Literature Communicating Across Genre, Forum
I started reading The Forever War by Joe Hademan last night. Or re-reading it, rather. I had started during the school semester, but then the work piled up so I had to push the pause button. Then rewind because I wanted things in context.
So, the below is technically spoilerish.
I like it, but I do tend to skim the military details -- I really don't care what the plan is to fight the so called enemy, I much prefer to think about the whys and the reactions to the decision making. So, there was this chapter which I found genuinely disturbing; it told how they first made contact, and how the military had made it easier for soldiers to kill:
[regarding the post hypnotic suggestion] My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists; vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)...a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters...
And it was like propaganda on steroids -- and it disturbed me reading this, that anyone would come up with an idea to manipulate someone's mind in this way, to violate someone's thinking process. At least, with today's propaganda, people are still in control of their minds. And yes, it did remind me of Doctor Who "The Friendly Earth": Fear generates savagery.
We talked a lot about propaganda in my lit courses -- how it was used to justify slaughter and other unpleasant aspects of ourselves: depersonification, objectification. We talked about how important it was to preserve the truth that people are still individuals and should be preserved as such. And, when I read things like this, it just drives it home how important literature is in portraying individuals as people, in reminding people to not descend into that sort of dogmatic, illogical, unreasoning, narrow-minded thinking.
But even so -- even when propaganda isn't being implanted into your brain -- it's so easy to succumb to it, as the protagonist acknowledges when the hypnosis wears off and he comprehends the massacre in which he has just participated:
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren't all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.
I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so...Well, there was always brainwipe
I think it's so fascinating to compare Haldeman's view of humanity to the Doctor's view. Here the protagonist ultimately questions what it means to be human and ultimately comes to a negative perception, in direct conflict to the Doctor's perception: be the very best of humanity -- as if when someone does not, they are falling short, meaning that humanity has a high, positive standard that people fulfill or do not fulfill. Haldeman presents an ultimately nonexistent standard, I suppose.
And I find the brainwipe even more horrifying than the hypnosis - you can't learn if you don't remember an experience. If he brainwipes, then he will no longer have this new found knowledge of himself, he won't even remembering questioning what it means to be human. He would go backwards, not forwards -- and that is horrifying.
And then he says,
We had just herded them up and slaughtered [the Taurans], the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears [a kind of animal they shot on sight when they first stumbled across them]. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.
And they say that science fiction isn't real literature -- I bite my thumb at such folks. This is science fiction at its finest.
So, the below is technically spoilerish.
I like it, but I do tend to skim the military details -- I really don't care what the plan is to fight the so called enemy, I much prefer to think about the whys and the reactions to the decision making. So, there was this chapter which I found genuinely disturbing; it told how they first made contact, and how the military had made it easier for soldiers to kill:
[regarding the post hypnotic suggestion] My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists; vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)...a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters...
And it was like propaganda on steroids -- and it disturbed me reading this, that anyone would come up with an idea to manipulate someone's mind in this way, to violate someone's thinking process. At least, with today's propaganda, people are still in control of their minds. And yes, it did remind me of Doctor Who "The Friendly Earth": Fear generates savagery.
We talked a lot about propaganda in my lit courses -- how it was used to justify slaughter and other unpleasant aspects of ourselves: depersonification, objectification. We talked about how important it was to preserve the truth that people are still individuals and should be preserved as such. And, when I read things like this, it just drives it home how important literature is in portraying individuals as people, in reminding people to not descend into that sort of dogmatic, illogical, unreasoning, narrow-minded thinking.
But even so -- even when propaganda isn't being implanted into your brain -- it's so easy to succumb to it, as the protagonist acknowledges when the hypnosis wears off and he comprehends the massacre in which he has just participated:
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren't all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.
I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so...Well, there was always brainwipe
I think it's so fascinating to compare Haldeman's view of humanity to the Doctor's view. Here the protagonist ultimately questions what it means to be human and ultimately comes to a negative perception, in direct conflict to the Doctor's perception: be the very best of humanity -- as if when someone does not, they are falling short, meaning that humanity has a high, positive standard that people fulfill or do not fulfill. Haldeman presents an ultimately nonexistent standard, I suppose.
And I find the brainwipe even more horrifying than the hypnosis - you can't learn if you don't remember an experience. If he brainwipes, then he will no longer have this new found knowledge of himself, he won't even remembering questioning what it means to be human. He would go backwards, not forwards -- and that is horrifying.
And then he says,
We had just herded them up and slaughtered [the Taurans], the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears [a kind of animal they shot on sight when they first stumbled across them]. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.
And they say that science fiction isn't real literature -- I bite my thumb at such folks. This is science fiction at its finest.