The Bad Guys in White, Part II (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

(This post will contain spoilers for The Unfinished Song, so if you haven’t read up to the end of Book 6, you might want to come back to it later.)

In my earlier post The Bad Guys in White, Part I, I discussed the term “Bad Guys in White,” the fantasy trope of a group of villains based on Templars or the Inquisition. I maintain that, given how much evil the Inquisition perpetrated over the centuries, it’s still fair game for inspiring many, many bad guys to come.

Of course, we can move beyond the clichés by, first of all, doing research on the real Inquisition, not simply recycling (as I suspect some writers do) the baddies from video games or other fantasy novels. Direct research always refreshes world building. One can tell when a writer has done her research by how alive and unique her world is, even when, from afar, it seems to be an overdone trope, such as a vaguely medieval Europe. Just look at the Kushiel’s Dart series, set in a fantastique recognizably based on pre-modern France.

My character the Bone Whistler, whose rise to power is described in Book 11 (and the novella Tomorrow We Dance, which is an excerpt from Book 11), is based on a Xhosa prophet. The Xhosa, like the Europeans, also believed in witchcraft, and the trials of accused witches were not much more fair than those under the Inquisition. But the real crisis to their community came when their land and way of life came under pressure from British colonialism. After a Xhosa girl saw visions, her uncle made her famous, and thousands of Xhosa people followed her, to their utter ruin.

We can also move past the easy tropes to really think about what makes the Bad Guys in White such a problem for the Good Guys.

A couple of things, really.

One, the Bad Guys in White say they are on the Good Guy’s side, but aren’t—they are hypocrites. Or they go further and accuse the Good Guys of being Bad, so they confuse innocent by-standers and third-parties, turning the very people the Good Guys are trying to protect against them.

Two, the Bad Guys in White divide the Good Guy’s camp. The Good Guys either have to work with these vipers, even knowing they are evil, or fight them at the same time they are fighting the Bad Guys in Black.

It may help to remember that history is full of examples of this dilemma in real life, not at all limited to the Inquisition. Just think of the two worst tyrants of the Twentieth Century: Hitler and Stalin.

During WWII, the democracies had to ally with Stalin in order to fight Hitler. Churchill, at least, was under no illusions about what Stalin really was, or how far he could be trusted. When he said he would ally with the devil himself to fight Hitler, I’m sure he knew that wasn’t far off. But Hollywood war propaganda painted “Uncle Joe” as an avuncular guy to sell the alliance to the American people. As a result, the Americans were not prepared when Stalin turned on his allies and crushed Eastern Europe.

Think of the irony: Britain and France declared war on Germany for the express purpose of honoring an alliance with Poland, yet at the end of the war, Poland once more a captive nation. Thousands of innocents who had just been liberated from Nazi concentration camps were rounded up again and sent to die in gulags.

And it’s sobering to think that if Hitler had been content to simply hunker down in his own nation, confining his genocide to his own borders, but Stalin, by himself, had invaded Poland (in real history, he invaded, but under the cover of the co-invasion by the Nazis), the West might have allied with Hitler to stop Stalin. Instead of jovial “Uncle Joe,” the Americans might have been sold a charismatic “Uncle Adolph,” and to this day, Fascists might be regarded as well-meaning if misguided idealists, the way all too many people regard Communists.

The Communists make a good model for “Bad Guys in White” because unlike Fascism, Communism seemed to many to offer a better, purer, more moral way of life than decadent industrial capitalism. Equality of all people, of men and women, the end of nationalism, the sharing of all material wealth, a future of reason and science, in which a wise and selfless vanguard would eventually lead everyone into a world without any government, or indeed suffering of any sort, at all. Who could object to such lofty goals? (The Inquisition, too, did everything only for the good of your immortal soul and to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.)

And yet, if only because they were in power longer, the Communists succeeded in mass murdering five times as many people as the Fascists–100 million human beings as opposed to the mere 20 million the Fascists managed to snuff out. (I have no doubt that if Hitler had been left in power, however, the Fascists would have gone on killing…and killing…and killing. Though maybe, they too would have eventually have collapsed from within, as in Harry Turtledove’s evocative Alternate History, In the Presence of Mine Enemies.)

But, say you were trying to convince people of the 1950s that Stalin was preparing a new genocide, apparently inspired by Hitler, to eliminate all the Jews, and millions of others, inside the Soviet Union. (Fortunately for the world, Stalin died first.) McCarthy would be the last “ally” you’d want. He’s become synonymous with the modern day witch-hunter, a real Bad Guy in White…or in this case, a pinstripe suit. In fact, there were quite a few genuine Soviet spies in positions of power in the government, sciences, and media, but McCarthy’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach probably gave them more cover than exposure.

Good Guys in an Epic Fantasy or an Urban Fantasy should have to struggle with foes like this, as much as with other kinds of villains, because ordinary people do too.

Don’t forget to check out Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.