It is my contention that a work that says that your enemies should be crushed mercilessly, that they are unredeemably evil and utterly without a shred of humanity is pro-fascist, even if or even especially if the subhuman enemies are identified as “Nazis” or “Fascists” in the work. To call Hitler an inhuman monster is just what Hitler would do.
A work that invites you to see the human side of your enemies, that urges you to have compassion for your enemies, that tells you that you always are responsible for every action you take, that you have to pay for your mistakes, that it is difficult to figure out the correct action is anti-fascist, even if the enemies we are invited to empathize with are identified with or analgous to Nazis or Fascists.
I’m not a proponent of the Ender/Hitler theory; I just keep hearing it brought up and thought it was interesting. I suspect you’re addressing me, so forgive me if I respond that way and it wasn’t intended.
I believe the argument is not whether Ender’s Game says per se, “Look, Hitler wasn’t so bad,” but rather, as Radford said, “Jesus would forgive Hitler if he really really repented” (and she says fuck that to this idea, triggering this whole mess). Hence,
It’s not “Naziism isn’t so bad!” but “Even genocide is forgivable!” and I’m not sure where you got fixated on that idea. We must be reading different articles.
Have you read Ezra Pound? I’m really not sure we’re on the same wavelength here. A whole lot of his work has absolutely nothing to do with fascism. I’m a fan of fascist aesthetics and imagery[1], but, y’know, I just don’t find any in Cathay. If you can point me at some, I’d be happy to acknowledge it, but… they’ve eluded me so far (though it’s been a couple years since I picked it up).
The line of thought behind my post is pretty wobbly, but it goes something like this (it’s half joke, which may be part of the problem):
Ezra Pound was a great artist. He was also a cheerleader for a major fascist. Oh, well!
Card is a… well, a respectable artist. He is also a cheerleader for… let’s not go there. Oh, well!
As Sleel says, sometimes you’re better off not knowing about your favorite authors’ extracurriculars.
[1]I don’t know where you get this idea about fascists not liking science and art. They like strong, stoic images, but they seem to like art just fine. Albert Speer was a fantastic architect (and a highly competent logistician). Ezra Pound really needs no introduction. Hugo Boss was a great designer. Leni Riefenstahl was a great (if tedious) photographer. Werner von Braun was a tremendous rocket scientist, both in civilian and military roles. They invented the jet plane!
Well, I read the kuro5hin.org article linked by Diogenes, and the author of that is convinced, not that Card believes that even Hitler could be forgiven, but that Card is secretly a pro-Hitler fascist.
And that’s just nonsense.
It is NOT an apologia for Hitler, like that Elaine Radford claims. Even if we grant that Card argues that even Hitler could be forgiven, how the fuck can she can that fascist propaganda? And then they have the stupidity to label the argument that even Hitler could be forgiven “moral absolutism”!
Maybe Card is just writing for his audience. If a columnist had to write in the heart of the bible belt, he/she could stay gainfully employed by denoucing gays, darwin and atheists. The columnist may not believe the stuff he/she is writing but that won’t stop the paychecks. Maybe OSC has found out that you can make money by telling people what they want to hear.
To me, this would be worse than if he actually believed it. :mad:
Of course, there’s an easy test: at the next con at which OSC appears, someone hold up a mirror to his face. If he’s really the idealist of old, and just spewing this garbage to line his pockets, the mirror will fail to reflect his image, and he will recoil from it.
Oh, Card. I’ve tried to reconcile my fondness for his books with his back-asswards political thinking for years, and I can’t tell for sure whether I’ve failed at that, or whether he’s stopped writing books that appeal to me (as the reason why I never seem to be interested in his books anymore, after gulping them down like crack as a child). Most likely it’s both. The new prequels to Ender’s Game started boring/annoying me to death, I realized the Women of Genesis series books all sound exactly the same (of course, I imagine life back in the bible days wasn’t all that varied), and I didn’t even bother to pick up Magic Street.
It’s sad. But he was my favorite author at some point (I think Greg Egan might be now), and I won’t deny it or stop liking what I liked previously.
This could be a very interesting discussion. I would maintain that Nabokov was dismissive of authors who said things like, “One day Harry Potter strolled out of my mind fully formed” (or something like that). Characters for Nabokov have no separate existence except as tools completely under the author’s control–compassion for a character would not enter into Nabokov’s consideration–for him it would be all about how the character advances the story or the author’s purpose–let him suffer or die as needed, he is only an implement.
In a particularly “meta” moment at the end of Bend Sinister, Nabokov “saves” his hero from torture and prison by writing him out of the book (of course realizing that he is only a creature of an authorial creator drives the creature mad:)).
So, I don’t think Nabokov would have any quarrel whatsoever with Card making his characters suffer–of course if Card is “punishing” (a word with implications of personal involvement) because he has bought into his characters and is “playing favorites”, then Card should be criticized for having lost control of his creative process, therefore making his books less than they could have been.
I remember some author, I think Lois McMaster Bujold, who said her creative process was to come up with interesting characters and then ask herself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to this character?”
Humble Servant, I agree with what you said, and I was only speaking in a loose sense. My point is that Nabokov seems to have compassion for human beings while Card seems annoyed at them for being weak. That’s the sense I get from their novels.
Also, full disclosure, it’s been years since I read Card, and my memory of his books is dim, but I remember thinking as I was reading them “Man, this guy has no tolerance for people at all.”
However, I’m sure if you asked him “Hitler, good or bad?” he’d say “Bad, most definitely.” There’s a big step between having a slightly fascistic ethos–if Card has that, I don’t recall him as a fascist in the Ender books–and being an admirer or apologist of Hitler and his lunatic racial ideas.
Card has a point. There’s actually a ton of information showing that a great portion of Iraq is doing very very well right now. GDP growth in Iraq has been steady, new business registrations have gone up, oil production has gone up, electricity is becoming more consistent and widespread across the country. Several provinces have been turned over to complete operational control of the provincial governors because the ISF in the area is both competent enough to deal with any problems that may arise and said areas are stable enough for them not to be a big concern.
It’s just as much “drinking the Kool-aid” to believe nothing good has happened in Iraq as it is to believe nothing bad is happening. And there is a great deal of bad. I don’t think at this point anyone can legitimately say we went in with the best game plan for post-war Iraq. I actually think the first three months after Saddam was toppled were extremely critical, and if just those first three months had gone differently we’d be looking at a totally different situation now.
And I’m not saying we’d be cheered as liberators by the entire country, because that isn’t the case (we have been cheered as liberators by some–and while that term is used sarcastically we are liberators.) Four provinces containing 37% of the country’s population constitute 87% of the insurgent/violent attacks in the entire country, and the disparity between those four provinces and the rest of the country is growing, not shrinking.
The reason things look so bad is because the media is way more likely to report on blown up bodies than it is an impressive electrical grid or GDP growth. And also, the fact is that while things are going better than they are popularly portrayed, we are facing an issue now where we could very likely be on the verge of civil war. Sectarian violence that is mostly being fought in one section of the country, if it breaks out into a full scale outright honest-to-god civil war the entire country could quickly become involved. That’s why right now is such an incredibly important time. We have a very strong responsibility to do whatever is going to stop the slide towards civil war because all of the progress we have made could be undone in a few months if a civil war is allowed to happen. Not to mention any Iraqi casualty figures we have now will look like a picnic compared to the blood bath that will come about if Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites across the entire country decide to fight a civil war.
Incidentally, while this thread is back on my radar, I found a copy of the Contemporary Literary Criticism yearbook with the Radford article and Card’s reply. It may take a while for it to show up (it’s a 600-page spiderkiller with 10 pages of actual article I want to read, sent Media Mail), but I’ll report back once I’ve read them.
I read some of the article linked to from that linked article. It seems to me these guys are completely misreading the book. For example, [spoiler]From the article:
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 authority, law, ally, or social structure may be depended upon. “The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you”[/spoiler]
The author of the article seems to read this as justifying killing as a necessary means to certain ends. But as a kid I read this passage from the book as nothing other than Ender’s rationalizations of his own behavior, false ones to be clear, and as being examples of the kind of thinking that helped set him up for the awful thing that happened at the end of the book.
In other words, I took the message to be "Don’t think like this, or you just may end up committing genocide and that’s clearly not something you want to have done. But the author of the article seems to read it as "think like this, and you’ll end up being justified in committing genocide and hey being justified at having done that means you can’t be doing all that bad.
:mad:
