Bashir vs Admiral Ross
- Thread starter Tebok
- Start date
You would actually let mass murderers go free without so much as a trial!!!
That's not what he said.
That's what he said amounts to, which is even worse, because there is a touch of hypocrisy attached to it.
The facts as we know them are these:
Out of all the founders only ONE will stand trial and likely won't be executed.
So to resume the situation we have:
One founder in jail on their side and billions of dead on the federation's.
And to all the other founders, NOTHING will happen.
I'll say if anyone thinks this is fair then there is something wrong with that person.
There's no need to make this personal.
How is every Founder being punished--which seems to be what you're advocating--fair? Do you any proof whatsoever that every Founder was responsible for the Dominion waging war against the Federation?
Moreover, you seem to be missing the point that an organization such as the UFP must hold itself to a higher standard than its adversaries. Punishing an entire race is not conducive to such behavior, no matter what crimes that race is guilty of.
How is every Founder being punished--which seems to be what you're advocating--fair? Do you any proof whatsoever that every Founder was responsible for the Dominion waging war against the Federation?
Moreover, you seem to be missing the point that an organization such as the UFP must hold itself to a higher standard than its adversaries. Punishing an entire race is not conducive to such behavior, no matter what crimes that race is guilty of.
Now I call non-sequitur. Policing of domestic crime is not war. Not only is that not essentially what we are discussing, it isn't even close. Police have the full weight of government's powers to back them up in their interpretation of the law. In war, the ONLY thing that backs you up is force, period. NOT ONE of the rights you have just listed has a thing to do with war.
To address your point: decency as you name it must fall by the wayside where survival itself is at stake. If you're dead, or enslaved or mutated, you don't get to mull over your ethics or anyone else's.
Hence: Inter arma enim silent leges.
About the Federation and its ethics: They had the Founders by the throat--thanks to Section 31 (please note that I am not saying that the Federation won the war due to Sec 31. Winning the war was a multifarious effort and many, including Sec 31, get the credit. I am just saying that the Founders were utterly at the Federation's mercy thanks to Sec 31). And after all those racist bastards in the Gamma Quadrant did to the Federation and the AQ, still the cumulative decision of the Federation was mercy to their enemies. They showed them mercy that the Dominion would never have shown the Federation in reversed positions. Ethically, the Federation is still head and shoulders above all the rest. That they are not the suicidal paragons you would like them to be just testifies to the Federation actually believing it has some duty to protect its own citizens first.
You and I are never going to agree on this. I've had this argument before. If you don't accept that survival trumps all else, and that in a war situation there is NO governing authority to take one of the sides aside and say "bad, you can't do this, stop now or I will imprison or execute you"--which is the explicit threat behind all domestic police powers, a threat that is utterly empty between warring polities--then we can never agree.
Even more--far, far more--than, say, a human despot and warmonger's inner circle, the Founders are responsible in toto and as a species for the Dominion war because of the nature of the Great Link and because they went out of their way to make themselves the GODS of the GQ.. They are all aware of what all the others know, and they are in agreement. There are no dissenting Founders--except for Odo, who did not participate in the Link since his immature state. And they made their species the ruling SPECIES. It is not only fair that all the Founders be punished, it is justice. Also, logical. And it didn't happen.
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The Federation endorses doing nothing while entire planets die. When you do that you lose any right to get on your high horse on any issue. At any rate, they have an obligation to see that the collective murderers of billions of their citizens don't go unpunished.
Well didn't they fight the Dominion with all they had? Perplexed.
Considering that the Federation is guilty of attmpted genocide and manipulated a species into a war that they had no part of in the first place, I'm not surprised by their actions.
Actually, they didn't actually fight the dominion. The dominion was safe at home thousands of light years away from the nearest battle. They fought their genetically engineered puppets, IE the jemadar, that the dominion considered like nothing more than a inexhaustible commodity. As both Damar and Vreenak said, the dominion considered their soldiers to be disposable (Weyoun said as much about the cardassian soldiers). They never wasted any resources trying to rescue them. To the dominion, the war was no more dangerous than a video game. And in the end NOTHING happened to them for all that.
Do you think that's fair?
Well no I don't! (consider it fair). Although I don't really pity the Jem'hadar. But wasn't Sec 31's act sufficient? I mean as another form of warfare, it was as potentially lethal to the Founders as any bombardment from space. Which would have been no small feat for the Federation to mount--I am not even sure they could--and ended in disaster for a Romulan/Cardassian force. But it was more useful as a bargaining chip than as a form of punishment...which, I do admit, leaves the Founders unpunished for their unjust war that killed millions.
At the least the Dominion should have been paying some sort of reparations for years. I can't imagine what, but no doubt the Federation would have come up with some ideas. And they should have been forced to cede huge volumes of space on the GQ side of the wormhole. And maybe they should have been compelled to demilitirize for a while, too.
I am not going to argue for leniency for the Dominion! Their whole premise for war is a flat-out racist one. Although I don't really buy their whole solids=bad line. I am sure they believe it, but really it's nothing more than a (false) justification for conquest and enslavement.
What you call attempted genocide was a necessary act of self-defense and WHOLLY justified and right. It is the Dominion that committed "genocide"--my that word does get tossed around!--during its war on the AQ. I also consider enslavement as tantamount to death and genocide. If you don't, maybe you can consider that it isn't a whole lot better? Because the Dominion is at its core a polity of racist warmongers and slavers. That's what you are defending. And they have a good dollop of Dr. Mengele in them, too, when you consider how they genetically warped the Vorta and Jem'hadar, a fate that I suspect they had in mind for humanity in particular. In the end, these killers got mercy from the people they had unjustly savaged in their willful, racist ignorance.
I'll take being the target of an attempted "genocide"--aka just act of self-defense in this case---any day over the REALITY of millions actually dead.
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I of course agree with your conclusions and I would add that in a way both the Vorta and the jem'hadar were also victims of the dominion. Remember how casually the foundress (female founder) told Weyoun to exterminate the vorta who were trying to find a cure and replace them by a new batch of clones. And for that villainy and the thousands of years during which they persecuted and tortured entire star systems in the GQ, NOTHING will happen to them.
Sometimes an unusual sci fi premise can complicate normal human ethics.
For humans to hold an entire race or nation responsible for the war crimes of its leaders is wrong. For humans to make war on an entire race or nation is heinously evil.
But the Great Link is not a race or nation with leaders in any human sense of those terms. Though the writers were somewhat vague and inconsistent in defining it, it's basically a single entity that can individuate itself into particular founders, possibly at will. While those individuations possess a consciousness and will of their own, they are also aware of and subject to a meta-consciousness of the whole Link. Even Odo was affected by it.
So the whole Link is responsible for what founders do. If the Link decides to go to war, every founder is a threat to its enemies. And for those enemies, the whole Link becomes a legitimate war target (though I oppose the extralegal ruthlessness of the particular way S31 targeted the Link).
But on the other hand, retributive justice or punishment of individuals implies individual responsibility for actions of a type the founders don't biologically have.
For humans to hold an entire race or nation responsible for the war crimes of its leaders is wrong. For humans to make war on an entire race or nation is heinously evil.
But the Great Link is not a race or nation with leaders in any human sense of those terms. Though the writers were somewhat vague and inconsistent in defining it, it's basically a single entity that can individuate itself into particular founders, possibly at will. While those individuations possess a consciousness and will of their own, they are also aware of and subject to a meta-consciousness of the whole Link. Even Odo was affected by it.
So the whole Link is responsible for what founders do. If the Link decides to go to war, every founder is a threat to its enemies. And for those enemies, the whole Link becomes a legitimate war target (though I oppose the extralegal ruthlessness of the particular way S31 targeted the Link).
But on the other hand, retributive justice or punishment of individuals implies individual responsibility for actions of a type the founders don't biologically have.
The great link is guilty of much more than just the war in the AK. They organised the oppression and torture of the entire GK for over two millennia (think of those people who were infected with the quickening) and there's no reason to believe that they'll change that policy of theirs. So it's not just retribution, it's the protection of others against an ongoing threat.
I dunno...it might have been interesting to see a Founder who was part of the link but disagreed with the invastion of the AQ. On the other hand, it might have come off as a cliched story.
And I really liked "Treachery, Faith and the Great River" and wouldn't care to see that story diminished. Though I wonder if they considered doing a Rogue Founder story first.
And I really liked "Treachery, Faith and the Great River" and wouldn't care to see that story diminished. Though I wonder if they considered doing a Rogue Founder story first.
Odo was basically a rogue founder (which is why I think "Treachery, Faith and the Great River" worked). We saw his difficulties.
The first time I watched through Deep Space Nine, I was highly critical of the way Odo betrayed the station's resistance movement and made nice with the female changeling, in the series of episodes that started Season 6. It almost ruined the character for me. But this time around, watching it with my sister, she pointed out that it's unfair to hold Odo accountable during a period of particularly disorienting brainwashing, when he's actually becoming someone else. And giving it some thought, she's right. The writers aren't clear, but the case could be made that after all those melds with the other changeling, Odo is not only a different person, so to speak, psychologically. Literally and biologically, he's no longer precisely the same entity.
The first time I watched through Deep Space Nine, I was highly critical of the way Odo betrayed the station's resistance movement and made nice with the female changeling, in the series of episodes that started Season 6. It almost ruined the character for me. But this time around, watching it with my sister, she pointed out that it's unfair to hold Odo accountable during a period of particularly disorienting brainwashing, when he's actually becoming someone else. And giving it some thought, she's right. The writers aren't clear, but the case could be made that after all those melds with the other changeling, Odo is not only a different person, so to speak, psychologically. Literally and biologically, he's no longer precisely the same entity.
Yet, in the last episode he's the one that changes the female changeling radically in about ten seconds (it seems to be the standard time for anything of significance to happen on the show).
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