The Word for World Is Forest

by Ursula K. Le Guin

No such reassurance rounds off The Word for World is Forest. The author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy. The invaders from Earth are indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right. But the novel’s revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt of the oppressed. The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting, new and strange to them; the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating, or by the rules. It is dirty and brutal and shocking.

That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised – particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity. The ennobling aspect of resistance – of standing up, of fighting back, of driving the invader from the homeland – is seen and celebrated. The corrupting aspect – the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity, the replacement of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and reprisal – is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seem the best of reasons. That too is part of the damage done.

The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty.

And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man”. The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous. It was from such pressures, internalised, that this story resulted: forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely—and with less pleasure.

Contempt came into his face. “You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretences. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”