The Leader of the Newts

SF and Treason

Gustav Dore’s illustration to the Divine Comedy

In Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno”, the ninth circle of Hell is reserved for the traitors. There, frozen into the lake of ice, the monstrous three-faced Satan, is eternally gnawing upon the bodies of the three worst traitors in history: Judas Iscariot, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus.

Most people know who Judas is, but the other two may be more obscure. I will come back to them later. First, let’s talk treason.

For millennia, treason was considered the worst sin imaginable. Betrayals of your family, your king, your country, and your God were seen as both morally contemptible and deliberately evil. Traitors in medieval Europe were punished by public torture and execution. In some Muslim countries, such as Iran, apostasy is still a capital crime. Even as recently as World War 2, traitors were executed. The infamous Lord Haw-Haw, the Englishman who anchored a Nazi propaganda radio show, was hanged for treason in Britain in 1946.

But in the last decades, and especially, though not exclusively, on the left, attitudes to treason have become much more ambiguous. Consider the lionizing of Edward Snowden who published classified documents and is now hiding in Russia; or of Chelsea Manning, court-martialed for the WikiLeaks scandal. Both are often described as ‘whistleblowers” rather than traitors. But the fact is that both broke the law and damaged national security, which is the legal definition of treason.

And then you have even more egregious examples of support for Islamic terrorism and radicalism in the West. Islamists clearly state that they regard the West as their enemy and are opposed to every single Western value: secularism, freedom of speech, and women and gay rights. Nevertheless, they have numerous allies among the literati. Judith Butler’s infamous embrace of Hamas is echoed by multiple “pro-Palestinian” protests, waiving flags of terrorism. This is not treason in the legal sense of the word but there is a clear ideological continuity between these actions and those of Sally-Anne Jones, an “ISIS bride” from Britain who converted to Islam to become an Islamic State fighter and propagandist.

So, what makes a traitor? As always, SF provides a magic mirror in which we can see some glimmerings of an answer. Let us start with the distinction among three categories of treason. And for that, let us return for a moment to the cold reaches of Inferno.

Lucifer, according to Christian theology, is the archetypal traitor: the beloved angel of God, he rebelled against the Creator out of pride, furious that Adam would be exalted above him. So, here is the first category: treason for vengeance.

Judas betrayed Christ for money. There are other interpretations of his actions, but the conventional one is that he sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. So, here is the second category: treason for profit.

But what about the other two Satan’s snacks, Brutus and Cassius Longinus? These men were the chief conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar. They are often presented in history books as noble and idealistic characters, defenders of freedom, who stabbed their longtime friend and associate out of the desire to protect the Roman Republic from the rising dictator. Far left Twitterati and Tik-Tokers who applaud political assassinations would undoubtedly embrace these two if they could spell their names. Dante, however, unhesitatingly dumps them in the lowest circle of hell. For him, they represent the worst kind of betrayal: treason for ideology.

Perhaps the easiest to understand - and to condemn - is treason for profit. Even today, as treason is losing its status of the ultimate crime, people who sell state secrets for money marshal little support or admiration. Saruman in The Lord of the Rings is a contemptible character, selling out to Sauron for power. No moral ambiguity there.

Treason for vengeance, however, is more complex. In Alan Campbell’s Scar Night (2006), for example, a professional poisoner named Devon literally brings down the city of Deepgate suspended on chains above the hellish abyss. His reason for doing so is revenge for his wife’s death and for his own exploitation by the priestly caste that rules Deepgate. Devon is a very unsympathetic character, and we are not supposed to identity with, or pity, him. However, he functions as the focus for the rottenness of the entire city whose worship of the monstrous god of the dead makes Devon’s treason understandable, if not forgivable. The fact that the abyss is inhabited by zombie angels reminds the reader of the treason of Lucifer who has sometimes been represented in literature as a sympathetic character, notably by William Blake. What if treason is against a tyrannical power or to avenge an intolerable wrong? Is it a bad thing?

Consider Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), in which the alien Trisolarans are invited to invade Earth by Ye Wenjie, a female astrophysicist who suffered in the Cultural Revolution. The realistic and unsparing depiction of the horrors of that self-inflicted genocide are enough to make the reader sympathize with Ye and accept her choice to answer the alien signal as understandable and perhaps even morally acceptable. But the trilogy does not end there, and a single act of vengeful treason mutates into an ideological crusade.

The Earth-Trisolaran Movement that betrays humanity and collaborates with the approaching fleet of alien invaders is composed of the same kind of people who support ISIS in the West: self-hating educated elites:

“The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

The ETO was called an organization of spiritual nobles. Most members came from the highly educated classes, and many were elites of the political and financial spheres….The ETO had once tried to develop membership among the common people, but these efforts all failed…because their thoughts were not as deeply influenced by modern science and philosophy, they still felt an overwhelming, instinctual identification with their own species. To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for them. But intellectual elites were different. Most of them have already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race…” (Liu 317).

Substitute “West” for “human civilization”, and you have an accurate depiction of the mindset of the postcolonial believers, so consumed with guilt over the supposed misdeeds of their own culture that they are willing to embrace its enemies, regardless of how violent, illiberal or dangerous they are. Liu’s great trilogy has been criticized for its supposed “Chinese nationalism” precisely by the people who believe that all nationalism is bad by definition. Only indigenous populations can have collective self-pride, though what constitutes indigeneity is never clear. Confusingly, China, formerly invaded and colonized by Japan and heavily exploited by the European powers in the 19th century, is not allowed its own national pride, presumably because it has traded its victimhood for patriotism and expansionism. ¹

The ideological traitors of Three-Body Problem explain Dante’s decision to depict the failed revolutionaries of Rome as fodder for Satan. Dante believed that Caesar was divinely ordained to rule and therefore Brutus and Cassius revolted against God. But regardless of his monarchic sentiments, the fractured history of Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries when he lived offered enough proof that religious or ideological extremism can make some people willing to betray their own kin for strangers, even when these strangers are a threat to the traitors themselves. You can buy spies with money. You can buy collaborators with promises of vengeance for real or perceived wrongs. But only true belief can buy you suicide bombers and those who cheer them on.

Let us end with one of the masterpieces of SF, unfortunately little known in the West. Karel Čapek (1890-1938) was a great Czech writer and playwright. Every time you say “robot”, you unwittingly honor his memory because he coined this word in his play R.U.R. (1920) as a derivative of the Slavic word “robota” - work. An opponent of both Nazism and communism, Čapek died before Hitler dismembered his country and before the USSR occupied it for forty years, or he would have likely ended murdered by one of these regimes (his brother was killed in Bergen-Belsen). His greatest SF novel is War with the Newts (1936).

The newts of the title are a species of salamanders, roughly humanlike in appearance, discovered on an island in Indonesia and promptly exploited by the rapacious European powers, first as divers and then as cheap labor force across the world. The analogy between the newts and Third-World indigenous peoples is quite clear throughout the novel. The newts are casually killed, shipped to other shores, and made to work as slaves. But eventually, their proliferation flips the power pyramid. Eventually the newts declare war on humanity, which they conduct by blowing up coasts and burrowing inland to flood continents. Ordinary people drown, suffocate, and starve to death as the newts conduct their relentless War of Liberation under the leadership of Chief Salamander.

But in the last chapter, in which the Author talks to himself, we are hit with a bombshell. Chief Salamander is no amphibian. He is human. “His real name is Andreas Schultze, and he took part in the Great War as an NCO somewhere.” ²

We do not know why Schulze betrays the human race, but we can imagine the combination of all three types of treason. Vengeance, perhaps, for some personal slight. Lust for power. And last but not least - an embrace of the ideology of resentment and guilt. Perhaps Schultze witnessed the mistreatment of newts. Perhaps he identifies with the downtrodden of the earth (or the sea, in this case). And perhaps he is just an idealist, eager to right his species wrongs.

And the fact is that it does not matter. Andreas Schultz, like the members of the Earth-Trisolaran Movement, is a traitor. And he deserves to be frozen in the lake of ice for an eternity.

1. I am not a fan of the current Chinese government, though it is orders of magnitude better than Mao. My point, though, is that the same people who embrace the Ayatollahs in Iran or the Taliban because “it is their culture”, denigrate Chinese nationalism.

2. The name with the initials AS is often interpreted as a sly reference to Hitler. Hitler’s paternal grandmother Maria Schicklgruber was unmarried when she gave birth to Hitler’s father Alois, who would have his mother’s name. She later married a man named Hitler or Hiedler who adopted her son and gave him his name (he may have been the boy’s biological father). Adolf always carried the name of Hitler, but once the scandalous history of his family became known, satirists seized upon “Heil Schicklgruber!” which does not quite have the ring of “Heil Hitler!”.