At the same time, we have plenty of examples of otherwise brave soldiers openly mutinying rather than obey orders that would lead to pointless slaughter. The 1917 mutiny in the French Army in World War I arose because the poilus were sick of being commanded to charge machine guns, using the same bankrupt tactics over and over to the same empty end.
Yet in thinking of that mutiny, it is good to remember that it took place in 1917—after nearly three years of the same pointless massacre with every assault against the German lines. The poilus did not mutiny until they had seen more than a million of their comrades die or get maimed or gassed in previous assaults. How many times did they obey those absurd, wicked, wasteful orders with great courage, before they finally said, Enough—stop wasting our lives.
So it was that combination—a knowledge that they were the last defense and hope of the human race, and a trust that if anyone could make their sacrifice amount to something, it was Ender Wiggin—that motivated them to “go over the top” in the face of overwhelming enemy fire.
They also knew what weapons they were carrying. They knew that if they got close enough to the massed fleet, the M.D. Device would create a destructive field that would feed on the mass of every ship it destroyed, and leap from ship to ship, perhaps all the way around the planet. They did not realize that Ender hoped to destroy the planet itself, and create a field that would wipe out everything, so there was no hope of the formics ever rising again from the cinders of this world. But they did understand that they had the capability of devastatingly effective attack. So they knew that Ender Wiggin was not throwing them against the enemy “machine guns” just to demonstrate courage or honor; this was no charge of the light brigade. They knew that if they got the M.D. Device into the midst of the enemy, victory might be achieved.
There was also no anonymity. No one could slip away unnoticed, even if inclined to do so. Therefore any lack of courage would also bring open shame in the eyes of friends who were obeying orders.
Under such circumstances, such men will and do sacrifice their lives, and have done so many times in the past. In this I know human nature well enough, and have enough history behind me, to feel absolute confidence that well-led soldiers will act as these soldiers acted, without a single man holding back or refusing to go.
—OSC
Q. Some would argue that Ender’s Game encourages critical thinking within the military, others argue that it glorifies war. Response to both?
A. The former is absolutely true; the latter absurdly wrong.
Peacetime military organizations promote bureaucrats to high command. It usually takes failures and defeats to identify the deadwood and get rid of it. Think of Lincoln’s search for a competent commander for the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War. Everyone thought he had that commander in Mcclellan, but in fact Mcclellan was the ultimate peacetime general: all training and maneuver, but unwilling to commit to battle. It took a long time to realize that Mcclellan was not a war commander and to replace him with someone who was.
Military organizations get themselves locked into mindsets that they cannot break free of. The “cult of the offensive” in World War I killed millions of soldiers by running them up against machine guns; not until Churchill’s tanks, and the fresh American military, changed the equation did victory become possible, and even then, most generals on both sides had utterly failed to learn the obvious lessons being taught in blood and horror on the battlefield.
In Ender’s Game, Graff and the others committed to Battle School understood that peacetime and doctrinaire commanders could not be weeded out in combat; they had to be weeded out in advance. This is part of what Mazer and Graff work out in the story “Mazer in Prison.” Victory will not be possible if the commander is chosen according to the normal pattern; creative, risk-taking leadership must be in place from the start, because there will be no time, no slack, in which to discover the real commanders after a few failures. There can be no failures.
This is much of the reason why military readers respond well to Ender’s Game. No one understands better than soldiers and officers how hard it is to get the right commander in the right place to achieve victory. Only a military that is able to self-criticize, learn from mistakes, and replace misplaced commanders has any chance of achieving its goals, especially when facing an opponent that does recognize errors, learn from them, and move incompetent leaders out of positions where lives and outcomes depend on their decisions.
As to “glorifying war,” what is invariably meant by this is that I show excellent soldiers as good people worthy of respect. The kind of people who complain about “glorifying war” are almost always people who think they’re “antiwar,” when they’re merely ignorant of history. When an aggressive enemy is determined to make war on you, then the only choices are to resist militarily or accept the aggressors as your overlords.
After the fall of France in World War II—a fall that was not necessary, had the French been competently led, for the Germans could have been defeated at several points after the breakthrough in the Ardennes—there were still many among the governing elite in Britain who, because of their hatred of war, were prepared to make peace with Hitler. It was only Churchill, who understood the indomitable will of the people, who kept britain from surrender. Any other likely candidate for Prime Minister at that time would certainly have sued for peace.
What would have been the result? Quite possibly a Europe dominated even today by either Nazism or Stalinism, or their successors. There are worse things than war. to recognize this is not “glorifying war”—it is recognizing that the best way to avoid war is to appear irresistibly strong and resolute to those who consider attacking you.
A resolute Britain, led in 1935 by the “warmonger” Churchill or one of the few who agreed with him, would certainly have avoided World War II and brought about the fall of Hitler at very little cost. It was the people who hated war and refused to arm for it who allowed Hitler to rise to domination of Western europe.
It is tragic but true that war can never be avoided by the unilateral decision not to arm or fight. The only result of such a decision is that the other side will win.
However, it is also true that there is such a thing as glorifying war—as witnessed in the attitude of many nations prior to World War I. But in this case, they were delusional about what war is: they had in mind the quick German victory in the Franco-Prussian War, or the tidy little colonial wars Britain had a habit of winning at very little cost (though the Boer War should have been a wakeup call, as it was not tidy nor quick nor low-cost).
Even then, what was needed was not an anti-military attitude, but a cold-blooded understanding of the brutal and terrible cost of war and a sharp eye toward what the goals of war should be. The fact is that not one of the nations that began World War I had anything meaningful to gain by victory, and all of them had much to lose through defeat.
Ender’s Game does not glorify war in the way that it was glorified in the imaginations of those who decided to move ahead toward war in 1914. On the contrary, if anything, Ender’s Game shows with brutal clarity just what war costs those who fight it, so that even when war is necessary, only a fool goes into it joyfully.
Yet when war cannot be avoided, when the cost of not-fighting becomes too high to be borne, one hopes that the military has been treated with respect and given the resources and training that allow them to serve their purpose and go to war with a reasonable prospect of victory. That is respecting and supporting the military, not glorifying war. It is unfortunate that many short-sighted people confuse the two ideas.
—OSC
Q. Was there any particular reason you assigned Dragon Army the colors grey, orange, grey?
A. No.
—OSC
THE PRICE OF OUR INHERITANCE
NEAL SHUSTERMAN
I was lucky enough to run into Orson Scott Card at a recent conference, and over lunch we discussed the nature of the essays coming in for the collection. He f
ound it interesting, and often flattering that people felt compelled to reminisce about where and when they first read Ender’s Game, as if it were the memorable shedding of their virginity. I, of course, won’t go there. You’ll never catch me talking about my first time.1
My curiosity was piqued by the conversation, though, because it pointed to the interesting fact that people do remember details around their first reading of Ender’s Game, in the same way people remember profound, life-changing events. For instance, so many of us remember exactly what we were doing the moment we heard about planes hitting the Twin Towers, or—for those of us who are parents—where we were the day we first learned we were going to be a father or mother. In time, our lives become slideshows of events that have left an indelible imprint on us. They become larger than life in our memories—and reading Ender’s Game is quite often a larger-than-life event.
I’ve read many memorable books, but few of them have such gravity that the memory sucks in other events around it like a black hole. I asked a number of friends, and discovered that each of them had also experienced “The Full Ender.” They proceeded to give me amazingly specific details about the first time their minds were subverted into thinking about formics, Battle School, and all that went with them.2
A common thread was that everyone—everyone—claimed they had been kept up until four o’clock in the morning reading. I have determined that 4:00 am is the golden hour of great literature, because, let’s face it, anyone can stay up until three o’clock reading—and a book that keeps you up until 5:00 am? Well, that’s just annoying. But reading until the fourth hour—that is the sign of truly great literature. So, regardless of the facts, if your memory tells you that you were up until four o’clock in the morning reading, then it must have been a life-altering book.
The question is: What makes Ender’s Game a fourth-hour book? What is it that we find so compelling? Certainly it’s the strength of character and story, but I think it goes beyond that to a deeper, more primal place. In Ender’s journey, Orson Scott Card has tapped into a visceral human conundrum: the ambivalence of survival.
“If you can’t beat them then they deserve to win, because they’re stronger and better than us.”
—VALENTINE WIGGIN
Evolution is cruel. Life is constantly in brutal conflict. Species evolve only through the untimely death of the weak and the unadaptable. Homo sapiens, however, as the apex species, has the luxury of compassion and empathy. We humans care deeply for the less fortunate. We are charitable souls, helping the needy and the infirmed. We seek cures for congenital diseases, refusing to allow nature the vicious victory of killing off a gene by slaying its sufferers. Instead, we find courage and meaning in their struggle far more than the struggle of the hunter over its prey. To modern man, survival doesn’t mean eat or be eaten, kill or be killed; it means a regular paycheck, a retirement fund, and a mortgage that isn’t upside down.
But what happens when it’s more than our mortgage that’s upside down? What do we become if survival truly becomes about survival once more? We would all like to think that we are enlightened beings and, as such, will always find the moral high road. Wisdom tells us the path is more important than the destination. However, when survival is truly at stake, suddenly the destination is everything, regardless of the path we take to get there.
“No, you don’t understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them ever to hurt again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”
—ENDER WIGGIN
Tell me—would you ever kill your neighbor in cold blood? No, you say? Well, what if it was to save your life? Still no? Then what if it was to save the lives of your children?
A parent knows that that’s not even the right question. The right question is, How many people would you kill to protect the lives of your children? And every parent also knows the answer:
As many as necessary.
So…if the survival of your family, your race, your species depended entirely on the irrevocable destruction of another species, would you pull the trigger on Dr. Device?
The threat from the formics was spelled out clearly. They attacked twice. The first attack was an exploratory mission; the second attack was an attempt to colonize. On both occasions, it was clear that they meant to destroy humanity, and there was no reason to think that they would stop. So, how was humanity going to save its children? How many formics would we kill? As many as necessary. Even if it meant every last one of them.
“Killing’s the first thing we learned. And it’s a good thing we did, or we’d be dead, and tigers would own the earth.”
—VALENTINE WIGGIN
The real power of Ender’s Game is that it’s not just about Ender’s mission—it’s about each of us coming to terms with that basic kill-or-be-killed imperative that Valentine so plainly put forth. At its most primal level, Ender’s Game is about the decisions we make as human beings when faced with dire circumstances, and why we make them. It also lays bare the ugly truth that species survival sometimes trumps compassion and empathy. Ender becomes for us the embodiment of this unthinkable question: What if, for humanity to survive, we as a species must surrender the very things that make us human?
However, to embody the question, he must also embody the answer—which he does by being more than just a victor, but the ultimate game-changer. When he couldn’t win by following the rules, he found ways around the rules without actually breaking them. Part of what makes him so compelling is that he finds loopholes no one else is smart enough to find—and the greatest of these circumnavigations is that he performs the unthinkable act of xenocide without ever losing his humanity. Ender gives us a noble answer to the question: No, we do not have to surrender our humanity to survive. Ender keeps his humanity, so perhaps we can, too.
When I first read Ender’s Game many years ago,3 there was a single review quote from the back cover that stuck in my mind. It said, Ender’s Game was “a scathing indictment of the military mind.” It bothered me. I wasn’t quite sure why at first. I wondered if that’s what the author intended—because it felt “off.” Incomplete. I ultimately came to realize that the book was ambivalent like Ender himself. Ender’s Game is both an indictment and a vindication of militaristic thinking at the same time. It provides a quandary, not a position. Ender’s Game does not give us a moral neatly wrapped with a bow—instead it opens the drawstring on a nasty bag of questions.
Take Graff, for instance. Is he a monster or a hero? As a reader, Graff made me uncomfortable, because I couldn’t decide whether I liked or disliked him. Clearly he cared about Ender. He openly admitted it more than once, if not to Ender, then to others.
“He [Graff] can use anybody—below him or above him or complete strangers who’ve never met him—to accomplish whatever he thinks is needful for the human race.”
—MAZER RACKHAM (in Ender in Exile)
Graff’s motive was to save humanity. Does that justify taking a six-year-old genius, and putting him through a trial by fire to forge him into the greatest weapon mankind has ever known? Let’s see…a single individual born to bear the burden of mankind’s salvation…Well, to say the least, there’s a cultural precedent! Still, it’s an unsettling question—especially when the military is involved. We want to say that such an action is never justified, and yet our survival imperative says otherwise. It’s easy for the people of Ender’s world to call Graff evil or irresponsible in retrospect once the formics are gone, and humanity’s greatest threat is once more itself.
Not only did the world condemn Graff, they condemned Ender as well—the very hero who saved them. In fact, Ender himself had a huge hand in painting his actions in a negative light, having penned The Hive Queen. It was a powerful choice Card made when he decided to have Ender go down in future history as a villain despised by good people everywhere. “Ender the Xenocide.” Future history saw him as so evil, so iconic, that the action became the person. He became the embodiment of the very concept of sp
ecies annihilation.
This was more than just an authorial choice, however; it was an epiphany. Of course the world would come to hate Ender! It had to! How else could humanity cope with the horrific cost of its own survival?
Who do we hate when a weapon of mass destruction leaves blood on our hands? When we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did we come to hate Einstein for coming up with the formula for nuclear fission? Did we hate Oppenheimer for building the bomb? Did we blot Truman’s name from history for using it even though it wasn’t necessary? No, because then we would be implicating ourselves as accomplices. So instead we hated the bomb.
When an act is perpetrated by us, rather than upon us, we tend to find a receptacle for our hatred that keeps our own consciences clean. We hate the weapon—and when that weapon is an individual, all the better.
“You had to be a weapon, Ender…functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at.”
—MAZER RACKHAM
In Ender’s world, it was very clear that “Dr. Device” wasn’t really seen as the weapon: Ender himself was. For the world to clear its conscience, and move beyond the formic extinction, there needed to be a scapegoat. Ender the Xenocide. With the blame cast firmly upon Ender, mankind was free to inherit the worlds and infrastructure left behind by the formics with impunity. To the victor goes the spoils of the stars.
If Ender’s world didn’t come to hate him, that would be a dark portent for humanity. It would mean that humanity approved of the xenocide. By distancing itself from what Ender did, humanity takes a step in the right direction. Were we as enlightened as the hive queen, we wouldn’t need a scapegoat. We would come to terms with our own actions, and accept the blame. But alas, we are not. So we blame Ender.
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