How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Through these Nordic layers of foreignness we can see that Ender was not a true xenocide, for when he destroyed the buggers, we knew them only as varelse; it was not until years later, when the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, that humankind first understood that the buggers were not varelse at all, but ramen; until that time there had been no understanding between bugger and human." (2.24)
The claim here is that if you don't see your enemy as human, then you're not really committing genocide against them. But in fact, humans usually decide that the enemy is not human as a prelude to, or as an excuse for, killing them. The buggers had spaceships and advanced technology; Ender and everybody else knew they were intelligent, and they certainly knew they weren't animals. The way the argument is phrased, you could let the Nazis off the hook because they thought Jewish people were subhuman monsters, and how were they to know killing them was a bad idea?
Quote #2
Their only intercourse with other tribes seems to be warfare. When they tell stories to each other (usually during rainy weather), it almost always deals with battles and heroes. (6.1)
Interestingly, we never see the piggies go to war in the novel, though they're supposed to be extremely warlike. The only violence we see them commit is the killing of Pipo and Libo, which is kind of a mistake. Would we like the piggies less if we saw them at war?
Quote #3
"He wrote cruelly, to turn their pride to regret, their joy to grief. And now human beings have completely forgotten that once they hated the buggers, that once they honored and celebrated a name that is now unspeakable—" (8.47)
We see Ender as the bullied underdog sent to war in Ender's Game; then in Speaker for the Dead, we see him as the hated xenocide. Despite his great capacity for violence and his massive war crime, Ender is always the despised underdog. This seems maybe problematic.