#the chee

Erek: "I'm sorry, I can't help on this mission. It's just too violent."

Marco: "Awww. Would you do it for a Scooby Snack?"

Erek:

Marco: "Would you do it for TWO Scooby Snacks?"

"No," Maria cried. "You don't understand. Chee do not hurt. Chee do not kill. No Chee has ever taken a life." p. 114

Its that idea that Chee do not hurt that I want to look at. Because within Book 10 itself we have some evidence to the contrary. It is indirect harm, but it still counts as harm.

Suddenly, I saw him. He was passing out flyers. He was walking through the crowd and passing out handbills. A breeze caught one of the sheets and it fluttered to the ground in front of me. I forced my dog eyes to look at it. I couldn't read the fine print, but I could see the two big words at the top. The Sharing. The Sharing. The front organization for Controllers. p. 17

Yes, Erek is maintaining his cover of being a Controller, but how many people did he recruit handing out flyers like this? How many humans did he lead to becoming Controllers, voluntary or otherwise? He knows what he is handing out flyers for. He knows because he is pretending to be Controller. And somehow I doubt that he stops people or warns them about what The Sharing really is when they take his flyers and check out the meetings.

They were chasing squirrels, smelling each other, and generally having a great ole dog time. p. 98

Anyone that has ever owned a dog can tell you that those dogs aren't just chasing those squirrels. If they catch them they are killing them. But its not just that the dogs will kill some of those squirrels; but those squirrels are probably very stressed out. These aren't wild squirrels; these are animals brought in for the enrichment of the dogs. They are in an enclosed underground kennel and have no way out. Those squirrels are being harmed. Maybe the Chee aren't harming them directly but they brought them down there. They released the dogs on them.

That's a common thread between the people Erek gives flyers out to and the squirrels underground; they might not be in that situation without the Chee acting as a middle man. The Chee's dog park is underground and the Yeerk Pool is underground; not sure if that is meant to be a connection but its there.

Erek turned off his hologram and became a machine once again. And then the front of his head split open. Inside his steel and ivory head was a chamber, just a few inches in diameter. And inside that chamber was a gray slug, helpless, unable to escape. Tiny wires, no thicker than hairs, wrapped around it. <Yeerk!> Ax hissed. "Yes," Erek said. "The Yeerks believe I am human. I accepted infestation. But of course the Yeerk cannot make a Controller of me. I made a place for him instead. He sees nothing. Knows nothing. I tapped his memory, not the other way around. And now I can pass among the Yeerks like one of them." p. 111-112

Marco even comments on the next page that keeping the Yeerk trapped like that seems harsh. He dismisses it pretty quickly because his other thought is that they have a powerful ally.

But Erek is keeping a sentient being trapped in isolation. Who knows how long that Yeerk has been trapped inside his head. Unable to go to the Yeerk Pool and be with its people. That Yeerk is in a sensory deprivation chamber and who knows what harm that is causing it mentally.

And we know that Erek knew about Marco's mom due to a conversation that they have on page 119. We know he was probably already pretending to be a Controller then since Marco mentions the weird behavior that Erek had at his mother's funeral on pages 31-32. Weather you like the Yeerks or not, that Yeerk has been in a sensory deprivation chamber for at least 2 years. Maybe more.

That is harm; but Erek doesn't think of it as harm. He is keeping the Yeerk alive. He isn't causing harm to its body. Therefore its not harm.

How many Chee do you think have been able to harm others with that logic? They aren't hurting the body so its not hurting them. How often has a Chee signed off on some paper that would give an order for others to cause harm? But they were just the paper pusher so they didn't harm anyone.

And knowing that the Chee have been around for so long on Earth and haven't stopped any of the cruelties? Did they ever try to argue against things or did they just passively go along with the horrors that humans do to each other as long as they didn't pull the trigger? What were they doing in America during the slave trade? The Civil Rights Movement? How about any in Europe during the Holocaust? Chose an event in world history and ask what they were doing. Were there times that they could have saved someone's life and they just didn't do it?

Erek King says that he helped build the Egyptian pyramids... as a slave.  It’s a subtle but really clever subversion of the conspiracy theory that aliens helped build the pyramids which has a super racist origin in the idea that the Mayans and/or Egyptians couldn’t possibly be more advanced architects than Ye White Europeans of Olde.