Lying to Your Face: The Hegemony & Donald J. Trump
- Victoria Xia
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
The government lies to us.
It’s reprehensible. It’s more blatant than ever.
You know it. Your friends know it. Everyone knows it—Americans’ trust in the government is at a historic low, with just 17% who trust the federal government a majority of the time. With the conflicts surrounding Israel-Palestine, ICE, transgender rights, and—most recently—Iran, our president sits at a paltry 33% approval rate. Life is hard, people are struggling, and the state of modern politics is bleak… but when is it not?
Ender’s Game… well, it’s anti-war, to an extent, and preaches empathy and understanding. The main story follows a small but startlingly-intelligent little boy (the titular Ender) in his journey to save the human race from a group of buglike aliens—or so he thinks. Ender undergoes too many traumatic trials for someone so young, being the third child in a world where only two are permitted and having a peerless intellect that makes him a leader, target, and messiah all at once; he is enrolled in Battle School, where young boys and girls play war games to become capable interstellar military commanders, and after killing a classmate in self-defense, he is pushed to Command School, a place for deadly intelligent adolescents that he nonetheless dominates despite his youth. Ender makes friends, takes lives, and learns how to be like the enemy in order to defeat them. Ender’s Game discusses love, violence, and knowledge.
It discusses the obfuscation of knowledge. It discusses the warping of it.
Throughout the course of the novel, Card makes readily apparent that the world around Ender conforms to the idea that knowledge is power: it is the weapon that the pubescent protagonist wields fiercely in defense of himself, it is the elixir he constantly reaches for to slake his thirst in life, it is the means by which he commits genocide on the behalf of mankind. Though it is Ender’s exceeding intelligence in both the logical and emotional spheres that enables the total annihilation of the Formics (crudely called “buggers”) as a species, the boy himself conducts this ultimate evil act unknowingly—he is manipulated into it, deceived by his higher-ups into thinking it’s all just a game when, in reality, he is fighting real enemies with real human forces, sacrificing real lives to eradicate a real civilization. How terribly ironic that the boy who holds the gift of knowledge so closely is denied the privilege of having it.
When he is finally allowed the truth, he is devastated: by this point in the book, he is only eleven years old, and he’s been lied to by every adult (and even some fellow children, including his sister) in his life so far. Since he was six, Ender was groomed to be a most excellent military commander, both exceedingly empathetic and exceedingly exact in his ruthlessness. The overarching International Fleet (I.F.) of the world’s Hegemony needs someone to take out a perceived threat, and its agents are willing to say anything to make sure humanity is safe from the buggers—to make sure that, at the end of the day, it’s the humans who survive and the buggers who don’t.
Of course, it turns out that the buggers are not really a threat at all. There was to be no “Third Invasion” by the Formics on Earth, only a shivering hiding-away in the shame of having attacked a species they didn’t know was sentient. The issue, ultimately, is that they could not communicate to humanity that they would not harm them any longer, and so the little fleshies of the Hegemony launched a full-tilt assault on a retreating people, intent on eradication.
Humans, themselves, are the ones to work themselves into froths, inclined towards definitive extermination rather than diplomacy—despite Ender’s insistence on diplomacy and de-escalation, sharing words with the languageless Formic hivemind is near impossible, especially given the heavy propaganda and conflict simmering on Earth itself. There is no drive to find a way to truly speak with the Formics, and international relations are volatile at best even considering more temperate political voices; after nursing the wounds of dead humans in alien conflicts past, the I.F. turns towards intense propaganda.
Humanity grows increasingly funneled towards anti-bugger violence the closer a possible Third Invasion comes to be, frantic in its efforts to paint an enemy: precious resources are concentrated towards the education of interstellar military commanders trained from childhood to kill their alien enemies most efficiently, videos of the past invasions are clipped and screened to show the brilliance of human fighters, bugger masks are sold to children to play as villains in cops-and-robbers-style games. Despite most humans never meeting a bugger in person, they treat them as grotesque caricatures of evil: black-and-white smears on the homely canvas of Earth, beings lacking in compassion who are only capable of depravity and destruction; both weak and overwhelmingly powerful, they are at once a cakewalk for the capable soldiers of the I.F. and an incredible threat to the planet as a whole.
Sound familiar? There are too many overused stereotypes of Hispanic-Americans stealing jobs yet also being lazy and never working; there is the idea of some mystical Jewish conglomerate controlling the country and drinking the blood of infants yet being so weak and cowardly that a good stamp of the boot is all that’s needed to scare them away.
The propaganda of bigotry is hypocritical: the enemy is necessarily strong enough to fear but weak enough to degrade; they will steal children and maim women, but a strong and good-hearted man of the majority demographic could beat them back with enough in-group passion. This has been the case in fascist history, in the fascist now, and—most likely—in the fascist future.
In such a time when the President of the United States can state on social media that he will kill “a whole civilization” without hesitation, that if they do not surrender the Iranian people will be “living in hell,” that he will bomb them “back to the stone ages, where they belong”—how can anyone possibly hold faith in the government?
American politicians, political commentators, and Trump himself have become increasingly self-contradictory and extreme in their efforts to propagandize for the Iran War. Our military is chock full of jet-flying badasses who can wipe out an Iranian naval base in an instant if you just watch what the White House posts on social media, but are tender martyrs for the starred-and-striped soul who must be avenged without for a second acknowledging the slaughter of a hundred innocent schoolchildren, because our thirteen to their two thousand somehow means more because they lie under a red-white-and-blue flag. The Iranian navy is dead in the water, yet we still cannot control the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has been totally dominated, for sure, but we still may need boots on the ground and to draft your sons and daughters to kill a bunch of people in the Middle East with whom they have absolutely no connection.
With enough money and power, you can say anything, do anything; slander anyone, kill anyone. If you keep lying to your followers, promising easy living and cheap groceries, then they will do it for you and kiss your feet while they’re at it.
In these scenarios—in Ender’s Game, in real life—people are unendingly and hopelessly gullible, willfully or not. People might catch a fishy smell, but actually digging into it requires grit and pain that many are not willing to expose themselves to; it’s easier to tuck one’s head away, listen to the Hegemon or the president of your nation, close your eyes, and nod along no matter what. It is a simple and very tempting life.
It is crucial to never fall for it.
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