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Everything Star Trek before JJ Abrams and STD

Vashon

Active member
Banned
Im gonna start a new thread on this

I don't know what crazy bullshit he said this time but don't bother giving a disgusting animal like him advice about debate, he's not here to add anything other than be a cancer like he usually is wherever he goes.

A tiger doesn't change its stripes and a Nazi that never apologized or regrets being a Nazi is still a Nazi.
Cardassians are not Nazi's and were the real victims of DS9. You can even see hints of the poor writing showing through when the writers turn Dukat into a supervillain out of no where, and have our protagonist use psychological warfare against an already broken individual out of spite, and break him even further.

In fact, according to some math I have seen, Cardassians were less lethal in their occupation of an entire planet than America was in Iraq. Not per capita, but in total. Its almost like they weren't there as a conquering, occupying force, but just their to protect ethnic? racial? (Given how easy Cardassians interbreed with Bajorans, apparently without scientific help, they'd have to be closer than donkeys and horses. yeah yeah, TNG had an episode, it still stands) Cardassians from racial violence from religious extremists. Extremists that had a caste system before the occupation....

You wanna know why the Federation betrayed to Maquis colonists? Because if they hadn't, and had bullied the fuck out of the Cardassians, they would have looked exactly like all the other imperialist aliens. Go all the way back to the original Gorn episode, and you can find an example of a small, lonely, vulnerable alien nation attempting to defend themselves from encroachment of a terrifyingly larger power. A power that does nothing to restrain its own people from engaging in conquering, pioneering, and settling like space is the old west and every alien not part of the Federation is an injun in dire need of shooting.

Now because of "reasons" a military budget that includes ships with teleportation and significant faster than light travel means you don't have enough ships for evacuating people.

It was politics. Pure and simple. Stellar Strategic politics to not appear like the hyper expansionist polity that the Federation was at that point, and had been in fact since it started. Using the thread of other 'evil' polities as a convincing measure, while its flagships where one and all the most powerful warships in the fleet with vast arrays of technological tools and vast manpower of scientific minds to overcome everything that could be thrown at them. Its common sense, sure, but there it is. And so here comes the Cardassian Union, a military intelligence entity that has formed out of desperate, immediate life threatening need. And they are in conflict with some settlers who demand entire worlds for themselves, while the Federation runeth aplenty with living space.

Sure, the Federation could crush them for daring to disagree with this, for daring to not simply come grovelling to the Federation for handouts. But then that finishes off establishing a pattern, that Federation settlers can go wherever, lay claim to any planet, and once they do that is Federation territory, and everyone that has a problem with can and will be killed. And they will use pithy, bullshit excuses like "protecting helpless, harmless, well meaning civilians" when all it is is conquest lead by civilians and not the military. If the Federation smashes the Cardassian Union like they could, it might jeopardize their alliance with the Klingons, no scratch that, it would destroy it, since the demilitarization of the Klingons occured largely because they were willing to beleive that the Federation weren't going to cruise in and blast them all.

So the Federation destroys the Cardassian Union like it could, then the Federation is the one that will suddenly be surrounded by enemies, and face a rival multi species alliance. And whats interesting and very indicative, is that Tellarites are supposedly a founding member, and yet they exist as a technically independent power. Perhaps it was because of all the colony worlds we find, almost none are exclusively colonies of a nonhuman species. Dont' get me started on the anti-logic of having millenia access to the stars and still having 90% of your species on a single planet. Vulcans, if you were wondering.

The Cardassians weren't Nazis, and Bajorans hysteria is literally bald faced bigotry and whining helped along by the most lying and deceitful propaganda campaign that could be imagined. Helpfully deleting and not mentioning everytime Bajoran terrorists engage in wanton murder of civilians. Bajor was like the IRA, without the immediate preceding history of brutal and exploitative oppression of the Potato Famine when the British refused to close ports after taking all the best land for beef exports, and the majority of the Irish welcoming the British with open arms and hands.
 
The Cardassians killed about 10 to 15 million Bajorans during their occupation. Quite a bit more lethal than the occupation of Iraq. Cardassia conquered Bajor for it's resources. The Federation gave up the Maquis colonies because they wanted peace and a clear border. I'm not seeing how the Federation citizens expanding the territory of the Federation is a bad thing. Also the Gorn defending themselves? They massacred a Federation outpost that did not know it was Gorn territory and tried to destroy the first Federation starship instead of trying to open diplomatic talks. I don't know where you get the idea that the Federation actually dedicating itself to defeating the Cardassians would somehow put at risk it's alliance with the Klingons seeing the Cardassians started the war for more resources instead of you know expanding in another direction to find new resources.

The Federation found itself fighting a number of other group's from the late 2340' to the early 2360's and even though they were at war with the Federation none of them tried to form an alliance at the time. So the Federation defeating the Cardassians doesn't likely to result in some anti-Federation alliance forming at this time. Maybe in the future of this scenario. Not really sure where you got that idea about the Tellarites. As for the Cardassian being or not being Nazi's argument, I always viewed them as more of a conquering race though I can see why people would view them as Nazi's due to the whole police state/labor camps thing.
 
The Cardassians killed about 10 to 15 million Bajorans during their occupation.
Over how many years? Oh right. 50. So thats 300,000 a year. But Iraq was a small country with a moderate population. Bajor is an entire planet. So yes. Bajor was occupied more gently than Iraq. A lot more gently. Such a low death toll over such a massive amount of time. Perhaps I should do the deaths per year and contrast with square kilometers, or just per capita. To get the points across, that the writers fucked up big time in trying to paint the Cardassians as villains and that its likely the Bajorans, religious extremists racist bigots of a resistance, who were the assholes.

The only figure I can track down is 3.8 Billion. So after I don't have to use my phone to type this, Im going to dig into your post some more, it might be a double post but Id rather not edit it in. But ill say this. Calling everybody thats mean a Nazi demeans the evil. And belittles the difference. You can call Israel for example Apartheid but calling it Nazi, for now, is just dumb. Not you calling you in particular dumb.
 
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I mean, we should probably take into account that those said writers probably don't have a decent sense of scale (then again, most sci-fi don't, so it's hardly a mark against them). Also a more realistic number would ironically be seen by most audience as unrealistic and too much to comprehend because most people in general have no sense of scale either.
 
I mean, we should probably take into account that those said writers probably don't have a decent sense of scale (then again, most sci-fi don't, so it's hardly a mark against them). Also a more realistic number would ironically be seen by most audience as unrealistic and too much to comprehend because most people in general have no sense of scale either.
Yeah thats half my point. The Doylist reasoning. But back to the Watsonian reasoning.

Another thing to think about, the Bajoran government was in shambles, and at first, the Cardassians just came over to chill, and I at this point I simply beleive Cardassians over hysterical Bajorans. I'd wager that 15 million figure is blaming literally everyone that died as a result of the occupation.

Counting all the Bajoran officials slaughtered by Bajoran insurgents. Think about it, outside of the mountain fighting, we mostly see Bajorans use explosives, like any good insurgency. And we know from our own history that collaborators are often targeted with prejudice, often times when the occupying force has withdrawn. We also know that for practical purposes, they had to let a buttload of former collaborators go, often going right to administration or even security. I'd wager that when they proudly marched to victory, they found they had done too good a job and slaughtering collaborators and "traitors", and quickly realized that if they didn't tone it down, they wouldn't have a civil service left, and might risk a civil war.

Also, another bit of reasoning I heard for such low casualties, is that the Cardassians provided significant medical care in order to keep more Bajorans alive, all while still decrying the occupation as genocidal. That doesn't make any sense. But what would make sense is providing medical care to Bajoran prisoners, laborers, civil service caught up in the fighting, being where they are for relatively minor offenses, and showing no clear signs of guilt.

I have also heard comparisons to the Japanese occupation of China in the 2nd Sino-Japanese war. A more apt comparison would be the Japanese occupation of Korea. Which was the opposite of genocidal. Yes there were comfort women, yes some bad things happened. But the overall standard of living improved and the population exploded. Not saying the Bajoran standard of living improved, but it would seem the vast majority of the population in the vast majority of the time were unaffected or unharmed.

"But the Religious Oppression"

They may have spent ten, twenty years tolerating it and trying to negotiate, before giving up and smashing the ever living shit out of a caste based fanatical religious order until they stopped. See-Thuggee's and some fo the worst practices of Hindi India the British put a stop to wherever they found them. And that same religious order may have started bombing schools and colleges over the caste system and science being taught over religious dogma.

That Caste based religion? It dominated Bajor and was an automatic disqualification for joining the Federation.

Religion bombing schools because of minor butthurt? "In the Hands of the Prophets". Thats not even a brutal occupation. Thats just a minor disagreement over labeling. The effective difference between a domesticated equine and a trained horse.

So I guess you could compare it to the British occupation of India. But then the whole line of "ruining our land to starve us to death" looks really fishy. Because then there should be an order of magnitude more deaths.
 
Yeah thats half my point. The Doylist reasoning. But back to the Watsonian reasoning.
And this where I'm willing to give far more slack to TV shows/movies as opposed to books, because holy shit the average viewer is a dumbass (probably, as least the perception among the CEOs) and I'm fine with writers compromise in the nitty gritty details to cater to the largest crowd possible.

The intentions of the writers/directors/whatever was probably to portray the Cardassians as Nazi/fascist stand-ins, and with only historical numbers (the body count of the Holocaust and the soviet gulags, no one gives a damn about the 45-145 million body count from Mao's great leap forward & culture revolution, it wasn't white people dying anyways) to go by they couldn't even scale things up, because most viewers are dumb.

Actually, populations in Star Trek are a lot lower than even the reality of the 1980s earth. Most colonies have populations only in the hundreds to tens of thousands at most, and core planets are rather under populated all things considered. In that context assuming that Bajor would have anything akin to OTL earth's population (even 1800s) might be overly optimistic.
 
I always figured they were an intended Communist stand in after the Klingons stopped being that, and they didn't want the Federation to openly be that
 
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