Ender's Game and Philosophy by Wittkower D. E. Rush Lucinda

Author:Wittkower, D. E., Rush, Lucinda [Wittkower D.E.; Rush, Lucinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698411
Publisher: Open Court

I would go further and say that all those who wish to be taken seriously should speak in public using a pseudonym. We don’t need to know who you are to know what you stand for. Tell us what you stand for. Remove your trappings of government authority or the wealth made in commercial enterprise and show us that your ideas make sense.

—DEMOSTHENES

War and Deception

I am so very glad to learn, given our most recent epistle from Demosthenes, that my pseudonym should be presented as a mark of civic-mindedness. Barely hidden in his posting are hints to his identity. Which of those three was the real Demosthenes: the garbage man, the teen, or the rebellious trooper? All represent fairly tame possibilities. He ignores some of the other potential hands at the keyboard. Is he the Hegemon’s right hand, testing the waters for a shift in the global order? Is he an agent provocateur, an old Russian bear egging us toward a fight that will likewise reshape the future? Or perhaps just the concoction of an arms dealer’s public relations firm, written by an army of eager interns? For all we know he may not be human at all!

Or perhaps he writes under other names as well, testing different identities and different positions to see which will win out in the end. Maybe these identities help to reinforce one another, providing a straw man or a foil or the source of unbridled praise. All we know for certain is that he aims to deceive, by not revealing the full truth of all that he is.

It is said that the first victim of war is truth, but the relationship goes the other way round as well. War is built on deception and on lack of transparency. We know how important deception is to the prosecution of war, to the grand strategy that brings us to war and to the tactics that end it. And if politics is war by other means, we might expect those who engage in political action to be equally likely to deceive. In fact, if Michael Walzer is to be believed, we require our politicians to have “dirty hands,” even as we should condemn them for the same. So, perhaps Demosthenes sees the concealment of his identity as akin to the “noble lie”—a deception in service of the public good.

Although in the original formulation by Walzer, and indeed in its precursors in Machiavelli and elsewhere, the dirty hands can include misleading the public, later Walzer applies it more directly to immorality in warfare: particularly the destruction of civilian targets. While he suggests that there is no exception that allowed for the civilian targeting of Hiroshima or Dresden late in the Second World War, earlier attacks on civilian targets were justified by “supreme emergency”—an existential threat to social life in the Allied nations. Certainly, Demosthenes’s heated rhetoric suggests that he sees his enemies as more than merely combatants, but as existential threats to humankind. Perhaps this justifies his willingness to mislead.

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