighting when he was playing the simulator. He was put into an awful situation where he was manipulated and deceived into killing off an entire race. A victim is one who does not have the intent to partake in an act, and Ender certainly does not in any case.
Yet despite the fact that he is fundamentally innocent, he takes “the sins of the world” onto his shoulders and bears the opprobrium that properly belongs to the people who made him into their instrument of genocide. He is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer.
No, what he IS is a child that realizes he just wiped out an entire species. That kind of burden would crush anyone with guilt, regardless of actual liability.
When Ender’s friend Alai points out that his habitual salute to Ender, “salaam,” means “peace be unto you”, an image immediately leaps into Ender’s mind. He recalls his mother quoting Jesus from the gospels.
“’Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ Ender had pictured his mother piercing Peter the Terrible with a bloody rapier, and the words had stayed in his mind along with the image.” (p. 187)
The word “peace” calls to Ender’s mind not the Prince of Peace, not the Jesus of turning the other cheek, not the Jesus who stayed his apostle’s hand when the apostle attacked the soldier who came to take Jesus in the garden. “Peace be unto you” evokes in Ender an image of murderous revenge against his personal tormenter: the savior as righteous killer
It isn’t like he is a psychopath for thinking that; it’s written in the bible. The fact that the image he conjures when he hears Salaam is just another demonstration of his great intellect and rational and memory; According to Revelations, that will be Christ’s role when he returns to earth. What he pictures in his mind isn’t some Freudian insight into his own guilty mind, but his realization of Christian belief pertaining to the matter at hand.
What becomes of all those people who are the successful products of a strict upbringing? . . . anger and helpless rage, which they were forbidden to display, would have been among these feelings—particularly if these children were beaten, humiliated, lied to and deceived. What becomes of this forbidden and therefore unexpressed anger? Unfortunately, it does not disappear, but is transformed with time into a more or less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons, a hatred that will seek to discharge itself in various ways permissible and suitable for adults.”19
—Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
This is all stated in relation to Ender’s relationships with his siblings when he is younger. What do I think about this psychobabble?
BULLSHIT!
My dad and stepmom raised me in an immensely strict environment; I wasn’t allowed to do anything, ever, and was yelled at/grounded/spanked for every little wrong step. So how did I turn out? Not at all the way Alice Miller theorizes I would have, or Kessel would like to imply is more proof of his theory. Anger is a form of energy, and like all types of energy, can change form. Ender uses his constructively (in his mind) to be the best soldier, then the best commander, that he can be. His anger isn’t redirected at anyone he fights; in fact, he states that he loves the Formics. People overcome their upbringings, as did Ender.
I would suggest that the methods of evasion that I have delineated in the text, and their congruency with the psychology of adolescence, offer an explanation for the novel’s deep and broad popularity. Psychologist Alice Miller has examined the mechanisms of abuse widespread in “normal”child rearing and explained how abused children incorporate their experience into their psyches, only to act it out years or decades later. Miller explains how children often justify abusive treatment, or deny even that it was abuse. I deserved it, they say, I needed to be socialized, my parents really loved me despite what they did, they did it for a larger purpose, for my own good. In extreme cases, the abused convince themselves that the abuse was evidence of love.
Because their abusers were secretly their friends, no anger against them is permissible. The repressed rage gets displaced, then acted out.
Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others or against themselves .
The abused child, when grown and given the power to act out his own suppressed rage, is unable to identify with the objects of his rage. In extreme cases, as Miller says about convicted child abusers,“Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves.”21 Yet to the abuser it still feels as if he is being abused, as if the sacrifice is his, and the effects of his actions on others take a secondary place to the emotions he feels himself.
This, I fear, is the appeal of Ender’s Game: it models this scenario precisely and absolves the child of any doubt that his actions in response to such treatment are questionable. It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender’s story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.
First of all, just because this Alice Miller is a psychologist doesn’t make her right. What really irks me is the whole “Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves” idea. It’s blame-shifting; “don’t blame me, my parents sucked” is what that excuse boils down to. Some people may exhibit such behavior, but there could be any number of OTHER reasons why they do so, and blaming it solely on the way their parents treated them is irresponsible and misleading. The last paragraph there had promise, but ends up in the gutter in the end. Personally, I believe the appeal of Ender’s Game is complex, but one of the factors is that all kids at one point feel left out, feel like they are ostracized for being different or better, and Ender proves that you can be those things and still overcome it all; that you can still be somebody. He proves to everyone that he IS special, that he IS better, and that is a feeling everyone has deep down, somewhere. The last few sentences had lots of promise, but he ruins it, in my opinion, when he goes back to the “because you’re special you can punish people” idea. Ask yourself why you loved the book; I guarantee that isn’t the reason. He isn’t qualified to answer the question, anyway, since he admits it wasn’t from his generation earlier in the essay; so how can he form judgements on why people love the story based on a logical ANALYSIS, when feelings of like/dislike are based in an entirely different realm? It isn’t possible. What should have been done here would have been to ask people who actually DID love the novel why they felt that way, and I guarantee they wouldn’t have said “Ender made me feel like when I got older I could hurt people like I was hurt when I was younger and it would be okay because I’m special.” See, it even sounds silly when you rephrase it out of “psycho-babble” talk.
God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It’s almost as good as having a nuclear device.
The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It’s a good thing I didn’t have access to a nuclear device. It’s a good thing I didn’t grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse—I didn’t deserve to be hurt—but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.
Yeah, he and his nuclear bomb are a bad analogy, for the simple fact that blowing up his school and bullies would have been a proactive choice to harm people, whereas Ender never sought to hurt or gain revenge on anybody. It’s just another example of the moral superiority that has been carefully woven into Ender’s fabric that makes his actions innocent of guilt, and Kessel’s hypothetical actions veangeful and evil.
We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy. Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo’s brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender’s suffering. For an adolescent ridden with rage and self-pity, who feels himself abused (and what adolescent doesn’t?), what’s not to like about this scenario? So we all want to be Ender. As Elaine Radford has said, “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special—especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.”23
But that’s a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card’s fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.
That’s because nothing IS his fault, as I’ve explained. Stilson picked that fight, and you want to blame Ender for winning it? That’s ridiculous. Same with Bonzo; he confronted Ender naked, in the showers, with a dozen other boys along with him, and again you’d like to fault Ender for ensuring his own survival when faced with a potentially lethal situation(especially in Bonzo’s case, where Card makes is abundandly clear that Bonzo won’t be satisfied with just hurting Ender). Ender does what is necessary to survive when being forced into potentially lethal situations; he response with like force in self-defense. How can he possibly be faulted for that? Anyone who would respond otherwise doesn’t have the survival instinct necessary to keep the human race alive. We don’t all want to be Ender because he gets to hurt people…what kind of sadists are you and Elaine Radford, anyway? People sympathize with Ender because he keeps getting thrown in unfathomable situations and not only survives, but saves the entire human race as well. It is then that he proves to everyone his worth, that he really WAS better then them; THAT is the best kind of revenge, and Ender gets it in the end. Ender is also a hero; he saves the human race from an enemy that had twice tried to eradicate us. Who doesn’t dream of that? It’s the same reason little boys grow up wanting to be firemen. It’s that feeling of worth that is imprinted into every young reader of Ender’s Game that makes it so special to so many people, an impression that obviously didn’t stick in Kessels case; and THAT is why he wrote that essay.
I'd like to apologize for the form of this response. It feels like, and probably IS like, sniping at someone who can't or won't respond. It's easy to tear apart someone's logic piece-by-piece, even when your intent is only to provide an alternate opinion on the same issue. So if anyone wants to, in turn, tear opinions apart, I probably deserve it :)
This is the thesis statement for this essay, written by John Kessel here- . He seeks to explain why Ender, the protagonist of Ender’s Game, is in fact guilty of genocide, that Ender’s guilt is a sign of his acknowledgement that his actions were wrong, and that our own love for the novel is some kind of reflection of our want to hurt people who hurt us. I’m going to go through most of the essay in chunks and provide my own, opposing insights.
Yet, for reasons that are never made clear, Ender never tells his parents; he learns early to hide his fear and hurt. “It was the lying face he presented to Mother and Father, when Peter had been cruel to him and he dared not let it show”(p. 47).
In the real world, the motivation for such secrecy, when it is not fear of retaliation by the abuser, is often shame—the child fears that he or she is somehow responsible for, even deserving of the abuse. It is interesting that the one time that Ender’s father confronts him and asks why Ender did not ask a grown-up for help when he was being bullied, they are interrupted before Ender can answer. The question is never answered. (p. 19).
The primary problem with this argument is that it works under the assumption that Ender is a normal child; he isn’t, and using our own experiences to judge his reactions are inadequate at best. Ender never states that he feels to blame for Peter’s actions; he’s too intelligent and rational for that. Why doesn’t he tell his parents? I don’t know, honestly, since Card didn’t explain it. Possibly, he feels that he can find a way out of the situation himself. Perhaps he hopes Peter will eventually just give up. Or maybe he’s just given up on fighting Peter. Maybe Peter threatened him if he ever told anyone about the way he treated Ender. The point is, we don’t really know anything EXCEPT that Ender isn’t a normal child, so working under assumptions based off the experiences of normal children is inadequate.
Like many scenes of personal violence in this and other Card works, this fight is painfully intense, ending with Ender kicking Bonzo in the crotch, “hard and sure”(p. 231). Though he does not know it at the time, Ender has killed Bonzo. But lest the reader be repulsed by Ender’s pursuing the fight until Bonzo is dead (which an observer might see as vengeful, unwarranted, or vicious), the narrative insists that it is done for entirely rational reasons, not out of a personal desire to lash out. “The only way to end things completely…” Ender thinks, “was to hurt Bonzo enough that his fear was stronger than his hate”(p. 231).
Ender generalizes from this situation that the only rational policy to insure safety in the world is to be ready always to cause excessive pain.
No, his goal isn’t to cause excessive pain, it’s to win that battle and all other battles, as he says. Pain has nothing to do with it, and is misleading in that it implies malice or hatred; Ender has never hated anyone, and says of the Buggers he loves them, because he understands them so well. He doesn’t intend to cause pain, he just wins every fight. And the realizations of “winning every battle” is reached before that, during the Stilson fight. He was attacked by Bonzo, whom he reasonably believed was going to kill him; responding with like force is, in that situation, acceptable both morally AND legally.
Graff’s judgment on the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson clarifies Card’s definition of a killer. Presumably, someone can kill hundreds, thousands, even billions (Ender eventually “kills” an entire race) and not be a killer. A killer is motivated by rage or by selfish motives. To be a killer you must intend to kill someone. And even if you do intend to kill, you are still innocent if you do it for a larger reason, “selflessly,” without personal motives. And if you feel bad about being forced into doing it.
Kate Bonin, in her article “Gay Sex and Death in the Science Fiction of Orson Scott Card”8 points out how the killing of Bonzo prefigures Ender’s eventual destruction of the buggers. The history of the war against the buggers follows the pattern of the fight against Bonzo; in fact, just before the final battle in which Ender exterminates the buggers, he explicitly compares his confrontation with them to the unfair fight in the shower (p. 322). The number of times this scenario of unjustified attack and savage retaliation is repeated, not just in Ender’s Game but in other of Card’s stories and novels, suggests that it falls close to the heart of his vision of moral action in the world.
Not true at all; by the actual legal definition, Ender doesn’t qualify as a murderer for two reasons: number one, you can’t “murder” anything but a human being, and two, is the heart of the argument; intent. Without intent, the Mens Rea requirement for culpability, your actions cannot be illegal. Intent can take several forms, but none of them are met by ender, let alone the fact that he is a minor and cannot be held liable for such crimes. How can self-defense NOT be seen as moral, anyway? He defends himself in the most effective way he can think of, and even THEN doesn’t actually mean to kill anyone.
Though this doctrine is not codified in Ender’s Game, it is everywhere present in the action. And by testing this moral premise in situations of murder, even genocide, Card seems to dare the reader to try to reject it—as if to say, if a morality of intentionality can stand up to this test, it can stand up to any. But at the same time he chooses these difficult examples, Card goes to great lengths to urge the reader not to reject Ender based on the violent reprisals he visits on his enemies. We are told over and over, without irony, that Ender is good. Just after Ender is recruited (soon after he has killed Stilson) Graff tells Anderson, “He’s clean. Right to the heart, he’s good.” (p. 38) Later, Graff insists, “There’s greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit.” (p. 280) Ender himself protests, “I never wanted to kill anybody. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to kill anybody.” (p. 331)
In a long scene between Graff and Valentine, Valentine insists desperately: “Ender is not like Peter!”
…maybe I’m like Peter, but Ender isn’t, he isn’t at all, I used to tell him that when he cried, I told him that lots of times, you’re not like Peter, you never like to hurt people, you’re kind and good and not like Peter at all!”
“And it’s true”
“…Damn right it’s true.” (p. 162)
But it isn’t just stated as fact to be assumed, it is reinforced by Ender’s actions.
Other characters in Ender’s Game are also forced to do things they see as immoral, against their better natures, in the service of saving the world from the buggers. Graff, the orchestrator of Ender’s brutal education, swears that “I am his friend” (p. 38) even though he does nothing to demonstrate that friendship, and in fact does many things that to a neutral observer would indicate a desire to destroy Ender. As with Ender’s goodness, this is a case of the author insisting on a quality in the character that need not be demonstrated by action to be held as true. Goodness is not a matter of acts, but of intentions, an inherent quality independent of what one does. “I don’t really think it’s true that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Card stated in a 2002 interview.9 “Good people trying to do good usually find a way to muddle through. What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good. They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.” The import of this statement is that there are some people who are good before they act, and some others who are bad before they act, and that goodness or badness is exhibited in their actions. These "bad" people can’t do good, and “good” people can’t do bad.
That isn’t what he means. What he is saying is, even if they accomplish their goal of good, the damage and harm they do along the way can outweigh their accomplishments. As for the “morality of intentionality”, I’ll deal with it, piece-by-piece, many times throughout the rest of this article.
So we see that later, when Ender is made a cadet commander, even though his treatment of his subordinate cadet Bean recapitulates in its unfairness and arbitrary harshness Graff’s treatment of Ender, Ender is not doing wrong. As Graff did to Ender, Ender makes the other cadets resent and dislike Bean so that Bean is forced to show his superiority. “That was the only way he could win respect and friendship,”10 Ender says to himself (but not to Bean). “I’m hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way . . . [even if]… I’m making you miserable” (p. 184) Like Graff, Ender insists he is Bean’s (secret) friend.
Whoa, Ender regrets what he did, as he states later. He realizes it is wrong, and tries to make up for it by being his only real friend; unfortunately, his view on normal relationships has been skewed by the Battle School and it’s crazy administrators, so what you see is a reflection of what they have done to him in what he does to Bean. But he does, in fact, regret what he does to Bean, even after his weak attempt at justification.
Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.
The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people. When Stryka, one of the students on Trondheim in Speaker, objects to the morality of intention that the Speakers propound, Ender dismisses her.
“Xenocide is Xenocide,” said Stryka. “Just because Ender didn’t know they [the buggers] were ramen [i.e. human] doesn’t make them any less dead.”
Andrew sighed at Stryka’s unforgiving attitude. It was the fashion among Calvinists11 at Reykjavik to deny any weight human motive in judging the good or evil of an act . . . Andrew did not resent it—he understood the motive behind it. (p. 39)
That’s the point in creating those characters; to create legitimate bad characters with whom Ender’s violence would compare favorably. Faulting Card for creating such narrow characters (although Peter is FAR from narrow and described later in Bean’s series as, in actuality, a good character) is like faulting a carpenter because his knife only cuts things. That’s the point. As for the Calvinists, it’s true that they tried to view the human psyche without including motive, but that was because they felt that it was impossible to measure, and thus, not appropriate for scientists to study; NOT because they thought it was irrelevant. And just because someone is dead doesn’t mean anyone is at fault; it happens all the time.
The possibility that Stryka may have a legitimate reason to object to Ender’s behavior is never considered—her qualms are “fashion.” A page later, Ender identifies Stryka’s real motivation (which Ender knows but she does not) as a fear of the stranger. In this case the stranger is not the aliens exterminated by Ender, but Ender himself. Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
Um, no? I really don’t understand the issue with not considering her opinion; besides the reasoning I just explained behind her opinion’s dismissal, the whole point of the novel is to show how good Ender is, and why his actions are justified. The fact that Card makes that statement at all is the only reason you have the opportunity to examine that side of the issue; thus, does his writing give you the ability to examine the very thing you say he dismisses.
This bait-and-switch stratagem prevails throughout these novels. In the extended ending of Ender’s Game and throughout Speaker for the Dead, Ender is presented as a victim of the extermination of the buggers rather than its perpetrator. Card bases much of Speaker on the irony that this most moral of humans (the founder of a new religion of understanding) is considered to be evil by people who are not as moral as he. Indeed, Ender’s notoriety as “the Xenocide” only works in Speaker for the Dead if he isn’t really guilty of the crime of genocide.
Two things. One, he WAS a victim; he was manipulated by adults into doing the work they couldn’t do. He had no choice in the matter once he left for Battle School, and didn’t even know what he was doing was real. And second, opposing religions hate each other. Well, the occidental ones, anyway, which is what concerns us in the West. So it makes absolute sense that others would hate him for his perceived moral superiority. There’s a long history of this; The Crusades are a great example of one religion thinking itself better than another and this religious conflict ending in many deaths.
As I have suggested, this issue of genocide puts the morality of intention to its ultimate test. We may forgive Ender the killings of Stilson and Bonzo, but can we forgive him the extermination of a race of intelligent creatures?
A good question, one I’d like to rephrase; If you could cure cancer by killing 100 children, would that be moral? What about ten innocent, newly-born children? One? One child, sacrificed on the alter of science to cure cancer; would that be moral?
No, because the number itself is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the intent, and he obviously had none. He had no way of knowing what he was doing, so how could he have intended anything? Besides, he only killed ONE intelligent creature, as I’ll restate later.
Radford’s essay speculates that Card wrote Ender’s Game as an apologia for Adolf Hitler. She points out certain parallels between Ender’s biography and Hitler’s—that they were both third children, that they were virgins until age 37, that they were close to their older sisters, that they were abused by adults, that they both committed genocidal acts.
Card, in the same issue of Fantasy Review,13 denied Radford’s assertions. He said that he had no knowledge of any of the Hitler biographical information that Radford cited. Such parallels were “trivial coincidences.” He said he intended Ender as the moral opposite to Hitler: Hitler knew what he was doing; Ender did not. Hitler intended to exterminate; Ender did not. Hitler felt no moral qualm; Ender spends the rest of his life expiating the guilt he feels for exterminating the buggers.
Let me say very clearly that I do not believe that Orson Scott Card wrote Ender’s Game as an apologia for Hitler. I do not believe the biographical parallels Radford finds to Hitler are evidence that Card intended any parallel with Hitler—other than the parallel that they both commit genocide. Like Card, I take the other points of similarity as coincidences.
I’d have to concur here; I’d only briefly pondered the similarities before dismissing them as coincidences, and it appears to have been the correct course of action. I think the key here, though, is that Hitler committed Genocide; Ender killed a bunch of aliens. Hitler had intent; Ender did not. Hitler incinerated, gassed, and/or shot three million Jews in ovens and camps; Ender killed a bunch of bugs during a time of war, in which the bugs were constantly fighting. They knew what was happening, and it’s only due to their language barriers that an official declaration of war wasn’t given. AND the buggers started it when they attacked Earth; Hitler started his own war. You know when you think about it, the Third Invasion was really custom-designed for Ender. We attack the Buggers because we see the situation as “either them or us” and we need to finish it once and for all. Ender fights battles with that same exact attitude, and it is what leads to the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson. A “War to end all wars” with a commander that ends all future confrontations by winning the current one thoroughly.
The sections in green here are from Card himself in rebuttal to Radford’s essay
On the broadest level, it should be obvious to every reader of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that I do draw one key parallel between historical monstrosities like Hitler, Stalin, and Amin, and my character Ender: they are thought of in the public mind as loathsome mass murderers. Despite their similar public image, however, every other element of Ender’s story is designed to show that in his case the image is not reality—he is not like Hitler or Stalin, exactly the opposite of what Radford claims. Far from using Ender to try to make people approve of Hitler, I use the contrast with Hitler, Stalin, and other genocides to illuminate the character of Ender Wiggin.14 "
“The humans in Ender’s Game never imagined that they were obliterating another species; rather they thought they were destroying an invading species’ ability to make war. Genocide was the result of not understanding the effect on the buggers of the death of the hive queen.” 15
“…Does Radford really believe that I was claiming Hitler’s near extermination of European Jews was an accident? That he and his underlings didn’t know their death camps might kill all the Jews? Yet if I made Ender’s crime so obviously different in intent from Hitler’s deliberate genocide, how can she imagine I meant Ender’s story to be an apologia for Hitler.”16
These paragraphs are full of obfuscation. First, the phrase “destroying an invading species’ ability to make war” is a careful parsing of language that obscures what happens in the novel: the buggers are unable to make war because they are exterminated. Characterizing this as destroying their ability to make war is like characterizing cutting off someone’s head as eliminating his ability to whistle.
Normally true; it would be seen as “Careful parsing”, or rhetoric, given our current political age, to say that the annihilation of an entire species was merely “eliminating their ability to make war.” However, here, they are absolutely synonymous. The humans apparently attempted diplomacy to end the conflict, but they couldn’t communicate with the buggers that way. Therefore, the only way to ensure that the human species wasn’t wiped out by the buggers was to kill them, thus eliminating their ability to harm us. He doesn’t say it in that manner to diminish the seemingly gruesome acts Ender commits; he says it because he wants it to be interpreted literally so that there is no confusion. As Graff or Mazer says, the humans would have been content to leave the Buggers alone had they not attacked AGAIN after the first invasion. The only way to keep the human race safe was to “Eliminate their ability to make war.” And yes, Card obviously failed if intelligent people still misread his intentions.
One thing I’d like to say, since the focus of the essay is on genocide, is the completely different circumstances surrounding the genocides of our own human history, and those committed by Ender. Hitler took a group of people and threw them in ovens. Ender kills a group we are at war with. Ender also doesn’t kill billions, as is suggested; in fact, Card specifically states that, due to the hive-mind mentality and physiology of the buggers, he may have only, in fact, killed one individual. While this is irrelevant in considering his guilt, it IS relevant in the crime he could be accused of. None of the other buggers were individuals, and Card says a few times they are like limbs of the actual mind, and that killing them is like clipping your nails to the Queen. So, in fact, Ender hasn’t even really committed genocide anymore than the guy who shoots the last Bald Eagle has committed genocide; He didn’t kill ALL of them, only the LAST of them.
Second, it is inconceivable that the commanders would not at least suspect that killing the queen would kill the entire race; the buggers in battle always responded as a unit, as if under the direction of a single mind, and in Mazer Rackham’s famous victory decades before, destroying a single ship caused the entire bugger fleet to go dead. (p. 206-07) Rackham explains the nature of the bugger group mind to Ender at length long before the final battle, and Ender uses this knowledge in preparing his strategy. The only reason the commanders would not know this is to make it possible for Card to assert that the final genocide was accidental.
I really don’t want to take a personal shot at Kessel; his opinion is valid and appreciated. However, in saying that ANYTHING should be obvious to a military officer displays a lack of experience in dealing with the military. It should have been obvious that Iraq had no WMDs, but we still invaded them under that pretense anyway. If I’ve learned anything about the military, it’s to never overestimate the intelligence of those in charge of it. As Card (again) says, if they had any brains they’d be life-insurance salesmen.
Third, even this point about the hive queen is an evasion. Ender doesn’t just kill the queen: he disintegrates the entire bugger home world. The “MD Device” is a weapon that destroys matter in an expanding sphere. Ender knows exactly what it does, as do his commanders. When he sets off the MD Device there is nothing left of the buggers’ planet but “a sphere of bright dust”(p. 325). “Where the vast enemy fleet had been, and the planet they protected, there was nothing meaningful”(p. 325). The buggers do not need to have a group mind for this to constitute extermination.
Oh, he does kinda address the issue of the Queen (yes, I’m writing this as I read the article), although not in the way I have. I’m pretty sure blowing up a clump of dirt isn’t a crime or immoral, though.
Fourth, the passages insist that the difference between Hitler’s genocide and Ender’s is that Ender’s was an accident. Ender thought he was playing a simulation whereas Hitler knew the gas chambers were real. This "science fiction element" (remote-directed war) serves in moral terms as yet another evasion; in reality, people do not commit genocide by accident. This is another parallel between the bugger war and the fight scenes where Ender kills Stilson and Bonzo, all three constructed by Card, however improbably, so that Ender never knows he is killing his adversaries. But whether or not Ender’s battle simulations were practice or real, the ultimate purpose of any practice was to enact such destruction in reality. Ender and his commanders were aiming for this battle and they all knew it; thanks to the trick played on Ender it just happened sooner than it would have otherwise.
Again, two points. For starters, there is a very large difference between playing a game that ends up being real, and actually being in a fight where you don’t realize you hurt the other guy as bad as you did. This goes back to the intent issue itself. Ender INTENDED to end those fights however possible, but did not have any intent while playing the game to actually kill anyone. Yes, his whole goal in playing the game was to prepare him to eventually win the war against the buggers, whatever constitutes “Winning”. But to be held criminally liable for a crime, one must not just have the intent to commit a crime, but the specific intent to commit THAT crime at THAT time, or exercise such recklessness or negligence that the action was likely to happen with the actors knowledge or through the actors negligence. Ender may have had the intent to win the war, maybe even to wipe out the buggers entirely, but at the time he was playing the game he did not, COULD NOT, have had such as to constitute the required intent for murder. Not even looking at it through the strictest criminal lens, how could you consider someone guilty of having the intent to commit a crime when, at the time, he couldn’t have possibly known he could be committing that crime? Intent requires knowledge of the situation in regards to one’s potential to commit an act, and Ender had no way of knowing the truth of the situation.
Fifth, Card implies that the humans were appalled by Ender’s success in destroying the buggers. Yet the officers have valued Ender from the beginning precisely because when he resorts to violence, he does so to the extreme, completely eliminating any chance that his enemy may regroup and strike again. Ender destroyed Bonzo and Stilson’s “ability to make war” by killing them. The commanders view Ender’s killing his adversaries not as an unfortunate overreaction, but a valuable trait. They need someone who will go to that extreme, they create Ender to be such a person, and they justify his killings afterward. So the fact that Ender succeeds in winning the war by totally destroying the enemy can hardly be called an unintended consequence. And when the bugger home world is obliterated, the humans in the battle room are not horrified, but relieved, even overjoyed, thanking God for their deliverance (p. 326).
I’m not sure what he is referring to in regards to Card implying anything, since my impression of the situation was the exact opposite. Ender is treated like the biggest war hero in history, because he wasn’t just representing one nation in the war; he was fighting for all of humanity, and the people of earth loved him for it. The rest of the paragraph is true, but irrelevant as far as establishing any element of the “Intent in Morality” theory.
No one charges Graff or the commanders with genocide. When, after the war, the courts charge Graff with "mistreatment of children, negligent homicide" (p. 336) in his running of the battle school, he is exonerated, essentially because of a Nuremberg defense: “I did what I believed was necessary for the preservation of the human race” (p. 336). When Ender’s killing of Bonzo comes up at the trial, “…the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense. . . . Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack. The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane”(p. 340). The only conceivable point of this last line is to assert that Ender is not sick, perverted, or insane. The prosecution of Graff, and through him, of Ender, is misbegotten and unjustified.
So despite the evidence in the book that the extermination of the buggers is at the very least a war crime, Card wants us to believe that Graff and Ender are not guilty. Any attempt to blame them is an injustice.
Nobody in the book blames them of anything in the first place; at least not genocide. Graff is charged in the death of Bonzo, and should have been nailed to the wall. The problem wasn’t the Nuremberg defense, it would have been a jury acquitting him by justification (or jury nullification, I get the two confused). The jury would have heard the evidence and decided that what he did was necessary towards the survival of the species regardless of what defense Graff himself raised. And again considering the current political situation in America of idiots being willing to give up liberty for security, is there any doubt that some would consider the sacrifice of a child a reasonable cost for securing the future of the species as a whole? When the threat of some big, bad, evil thing looms over some people’s heads, some stand up and fight; others crawl in the corner and pray for someone to protect them no matter the cost. I’m ranting on a tangent, so I’ll save that idea for another time. Regardless, a jury would most likely have believed his story given the results of the invasion.
But wait. Despite his heroic reception in the immediate aftermath of the bugger war, and his exoneration by the courts, as time passes isn’t Ender vilified as a mass murderer? Despite Mazer Rackham’s assertion that Ender is blameless, [Mazer says, after the battle, “We aimed you. We’re responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it”(p. 329).], Ender goes down in history as “the Xenocide.” Doesn’t this indicate that Card believes that Ender did something wrong?
Moreover, doesn’t Ender accuse himself even more than others do? After brutally beating up Stilson, and after virtually every incident of violence he performs, Ender accuses himself of being a sadist like Peter.
Feeling guilt isn’t the same thing as being guilty. One is an emotional response to a situation none of us are really able to comprehend; the other is actual, criminal liability based on a bad act and the intent to commit the act. Of course he FEELS bad, and may even feel that he is responsible; it doesn’t mean he IS responsible, anymore that a victim of child abuse is actually at fault because he/she feels that way. Emotional responses are just that; chemical imbalances created by situation and circumstance, and have nothing to do with the rules of law that govern man.
Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.”17 I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game.
Wow, I find this paragraph to be very cold-hearted, though very relevant in digging at one of the core issues of the theory. I believe, as does Card, that Ender IS a victim in the situations crafted by the Battle School administrators. He doesn’t choose to fight anyone; The fight with Stilson happens because of the monitor being removed, and is admitted by the administrators to have been a test. His abuse from Bonzo is again set up by the administrators, and even though they had the power to stop it they didn’t. Especially in the fight with Bonzo, Ender only acts in self-defense; if he had actually wanted to hurt Bonzo, he wouldn’t have begged for mercy in an attempt to make himself appear less important or powerful to Bonzo. Yes, Bonzo and Stilson are victims too, although Stilson less so; he picked the fight of his own volition. Bonzo was in the care of Graff and Co., and they let him die to help harden Ender for what he had to do. But there can be victims on both sides of a confrontation, as also there are different types of victims. Bonzo and Stilson become victims to their own nature pitted against one of superior intellect and survival instinct. Ender is a victim of both circumstance (being born a Third with little rights and practically being handed to the government at birth), and of the adults who hold all the power over him and use it to make him commit their horrible acts. How can he not be seen as a victim? He didn’t pick the fights with Stilson or Bonzo, and he didn’t even know he WAS fighting when he was playing the simulator. He was put into an awful situation where he was manipulated and deceived into killing off an entire race. A victim is one who does not have the intent to partake in an act, and Ender certainly does not in any case.
Yet despite the fact that he is fundamentally innocent, he takes “the sins of the world” onto his shoulders and bears the opprobrium that properly belongs to the people who made him into their instrument of genocide. He is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer.
No, what he IS is a child that realizes he just wiped out an entire species. That kind of burden would crush anyone with guilt, regardless of actual liability.
When Ender’s friend Alai points out that his habitual salute to Ender, “salaam,” means “peace be unto you”, an image immediately leaps into Ender’s mind. He recalls his mother quoting Jesus from the gospels.
“’Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ Ender had pictured his mother piercing Peter the Terrible with a bloody rapier, and the words had stayed in his mind along with the image.” (p. 187)
The word “peace” calls to Ender’s mind not the Prince of Peace, not the Jesus of turning the other cheek, not the Jesus who stayed his apostle’s hand when the apostle attacked the soldier who came to take Jesus in the garden. “Peace be unto you” evokes in Ender an image of murderous revenge against his personal tormenter: the savior as righteous killer
It isn’t like he is a psychopath for thinking that; it’s written in the bible. The fact that the image he conjures when he hears Salaam is just another demonstration of his great intellect and rational and memory; According to Revelations, that will be Christ’s role when he returns to earth. What he pictures in his mind isn’t some Freudian insight into his own guilty mind, but his realization of Christian belief pertaining to the matter at hand.
What becomes of all those people who are the successful products of a strict upbringing? . . . anger and helpless rage, which they were forbidden to display, would have been among these feelings—particularly if these children were beaten, humiliated, lied to and deceived. What becomes of this forbidden and therefore unexpressed anger? Unfortunately, it does not disappear, but is transformed with time into a more or less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons, a hatred that will seek to discharge itself in various ways permissible and suitable for adults.”19
—Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
This is all stated in relation to Ender’s relationships with his siblings when he is younger. What do I think about this psychobabble?
BULLSHIT!
My dad and stepmom raised me in an immensely strict environment; I wasn’t allowed to do anything, ever, and was yelled at/grounded/spanked for every little wrong step. So how did I turn out? Not at all the way Alice Miller theorizes I would have, or Kessel would like to imply is more proof of his theory. Anger is a form of energy, and like all types of energy, can change form. Ender uses his constructively (in his mind) to be the best soldier, then the best commander, that he can be. His anger isn’t redirected at anyone he fights; in fact, he states that he loves the Formics. People overcome their upbringings, as did Ender.
I would suggest that the methods of evasion that I have delineated in the text, and their congruency with the psychology of adolescence, offer an explanation for the novel’s deep and broad popularity. Psychologist Alice Miller has examined the mechanisms of abuse widespread in “normal”child rearing and explained how abused children incorporate their experience into their psyches, only to act it out years or decades later. Miller explains how children often justify abusive treatment, or deny even that it was abuse. I deserved it, they say, I needed to be socialized, my parents really loved me despite what they did, they did it for a larger purpose, for my own good. In extreme cases, the abused convince themselves that the abuse was evidence of love.
Because their abusers were secretly their friends, no anger against them is permissible. The repressed rage gets displaced, then acted out.
Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others or against themselves .
The abused child, when grown and given the power to act out his own suppressed rage, is unable to identify with the objects of his rage. In extreme cases, as Miller says about convicted child abusers,“Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves.”21 Yet to the abuser it still feels as if he is being abused, as if the sacrifice is his, and the effects of his actions on others take a secondary place to the emotions he feels himself.
This, I fear, is the appeal of Ender’s Game: it models this scenario precisely and absolves the child of any doubt that his actions in response to such treatment are questionable. It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender’s story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.
First of all, just because this Alice Miller is a psychologist doesn’t make her right. What really irks me is the whole “Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves” idea. It’s blame-shifting; “don’t blame me, my parents sucked” is what that excuse boils down to. Some people may exhibit such behavior, but there could be any number of OTHER reasons why they do so, and blaming it solely on the way their parents treated them is irresponsible and misleading. The last paragraph there had promise, but ends up in the gutter in the end. Personally, I believe the appeal of Ender’s Game is complex, but one of the factors is that all kids at one point feel left out, feel like they are ostracized for being different or better, and Ender proves that you can be those things and still overcome it all; that you can still be somebody. He proves to everyone that he IS special, that he IS better, and that is a feeling everyone has deep down, somewhere. The last few sentences had lots of promise, but he ruins it, in my opinion, when he goes back to the “because you’re special you can punish people” idea. Ask yourself why you loved the book; I guarantee that isn’t the reason. He isn’t qualified to answer the question, anyway, since he admits it wasn’t from his generation earlier in the essay; so how can he form judgements on why people love the story based on a logical ANALYSIS, when feelings of like/dislike are based in an entirely different realm? It isn’t possible. What should have been done here would have been to ask people who actually DID love the novel why they felt that way, and I guarantee they wouldn’t have said “Ender made me feel like when I got older I could hurt people like I was hurt when I was younger and it would be okay because I’m special.” See, it even sounds silly when you rephrase it out of “psycho-babble” talk.
God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It’s almost as good as having a nuclear device.
The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It’s a good thing I didn’t have access to a nuclear device. It’s a good thing I didn’t grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse—I didn’t deserve to be hurt—but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.
Yeah, he and his nuclear bomb are a bad analogy, for the simple fact that blowing up his school and bullies would have been a proactive choice to harm people, whereas Ender never sought to hurt or gain revenge on anybody. It’s just another example of the moral superiority that has been carefully woven into Ender’s fabric that makes his actions innocent of guilt, and Kessel’s hypothetical actions veangeful and evil.
We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy. Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo’s brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender’s suffering. For an adolescent ridden with rage and self-pity, who feels himself abused (and what adolescent doesn’t?), what’s not to like about this scenario? So we all want to be Ender. As Elaine Radford has said, “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special—especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.”23
But that’s a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card’s fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.
That’s because nothing IS his fault, as I’ve explained. Stilson picked that fight, and you want to blame Ender for winning it? That’s ridiculous. Same with Bonzo; he confronted Ender naked, in the showers, with a dozen other boys along with him, and again you’d like to fault Ender for ensuring his own survival when faced with a potentially lethal situation(especially in Bonzo’s case, where Card makes is abundandly clear that Bonzo won’t be satisfied with just hurting Ender). Ender does what is necessary to survive when being forced into potentially lethal situations; he response with like force in self-defense. How can he possibly be faulted for that? Anyone who would respond otherwise doesn’t have the survival instinct necessary to keep the human race alive. We don’t all want to be Ender because he gets to hurt people…what kind of sadists are you and Elaine Radford, anyway? People sympathize with Ender because he keeps getting thrown in unfathomable situations and not only survives, but saves the entire human race as well. It is then that he proves to everyone his worth, that he really WAS better then them; THAT is the best kind of revenge, and Ender gets it in the end. Ender is also a hero; he saves the human race from an enemy that had twice tried to eradicate us. Who doesn’t dream of that? It’s the same reason little boys grow up wanting to be firemen. It’s that feeling of worth that is imprinted into every young reader of Ender’s Game that makes it so special to so many people, an impression that obviously didn’t stick in Kessels case; and THAT is why he wrote that essay.
I'd like to apologize for the form of this response. It feels like, and probably IS like, sniping at someone who can't or won't respond. It's easy to tear apart someone's logic piece-by-piece, even when your intent is only to provide an alternate opinion on the same issue. So if anyone wants to, in turn, tear opinions apart, I probably deserve it :)
posted by Burn1nMyLight at 9:06 PM
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