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The Hunger Games HOWTO
The Hunger Games HOWTO
You have seen the movie The Hunger Games. In a "dystopian" future, each of the nation's twelve districts are required to supply a boy and a girl, twelve to eighteen years old, to fight to death in an arena. This is punishment for a revolt many years ago.
You are inspired. Let's do this! How do we do this?
There should not be many spoilers in this article, but it will help if you have read the book and/or seen the movie. I have seen only the first movie and read only the first book. I could be missing some plot exposition.
Every year, we select a group of boys and girls between twelve and eighteen as tributes who fight to the death in our arena. The event is symbolic, although we do everything possible to make it fun. To pull this all off...
The age range probably has a lot to do with author Suzanne Collins' target audience.
The book is clearer and more logical than the movie. Short stories convert well into movies. Novels are rather long. Hunger Games is written in first person. The novel closely follows the main character's train of thought. This sort of thing is hard to show in a movie, and it matters here.
The One Eyed Doe
A Doe had had the misfortune to lose one of her eyes, and could not see any one approaching her on that side. So to avoid any danger she always used to feed on a high cliff near the sea, with her sound eye looking towards the land. By this means she could see whenever the hunters approached her on land, and often escaped by this means. But the hunters found out that she was blind of one eye, and hiring a boat rowed under the cliff where she used to feed and shot her from the sea. "Ah," cried she with her dying voice,
"You cannot escape your fate."
In The Hunger Games, some of the tributes are described as career tributes. They are trained from early childhood to fight in the arena. In some cultural contexts, this makes sense. To a district administration, victory in the arena is prestigious. The tributes could be eager to represent their district and family, showing off their skill in battle, and the courageous way they finally bite it. If only four or six of the tributes are trained this way, their chances of survival would be very much better than that of the others, chosen by lot. This is especially true if the career tributes are seventeen and eighteen years old. In the book, they all seem to be large. Twelve year old girls are dead meat.
The moral of the fable quoted above, is alien to modern ears. It made sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who originally collected Aesop's Fables. Whatever was to befall you, you were expected to face it bravely. This would have made it much easier for the Romans to stage their gladiatorial games. Greek and Roman writers had no pity for losers. Carefully read Plutarch's history of Roman general Aemilius Paulus. When Macedonian King Perseus begged for mercy. Aemilius was offended...
Why, unhappy man, do you thus take pains to exonerate fortune of your heaviest charge against her, by conduct that will make it seem that you are not unjustly in calamity, and that it is not your present condition, but your former happiness, that was more than your deserts? And why depreciate also my victory, and make my conquests insignificant, by proving yourself a coward, and a foe beneath a Roman? Distressed valour challenges great respect, even from enemies; but cowardice, though never so successful, from the Romans has always met with scorn.
According to Plutarch,
...[Perseus] was possessed with a vice more sordid than
covetousness itself, namely, the fondness of life; by which he
deprived himself even of pity, the only thing that fortune never
takes away from the most wretched.
Plutarch would have died bravely in the arena.
It is possible to indoctrinate people into a high level of obedience. When their leader Marshall Applewhite, gave orders, the members of the Heaven's Gate cult, committed suicide. The end of Jim Jones' People's Temple actually was a mass murder, but this required the cooperation of many, if not most of the members. According to Wikipedia, members of the Assassins, did not leap off the battlements to their deaths, at the command of their leader. Most of their assassinations were suicide missions, though.
All of these are cults that people voluntarily joined. The people around them had the option of not joining, and in many cases, of leaving when the going got too weird. Indoctrinating an entire nation to this level of obedience, would be a challenge.
There are (or were) the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. According to Wikipedia, the Tamil Tigers invented suicide belts, and pioneered the use of women as suicide bombers. Young Tamils who joined the Black Tiger wing were granted a last supper with the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, and their families were honoured. The Tamil Tigers may have been very good at indoctrinating at least a subset of their young people. The Tigers probably were ruthless enough to kill the families of bombers who did not follow orders. We do not know how willing the bombers actually were.
Japanese military doctrine stated that Japanese military were to fight to the death. Japan quickly ran out of trained pilots during WWII. Late in the war, their air operations were massacres, as half trained Japanese pilots in obsolete aircraft took on superior numbers of crack U.S. Navy pilots in the latest equipment. The Kamikaze tactic of deliberately crashing into enemy ships and aircraft had little effect on their pilots' chances of survival.
Read up on Aztec Flowery Death. Aztec warriors supposedly looked forward eagerly to having their hearts cut out on the altar. Closer study shows that they usually captured warriors from neighbouring cities and sacrificed them. The people from these cities showed their gratitude by joining Cortes in his invasion of Aztec Tenochtitlan.
If people will not do exactly what we want, when we want them to do it, perhaps we can terrorize them into obedience!
Slaves do what they are told, right?
Maybe!
An excellent read on this subject is Roll Jordan Roll. by Eugene Genovese. Plantations in the Deep South were rational economic units. The costs of running the plantations needed to be covered by the income from the sale of crops. The military force needed to keep angry slaves in line was far more expensive than getting along with them, and showing some respect for their humanity. There were few laws to protect slaves in the south, but there were customs. There was an informal understanding between most slaves and their owners that they would be treated humanely and that they would work. Slaves expected food and shelter. It was understood that they could retire when they were too old to work, and their owners would care for them, and of course, that there would be no combat to the death.
Social prestige was important in the deep south. An upper class Real Man was able to command and control. It helped if he owned slaves. It did not help if the slaves revolted, and he had to ask the local white trash to help put them down (please?).
Slavery was under attack throughout the nineteenth century. Southern slave owners chose to defend their "peculiar institution" on moral grounds. The most popular explanation was that the Negroes were helpless, and needed to be cared for. This is stupid, but it forced relatively humane conduct on the slave owners.
Yet another factor that protected slaves in the southern USA, at least during the nineteenth century, was that they were valuable. The vast majority of slaves from Africa wound up in the Caribbean and Brazil. There were all sorts of slave revolts, made much less manageable because many of the Negroes were warriors and chiefs with combat and leadership skills. These are described in much detail by Charles C. Mann in his book 1493. After a nasty revolt in South Carolina, Americans concluded that it would be safer for everyone if slaves were raised locally, and brought up to be docile and accepting of their slavery. By the nineteenth century, the British were actively repressing the slave trade, making slaves from Africa even rarer. The vast majority of nineteenth century American slaves were born in the United States, and brought up, at considerable expense to their owners.
During the American Civil War, the negro slaves were pro-Union. This is not surprising to people whose reading about the Civil War extends beyond Gone With The Wind. Earlier, in the War of 1812, the British conducted raids up and down the Chesapeake Bay, ultimately burning the White House. Slaves were a good source of intelligence and a source of recruits for the Corps of Colonial Marines. Imagine you are a snooty British aristocrat officer facing a bunch of obnoxious colonials claiming to be free men. What could be more fun than freeing their slaves?
Working classes were not well treated during the nineteenth century, and slaves in the Deep South did not get the worst of it. Genovese compares the treatment of children in southern US plantations with that of children in factories in England, France in Germany, as well as that of children in the British Caribbean. Southern slave owners were aware of this, and they appreciated the hypocrisy.
The ancient Spartans were the ultimate oppressors. Spartans did not demean themselves by working. They sat around all day discussing virtue, and training for war. Their agricultural class, called helots, were humiliated and terrorized at every opportunity. Young Spartans roamed the countryside, where they acquired useful military skills by killing off potentially dangerous helots.
The Spartans were admired by their ancient contemporaries for their military prowess, and their social discipline. The Spartans did not believe in comfort or culture. An ancient Athenian joked that the reason they liked dying in battle was that it must have been very boring to be a stupid Spartan. One can overestimate how many Spartans actually died in battle. Hoplite battles in ancient Greece actually were not all that dangerous, as long as you were on the winning side. Most of the victims died when they were cut down while fleeing. At the peak of their history, the Spartans won all their battles.
The Spartans did not delegate the terrorizing and slaughtering of their Helots. They did it themselves. This guaranteed their military and political control of their state. It left them living a life of something less than luxury.
Sparta was organized around maintaining a group of around 10,000 Spartiates. When the Thebans under Epaminondas finally defeated the Spartans at Leuctra there were only around 700 Spartiates, most of whom were killed. The Spartan system did not work at maintaining numbers. Wikipedia figures that too many Spartans were being killed in battle, and they were marrying too late. Manly culture in ancient Greece was homosexual. Manly men hung out with other manly men. Spartan girls ran around naked. Spartans supposedly lent their wives out to other men. Spartans poked fun at men who did not have sons. This sounds suspiciously like a culture that was not getting its women pregnant. We are told that Spartan women were happy and even enthusiastic about their sons getting killed in battle. This could be true. It could also be nationalistic BS. If you were a Spartan mom, your son was taken away from you when he turned seven.
It was easy for the victorious Thebans to detach Messina from Sparta, depriving them of most of their helots. The Spartans were not loved by their subjects. Arming helots for an evening of gladiatorial combat was a bad idea.
The Spartans ran a cruel, repressive system for hundreds of years. Through this period, they remained secure, and politically stable, although they faced several helot revolts. As noted above, they were widely admired. Even today, dramatic movies portray Spartan king Leonidas as a pure and virtuous hero.
The Congo Free State was established by and ruled as a personal fief by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1885. Between 1885 and 1908, about half the population, possibly as many as ten million people, was lost, due mostly to the rubber trade.
Leopold got into the Congo originally because he wanted to be something more exciting than the constitutional monarch of a minor European state. He hired Henry Morton Stanley to explore and claim Congo territory. He rapidly ran into financial problems, and he got a loan from the Belgian government on the understanding they would inherit the colony when he died. Leopold continued to demand money, and he did not worry about how his colonists were making it.
Leopold's primary benefit from the Congo Free State was financial. He lived extravagantly, and he paid for all sorts of monuments located all over Belgium. The scandal broke in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Belgian government took over his colonies in 1908. Leopold's regime failed in the end. He was reviled in his own lifetime, and he is listed a monster in current histories.
However profitable and fun Leopold's colony was, one has to ask the Libertarian question. What would have happened if Leopold's colonists had respected the natives' property rights and had established some sort of win‑win trade relationship. Security costs go way down. Productivity probably improves. One of the principles behind the rubber trade, the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union in the thirties, and the Great Leap forward in China in the fifties, is that you manage farmers by putting guns to their heads, shooting a few of them to show you mean business, shooting a whole bunch more just for the hell of it, and not caring when they and their families starve to death. If you want to plant stuff, grow it and harvest it, perhaps you should try to get along with farmers.
The British were the dominant power in and ultimately the rulers of India between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Like slave owners in the American south, they regarded themselves as benign rulers. Unlike the American slave owners, they were an improvement over the people they seized power from. According to Abraham Eraly, the earlier Moghuls extracted at least a third of India's gross national product in taxes and income, and spent the whole lot on luxuries and dynastic warfare. (The Mughal World page 166)
The British perceived themselves as good rulers of India. They were racist and culturally insensitive, but otherwise, they ruled fairly well. India functions today pretty much as a British style parliamentary democracy. On one occasion during the twentieth century, the British got nasty.
At the end of World War I, Indians were agitating for Indian participation in government, and for outright independence. In Amritsar, a military picket shot at a crowd of protesters, killing a couple of them. There was a series of riots in response to this, culminating in an attack on an English female missionary. The British reacted by forcing the locals to crawl down the street on their hands and knees. They also banned large gatherings. A couple of days later, thousands of people gathered near a Sikh shrine to celebrate an annual festival. General Reginald Dyer marched in with a force of Gurkha and Baluchi troops, and ordered them to open fire. The casualties are not known for certain. Estimates range from 379 to around a thousand dead.
The Amritsar Massacre was immediately successful at stopping the demonstrations. Dyer and other British Indian officials were concerned that the situation would escalate into a full rebellion. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was within living memory in 1919.
In the aftermath, Dyer was widely praised by English people, especially those in India. When the British government understood what had happened, they were appalled. Dyer was condemned for his action, although never charged with anything in court. Indians were appalled too. Indian nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru never forgave the British for Amritsar.
There was no problem getting Indian troops to shoot at the mob. Dyer's Gurkhas and Baluchis were traditional enemies of the Sikhs and Indians in the crowd.
The British in India ultimately were not willing to use extreme violence to maintain control. Mahatma Gandhi, trained as a lawyer, took full advantage of Britain's unwillingness to use extreme force against non-violent demonstrators.
Godwin's Law! Sorry. :(
Actually, Nazi Germany is a poor example of a nasty empire, as it did not last long. They took over Austria in 1936. They lost the second battle of El Alamein in late 1942, and the battle of Kursk in 1943. After this, any sane German recognized the near certainty of defeat. From this time, until its conquest in May 1945, Germany struggled desperately to survive.
The Germans used absolutely savage repression to keep their subject peoples in line. This was fairly effective. Resistance groups in occupied Europe understood that whatever it was they did, German retaliation would be way out of proportion. Outside of the USSR, the Germans were generally not attacked until the liberating Allied forces were in the vicinity. Resistance groups outside the Soviet Union had little effect on the conduct of the war. The Soviets were willing to take the casualties inflicted by vengeful Germans. According to Timothy Snider in Bloodlands, about half the population of Belarus was either deported or killed during World War II.
Germany was remarkably successful at recruiting its entire population to resist the allied invasions of late 1944. This reflected some lingering belief in Nazism, fear of savage punishment by the Nazi regime, fear of retribution by the allies, particularly the Russians, and rage at the allied bombing of German cities. An internal collapse of the German army was made less likely by memories of the collapse of the army back in 1918.
What the Germans desperately needed from 1943 on was friends. Writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nicolai Tolstoy have argued that the war in Russia was winnable for the Germans. The USSR was an empire, and many of the people living in the German occupied areas felt no allegiance to it, especially after the Stalinist purges of the thirties. Nazi policy on "inferior" races such as the Slavs, deprived Germany of potential allies. The Nazis wanted to be friends with the Germanic Danes, Norwegians and Dutch, but even this was not reciprocated much. Nazi Germany threatened and enraged all the major powers around it, and then failed to survive the crisis. The Nazi empire failed to achieve peace, and a stable working relationship with its neighbours and subject peoples. The Khymer Rouge had the same problem, lasting only from 1975 to 1979.
The Nazis were fascinated with the British conquest of India, as well as the American conquest of their Indians, and their treatment of Negroes, especially in the south. Nazi officials in the Ukraine even referred to the Ukrainians as "niggers". The Nazis regarded the nineteenth century American Indian wars as a precedent for their treatment of Jews. The Nazis planned to run eastern Europe much the way the British ran India. The racially superior Germans would rule an underclass of Slavs. There would be a frontier somewhere out in the Urals that would provide Germans manly practise fighting border wars. The Nazis did not appreciate how badly outnumbered the British were in India, how much they needed support from the Indian population, and how much the British played groups off against each other.
The model for the book Hunger Games is Roman gladiators.
Roman gladiatorial combat grew out of what probably were Etruscan funeral ceremonies. A couple of criminals or slaves would be ordered to fight to the death to honour whoever died. By the late republic, wealthy, powerful patricians were putting on games whose obvious purpose was to entertain the public, and show off the importance of the patron running them. There was no need to wait for an important relative to bite it.
A problem with superficial descriptions of the Romans, is that it appears that they were culturally, politically and militarily stable throughout their history. This is not even approximately true. The earliest reliable accounts show that the Romans were a republic in which the right to vote was tied to one's ability to participate in warfare. The army was a militia. Citizens provided their own weapons and armour. They were led by members of the patrician class, looking for fame and glory. By the first century BCE, Rome's citizen soldiers had been replaced by paid professionals, loyal more to their generals than to the Roman state, or to the "Senate and the People of Rome". The armies still were led by patricians who perhaps were even more ambitious than their predecessors. In 33BCE, Julius Caesar's adopted son Gaius Octavian accepted the title Princeps Civitatus, or First Citizen, and the name Augustus. making him dictator of Rome. The institutions of the Roman Republic continued to function but they became less and less important. By around 300 CE, Caesar's power had become absolute, officially at least. In practise, the Caesars did not have a mandate to hold power. The institution was a prize of war, and many, if not most Caesars were murdered, mostly by the army.
All of this affects the institution of slavery, and gladiatorial combat. The first thing you need to run gladiator games is expendable, combat trained slaves. The wars of conquest, during the late republic produced vast numbers of these. The supply would have dried up in the early principate, when the Roman wars of aggression largely stopped. During the late republic, Roman nobles needed military glory, plunder, and battle hardened, loyal troops. For the early Caesars, these nobles were a threat. Any aggressive wars during the imperial period either were supervised directly by the Caesars, or they were not waged. The supply of combat capable slaves quickly dried up, along with the supply of expendable gladiators. We can figure that Vespasian's and Titus' reconquest of Israel, Trajan's conquest of Dacia, and Septimus Severus' defeat of the Persians would have provided a bunch more, but these would last perhaps a decade each over a period of five hundred years.
I claim that Roman Gladiatorial combat in the imperial era had more to do with the WWE than with systematic combat to the death. We observe inappropriate weapons and armour. We observe highly trained, expensive gladiators. We observe gladiator outfits that conceal the gladiator's face and identity. There was much opportunity and lots of motivation to fake the death and gore. We know that people volunteered to become gladiators. Almost certainly, a gladiator's job was dangerous, but it was adequately survivable.
The ancient Romans faced a nasty problem that really ought to have been anticipated. If you are in control of a group of people, you can decide whether or not to arm and train them for combat, and you can decide whether or not to grossly mistreat them. The Roman gladiator masters managed to get this wrong. The result was the Third Servile War under Spartacus. The previous Servile Wars appear to have mostly been regular slaves. The Romans of the late republic seem to have had problems getting along with their slaves! I am not aware of problems during the Principate.
In Hunger Games, the state of Panem wisely equipped its tributes with swords, spears and bows and arrows, leaving state of the art weapons in the hands of its peacekeepers.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rule, to be as nasty as possible, to survive in power, and to pass that power on to your chosen successor. The surviving in power part is important. If your evilness gets you lynched, assassinated, captured and convicted of war crimes, or sent to bed without supper, you have failed.
A lot of successful repression is inflicted on minorities. This makes sense, as long as the majority approves of your conduct. If the minority lack the numbers and resources to resist you, and the majority are at least comfortable with your conduct, you will do fine.
Get along with your neighbours. They have all sorts of your disloyal subjects to spy on you, to join their armies, and to become their new loyal citizens after they conquer you. This was a big problem for both the Spartans and the American South. The WWII Japanese tried to exploit western racism, but they were nasty racists themselves.
It is nice when the people who criticize you for your evil conduct, are hypocrites. Unfortunately, this does nothing to help you. Some of the people who signed petitions condemning American slavery were serf owning European nobility, and industrialists who mistreated their workers. Prior to WWII, the Japanese, Italians and Germans knew damn well how the British, French, Dutch and Americans acquired their empires, and they resented criticism for their military aggression. This did not stop war crimes trials, and it did not stop American bigots and British imperialists from fighting the Germans and Japanese. It did not even stop the Negroes and Indians from fighting the Germans and Japanese.
In The Hunger Games, the movie and the book, it is not obvious who the "Peacekeepers" are. Are they the ruling class' young men serving their terms in the ranks? Are they conscripted lower classes? Are they mercenaries? This all matters. Any political system that relies on repression by someone other than the ruling class, is going to have a new ruling class.
I am fascinated at the number of middle aged parents of teenagers who enjoyed Hunger Games. Perhaps I have overestimated how unhappy parents would be at having to sacrifice a teenager or two to provide public entertainment. Any teenagers reading this, should be thinking very hard right now.
...and reading list
Howard Gibson —
Email
hgibson@eol.ca
—
Last updated:
2022/04/03