The only good enemy is a dead enemy

“The only good enemy is a dead enemy” is a Green Martian maxim that makes killing seem not merely permissible but materially advantageous. Its force lies in the logic behind it: the dead enemy no longer competes with the living for what remains. Set against Dejah Thoris’s plea for peace and John Carter’s account of Earthly mercy, the expression encapsulates a society in which violence is ordinary, communal, and difficult to imagine otherwise.

Meaning and Social Logic

The maxim is stated explicitly through John Carter’s explanation of Dejah Thoris’s laughter at his claim that an accidentally wounded enemy would be taken home and nursed back to health. She cannot understand his answer because, despite her tenderness, she remains a Martian: to a Martian, the good enemy is a dead one, since each fallen foe means more to divide among those who survive. The saying thus joins a blunt moral judgment to a practical calculation. It does not simply call enemies dangerous; it treats their deaths as a benefit shared by the living.

That calculation belongs to a wider pattern of Green Martian customs. John Carter describes the death agonies of a fellow being as a source of hilarity and the ingenious killing of prisoners of war as the most common form of amusement. In this setting, the maxim is not an isolated flourish or a private eccentricity. It expresses a collective outlook in which an enemy’s suffering and death can be entertainment as well as gain, and where the boundary between combat and cruelty is thin.

A Clash of Moral Worlds

The exchange with Dejah Thoris gives the expression its sharpest contrast. John Carter presents care for a wounded enemy as an ordinary practice among civilized men on Earth; she laughs because the premise is alien to the Martian rule that a dead opponent benefits the survivors. Her reaction makes the difference tangible: even kindness in one society can sound absurd in another when the underlying assumptions about enemies, survival, and shared resources diverge.

Dejah Thoris’s appeal before the Green Martian leaders expands that contrast from an exchange between two people into a political alternative. She says that her peaceful scientific expedition sought to rechart air currents and test atmospheric density, and that maintaining air and water supplies serves both red and green peoples. She urges the warriors to abandon hostility, describes their communal ownership as a system that leaves them owning nothing together, and offers red Martian aid in regenerating their dying planet. Her argument imagines cooperation where the maxim presumes that the enemy’s death is the useful outcome. The leaders listen in silence; John Carter believes they are moved, and observes Tars Tarkas rise with a rare expression of inward struggle and momentary kindness. The scene suggests that the maxim’s hold is customary rather than inevitable, even as custom weighs heavily against change.

The Maxim Beyond the Battlefield

John Carter’s own encounters show the danger implicit in the saying. After his unexpected agility changes the warriors’ intention from annihilating him to capturing and exhibiting him, he studies their weapons and decides against escaping by flight because of their rifles. Those weapons use explosive radium projectiles; their theoretical effective range is three hundred miles, and their practical range with wireless finders and sights exceeds two hundred. Capture temporarily keeps him alive, but the weapons make clear how easily a human body could become the dead enemy of the maxim.

The same warlike logic shapes later choices on Barsoom. After resting with the brothers who shelter him, Carter is advised that his story will not be believed until he proves trustworthy and wins friends among the nobles; military service is recommended because the people are warlike and reserve their richest favors for the fighting man. Later, Tars Tarkas assembles a force that grows from one hundred thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand warriors on the march toward Zodanga, recruiting additional hordes with promises of loot. The marchers’ feuds are submerged by their shared hatred of the red men and especially the Zodangans, whose long campaign of extermination has targeted Green Martian incubators. These episodes do not repeat the maxim word for word, but they show the conditions that sustain it: military service earns favor, enemies are defined by group conflict, and the prospect of plunder can unite otherwise quarrelsome warriors.

Narrative Significance

The saying condenses a recurring tension in the story between violence as inherited social common sense and the possibility of fellowship across hostile groups. Dejah Thoris can offer an alternative, and Tars Tarkas can appear momentarily touched by it, but the assembly’s silence does not itself overturn established custom. Elsewhere, Carter observes that the Green Martians’ humor depends on death and suffering, while his conversation with Dejah Thoris reveals that even she retains the assumptions of the world she inhabits. The maxim therefore marks not just hostility toward an opponent but the deep reach of a social order: it shapes what counts as amusement, prudence, and imaginable mercy.