In Ender's Game there are so many different enemies. The one that Ender is instructed to fight in the end are the bugs, the alliens who the human world is so afraid of. But in terms of the other, I would think that Ender and his jeesh are more "other" than the alliens they are fighting. These young children who have these great minds are taught tactics and battle manuvers that no normal human child would be able to do. In the effort to creat these guenius children the government created another "other" that they will eventually want to distroy. As soon as he killed all the buggers, all of the countries of the world came after him. Even though he was their hero, he disolved their united front against an attack by the buggers. He was too powerful and too good to let anyone have him. Therefore, in the minds of the normal citizens of the world Ender became that other that needed destroying.
There always needs to be a semblance of sameness within any society. We destroy or condem what is not like us because it is frightening. What if it could hurt us? What if it too is determined to destroy what they do not understand. Peter while the world does not understand him, still believes him to be a normal human being. They swapped the impressions of Ender's compassion with Peter's violence. People can empathise with someone who wants power, like Peter. Ender however, his ability to work with others and to create a coalition of young people who unwittingly destroyed an enemy is too great of an idea for people to place themsevles within. Instead, Ender becomes the other. Is it possible then, that there are always humans, always people who are others? Perhaps the Jews? Albanians? The other is simply what we ourselves do not understand within our own ignorance. It doesnt need to be an alien for us to desire to anihilate it.
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I think there are always "others". It is essential to the way that we humans define ourselves and form our identity. It is more common to look at the other and say, "I am not that because that is different than I" than to formulate thought the other way, that is, starting from nothing and defining what we are without relation to others. What we are in comparison to others is very either/or--we are either similiar or dissimiliar. We are either man or woman. We are either human or not. "It was from Hegel's account of the clash between Master and Slave that Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre took the categorical opposition of Self and Other and made it into an absolute" (Source: http://www.static-ops.org/archive_june/essay_3.htm). I read de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" freshman year, and highly reccoment it. In this work, de Beauvoir states, "Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. ... Jews are 'different' for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged." In order for the master or the “one” to define what one IS, he must set himself up against what he is not--definition by opposition.
This theme of "otherness" is present in many of the works we have read so far. Manifest Destiny encompases notions of defeating "the savages"; "He, She, and It" raises the question of Human (the One, the creator) vs. Machine (the other, the created). THe theme is also inextricable in sci-fi works that deal with encounters of alien races, as they truly are "others" in every sense of the world--completely unknown to our world.
I agree with Jessica - there are always others. Humanity needs to identify a "them" in order to indentify an "us", in order to unite the in-group. Countries are most united in times of war (war time presidents are always reelected), groups of kids in elementary or middle school bond by picking on kids outside the group, and the whole Japanese system of in-group vs. out-group fosters community and loyalty.
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