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Essay / Humanity as an enemy of itself in "Enders Game"
Imagine that the world was invaded by an alien race that humans call "Buggers". They have invaded twice and the third invasion is expected. This is the idea behind the book “Enders Game” by Orson Card. In "Ender's Game", the main character Ender is sent to combat school at the age of 6 to begin his training to become a military genius. Throughout the book, Ender learns to come up with strategies to kill entire fleets of buggers. He is pushed to the brink of his breaking point several times to save Earth from the enemy alien race. Ender learned that the enemy has always been the buggers and that they want to kill the entire human race. The evidence in the book points to a different enemy. It is humanity, not the buggers, that is the real enemy of "Ender's Game." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay If humans encountered an alien race, it's unclear what kind of being we would encounter. They might think and act like us or have no language that we could understand. What is the kind of being encountered by humans in "Enders Game". When the humans sent a tugboat to investigate the endangered rock they now call Eros, they encountered the buggers for the first time. All the ship's crew members were killed by the buggers. This made the humans believe that the buggers wanted to kill them all, even though the buggers didn't have those intentions. Their mind is actually controlled by a queen and so they didn't know that they were killing innocent, individually thinking human beings. When Ender found the hive queen at the end of the book, they share their thoughts and she tells Ender, "We didn't mean to kill, and when we figured it out, we never came back ( Map 321). » These buggers didn't intend to kill all the humans. They thought someone was simply invading the colony they were creating and cutting off communication with their queen. If that's the only type of communication a species has, that's what it would assume other species have. Just like the humans in Ender's Game believed that the buggers had a means of communicating with each other. When the first white men arrived on the shores of the Americas, they did not know that there were already people like the Indians living there. When they discovered that the Indians had no organized religion and would not adopt one, they were considered savages. Quite simply because they didn't think the same thing. When the humans assumed that the buggers were intent on killing, they decided to kill the alien species before killing the rest of the humans. Over time, civilizations had to defend themselves against other invading civilizations. It is a fact that countless numbers of people have been killed by wars throughout the ages. It is also true that over time, men have had to invent other means of defending themselves. From simple spears to swords, from horses to chariots. Humans have always found new ways to kill and defend themselves. This is also true when humans encounter the buggers. When Mazer tells Ender about the first invasion, Ender realizes that the buggers share one mind. He understands that the buggers probably didn't realize what they were doing. When he mentions this to Mazer, he responds, "Just because they didn't know they were killing human beings doesn't mean they weren't killing human beings." We have the right to defend ourselves as best we can.”