just finished reading babel by r. f. kuang and wow, what a phenomenal book.
one point that’s really weighing on my mind is letty’s decision to betray her friends on the pretext that she was preventing a violent uprising and saving the lives of the english people. it baffles me that she could never quite see or understand the racism and prejudice that she purported with both her ignorance and assumptions.
anthony had beat griffin. his choice to peacefully influence parliament through lobbying and influencing public opinion had been accepted by the hermes society as their plan of action. they had not entertained violence as an actual option. griffin pushed for it, but he was so outnumbered that his opinion didn’t hold nearly enough weight. all thoughts and ideas of violence came to them in the middle of the night amidst delirious ramblings and frustrated expressions. none of it was intended to become reality. everybody knew this, except letty. she couldn’t comprehend the idea that a group of foreigners could speak with such ferocity and not act upon it. she assumed that they’d take that path eventually, and in doing so, catalysed the strike and subsequent civil war.
but what was most irritating of all was her inability to understand the notion of being angry enough to make noise. especially when you consider the sheer hypocrisy of her dispersal of hermes involving the murder of their members. the necessity of violence, in her mind, existed only when wielded by her and people like her. when it came to protecting her country and the people in it. but the same couldn’t be said for her foreign friends. just theorising about violence was enough for their lives to be forfeit. no matter how much she cared for them, she couldn’t love them in full unless they yielded to a regime that barely viewed them as people.
