ai ze ren de

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love', 'duty', 'humanity' and 'virtue' - words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like "I surrender" in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life. 

Paul Linebarger was a psychological warfare consultant to the US army in Korea and elsewhere. But he’s probably better known as Cordwainer Smith, at least to science fiction fans, or people who were, way back when. Via comments here.

Comments

[Nick L]

I just bought 'The Rediscovery of Man' the other weak. If I can spare the time, I'm planning to combine reading it with Gilman's 'Mandarins of the Future', which chronicles the role of modernisation theory and social science in US Cold War policies.

I don't think it is a surprise that the 'golden age' of science fiction occurred at the same time as the height of American confidence in both technology and its own capacity to rationally manage the future development of other societies and world events.

[Fellow Traveller]

He literally wrote the US Army manual on Psychological Warfare and I think Chiang Kai-shek was the godfather of his children (or vice-versa).

Fellow SF writer James Tiptree jnr. (Alice Sheldon) was one of the original founders of CIA.

[Richard J]

Other useful Cordwainer Smith linkage.

http://comicscomicsmag.com/2009/11/comics-enriched-their-lives-15.html

[jamie]

I'd like to read Sheldon/Tiptree again, as it goes. Cordwainer Mith had a fair degree of whimsy in him - there was one story about a reincarnation o the Buddha meeting a Communist Party official that was pure CS Lewis, but Tiptree's stuff was positively disturbing.

[Cian]

Nick,
except Cordwainer had a rather more ironic take on modernity and progress than most of his peers.

[Fellow Traveller]

Wasn't it a Buddhist demon meeting the Maoist? Quite a difference! Linebarger was a committed Christian (a Catholic I think) and his faith underlies many of his stories in a slightly more subtle fashion than C.S. Lewis. The Underpeople (uplifted animals given intelligence and humanoid shape by humanity who employ them as slaves) start a religious movement which resembles Christianity during the time of the Roman Empire before its adoption by the state.

[Nick L]

Cian- interesting, do you have any links?

[Chris Williams]

Nick, there's an excellent collection of most of CS's output in print. Best opening line evah: "Do not read this story. Turn the page quickly"

Jamie - is it true that many of his narrative forms were lifted from Chinese literature?

[jamie]

FT: I can't remember the name of the actual story, but I can definitely recall it was a soviet cadre: a volga German, for some reason.

Chris: So I heard, too. I don't really know enough to be able to say. It must be at least fifteen years since I've read anything of his, though it certainly haunts.

[John Cowan]

Actually, he's a Martian posing as a Buddhist demon, and the story is "Western Science Is So Wonderful". It can be found in the definitive Smith collection The Rediscovery of Man.

The characters for aì zé rén dé are 愛則人徳.

[skidmarx]

Chris Williams -
That's the story.
Furthermore it isn't true

[ejh]

Fellow SF writer James Tiptree jnr. (Alice Sheldon) was one of the original founders of CIA.

Wikipedia has the CIA being founded in 1947 and Sheldon being invited to join in 1952.

I remember finding "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" quiet impressive.

[Cian]

Chris, yes it is true. I loved his stories when I was growing up (my dad worked for Granada when they had an excellent backlist of SF, and so we had shelves of the stuff). Of contemporary relevance, perhaps, are his stories about the extraordinarily wealthy farmers who kept themselves poor and honest through punative import taxes. Less didactic than that sounds :)

Nick. Cordwainer's take was probably more a mixture of Chinese and Catholic conservatism; and thus quite ambivalent about progress. For me the other key writer of the period was Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote some pretty freaky stuff and was a huge influence on soft SF. He also invented half of the Star Trek mythos, but nobody's perfect.

[skidmarx]

My CS collection entitled The Rediscovery of Man[VGSF 1988] doesn't include that story. Presumably you have the NESFA collection published five years later.