What is Jingo about? Is it just about war, about racism, about how during wartime lives of young men are lost without them even really knowing why? It's certainly all this, but I think it is also about why people fight and most of all about how wars could be avoided if only people wanted it hard enough.
The war didn't start because a politician decided in cold blood that it'd be useful to him and wanted it so much it was perfectly ok for him to sacrify his own brother: he was thinking of his interests, politicians do that. No, the whole thing started before any politician even knew a thing about it. It all started with ordinary men who jumped at the occasion to divide the world in two categories: US, the righteous, the brave, and THEM, without honor or courage, them who are not like us. People always embrace this 'fairytale' approach to life, it's easier, it's comforting.
The first half of the book always makes me angry, it really makes me want to go Aaargh, because in it I see no principles at all, no traditions to mantain to keep you safe, nothing to justify people's behaviour.
Jingo is not about politics (it plays a relatively small role), is about people and the will to fight people have inside. People have a yearning desire to find a group (a team, a country or whatever) to belong to, to believe in, to fight for, and if they don't have it they create one as soon as the occasion arises. In this case a whole island appeared from beneath of them.
Maybe it is because most people like the easy way, and that is=Us, on one side, good, sometimes victims sometimes heroes, and Them, always evil. That way is easy to know who the enemy is and who you can trust because they are all your friends: as always in real life is the hard-way the true one.
A group can also give people what they don't have alone: courage, means, and most of all reasons, excuses to fight. Jingo is full of them. Nobody really gave a damn about that island, someone just found a good excuse and hang onto it. It happens to everybody, even to the best of people, if they aren't enough careful. Colon jumps to it with all his racist comments, but he represents the ignorant people who like to think they know everything.
Vimes is the good guy in Terry Pratchett's books, the one who always tries at his best to do things right, and he falls for it too. He dislikes ALL powerful, rich or aristocrats people, in spite of having married one and being now the most rich man himself. After knowing Sybil he should know that you should NEVER generalise, but he always does it because, as he admits to himself: "if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that they were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make ME? After all I''m one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. Noone ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them who do the bad things " So wanting as always to go against the aristocratic rich scum he doesn't even consider the possibility that Prince Cadram might be behind the attempted murder until Ahmed tells him "TRULY treat all men equally. Allow Klatchians the right to be scheming bastards".
But not only Vimes, Carrot too!
Carrot, the one who is always "kind without thinking of it, who takes an interest, who makes space in his head for other people", the same Carrot who thinks D'Regs like city-gang members are just jolly-good-chaps underneath, at one point he becomes 'one of Us' being in the desert with the D'Regs and the watchmen altogether, and after having made the Klatchian prisoners strip off because "makes them bit of a laughing stock when they return, a blow to their pride", he declares his will to stay there and help them fight "against the bad Klatchians"=Them.
To help the excuse to grow, people enrich it with racist comments to make it easier to know who they are, but at a close look we see how every step of the way TP keeps showing us how the 'second cousin of a jackal, the perfidious untrustworthy sausage-eating madmen, may-you-be-consumed-by-a-thousand-devils you unclean sons of a dog of the femile persuasion' and the 'thieving foreign bastards, the treacherous greasy towel heads, bottom-feedin' scum that y'are!you camel eating, evil lying little devil' at the end of the day are pretty much the same thing= from the two fishermen's sons who share the same "galactic-size embarassement of having parents" to Vimes and Ahmed who both have the heart of a copper, right up to the descriptions Vetinari does of those who at the beginning of all this had gone to the island. He says that Ankh-Morporkians are "showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and additional wealth in a new land" while Klatchians "are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for nothing" because that's not what he thinks but is what people of A-M wants to hear, and when he says "I seem to have read those last two sentences in the wrong order" noone gets the sarcasm because noone wants to.
I also said that Jingo, like Monstrous Regiment, to me talks about how people could decide NOT to kill, how wars could be avoided if only everyone wanted it hard enough (but there are no Vetinari in the real world): it's clear in Vimes optimistic and naive words "I'm supposed to keep the peace, if I kill people to do it I'm reading the wrong manual", or in those of the Klatchian commander "I love the idea of giving in without a fight. I've fought for ten years and giving in without a fight is what I've always wanted to do". Vetinari himself tells Vimes that "there's always a chicken if you look hard enough", and that means that every war could be stopped if intelligent people really wanted it, but in the real world most people are ignorant, or stupid, or driven by greed for money, for power, or simply driven by hate. In the case of Elharib and Smale it is so in the Discworld too. If one says that a word in the holy book means god why should one care if another city translates it as man? Why does one even bother? Why live and let live is not an option? Why people have to die? Why does one keep on the same track even after so many have died?
Minor role in this book has the feminism (another form of prejudice), put there, other than to make us laugh with Nobby, also to make a point, then Terry Pratchett probably realised how many thick heads there are out there so he decided to try really harder to make his points and wrote Monstrous Regiment.
I liked Jingo for its contest anti-war, anti-racism, anti-prejudices in general; I also liked it because there's a lot of Vetinari in it, and if you knew me like I know me you'd know how much that counts ^_ ^ although I can't stand the fact that Carrot goes around doing what he wants and even commanding the Patrician!
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