Lynda Williams at Reality Skimming continues her Ethics in Speculative Fiction series of essays and interviews by interviewing internationally published author Alma Alexander. Ms. Alexander is interest in what happens after “happily ever after”, especially to those who lose the climactic battle. What happens to the losers in a conflict? Is their story ever told?
If the story of those who lose in a conflict is ever told, it is certainly not by those who won the battle. History is written by the victors, and they tend to cast themselves as the good guys in a confrontation between Good and Evil. The vanquished in such conflicts become the bad guys, servants of evil, and they must be eradicated so that they can never again rise and threaten Goodness and Light. Then again, each side saw itself as on the side of righteousness, and its opposition as servants of iniquity, while the conflict still raged.
Why do the victors in a conflict treat a whitewashed history that portrays them as being on the side of the angels as objective fact? Why do the victors inflict upon the vanquished a heartless victor’s justice that designed to further humiliate their defeated enemies?
I think it comes down to our tendency as human beings to dehumanize our enemies so that we can fight them without reservation, using every weapon and stratagem at our disposal. But when the fighting’s done, and we see what we have done, cognitive dissonance sets in. We condemn our enemies as monsters, but we ourselves became monsters in order to defeat our enemies. We cannot acknowledge this lest we find ourselves forced to admit that our cause, however just it might have been, is irredeemably blackened by our methods.
This places us in a dilemma. We cannot admit that we are no better than our enemies or that our enemies were no worse than we were without throwing away our justifications for war. So we continue to dehumanize our enemies in the histories we write to explain the conflict to our children, and their children, and so on. All the while, any of the enemy who survived continue to tell their children the story as they understand it.
This tendency to dehumanize also affects us when we write. We instinctively root for some of our characters to win over the others, especially when writing the sort of fantasy that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings exemplifies. By not giving the characters we’ve cast as bad guys or villains the same characterization and moral ambiguity we lavish on our protagonists or heroes, we dehumanize them.