Enders Game In Real Time By Ron Shirtz
(2010-04-21 at 18:55:36 )

Enders Game In Real Time By Ron Shirtz

Orson Scott Cards prescient futuristic novel, Enders Game, tells the
story of an extremely intellectually gifted young boy, Ender Wiggin, who
at the age of six is enrolled in Command School, a military academy of
the best and brightest youth of Earth. He becomes an unwitting weapon in
mankinds war against the Formics, an alien race commonly referred as
the Buggers.

Ender is both ostracized by his peers and admired as a brilliant
strategist, a situation fostered by his teachers to develop his
creativity and his leadership abilities. His war training becomes all-
inclusive - Daily he must defend himself from jealous, bullying
classmates and outwit manipulative teachers. Dink, one of his few friends
tells him; It is the teachers, they are the enemy. They get us to fight
each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win Win Win.
It amounts to nothing. (p. 108)

Ender is constantly engaged in an ongoing series of war games to exploit
his intelligence towards military tactics. Each one becomes more
challenging than the next, pushing the young Ender to his limits.

At one point, Ender questions the reason of the conflict with Colonel
Graff:

-So the whole war is because we can not talk to each other.

-If the other fellow can not tell you his story, you can never be sure
he is not trying to kill you.

-What if we just left them alone?

-Ender, we did not go to them first, they came to us. If they were going
to leave us alone, they could have done it a hundred years ago, before
The First Invasion.

-Maybe they did not know we were intelligent life. Maybe - (p.178)

Colonel Graff convinces Ender that there can be no negotiating with the
inscrutable Buggers, that the war is a Darwinian battle for survival of
one competing species against another.

In a final test, he is given a computer simulation to fight through the
Buggers defenses and destroy their home world planet with a devastating
bomb. Against tremendous odds, he succeeds - Only to discover afterwards
from his adult mentors that It Was Not A Simulation.

At age 12, Ender discovers he has single-handedly Committed Genocide
Of An Entire Planet.

-Real. Not a game. Enders mind was too tired to cope with it all. They
were not just points of light in the air, they were real ships that he
had fought with and real ships he had destroyed. And a real world that
he had blasted into oblivion. He walked through the crowd, dodging their
congratulations, ignoring their hands, their words, their rejoicing.

- I killed them all, did I not I? Ender asked.

- All who? asked Graff. The Buggers? That was the idea.

Mazer leaned in close. That Is What The War Was For.

- All their Queens. So I killed All Their Children, All Of Everything.

- They decided that when they attacked us. It was not your fault.
- It had to happen.

Ender grabbed Mazers uniform and hung unto it, pulling him down so they
were face to face. I did not want to kill them all. I did not want to
kill anybody! I am not a killer!You - but - you made me do it, you
tricked me into it! He was crying. He was out of control.

- Of course we tricked you. That is the whole point, said Graff. (p.208)

Predator drones are a progressive example of current military technology
blurring the distinction between real and the digitally contrived. These
technological terrors desensitize the inherent human aversion to violence
by reverting harsh reality into an entertaining simulation. Such
technology encourages a delusional mindset that killing in war can be
sanitized, without the unpleasant experience of suffering the emotions of
remorse or revulsion.

Someone once said, The First Casualty Of War Is Truth.

The Government knows this, and seeks to hide this unpleasant truth from
the public. Examples include the previously suppressed 2007 Apache attack
video of the killing of two Reuter journalists, the Pentagons censorship
of pictures of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, and Defense
Secretary Robert Gates criticism of the published photo of the Lance
Corporal Joshua Bernard dying in combat.

Why your organization would purposely defy the familys wishes knowing
full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. demands Mr.
Gates of the AP Press. Perhaps if Mr. Gates and the rest of the
Government had read Joseph Hellers novel, Catch 22, he would understand
wars terrible secret, as Hellers protagonist Captain Yossarian grimly
discovers:

- Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the
snaps of Snowdens flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowdens
insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept
dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into
his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through,
drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the
gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed
a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were
chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was Gods
plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared - liver, lungs,
kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten
that day for lunch.

Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away dizzily and began to
vomit, clutching his burning throat. The tail gunner woke up while
Yossarian was vomiting, saw him, and fainted again.

Yossarian was limp with exhaustion, pain and despair when he finished.
He turned back weakly to Snowden, whose breath had grown softer and more
rapid, and whose face had grown paler. He wondered how in the world to
begin to save him.

- I am cold. Snowden whimpered, I am cold.

- There, there. Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be
heard. There, There.

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose
pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim
secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read
the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowdens secret.

Drop him out a window and he will fall. Set fire to him and he will burn.
Bury him and he will rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone,
man is garbage. That was Snowdens secret. Ripeness was all.

(Catch 22, Joseph Heller, chapter 41)

It is not my intent to write a screed on the moral evils of video games,
or advocate we devolve into to Luddites. I only desire for the clueless
to experience a second-hand Yossarian-epiphany by reading history and
literature, like the books referenced here. To disabuse the notion that
State-Sponsored Violence Is Necessary To Safeguard Ideals Such As
Country And Honor.

To Rediscover The Lost Truth That War Is Truly Terrible, Lest We,
As Robert E. Lee Warned, Should Grow Too Fond Of It.

April 17, 2010

Ron Shirtz is a transplanted Californian teaching Graphic Communications
in Northern New York. His hobbies include arranging deck chairs on
sinking ships, tilting at windmills, and being fashionably late.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.