A Death at the Gates of Heaven – Page 7
I appreciate all the kind notes and comments from everyone, truly. At the moment, I’m working to a tight deadline so although it might seem from how I appear online to be living a carefree and open existence, I’m pretty much working overtime at the moment. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have held on to my job at the moment, so I’m basically going for all I’m worth at that right now.
Nevertheless, this little short story continues! And by the way, this story appearing on the site has generated more than a few sales of the print and digital anthology. On behalf of the SpiderForest Webcomic Collective, I want to convey our thanks for your support, and that we’re all really hoping you enjoy the books!
About A Death At The Gates Of Heaven:
This story first appeared in 2018 in the Spiderforest Webcomic Collective anthology Threads: A Gallery of Rogues, which is available in print for the impatient among you by clicking on the image below. It appeared alongside fifteen other graphic short stories in full color, and so for my money it’s a good buy for entertainment during the current time! You can also find other volumes of our anthology, and the work of a lot of other great Spiderforest artists worth looking into.
And of course, please give Ally’s spectacular Wychwood a look as well!
And as always, thanks for the continued support! The notes and emails I’ve received have all been so positive and encouraging, I can’t tell you all how much it means to me. God bless!
So, a human war “hero” is bad, but centran war criminal (and murderer-apparent) is “a mistake”, but is all well and dandy. What a lovely leap in logic.
Glad to hear you are holding somehow. 🙂
Depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?
I *love* the little trick you found of using the slight angle of the glasses to convey S’s emotions. Would have been much harder to do with just a plain blank faceplate
Yeah, it’s kind of like Gir from Invader Zim. I tried initially to give him a dot-matrix eyeplate but it didn’t look good. And definitely the blank faceplate is only expressive of certain emotions.
S is a good hypocrite entitled and smug
We’re always predisposed to think “our” side is rational, enlightened and forward thinking, and the “other” side is irrational, resistant to the truth and out to get us.
I wonder is he extracting a hitman?
I sense a „What you call genocide, I call a days work“ moment incoming…
“What lies? You mean my failure to divulge my true identity? Believe me, Major, I yearned to tell you. But I knew how much more satisfaction you would have if you found out for yourself, and that was my only deception. Marritza was a magnificent file clerk. And I, Gul Darhe’el? I hope you’ll not think it immodest of me to say so, but I was a magnificent leader. Oh, you never saw Gallitep at its height. For a labor camp, it was the very model of order and efficiency. And why? For that, you have to look to the top. To me! My word, my every glance, was law. And my verdict was always the same: Guilty.”
“You’re insane!”
“Oh, no, no, Major… you can’t dismiss me that easily. I did what had to be done. My men understood that, and that’s why they loved me. I would order them to go out and kill Bajoran scum, and they’d do it, they’d murder them! They’d come back covered in blood but they felt clean! Now why did they feel that way, Major? Because they were clean!”
(…)
„I was twelve when I started fighting but I’ve heard of some who were even younger than that.“
„Yes, yes, let’s get to the real issue. How many Cardassians did you kill? I mean personally.“
„I didn’t keep count.“
„Oh, I think you did. And I’m sure your total wasn’t limited to military personnel. After all, the most effective terrorist weapon was random violence. Don’t leave now, Major, it’s just getting good. How many Cardassian civilians did you kill?“
„Look, I regret a lot of what I had to do.“
„How convenient of you.“
„We had no choice! We were fighting for survival!“
„So were we! We had an empire to protect. We needed your resources. Everything I did was for the greater glory of Cardassia! And if you spineless scum had to be ground under, so much the better. All that mattered was Cardassia. I loved my homeland. That’s what justified my actions, that’s what gave me my strength.“
„Nothing justifies genocide.“
„What you call genocide, I call a day’s work.“
There is a bit of a dig at Star Trek in this I guess. There’s this smugness in some sci fi milieus, exemplified by the Federation, believing itself to be some highly evolved group that can’t comprehend that anyone might not want to be a part of it, and being more than a little condescending to whoever doesn’t live by their rules and morals. But on the other hand, it’s races like the Ferengi, Cardassians and Klingons who act as fools to the Federation’s self-indulgence, probably unintentionally, by being far more morally consistent. You might not LIKE Ferengi morality (and there’s some debate as to whether they might have been an antisemitic stereotype) but they lived by them and like it or not, had a functional society. There’s a hidden insult in the suggestion that someone needs to “grow” or “be educated” by someone else – it assumes that one person is in a more advanced form than the other. It’s the cause of a great deal of problems between people at the moment and I’m not entirely sure where it comes from, but it can come to dominate relations between people in a very destructive way.
Well that is what happens when you have a communist society smug idiots who think they know best because communism. Frankly DS9 stole everything from Babylon 5 and did it worse despite being one of the best star trek entries.
DS9 was far more successful at portraying the Federation as a deeply flawed and often overbearing entity. I much preferred the representation in DS9 than in the other incarnations, except perhaps the Original Series, in which the Federation was distant and somewhat irrelevant to the goings-on in the Enterprise’s exploration mission. There, you had more latitude for the characters to explore their own philosophies and to reap the consequences. In TNG, much as I loved it, they were always just a bit too cocksure about their commitment to goodness and the correctness of the Prime Directive, which often got tossed around to make life convenient for them when they needed a plot twist to avoid doing something complicated. On the other hand the current crop of Trek goes a bit too far in the other direction and I’m not sure I get where it’s coming from this time in Discovery and Picard. Enterprise was the most faithful to the difficulty of really grappling with the morality of things like alien contact and whether or not humanity would or should be an ascendant galactic species. That series had a ton of unrealized potential. With only a few exceptions I don’t rate Voyager at all. They always sum up by realizing how right they are and how committed they should be to their own ideas. I found it tiresome after a while.
The modern Star Trek has gone where it was doomed to go if Voyage was any proof. I remember Janeway had this captain on trial for simply keeping his crew alive by killing space dolphins. He told her his crew was starving, bulk heads were broken, and the engines were dead. She just said “its never easy but if we give up being human we lose more” like really what a pompous bitch she ignored all his issues and tried him for murder because killing animals to survive is wrong.
Yeah, this is ugly.
There are real world examples that come to mind but I won’t post them here considering some fellow readers are flipping out over Star Trek (honestly, Star Trek is something that you should not taking seriously)
Well strictly speaking fiction itself is not something to take too seriously. Even I am not immune, I guess, to the effects of what I am now calling the “Age of the Violent Hard-Ons.” We get a little carried away don’t we.
And yes you’re right, it’s very easy to race to the bottom on things like blame and who has done worse than whom when presented with arguments like what I depicted in this story. I subscribe to the Curtis LeMay principle that’s all war is immoral, but once started you can often be carried along by a higher need to win, which subjects you to the likelihood that you will commit atrocities in the name of victory that you would never consider under other conditions. The way I phrase it is that some wars, once started, can be worth winning, but they are almost never worth starting in the first place.
Exitus acta probat.
God help us, I’m certainly not any kind of supporter of ends justifying means, nor of the “In war there is no law” approach to the world.
I think what LeMay was really getting at was that desperate means sometimes become one’s only option in a war, which is the reason to avoid warfare in the first place. LeMay gets a very bad rap for his support for SAC and atomic deterrence but he was not by nature a warmonger and spoke on a number of occasions of the importance of deterrence. Hermann Kahn similarly was a badly misunderstood thinking in the field of deterrence.