In
Patterns of Force, I suspect the biggest reason the
Enterprise didn't fix the Nazi planet was because the problem was too big to fix (except by nuking them from orbit). That would have been a job for a huge number of Federation sociologists and troops to undo the damage the first guy did...
FedRebel wrote:Half the joke on SDN is that the Federation in reality is a Communist dystopia, everything we've "seen" is state propaganda, and all the high minded preaching by the heroes is the same...and Troi is less therapist...and more of a 'Political Officer'.
Personally, I've come to think that thesis is rather stupid. For one, there are a LOT of explanations for why we don't constantly see people referring to their own personal starships, or why a Federation economy dominated by replicators and energy production doesn't have the kind of thriving small-scale commercial economy we might expect in the absence of such a society. Or why everyone is spending a lot of time listening to 'ancient' music and so on.
Likewise, Troi is possibly the
WORST CANDIDATE EVER for a job like "political officer." Can you imagine her ordering Riker arrested for subversion? Having a crewman shot for treason against The People? Literally the only thing she has going for her as a commissar is her empathic abilities, and just having the physical equipment doesn't mean you're qualified to do the job.
The claim that the Federation is a "communist dystopia" a la Ceasescu's Romania or the Kims' North Korea is sheer nonsense. It is at best an (anti-) fan theory constructed by people who are so wrapped up in the "CAPITALISM SUPERIOR" attitude that they cannot conceive of a functional civilization in which profit-seeking dominated by capitalists is anything other than the most prevalent form of human activity. And who assume that profit-seeking is absent in the Federation purely because the military officers and scientists we actually encounter regularly aren't engaged in it.
Out of universe, writer's ignorance creates these headscratchers for act of plot. The critical research failures mount up with a decades long franchise...
In-universe, the Federation makes the USSR look like a utopia. Unfortunately that's how the litany of research failures and uninformed idealism mount up over 20 years.
...Uh, what are you talking about?
Of course the Federation makes the USSR look like a utopia. It's got the technology to be orders of magnitude richer per capita- and even the USSR could afford to keep food on everyone's table, roofs over everyone's heads, and access to basic medical care for all. The government appears to have little or no interest in violating the human rights of its subjects, probably because it is NOT some kind of dictatorship that needs to exercise control over the political ideology of its people. And unlike the USSR, it isn't trapped in a paranoid cycle of spending a double-digit percentage of its GDP on the military so it can keep up an arms race with a vastly richer superpower... or if the Federation
is spending that much of its resources on Starfleet, it is so staggeringly prosperous that it can do so and still support its people in material comfort as great or greater than anything we enjoy today.
U.P. Cinnabar wrote:Fed Rebel wrote:Half the joke on SDN is that the Federation in reality is a Communist dystopia, everything we've "seen" is state propaganda, and all the high minded preaching by the heroes is the same...and Troi is less therapist...and more of a 'Political Officer'.
Commissar Troi?! Hmmm, maybe that's why Diane Duane and Peter David cast her as the mirror
Love Boat-D's head of security in his novel
Dark Mirror* . Even as a
zampolit, however, she fails at her job...
Oh sure, Troi's
evil opposite could do a good job as a commissar... but then, mirror versions of Star Trek characters don't resemble their originals very closely in basic personality.
On the mirror version of Kirk's
Enterprise it was Sulu who was the treacherous, oppressive, wicked chief of security- that doesn't mean Sulu was secretly a political commissar in 'our' version of the Federation.
Jean-Luc has only himself and Worf's stepbrother to blame for setting that precedent. And, given he ordered Doctor Pulaski to diddle with a little alien girl's mind to cover up the incompetence of one of his officers(TNG "Pen Pals"), he has little basis for taking the moral high ground.
It seems to me that Picard's approach to actually
enforcing the Prime Directive tends to be extremely... ad hoc... in the sense of doing things like tampering with people's memories and sedating them and so on rather than simply killing them.
It doesn't help that the whims of the plot are constantly putting him in situations that would be nightmares for most of the Federation officials who presumably drew up the Prime DIrective. Like "what if our intervention is required to stop this planet from exploding" or "what if, while carrying out a mission we
ordered them to carry out, they accidentally get spotted by primitive aliens?"
The franchise and its fans tend to cheer its protagonists for making dubious moral choices. Sisko gassing a civilian colony in "For the Uniform," Ross for helping install a Fed puppet at the head of the Rom government in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," Kirk breaking the Prime Directive left and right in TOS, Worf playing Klingon kingmaker twice, being "reprimanded" the first time, and promoted the second, and, in the two Abrams abominations, Kirk is cheered for cheating on the Kobayashi Maru in the first, and for being the maverick rulebreaker in the second.
This is... more than a little of a problem. I will note that:
1) The Prime Directive was rather less 'prime' back in TOS, and appears to have been aimed almost entirely at preventing technology transfer or the provision of scientific data that might inspire cultures to develop advanced weapons and space travel at an early stage in their cultural development. This is understandable; the Federation already has to deal with
one bunch of medieval crazies in starships, and the Klingons are a handful as it is. Also, the instances we DO have of aliens getting their hands on human cultural information in TOS are fairly disastrous, what with planets of Nazis and gangsters. But despite this, in Kirk's era we see no sign that, say, blowing up the computer that's mind controlling a bunch of alien colonists counts as a Prime Directive violation. It just doesn't come up- it seems to be the sort of thing that Starfleet captains are entitled to do at their own discretion. Obviously, by Picard's era, this discretionary power has been reduced. That, or Picard is unusually reluctant to exercise it.
2) I believe the second time Worf got involved in top-level Klingon politics it was after a
war between the Klingons and the Federation (revealing Martok as a shapeshifter, right?) which may have led the Federation high command to be more sympathetic because he was doing something they were sure they wanted him doing.
3) I'm... going to disown the Abrams setting. They made Kirk
far too much of a bad-boy. Shatner's Kirk, well. I once read it this way:
Captain Kirk is trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, clean, and reverent... and yet, Jim Kirk is no Boy Scout.
They kind of failed to capture a lot of the parts of the character in the Abrams setting. Shatner's Kirk was certainly
capable of pulling outrageous stunts, duping his enemies, and engaging in bold, dangerous gambits for the sake of saving the ship or accomplishing the mission. But all his risk-taking and rogueishness was backed by a solid layer of professionalism and discipline that Pine's Kirk lacks.
Only in the TOS movies(STII-VI)do we see moral choices being made which aren't dubious. Kirk risks everything to save Spock, then he turns himself over to the Federation Council for judgement, and takes responsibility for his actions for maybe the first time in his life.
Then, in Star Trek VI, we see him not only questioning his reasons for opposing peace, but put aside the hatred he harbors toward the Klingons for their killing David, and work to do the right thing.
I don't think those are the
only decent moral choices in the series... I mean seriously, with 200-300 episodes at least, it's inevitable that characters are doing unambiguously decent things a lot of the time. I have no doubt I could easily find plenty of examples.
U.P. Cinnabar wrote:That whole incident in "Justice" could've been avoided if everyone had focussed on briefing the shore leave parties what the markings of the clearly-marked justice zones looked like(and the nature of justice on the Edo homeworld, as the Edo hadn't made a secret of either)instead of focussing on the fact that the Edo fuck like rabbits at the drop of a hat...any hat.
My understanding is that the command team didn't find out about the Edo's little habit of randomly executing people for squashing the flowerbed until it was a bit too late. This was a new culture they had only just discovered, and the Edo informed them of the "justice zones" after they'd already beamed down.
Also, the "justice zones" were NOT clearly marked; the entire point of the Edo legal system is that you never know when you're in such a zone, and that (at least for the Edo) the risk of being in one is enough deterrent to keep anyone from committing a crime.
The big mistake the command team made was in
assuming they understood the Edo after such a short amount of contact with their culture- that because the Edo's culture looked like a paradise, with no evidence of violence or crime, it must be 'safe,' and it was okay to send unsupervised children out to play in that culture. This is... from my point of view the result of two major cultural blinders exhibited by the TNG-era Federation:
1) The assumption that cultures evolve in a more or less linear ways. For instance, the Federation core worlds are very peaceful, clean, happy, orderly places from what we know of them. And the Federation tends to assume that whenever they see a peaceful, clean, happy, orderly place, it must be 'enlightened'
in the same way the Federation is enlightened. You'd think Kirk's experiences alone would be enough to disprove this; there must be half a dozen episodes of TOS whose plot contains the element "the
Enterprise discovers a place that seems to be a paradise, but secretly isn't."
2) The tendency to bring children along on their starships into dangerous environments. Picard, at least, makes token protests against this once in a while, but overall it's a huge blind spot. Just because it's appropriate to send military personnel into a place where their lives are at risk doesn't mean civilians, especially children, should be accepting the same risks. And children in particular are simply incapable of conducting themselves with the same level of control and discipline as adults, which makes them a
massive liability in a situation like a first contact.