The world of Mahouka is a world of moral insanity. Right and wrong are inverted. Discrimination is right, violence is peace, power is justice, and the weak are scapegoated and dehumanized. When the world is this screwed up, what can one do? Anyone who attempts to rebel is quickly retaliated against, through the main tools in the toolkit of evil: violence and scapegoating. Those who resist the social insanity in Mahouka are brutally tortured and killed by glorious freedom fighters such as Erika. Others who resist are shamed into insignificance, by being labeled as “terrorists” and vilified as traitors who work with foreigners. Their rebellion is blamed on personal and psychological problems and they are considered foolish or mad or insane, even while they are the only sane people in a world that has gone mad.
But even in such a world, Mahouka (unintentionally) offers a glimmer of hope, through the hero of this week’s episode.
Her resistance is small and futile, of which she is well aware.
The powers that be in this mad world subdue her with violence and brutality.
They justify themselves and ignore her witness, accusing her of impure motives, selfishness and more, all in order to look down on her from the moral high ground. They’re the playground bully who yells at their victim, “Why are you making me punch you?! I don’t want to punch you! Stop making me punch you!”
They attempt to shame, threaten and silence her.
But she still chooses to live in rebellion and to resist the moral madness that grips the world around her.
This is hope.
Here’s a small, relevant snippet from An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land by William Stringfellow, which I read the other week (highly recommended):
…the Resistance, undertaken and sustained through the long years of the Nazi ascendancy in which most of Western Europe was conquered and occupied, consisted, day after day, of small efforts. Each one of these, if regarded in itself, seems far too weak, too temporary, too symbolic, too haphazard, too meek, too trivial to be efficacious against the oppressive, monolithic, pervasive presence which Nazism was, both physically and psychically, in the nations which had been defeated and seized. Realistically speaking, those who resisted Nazism did so in an atmosphere in which hope, in its ordinary connotations, had been annihilated. To calculate their actions— abetting escapes, circulating mimeographed news, hiding fugitives, obtaining money or needed documents, engaging in various forms of noncooperation with the occupying authorities or the quisling bureaucrats, wearing armbands, disrupting official communications— in terms of odds against the Nazi efficiency and power and violence and vindictiveness would seem to render their witness ridiculous. The risks for them of persecution, arrest, torture, confinement, death were so disproportionate to any concrete results that could practically be expected that most human beings would have despaired— and, one recalls, most did. Yet these persons persevered in their audacious, extemporaneous, fragile, puny, foolish Resistance.
Hindsight, of course, has romanticized the Resistance to the Nazi occupations to a glorious episode. The testimonies I heard from some of those who survived are contrary, they were engaged in exceedingly hard and hapless and apparently hopeless tasks.
Why would human beings take such risks? It is not, I think, because they were heroes or because they besought martyrdom; they were, at the outset, like the Apostles, quite ordinary men and women of various and usual stations and occupations in life. How is their tenacity explained?… Why did these human beings have such uncommon hope?
The answer to such questions is, I believe, that the act of resistance to the power of death incarnate in Nazism was the only means of retaining sanity and conscience. In the circumstances of the Nazi tyranny, resistance became the only human way to live.
To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, obeisance, collaboration— to covet “safety” or “security” on the conditions prescribed by the State— caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous Commandment mentions. And if that posture involved grave and constant peril of persecution, imprisonment, or execution, at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks. Not to resist, on the other hand, involved the certitude of death— of moral death, of the death of one’s humanity, of death to sanity and conscience, of the death which possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others.
In Mahouka, resistance is the only human way to live.
Further Thoughts
What is with Erika and torture and murder. She really seems to enjoy this stuff. I guess that’s why she’s one of the bad guys.
Ok. Thanks for that, Mahouka. Just what we all needed.
Well, obviously. But I still can’t believe they actually said that out loud…
Even if there’s a glimmer of hope of it, I cannot accept Mahouka nonetheless because they have artificial magicians in contrast to the fantasy genre’s magicians. Psions are for espers only. On top of that, I already know that they’re making artificial magicians in an attempt to play God.
Oh, don’t worry, I don’t accept Mahouka either.
Emm…. who’s the girl?
Some random girl who joins with the Chinese terrorists. Don’t know her name.
i think that would have happen if Japan won the World War 2 beside the Reich -sarcasm-
‘ Right and wrong are inverted. Discrimination is right, violence is peace, power is justice, and the weak are scapegoated and dehumanized. ‘
In fact, Japan in Mahouka is Maoist China. So… is Mahouka in fact a strange reversed political commentary? That would be very weird and clever at the same time. Mahouka Japan=communist China, Mahouka China=Japan from the ’30s and ’40s.
That would be clever, but I think it’s more like Japan=worse than communist China and the author is proud of his country for being that way.