Imagine that the world has been invaded by an alien race that humans call "Buggers". They have invaded twice and a third invasion is expected. This is the idea behind the book “Enders Game” by Orson Card. In "Ender's Game", the main character Ender is sent to battle school at the age of 6 to begin his training to become a military genius. Throughout the book, Ender is taught to devise strategies to kill entire fleets of bastards. He is pushed to the breaking point several times to save the Earth from the enemy alien race. Ender was taught that the enemy has always been bastards and that they want to kill the entire human race. The evidence in the book points to a different enemy. Humanity, not the bastards, is the real enemy of "Ender's Game." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay If humans encountered an alien race, there is no telling what kind of being we would encounter. They may think and act like us or have no language we could understand. Which is the kind of being the humans encountered in “Enders Game.” When the humans sent a tugboat to investigate the endangered rock they now call Eros, they encountered the bastards for the first time. Every member of the ship's crew was killed by the bastards. This made the humans believe that the bastards wanted to kill them all, even though the bastards didn't have those intentions. Their minds are actually controlled by a queen and thus they did not know that they were killing innocent, individually thinking humans. When Ender finds the Hive Queen at the end of the book, they share thoughts and she tells Ender "We had no intention of killing, and when we understood we never returned (Card 321)." The bastards didn't mean to kill all the humans. They thought someone was simply invading the colony they were creating and were cutting off communication with their queen. If this is the only type of communication a species has, it is what they would assume other species have. Just like the humans in “Ender's Game” they believed that the bastards had some means of communicating with each other. When the first white men arrived on the shores of the Americas, they had no idea that people like Indians already lived there. When they discovered that the Indians had no organized religion and did not want to adopt one, they were considered savages. Simply because they didn't think the same way. When the humans assumed that the bastards intended to kill, they were determined to kill the alien species before killing the rest of the humans. Over time civilizations have had to defend themselves from other invading civilizations. It is a fact that over the centuries there have been countless people killed by wars. It is also a fact that with the passage of time people have had to invent other ways to defend themselves. From simple spears to swords, from horses to tanks. Humans have always discovered new ways to kill and defend themselves. This also applies when humans encounter bastards. When Mazer talks to Ender about the first invasion, Ender realizes that the bastards share a single mind. He realizes that those bastards probably didn't realize what they were doing. When he mentions this to Mazer he responds with “Just because they didn't know they were killing humans doesn't mean they weren't killing humans. We have the right to defend ourselves as best we can, and the only way we've found that works is to kill those bastards before they kill us (Map 270).” Humans saw no other way of self-preservation.”