Really interesting discussion of a really interesting story — one which, while being very Wolfe-ish and, as you noted, quite well structured in its world-building, is unusually puzzle-free (unless I am missing something, although it seems like you two agreed, as did Marc Aramini in his write-up (which, by the by, includes a handy reconstruction of what he thinks the other side of the conversation is.))
I do, however, want to disagree with Brandon's reading, or at any rate his retelling, of the story as presented in the recap. Some of these may have been slips of the tongue; but in a few cases I think there's some misinterpretation. Not trying to give you a hard time or anything! But I thought it was worth spelling these out:
Contra Brandon, it wasn't the speaker who wanted to talk about weapons and not morality; he says explicitly: " “We were talking about morality, and I feel that is a more fruitful and interesting subject; but I can tell you very briefly how we constructed our weapons, if you want— provided you understand that we are going to return to the moral question afterward." This is important, I think, because it highlights and instantiates the degree to which (as he also states explicitly) that this speaker feels no shame; he is proud of what he did. He insists on talking about morality! He is quick to say that he "feel[s] no need whatsoever to justify myself"; this is not guilt. He simply wants to communicate "the imperatives of the situation."
Brandon says a few moments were the result of training which I think were clearly intended to be the result of combat. The cutting of the shirts, for instance, does not happen in training (again, possibly a slip of the tongue). Its role in the combat is suggested by the speaker's noting that " the braver someone was, the more torn up their shirts got". (Note also the speaker's pride when he notes that his own shirt—which was made into the flag—was entirely intact... in the back. i.e. he never turned around and ran.)
Similarly, what Brandon calls the "sexual component" takes place not during training but during actual combat, and is fairly explicitly meant to be rape. Nor did the yellows discourage this, nor did the blues/greens flee to the yellows to escape it. Rather, the yellows committed the rapes, and it was the raped blues and greens who (although he says he didn't think they liked being raped), " Still, they were the ones, mostly, who wanted to join us." They weren't joining to escape rape, but because they had been spiritually crushed by it. (Arguably very disturbing from a feminist pov, but put that aside.)
Similarly (and again, probably a slip of the tongue), it wasn't that some women and some men didn't want to fight; it was that some women didn't want to fight, and some men didn't want the women to fight. (“Some of the women didn’t want to, of course. And some of the men didn’t want to have them do it, either.")
Overall, the story is far, far more brutal than Brandon's recounting suggested: the protagonist's army is fighting a lot, and is raping, and is proud of it. (The story is also, arguably, rather sexist.)
It's less clear to me than the above, but one implication that I think was missed is that the narrator speculates that "They were monitoring a few selected individuals, I suppose, though we didn’t know it. She must have been one of them." is because they had killed so many others, in battle. Now we don't know if that's right, or if the timing was a coincidence, or what the experimenters were thinking — since we don't get their side of the conversation, we can imagine that perhaps this is in a horrific world in which they are trying to figure out how to martial murderous authority, and maybe they're even glad he feels no shame! Again, we just don't know. But I do think the import of the line about only monitoring a few individuals is to clarify that she was not the first one killed, not by a long shot.
It's interesting thinking about what inspired this story. Your context of the Milgrim experiments (those were the shock ones, from 1961, about a decade before the Stanford Prison experiments) and the Stanford Prison Experiment too is definitely part of this. There were other experiments along those lines, too. There were the experiments done by Jane Elliott in the late 60s dividing her class into blue & brown eyed students, which provoked prejudice; that got a lot of attention too, I believe. There's also the earlier Robbers Cave Experiment which divided pre-teen boys into two groups at random & had hostility spring up.
(By the way, one of the best recent novels I've read, Richard Powers's The Overstory—an environmentalist novel with a heavy focus on trees—has as one of maybe eight or ten protagonists one of the subjects of the Stanford experiments (fictional, of course). Just another example of its use in fiction, which I mention largely to plug this really awesome book.)
It's worth mentioning that the Milgrim and Stanford experiments can't be replicated partly because, in the wake of those experiments, increased controls on and ethical limits for experiments using human subjects were put in place. They're a part of why such guidelines were implemented (along with others, such as the Tuskegee experiments).
I also thought your speculation on the Cultural Revolution was interesting. One thing I don't know, however, is how much was known in the U.S. about the Cultural Revolution by 1975— remember Nixon had just opened China, and that was pretty ceremonial. Of course, if your thinking about dehumanization of Asians, and wondering how good people get turned into murderers, there is a closer example to hand in America's conduct in Vietnam, in particular the My Lai massacre, which was a few years before this story. (The My Lai massacre was hardly alone, as was made clear at the Winter Soldier hearings in 1970-1971 and elsewhere — see Nick Turse's book Kill Anything That Moves for a historical take on this — but of course it was the most famous example, and a lot of Americans thought of it as exceptional.) I don't know what Wolfe's attitude towards Vietnam was (nor Korea, for that matter), so I don't know if this was in his mind, but the timing fits.
I second the recommendation for Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, one of the best history books on the holocaust that I know of (focusing on the perpetrators, not the victims, of course), and a really haunting read.
Oh, and it's interesting about the Klingons being based on the Asian Peril. I had always taken them as the stand-in for the Soviets (the main enemy), with the Romulans (mysterious, closed society) as the Chinese.
This is a really good story! I'm glad you guys covered it.
As usual, many of the points I wanted to make were already made by @stephenfrug! I think the Robber's Cave experiment is as important to this story as the Stanford Prison Experiment. As anyone who has ever participated in Color Wars at a summer camp can attest, attachment to arbitrary identities can be created in an instant.
Also, putting my social scientist hat on for a second, these studies are only non-replicable because an IRB wouldn't let you replicate them anymore. To my mind, the problem with many psych experiments is a lack of "external validity"--do the findings generalize past extremely specific manipulations to extremely specific populations in extremely controlled environments? In most cases, no! This leaves me feeling that the rape and torture and barbarism in this story is extremely contrived. For one thing, I have participated in many Color Wars, and I have never witnessed a ritual murder of a Green!
FWIW, this was one of my least favorite Wolfe stories so far (right down there with Car Sinister and How I Lost The Second World War). Like in those pieces, the gender and racial attitudes in this piece do not sit well with me. Glenn and Brandon present the piece as wrestling with Yellow Peril and Orientalist tropes in pulp fiction, but to me it felt like Wolfe was using them for humor rather than holding them up for examination.
The Sanford Prison Experiment can’t be replicated because it’s junk science. Some of the researchers involved admitted to influencing the guard subjects to behave the way they did. I don’t know about the other experiments mentioned but I am dubious of the validity of most of the conclusions reached in science these days. There is a large issue with nonreplicatability of many scientific studies being done now.
We actually get surprisingly few Romulan stories in Star Trek: The Original Series, but I think your sense of them works well for The Next Generation for sure. Valerie and I just did the pair of episodes where Picard and Data go to Romulus and it's an interesting place that maybe is a kind of vision of China with a centuries-old fascist state. But, yeah, the Klingons are also totally Soviets in the TOS, but the production notes make it clear that they were meant to look like Mongols (and I watched Day of the Dove last night, which features the most Klingon characters we get on TOS and wow, that make-up does not sit well); of course by TNG they're space samurai.
That's an interesting question about what Wolfe would have known about the Cultural Revolution in 1975. When we get back to covering short stories (years from now, really, after The Book of the New Sun, it might be fun to check in on the cover pages of the Chicago Tribune from the time each story was written. It would certainly be nostalgic for me.