Were the Cardassians on Bajor initially benevolent?

[suarezguy]

Or did they at least plausibly pretend to be?

It wasn't developed or focused on much in the show but early on Kira was averse to the Federation presence because, she said, the Cardassians came in saying similar things.

Did the Cardassians initially come to Bajor claiming that they would be partners or allies and/or help develop the planet? If they did, and they were sincere, how do you think the relationship went wrong?

 

[Tosk]

There was almost definitely the pretense of friendship at first, which is why you had the Bajoran Occupational Government. But they had no actual power. And the Resistance did not form for something like ten years until after the formal occupation, which makes one wonder how long it took for the Cardassians to slide from forced labor into slavery and all the other hideous atrocities we know happened during the Occupation.

There was never an iota of benevolence involved. The Cardassians were struggling for resources, so they simply strode in and took what they wanted from another species. They were not there to help, no matter what a demented former prefect of Bajor might have claimed once.

 

[DonIago]

I very much like the development of the occupation as depicted in the Terok Nor novel trilogy. Essentially yes, they did portray themselves as benevolent (and some of them genuinely were), but their larger intention was to weaken Bajor's position and ultimately occupy it.

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

When the ancient lightship landed on Cardassia, I tend to think the Cardassians' reaction would've been like when the Vulcans landed on Earth in the Mirror Universe (as seen on ENT), and the event inspired terror and militarism instead of harmony and understanding. In "Empok Nor," Garak said Cardassians were xenophobic by nature, and maybe that lightship inspired a long-term plan to occupy Bajor, even if the general public was subjected to a cover-up about it.

 

[diankra]

No, but they probably told themselves they were. Helping the ignorant natives and all that.

 

[Sci]

I think a really good comparison would be to European colonial powers, who often insinuated themselves into the societies they intended to conquer and rule by using the pretext of benevolent assistance.

 

[Timo]

Picard knows a thing or two about Bajor and its ancient civilization. It sort of stretches credibility that Cardassians would have been the first space monsters to visit the planet!

A perhaps more probable scenario has Bajor receive regular visits from all sorts of folks, most of whom fail to appreciate the temples and irrigation systems and leave when failing to secure deals with replicator factories. But Cardassians live next door, and eventually decide they have to grab the market for pure sphere-of-influence reasons, even when the business potential is close to nil. So they gradually expand their influence - not after a spectacular first contact in the early 24th century, but after three or four centuries of indifferent coexistence during which the Cardassians only had a token presence on Bajor, with a few scholars studying the quaint culture and a couple of criminals hiding from Cardassian justice and whatnot.

Bajorans would play the part of sharpened-avocado-wielding primitives in reed skirts chiefly because they have this psychological block against exploring or otherwise going abroad. They refuse to settle even their Class M paradise moon, so of course they are out of their depth in interstellar politics and have no allies when the Cardassians begin to squeeze.

But before the big squeeze, there would in all probability be coexistence. Not benevolent for benevolence's sake, but because of indifference.

Whether a Cardassian need for raw materials really played any part in the conquest is debatable. It's a convenient excuse for Gul Madred to use; it doesn't follow that it should be true. And strip-mining the place and then rather lightly abandoning it need not be in contradiction with the sphere-of-influence thinking, either: the abandoning would come after the Union lost a war to the Federation and had to accept all space around Bajor (and right next to the homeworld!) as "neutral", so squeezing Bajor dry and throwing it away would simply be how they make lemonade out of that situation, not how they originally planned to make it.

Tio Saloniemi

 

[kkt]

Yes, Timo, there's no canonical answer but that certainly seems plausible.

 

[Tosk]

Bajorans would play the part of sharpened-avocado-wielding primitives in reed skirts chiefly because they have this psychological block against exploring or otherwise going abroad. They refuse to settle even their Class M paradise moon

That doesn't work as a reason for assuming Bajorans do not explore or settle other areas. For starters, Bajor allowed the Romulans to set up a hospital there. (They objected to the Romulans fortifying their position on the moon, which is an entirely different ball of wax.) We don't know the reason/s why Bajor themselves did not have people on the moon at the time, so we cannot assume one way or the other.

Plus, Bajorans were exploring the system hundreds of years earlier, and have established colonies on both other worlds in their own system and at least one in the Gamma Quadrant (RIP).

 

[Imaus]

It seems to me more like the Cardassians came in and started 'advising' and using paragovernmental organizations like government-influenced companies to take over Bajoran resources, for both personal and public profit. It doesn't seem like the Cardassians flew into Bajor and landed Mars Attack style, they just came in and acted a bit like Neo-colonizers we see today like the PRC or France.

The occupation began after or during a recession or depression in Cardassia, where people were starving and selling off their culture, around 2319, formally annexed 2329, released in 2369 or so. The Bajoran Occuputional Government existed for most of that time, but we also just know Cardassian military presence started, expanded, exploded, and then Bajor was toppled.

 

[Timo]

That doesn't work as a reason for assuming Bajorans do not explore or settle other areas. For starters, Bajor allowed the Romulans to set up a hospital there. (They objected to the Romulans fortifying their position on the moon, which is an entirely different ball of wax.) We don't know the reason/s why Bajor themselves did not have people on the moon at the time, so we cannot assume one way or the other.

Plus, Bajorans were exploring the system hundreds of years earlier, and have established colonies on both other worlds in their own system and at least one in the Gamma Quadrant (RIP).

But we hear of zero Bajoran offworld presence (including inside their own system) before the Cardassians utterly destroy their societal order.

We know the paradise moon was unsettled for what appears to be tens of thousands of years at a minimum - that is, Bajorans were looking at the Moon with the eyes of city-builders, but apparently without the glint of true explorers. We know the introduction of space travel changed nothing there yet, even when the timetable for that remains a bit unclear (the Orbs appeared "in the skies" ten thousand years before the show, some of the decidedly in outer space but some of the early ones perhaps merely in the clouds).

So we know for certain Bajorans don't settle. They just plain don't. Heck, they don't even survey their own mountains even when given apparent hundreds of thousands of years for it!

It's just that after the Occupation, there are no Bajorans any longer. Just these abominations that defy the natural order of things and act outside their d'jarras. But the settling of space rocks seems to have been a Cardassian project first and foremost, akin to the Nazi mass deportation of Jews before other solutions were invented.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tosk]

So we know for certain Bajorans don't settle. They just plain don't.

We'll just have to agree to disagree in terms of it being a dead cert. "They didn't colonize one of their moons!" is not enough evidence in my eyes to state definitively that Bajorans never settled anywhere pre-Occupation.

I'm not saying they did settle prior, just that we don't know one way or the other for a fact. We know the eighth planet is colonized prior to the series even starting, but as to when it happened we don't know.

How about the other part. Exploring?

 

[Timo]

Well, that's where the Janitza Mountains come in.

It's quite plausible for Earth even today to have locations not properly surveyed, or visited in person. After all, we apparently have been wandering this Earth for about 10,000-20,000 years only, being geographically limited earlier on. Bajorans would appear to have had a fiftyfold head start, unless Picard was being unusually disingenuous in "Ensign Ro" about the depth of Bajoran history.

So Bajorans don't even bother to explore places they can reach on foot. And what use do they make of spacecraft? They sail out from their planet in order to contemplate in silence!

Conversely, it's sort of understandable that no Bajoran explorers would exist. What employment would the members of an Explorer Caste enjoy on a planet that has been inhabited by cartographers for hundreds of thousands of years? So when space opens up, there's nobody to go up there but Poets and Carpenters.

And, yes, Diplomats and Merchants. But their professions might be held back by the general psychology of a culture/species that has weeded out all curiosity on what lies behind the horizon.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vger23]

No. They were dicks the whole way.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

No occupying force is ever benevolent. They might have initially planned to be less cruel before the Bajorans fought back. But they invaded a foreign planet for the sake of dominating and exploiting them with the reasoning that they were the superior race. There’s no good version of that, just degrees of cruelty.

Just like there were some slave masters who were kinder to their slaves than others, but they were still slave masters and therefore evil.

 

[Timo]

This presumes they would have been an occupying force. Yet the original question makes no such presumption: we don't really know why or how the Cardassians came to be on Bajor. Are tourists automatically malevolent? Are pilgrims or preachers? Are merchants or researchers?

It is possible that the centrally led Cardassia already planned to subjugate Bajor when granting the first anthropologists or poets or bicycle salesmen the permit to fly to the planet. But it's equally possible that the conquest plans came later, perhaps as the result of feedback from those who had traveled to the backward place and encountered unexpected riches.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JirinPanthosa]

This presumes they would have been an occupying force. Yet the original question makes no such presumption: we don't really know why or how the Cardassians came to be on Bajor. Are tourists automatically malevolent? Are pilgrims or preachers? Are merchants or researchers?

It is possible that the centrally led Cardassia already planned to subjugate Bajor when granting the first anthropologists or poets or bicycle salesmen the permit to fly to the planet. But it's equally possible that the conquest plans came later, perhaps as the result of feedback from those who had traveled to the backward place and encountered unexpected riches.

Timo Saloniemi

That puts them in the same category as the early American settlers who treated the Native Americans to a nice meal then went back and told the King how ripe for conquest they were.

I guess we don't know when and how Cardassia became expansionist. It's possible Cardassia was friends with Bajor for a while before they made the decision to turn hostile. But there's no indication that Dukat's unhinged rant of 'It was clear we were the superior race! Technologically, culturally' was solely his own opinion. Even if their relations were originally peaceful, Cardassia saw them as inferiors the whole time.

 

[Timo]

The whole superiority thing could have been invented to facilitate the conquests: recent'ish history is rife with examples of such propaganda, pulled out of relatively thin air when needed. The conquest thing in turn appeared fairy recent in "Chain of Command", or at least it had not yet made young Madred's life easier yet even though his argument seemed to be that it would do exactly that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Oddish]

Chancellor Durken in "First Contact" (the TNG episode) said it best: conquerors often arrive with the words "we are your friends".

 

[at Quark's]

Chancellor Durken in "First Contact" (the TNG episode) said it best: conquerors often arrive with the words "we are your friends".

Well, if we look at Western Europe's colonial history, they often used bringing the light of (western) civilization to those poor savages as a pretext for colonization and exploitation.

Probably, the more naive part of the colonizers themselves believed that was their mission. Just not the part that got filthily rich exploiting those colony's resources.