Talk about fascism from your heros. I love OSC’s Sf writings – well, most of them. But his political and social views are just so far out of my league it’s boggling.
Here, Card pretty much states that fascism is the only way to reign in the horror of free speech.
Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It’s not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It’s just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.
Read the entire rant at The Ornery American.
Update – I’d also recommend reading other interesting commentary regarding Card in the Kuro5hin article. Interesting stuff.
With all due respect, that’s not fascism.
As appalling as it may seem to treat the Koran that way, I might agree with this statement, it is preferable to physical torture.
I thought the Kuro5hin article was crap, as was the comparison between Ender and Hitler. (On the other hand, I think a comparison between Ender and Stalin could be made, easily.)
OSC has hardly made a secret of his feelings over the years.
Did you ever read the article in Salon about an interview with him? The one where he talks about how much he likes communism and dislikes capitalism?
Darn it. URL is http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card/index.html.
Personally, I feel that the woman had already established herself as “jumping to conclusions without appropriate information to that effect” – jhust by her original commentary – jumping to conclusions before having all the facts.
As such, I would hold any of the opinions she puts out as already pre-biased and pre-decided. She decided to find the connection between Card’s writing and Hitler long before she wrote her article, so I would hardly call her an objective reporter.
I could probably find the same parallels between Enders Game and the Easter Bunny if I worked hard enough at it.