The other....
"Kill the Buggers! Kill the Bugs! Kill the Arachnids! Kill the Aliens! Kill the Piggies! Kill the Indians! Kill, kill, kill, kill..."
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of all this killing? Over and over in science fiction, there is a repeated emphasis on wiping out the different ones. I know we've talked about it over and over, but still....
Oh, and what about our moral hypocryse (and lack of spelling ability) regarding geno/xeno cide. When it was Ender wiping out the Buggers, we were all saying "Yeah, let's go get the fuckers!" but when we were reading Todorov, everyone was saying "Well, there is no question it was morally reprehensible..." Mightn't we be in a bit of a Speaker for the Dead situation? In retrospect, "shit, that was a bad idea". Shouldn't we try to understand what was going on at the time? I know that the Native Americans were not the threat that the Buggers appeared to be, but they might have been as much of a threat as the Buggers genuinely were. After all, the Buggers weren't coming back to get Earth and the Native Americans weren't coming back to get the Europeans.
posted by lennearb @ 10:54 AM
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