[quote]Let me tell you about a book I just read. It's the story of a young boy who was dreadfully abused by the grown-ups who wanted to mold him into an exemplary citizen. Forced to suppress his own emotions in order to avoid being paralyzed by trauma, he directed his energy into duty rather than sex or love. In time, he came to believe that his primary duty was to wipe out a species of gifted but incomprehensible aliens who had devastated his kind in a previous war. He found the idea of exterminating an entire race distasteful, of course. But since he believed it was required to save the people he defined as human, he put the entire weight of his formidable energy behind the effort to wipe out the aliens. You've read it, you say? It's Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, right? Wrong. The aliens I'm talking about were the European Jews, blamed by many Germans for gearing up World War I for their own profit. The book is Robert G. L. Waite's The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hilter. I don't know of any pair of novels that have been as consistently misinterpreted as Card's Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Even a reader with a rudimentary knowledge of twentieth century history might be expected to guess that the character of Ender Wiggin, the near messianic superhero, is based on that of Adolf Hitler. Card himself is the "Speaker for the Dead" who seeks to understand and forgive the genocidal dictator's behavior by demonstrating that his intentions were good. Because Hitler/Ender committed genocide to preserve the existence and dignity of what he defined as human, he is not a monster but a true Superman who willingly shouldered the heavy responsibility thrust upon him. For those who missed the point of what he was doing in Ender's Game, Card sums up the Speaker philosophy near the beginning of Speaker for the Dead. "Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act..." Toward the end, he has a child voice the inevitable corollary, "When you really know somebody, you can't hate them." To which I can only say, "Bullshit." You can easily hate someone you know very well -- ask a few people who have had to learn a great deal about their abusers in an effort to head off some of their attacks -- and, in any case, adults remain responsible for their actions no matter how good their intentions. Certainly, it isn't OK to kill somebody because you think he might try at some time in the future to kill you. Why then is it OK to wipe out whole races for the same reason? What in the world made responsible science fiction readers and writers embrace Ender Wiggin, a.k.a. Adolf Hitler, as a hero? It isn't because the books are skillfully written. Ender's Game is plotted around the weariest cliche going, the game that becomes real. Speaker for the Dead is a preachy, tedious text that substitutes coincidence and the Superman's omniscience for plot drivers. The characters in both books, to quote a friend, are constructed of the highest grade cardboard. But since Norman Spinrad has already detailed Card's amazing lack of originality in plot and character construction, I won't indulge in a literary hack job here. I'll only say that I suspect that we take Ender/Hitler to our hearts because fascist ideals remain frighteningly alive in all of us. 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. Perhaps you feel that I exaggerate. I can hear you thinking: How could anyone equate that abused little boy with the Great Dictator? What kind of dirty mind does that Radford person have, anyway? In reply, I will now demonstrate that the Ender/Hitler connection is clearcut and central to the structure of both novels. I'll leave it to you to decide what it means that so many people found it so easy to identify with Ender Wiggin. The Formative Years To see what Card's up to, let's first look at Ender's formative years. Because eugenics works in his universe, Card grants the government the ability to predict the Wiggin children's genius from their parents' genes. Since the first two children are disqualified from Battle School on personality grounds, the parents are asked to try again -- producing Ender, whose early years are a nightmare of persecution because he's a Third child in an overpopulated world. His only friend is his sister Valentine, with whom he'll eventually wander about the galaxy in a quasi-incestuous relationship. The reader is left with several questions that aren't easy to answer without comparing Ender's background to Hitler's. Why invoke eugenics, at best a pseudo-science and at worst an excuse for controlling one's "inferiors?" Why is it so important that Ender be a Third, to the point that Card gives the word a capital T? And why, oh why, the unnecessary and offensive hints at incest with his sister, the only member of the family that Ender is close to? Alan Bullock writes in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, the following synopsis of Hitler's early years. "Adolf was the third child of Alois Hitler's third marriage. Gustav and Ida, both born before him, died in infancy....There were also, however, the two children of the second marriage with Franziska, Adolf Hitler's half-brother Alois, and his half-sister Angela. Angela was the only one of his relations with whom Hitler maintained any sort of friendship. She kept house for him at Berchtesgaden for a time, and it was her daughter, Geli Raubal, with whom Hitler fell in love." It's all here, isn't it? Hitler was three times a third -- the third child of a third marriage, and, because his older siblings died in infancy, the third child actually present in the house. Since his mother didn't conceive again until Hitler was six, Hitler, like Ender, spent his formative years as the third of three children. Like Ender, he eventually grew away from all of his family except his older sister. The main difference is that it was her daughter, and not Angela herself, with whom he engaged in a chaste but emotionally compelling love affair. (After Geli killed herself to escape her uncle's attentions, the doctor confirmed that she died a virgin. Likewise, Card makes us wait until well into the second novel before he tells us that Ender hasn't consummated his love for Valentine.) Similarly, both children's lives were deformed by physical and emotional abuse. Ender escapes the abuse of his peers to join the Battle School -- where he is, of course, abused by adults. Hitler was literally treated like a dog by his father, who expected him to answer to his whistle and accept vicious beatings -- beatings which were all the more terrible to the boy because he had an undescended testicle and deeply feared losing the other. Both cases represented awful violations of a child's body and spirit in the attempt to mold the kind of character that adults decided the child should have. The Logic of Misogyny As an adult, it's in his relationships with women that Ender displays some of his most obvious parallels with Hitler. Indeed, as with the incest theme, some elements of Speaker for the Dead are inexplicable unless you're aware of Hitler's dyed-in-the-wool misogyny. In a world where the Wiggin genes are "crying out for continuation," Ender's chastity until his marriage at the age of 37 is puzzling. But, again, when we look at the Hitler connection, all becomes clear. Probably because of his childhood trauma, Hitler remained chaste for an unusually long time. He isn't known to have felt love for any woman until -- are you ahead of me here? -- age 37. Another bizarre element is the fact that Ender chooses a bitter, self-destructive woman for his mate. Why? I presume it's to remind us that Hitler too chose self-destructive women. Of the seven close to him, six killed themselves or made serious attempts to do so. In his eagerness to help us understand Ender/Hitler, Card comes close to justifying misogyny. At the Speaking of Marcao, Ender says that Novinha solicited beatings from her deceased husband in order to atone for her adultery. Marcao wasn't really a violent person, you understand, since he never hit anyone but his wife. How false and ugly that seems to those of us aware of the truth about abusive behavior, which is that abusive people will take out their frustrations on anyone -- woman, child, dog, or elderly parent -- who doesn't have the power to fight back. In this central chapter, meant to help us understand how speaking the truth heals a community, we see only a new lie traded for the old. Marcao may not have been the great guy we pretended he was, but hey, it was all his wife's fault. Women have heard this tired story too many times before. It's called Blaming the Victim. The author's contempt for women shows most clearly in his creation of Jane, a sentient supercomputer. Now there is no reason on God's green earth for Jane to present herself as female or even human. But Card knows that the reader would die laughing at the image of a neutered computer focusing on Ender like this. "And with all that vast activity, her unimaginable speed, the breadth and depth of her experience, fully half of the top ten levels of her attention were always, always [Card's emphasis] devoted to what came through the jewel in Ender Wiggin's ear." Hard to swallow, isn't it? But Card expects us to understand when he depicts Jane as a woman in love. Surely the reader will recognize that a woman, no matter how intelligent, has nothing better to focus on than a man?[/quote] cont in a comment