SPOILERS!
Episode 5: The Bells
What choice did we have? Us who held Daenerys as the ideal leader, who named our children after her then had to defend her virtue after she burnt innocent children the same age as our own. What choice did we have but to blame the “incompetent” producers. Our beloved Khaleesi would never have done something so heinous.
This was the dilemma many supporters of the communist doctrine found themselves in after being sent to the gulag in soviet Russia, having to defend their beloved social theory behind the bars of the cells it created.
“How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved axe — then have to justify its wisdom. But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
With palpable disbelief, shock and disappointment we watched as our dream for a better Westeros, a free Westeros ruled by the benevolent Queen Daenerys was reduced to ash. How did we get here? A deep, pervasive feeling that we have somehow been cheated sets in. But by who dear Reader? The writers or Our Khaleesi?
I have to admit, I was outraged and I too vented my frustrations on the producers. I have now come to believe however that this conclusion was inevitable, it was merely the culmination of a cult of personality that we all partook in until we were unwillingly forced, Kicking and screaming to open our eyes and see through its benevolent guise.
Nature or Nurture?
In psychology, there is an ongoing debate about nature vs nurture. The premise is simple “to what extent do psychological processes reflect biological or environmental influences”. Daenerys Targaryen did not have a pleasant life, Hers was the real tragedy from beginning to end. She lost everyone she ever loved, her husband, her unborn son, her dragons and in the end, it was a man she loved who ended her life at the foot of a throne she had dedicated her whole life to.
Undressed by her brother and then raped on her wedding day. The question is, Did she lose her mind in the end or was she already damaged by the traumas of her past? A combination of both maybe? Some say it was in her blood, perhaps even destiny. What I can say for sure is that many like her have transcended the horrors of their past without burning down whole cities. Maybe, like the rest of us, she always had the capacity for both good and evil but lack of opportunity made her seem virtuous, until the tables turned. Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Fear is the mother of morality”. So what was it nature or nurture? I’ll leave this one for you to decide.
The Signs
The harmless, timid, wide-eyed girl we first encounter does not stay that way for long. Carrying the son of warrior king Khal Drogo Daenerys becomes the Khaleesi of a vast Dothraki horde. For the first time, she is happy but even more importantly, she has power. Former U.S president Abraham Lincoln once remarked “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”, freed from the adversity of her upbringing it is not long before we start to see Daenerys’ true character.
Her husband decides to execute her older brother, She does not aid him, but she raises no finger to stop it. Viserys looks at her little sister and he screams “Danny please”. She looks on and doesn’t utter a word, and make no mistake this is not the look of a terrified little girl afraid to speak up, this is the look of a Queen indifferent to the impending death of her own brother. Granted Viserys was no saint, far from it to be honest but he single-handedly protected and educated her since she was a helpless child. Nonetheless, Daenerys remains unmoved, even anger would have shown a capacity for emotion but she is just cold. He shouts out again, one last plight of mercy to his little sister.
Silence…
His final cries, his last breath, nothing provokes an emotional response from the Khaleesi, Instead she says softly “he is no dragon, fire cannot kill a dragon“. Right then dear Reader we should have known who she was. If she couldn’t muster the emotional strength to care about her own blood what chance did the peasants of kings landing have?
What about you and me. We stood there with her and cheered from the comfort of our couches. Who doesn’t like to see someone rise above their past weaknesses and become strong and assertive, But was that the lesson here? Most of us just said nothing, we didn’t condemn her actions but we didn’t cheer for her either, That makes us innocent right? Well, in any case, Viserys was evil so he deserved to die, right?
On Saturday 30 December 2006 former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was executed. The event was broadcast on live tv. We watched, some cheered, some were indifferent. When it was all done, we went about our business as if nothing happened, went to the mall, watched a movie, went to watch our son’s soccer practice, just another Saturday.
Fiction it turns out, is often just the mirror of our own perverse reality.
Wikipedia notes “While officially released footage of the event stopped short of showing the actual execution, an amateur video shot using a camera phone from a staircase leading up to the gallows surface, contained low-quality footage of the entire hanging. The amateur footage, unlike the official footage, included sound; witnesses could be heard taunting Saddam at the gallows.”
Yes, witnesses taunted the condemned man and don’t be quick to judge them either, They are you and me, they are well-intentioned individuals thoroughly convinced about the just nature of their cause. What would you have done if you were a Dothraki screamer, would you have exercised mercy? If you were part of the unsullied infantry mutilated and enslaved all your life and then finally free, if you were one of the women raped by the masters, if you had watched your father get mauled by a bear in the fighting pits, would you have exercised mercy?
To quote Solzhenitsyn once again, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Those that taunted the hanging corpse of Saddam Hussein are not unique individuals that much different from you and I. Only that in the moment they believed themselves paragons of virtue, their hatred and murderous intent vindicated by the purity of their cause. Saddam Hussein was evil so he deserved to die, right?
The Queen’s Justice
When Daenerys killed the masters in Astepor, we got our first taste of the Khaleesi’s justice. She doesn’t bend, she breaks. She said “Harm no children” and therefore cleared her conscience, but to see your father murdered was this not harm enough for the children? Justice we all called it.
The masters of Mereen had to die. It was for a good cause, but whose cause exactly? The masters were not good people; they were slavers and murderers but did murdering them in return make our queen any better? Does being evil to someone who is evil make your actions good? Do good intentions justify the means by which they are pursued?
Ser Barristan Selmy councils her saying, “ your grace the city is yours now, all these people are your subjects now sometimes it’s better to answer injustice with mercy”, she responds “I will answer injustice with justice“, then she has 162 men nailed to crosses alive, Justice!
After world war two nazi war criminals were tried and sentenced at the Nuremberg trials. We could have given in to our baser impulses and nailed them to crosses too, lord knows they deserved it, but would that have been a good foundation for the future? Doing so would only have sown more resentment and anger. Instead, we tried them legally and convicted them. 20 years on we are better for it. We practice justice with mercy lest our darkness consumes us and we become much like those we condemn.
What separates us from other animals is not just our capacity for evil but our ability to transcend it. We are not free of temptation, but through a continuous process of self-reflection and discipline, we can tip the balance towards the good.
Beyond Good and Evil
In Astepor a butcher named Cleon among the man Daenerys freed deposed the council she established before she left and declared himself his imperial majesty. Not all victims are good.
Daenerys meets with Hizdar Zo Loraq and he mentions his father who oversaw the maintenance of all of Mereen’s landmarks, Daenerys thanks him for this and she says she would be honoured to meet him. Hizdar responds “you have your grace, you crucified him. I pray you never see a member of your family treated so cruelly” She replies haughtily “ your father crucified innocent children”, to which Hizdar responds “ my father spoke against crucifying those children, he decried it as a criminal act but was overruled”. He then asks “ is it justice to answer one crime with another?” Not all who have power are evil.
The Dangers of Ideological Possession
How could we see the monster our Khaleesi was turning into when the veil of her admirable social theory was draped over our eyes.
She says to Hizdar “I am sorry you no longer have a father, but my treatment of the masters was no crime, you’d be wise to remember that”. Like all those possessed by the necessity and virtue of their ideology, Daenerys employs her subjective morality to impose her will on those she condemns.
“Let the priests argue over good and evil” she says and what this means is whatever serves her mission is good and everything that goes against it is evil. If her proclaimed mission is to end slavery, then it is a good mission right? By this definition, any impediment to that mission is evil. The citizens of kings landing stood as impediments to this mission, So by their unfortunate birthright they stood condemned as impediments to the pursuit of Daenerys’ Utopia.
Much like the kulaks in soviet Russia had to perish in the millions because by their unfortunate birthright they stood as impediments to Stalin’s Marxist Utopia. The citizens of communist china too had to pay the human price for Chairman Mao’s “Great leap forward“, and they paid it in the tens of millions.
All these atrocities and many others were born out of sympathetic social theories whose intent was to help “the people”. Good as a mission may be it is what can then be justified in its pursuit that is dangerous. The world is not a perfect place and working towards alleviating the suffering that’s endemic to existence is a noble pursuit, The question always is however, at what cost?
Rarely are there neat solutions to the problems we have in the world but only trade-offs. We mostly have to choose what we are willing to forgo to achieve our desired end. This requires not only understanding the desired end but the consequences of pursuing that end.
Ideology blinds us to these realities and makes the goal paramount regardless of the cost.
Maybe the citizens of kings landing were guilty and Daenerys was indeed divinely ordained judge, jury and executioner, Maybe. We never asked if she ever deserved to rule anyone in the first place. She believed she was the rightful ruler because of her birthright and her superior blood, But so did Adolf Hitler.
We ignored Daenerys’ past atrocities much like today’s proponents of Communist, Socialist and even fascistic theories ignore the crimes perpetrated in their name because ideological possession traps you in a fog. There was never any difference between Daenerys and her brother Viserys, Just that Viserys didn’t pretend to be motivated by a desire to help the innocent.
We understand very little about our own capacity for malevolence so we look at the people In history from a moral pedestal. Do you really think that the german people were intimidated by a single Hitler into ignoring what was happening during the holocaust? Do you think they somehow just didn’t know what was happening? Maybe you believe that a whole nation just turned evil? No dear reader these were all well-meaning people like you and me, who loved their children and were kind to their neighbours. Ideology blinded them to the evils they were complicit in. If we ignore history and we view ourselves as morally and intellectually superior to those who came before us, we are doomed to repeating their mistakes.
To quote C.S Lewis “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Valar Morghulis
As she stood atop the steps of what used to be the red keep. Much like Adolf Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg in 1927, The Khaleesi gave her final speech with decisive force, elevated and surrounded by her massive army. She promised to liberate the whole world from the back of Drogon. We all felt chills as she addressed her loyal soldiers ”you have freed the people of kings landing. But the war is not over, we will not lay down our spears until we have liberated all the people of the world. From Winterfell to Dorne, from Lannisport to Qarth, from the summer isles to the jade sea! Women, men and children”
We don’t quiver because we fear the prospect of worldwide liberation. We quiver because now we know the cost.
Now we are painfully aware of the Khaleesi’s brand of liberty,
Fire and Blood!
“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn(The gulag archipelago)
A few Questions for the Reader.
- Was Daenerys born an evil tyrant?
- Or was she just the victim of a traumatic past?
- Was she a well-intentioned but misguided leader, whose ignorance of her intrinsic capacity for both good and evil led her to eventually lose control of the precarious balance between the two, then she gave in to her baser impulses?
- Or was she merely guilty of ignoring her true motivations, the deeper unconscious impulses dictating her actions?
- Maybe it was the interaction of all these that led to the massacre at kings landing?
Further Reading
The gulag archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Crime and punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Unit 731 Testimony – Hal gold
1984 – George Orwell
Ordinary men – Christopher Browning
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