Gathered citizens and soldiers! What is the purpose of our having gathered in this place today? It is to console the souls of the 1,500,000 departed who fell in the Astate Starzone. They sacrificed their honorable live protecting the freedom of their motherland. They were good spouses, good parents, good children, good lovers. They deserved to have happy lives. But they gave up that privilege and gave up their lives. Citizens, I dare to ask! Why did 1,500,000 soldiers die? There is only one answer. They gave up their lives to protect the freedom of their motherland! Do you suppose that this is worthy of a noble death? My friends; here we must bear in mind. The motherland and freedom; these things are worth protecting. This mighty motherland is free. Friends, don’t be afraid of death! We will fight for the sake of our free motherland! We must fight for our motherland! Love live the Alliance! Long live the Republic! Down with the Empire!
Our weapon is the unified will of all our citizens. This is a free country and being a part of a democratic republic, you have the freedom to oppose national policy. However, if you citizens are people of good sense, you must understand that in order to advance toward true freedom you must be one with the nation! Friends!
Secretary of Defense, I am Jessica Edwards. I am the fiancé of 6th Fleet Staff Officer Jean Robert Lap who died in battle at the Astate Encounter. No. I was his fiancé.
That’s…that’s regrettable. But…
You don’t need to console me because you say that my fiancée achieved a noble death protecting the motherland.
I see. Well, you are a person who must be called a model for the surviving women and children.
Thank you very much. I only came to ask you one question, Secretary of Defense.
What kind of question is it? I hope it’s a question I can answer.
Where were you?
Huh? What?
My fiancée went to battle in order to protect the motherland, and now he’s gone – Secretary of Defense! – Where were you? Where were you who glorify the war dead?
Miss..
Where is your family? I offered my fiancé as a sacrifice. So where is your family, who preach the necessity of citizen sacrifice. Are you practicing what you preach?
Guards, this woman has lost her composure. Take her into another room.
Let me go! Let me go!
Regrettably, grief invites madness. However, we citizens of the Free Planets Alliance must not be defeated by grief. We must commit ourselves to sanity. Victory in freedom! The military band, the national anthem! Play the national anthem!
Typically Trunhilt crafts a speech sewn of non sequiturs (unified will? political opposition?) and pathos provoking rhetoric. Interestingly, he never explicitly says that citizens have freedom. They have, as he put it, the freedom to oppose national policy, but as Yang pointed out later that episode, the greatest freedom is “the freedom to not get involved.” What Trunhilt does explicitly state is that the nation is free – the freedom of the motherland. Like many democracies, the ideology of freedom is often appealed to as a legal reality, but legality doesn’t always take into consideration the social conditions under which such legal rights are enacted and used: you can oppose national policy but you’ll have the government’s “secret police” (PKC) up your ass.
The fact that “in order to advance toward true freedom, you must be one with the nation,” does stir up quite a deal of trouble. To dissent is to go against the nation, so Trunhilt’s juxtaposition of freedom and unity is frighteningly paradoxical. The rhetorical deployment of the nation, specifically the essentialist ideology of national absolutism – that the nation’s subjects are all the same (seen one, seen ‘em all) – opens up for viewing the heterogeneity of political nation-states and cultural nations. Rhetoricians under the banner of democracy will use this as a discursive device to establish hegemony, the sense that the social structure of the nation is egalitarian, and it’s funny to see how the Empire never says anything about a “nation” (I think?), though in a sense they are a nation of monarchial ideologues. I remember somewhere, someone (in the anime) saying that democracy was just a means for the few to dominate the many. The difference between the rulers of the Free Planets Alliance and the Empire is that the latter are more aware of their hegemony and the sheer power they have, while the former (most of them, Trunhilt was quite calculating) are rather ignorant of their power and subsequently fall subject to their very own hegemony – I’m thinking particularly of the officials at Yang’s inquisition around episode 34 when the graceful Yang verbally out-maneuvers them and exposes that power and political position (and intelligence) aren’t always coextensive.
←[77]
One Comment
“I remember somewhere, someone (in the anime) saying that democracy was just a means for the few to dominate the many”
That’s Lang, but he does not exactly says that: Lang believe that “the few rule the many” is the right way of government: being obviously very elitist, his moral can be summarized as “I’m way smarter than the average, therefore I have to be in charge”, and he point during a conversation with Oberstein that the same can happen with a democraty (you need 51% of the vote to rule 100% of the population, but the biggest faction of the victorious party who’s worth 26 of its 51% can rule the whole party, and the clan which is worth 14% can rule the dominating faction of the victorious party, etc: ergo, the minority rules in the name of the majority).
Anyway, I like to link both Lang and Truniht to Bob Altemeyer’s theories of authoritarism and social dominance: both characters are social dominators: they want to rule over the rubes and have a hight opinion of themselves, but while Lang is only a social dominator (and does not make any mystery of this), Trunhit is a “double high”: prone to use religion and beliefs that are not his own to grasp power, going way farther than Lang into self-rightousness, and ready to submit to anyone more powerful than he is (had Yang entered politics, Trunhit would have been fast to convert to Yangism and to become a very zealous supporter) going as far as putting on a show of self depressiation in front of his new masters later in the story, while Lang will fight back if he feels that those above him do not deserve his respect.