you can always break a pilot
Nov. 11th, 2010 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleIt can take me a long time to go from idea to post, especially when I'm depressed. I started thinking about this one years ago, when I was reading various enlightened commentary, disapproving of 24 and other mainstream/conservative stories glorifying torture. I keep being reminded of related issues, and bogging down in stuff that's difficult to even think about.
Spoilers for Vorkosigan books 1-7. Disturbing moral questions. Not for the squeamish. ANNE, DO NOT READ. If anybody is still with me,
The Dendarii Mercenaries began in torture. In the moral context of The Warrior's Apprentice, the torture is necessary. Just like in the "ticking time bomb" situation of legend (and those implausible set-ups are designed to push squeamish folks, and moral opponents of torture into thinking, "well, ok...maybe just this once...") the torture victim has critical information that our "heroes" know he has. They try to get the information by suborning him, and by threatening him, but he is so stubborn that only torture can force him to reveal the information. Because the torture is so spectacularly severe, he cannot possibly be lying.
Bothari's active desire to torture, his enjoyment of the process, is shown as reprehensible (though that seems to be mitigated, in context, both by the way he appears too broken to be fully responsible for his actions, and by the fact that he is acting under orders.) Miles is in charge of torturing a prisoner to death. It's supposed to be ok, because he regards it as horribly necessary. Arde, who witnessed the torture, makes that moral judgement explicit, but I think it's a more general narrative approval. In the moral context of my first reading, which lingered through several rereads, I swallowed it whole. In 1987, I was 19, and had not learned much compassion or moral sophistication.
When I was a teenager, I more-or-less believed this--that torture was a useful way to get information, and that heroes might sometimes have to apply a bit of coercive interrogation (it could be morally ok as a last resort, if they just wanted the information and weren't acting maliciously.) I believed it without thinking about it too much. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of Americans thought that way before Abu Ghraib...it was such a pervasive idea in stories about war and police work.
Miles said he was taking responsibility for torturing a prisoner to death. In 1987, I accepted that he was. My understanding has changed. When I write to my political leaders, and demand that they "take responsibility" for war crimes committed under their command, authorized by their orders, I don't mean that I want them to have nightmares.
Miles takes a lot of his ideas about how to be a decent adult human being from Aral. (17 year olds tend to do that. When a charismatic leader is a good father, his children tend to do that.) It's hard for me to look at Aral clearly, seeing him almost entirely through the eyes of characters who love him to the point of idolatry. Do you remember the scene at the beginning of "At the Mountains of Mourning," where Miles sees his father at breakfast and describes his face? He thinks about all the vicious, unfair caricaturists that drew that face to make Aral look like a military dictator. His da is really nothing like that, because his da is smart. *eyeroll* It's good to have a smart military dictator, if you have an admiral ruling the planet for 15 years, as he and a handful of close allies push through enormous changes in law, trade, and society (many opposed by those previously in power). Aral is very smart and politically adept.
In The Warrior's Apprentice, the torture victim dies, and Miles feels a flash of distress, almost recognizable as shame. He tries to hide the evidence of the pilot having a bit of his brain torn out, pretending he died of a stroke (caused by something other than neurosurgical vandalism) or in the normal usage of war. Bothari reminds him of the reason for torture--after all, it was necessary, life-saving information, they could not have gotten any other way. Right? Miles responds, "I'll keep that in mind when I come to explain to my father how it was we happened to torture a prisoner to death."
That struck me as such a great line, it took me years to realize I had no idea how that conversation might have gone. Now...I'm not entirely sure Aral would have disapproved. From what we've seen, Aral objects to war crimes that are politically unnecessary. Or that provoke unnecessary political difficulties.* I'm glad so many people oppose the torture of those they love. I will take all the allies I can get. I'm also glad so many people oppose gratuitious torture--torture that is not intended to do anything but gratify the torturers' personal cruelty.
Aral wasn't the only person who taught Miles how to be a decent adult. There's Cordelia. Did she ever tell him about torturing the psychologist on Beta? The first dozen times I read that scene, I didn't think of it as torture. I thought she was being clever. Insofar as it occurred to me that she might be doing something morally questionable, stealing the ship would have seemed more problematic than the torture incident. There's "Uncle Simon," who runs the secret police. He would not have told a civilian child about covert ops. I think there's an oblique mention at the beginning of Memory, of Miles doing much uglier jobs for Simon than courier work, which made something *click* in my mind. I would be astonished if Simon did not think of torture as being occasionally necessary.
The specific horror that happens to Simon in Memory could have been described in terms of the torture in The Warrior's Apprentice. Once I saw the echo, I was expecting a reference, because Bujold does has so many subtle cross-references. It isn't there. He doesn't feel like his brains are "ripped out of his head," he just feels like his "brain turns to snot."
*The Solstice Massacre on Komarr was such an outrage because there was no military need to kill the prisoners. As Aral saw it, there would be huge political advantages, in making Komarr easier to govern, if they treated the prisoners very gently. They weren't tortured for information, or killed anywhere near the heat of battle. The killer's motives are never discussed, but the only reasons I can think of for killing in such a context would be for revenge, or for sadism, or as a gesture of intimidation. Knowing Barrayar could not afford such a gesture is different from disapproving of killing prisoners as a general thing.
We also know Aral and Simon disapprove of the outrage on Kyril Island at the beginning of The Vor Game. That wasn't just abuse of trainees and use of biological weapons. The outrage, for Aral and Simon, was that it aggravated race hatred in the military, with a risk of escalating to civil war. Would they have considered it ok to do what Stannis did to an ethnically-mixed group of criminals serving short terms at hard labor? How about treating prisoners of war that way?
Spoilers for Vorkosigan books 1-7. Disturbing moral questions. Not for the squeamish. ANNE, DO NOT READ. If anybody is still with me,
The Dendarii Mercenaries began in torture. In the moral context of The Warrior's Apprentice, the torture is necessary. Just like in the "ticking time bomb" situation of legend (and those implausible set-ups are designed to push squeamish folks, and moral opponents of torture into thinking, "well, ok...maybe just this once...") the torture victim has critical information that our "heroes" know he has. They try to get the information by suborning him, and by threatening him, but he is so stubborn that only torture can force him to reveal the information. Because the torture is so spectacularly severe, he cannot possibly be lying.
Bothari's active desire to torture, his enjoyment of the process, is shown as reprehensible (though that seems to be mitigated, in context, both by the way he appears too broken to be fully responsible for his actions, and by the fact that he is acting under orders.) Miles is in charge of torturing a prisoner to death. It's supposed to be ok, because he regards it as horribly necessary. Arde, who witnessed the torture, makes that moral judgement explicit, but I think it's a more general narrative approval. In the moral context of my first reading, which lingered through several rereads, I swallowed it whole. In 1987, I was 19, and had not learned much compassion or moral sophistication.
When I was a teenager, I more-or-less believed this--that torture was a useful way to get information, and that heroes might sometimes have to apply a bit of coercive interrogation (it could be morally ok as a last resort, if they just wanted the information and weren't acting maliciously.) I believed it without thinking about it too much. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of Americans thought that way before Abu Ghraib...it was such a pervasive idea in stories about war and police work.
Miles said he was taking responsibility for torturing a prisoner to death. In 1987, I accepted that he was. My understanding has changed. When I write to my political leaders, and demand that they "take responsibility" for war crimes committed under their command, authorized by their orders, I don't mean that I want them to have nightmares.
Miles takes a lot of his ideas about how to be a decent adult human being from Aral. (17 year olds tend to do that. When a charismatic leader is a good father, his children tend to do that.) It's hard for me to look at Aral clearly, seeing him almost entirely through the eyes of characters who love him to the point of idolatry. Do you remember the scene at the beginning of "At the Mountains of Mourning," where Miles sees his father at breakfast and describes his face? He thinks about all the vicious, unfair caricaturists that drew that face to make Aral look like a military dictator. His da is really nothing like that, because his da is smart. *eyeroll* It's good to have a smart military dictator, if you have an admiral ruling the planet for 15 years, as he and a handful of close allies push through enormous changes in law, trade, and society (many opposed by those previously in power). Aral is very smart and politically adept.
In The Warrior's Apprentice, the torture victim dies, and Miles feels a flash of distress, almost recognizable as shame. He tries to hide the evidence of the pilot having a bit of his brain torn out, pretending he died of a stroke (caused by something other than neurosurgical vandalism) or in the normal usage of war. Bothari reminds him of the reason for torture--after all, it was necessary, life-saving information, they could not have gotten any other way. Right? Miles responds, "I'll keep that in mind when I come to explain to my father how it was we happened to torture a prisoner to death."
That struck me as such a great line, it took me years to realize I had no idea how that conversation might have gone. Now...I'm not entirely sure Aral would have disapproved. From what we've seen, Aral objects to war crimes that are politically unnecessary. Or that provoke unnecessary political difficulties.* I'm glad so many people oppose the torture of those they love. I will take all the allies I can get. I'm also glad so many people oppose gratuitious torture--torture that is not intended to do anything but gratify the torturers' personal cruelty.
Aral wasn't the only person who taught Miles how to be a decent adult. There's Cordelia. Did she ever tell him about torturing the psychologist on Beta? The first dozen times I read that scene, I didn't think of it as torture. I thought she was being clever. Insofar as it occurred to me that she might be doing something morally questionable, stealing the ship would have seemed more problematic than the torture incident. There's "Uncle Simon," who runs the secret police. He would not have told a civilian child about covert ops. I think there's an oblique mention at the beginning of Memory, of Miles doing much uglier jobs for Simon than courier work, which made something *click* in my mind. I would be astonished if Simon did not think of torture as being occasionally necessary.
The specific horror that happens to Simon in Memory could have been described in terms of the torture in The Warrior's Apprentice. Once I saw the echo, I was expecting a reference, because Bujold does has so many subtle cross-references. It isn't there. He doesn't feel like his brains are "ripped out of his head," he just feels like his "brain turns to snot."
*The Solstice Massacre on Komarr was such an outrage because there was no military need to kill the prisoners. As Aral saw it, there would be huge political advantages, in making Komarr easier to govern, if they treated the prisoners very gently. They weren't tortured for information, or killed anywhere near the heat of battle. The killer's motives are never discussed, but the only reasons I can think of for killing in such a context would be for revenge, or for sadism, or as a gesture of intimidation. Knowing Barrayar could not afford such a gesture is different from disapproving of killing prisoners as a general thing.
We also know Aral and Simon disapprove of the outrage on Kyril Island at the beginning of The Vor Game. That wasn't just abuse of trainees and use of biological weapons. The outrage, for Aral and Simon, was that it aggravated race hatred in the military, with a risk of escalating to civil war. Would they have considered it ok to do what Stannis did to an ethnically-mixed group of criminals serving short terms at hard labor? How about treating prisoners of war that way?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-11 05:18 pm (UTC)I think Bujold is one of those writers who is so incredibly lovable that it's very hard for many readers to see her flaws. I can imagine that in a few decades she'll occupy the niche that Heinlein does today. Some people will write carefully argued essays about the things she did that were wrong or offensive, and hordes of angry fans will try to drown out the critiques with sheer volume of adoration.