Nazi ideology in "The Killing Game"?

[Ragitsu]

Good morning.

Was there supposed to be a deep message behind the scene where a holographic representation of a Nazi officer actually manages to convince a LIVING Hirogen that this centuries old ideology of ethnic/racial supremacy has merit? Is this scene about gullibility in general, the psychological/sociological pliability of an aimless culture (i.e., what the Hirogen were in danger of becoming) or the notion that Nazism in particular will always hold appeal with the right minds at the right time?

 

[Christopher]

Do you mean the scene where the Kapitan convinced the Beta Hirogen Turanj to join him in turning against the Karr, the sympathetic Alpha Hirogen in the role of the Kommandant? I don't think it had any "deep message" beyond Turanj being the bad guy of the episode, the one who opposed Karr's vision of reform and just wanted to continue the Hirogen's usual traditions. The Kapitan didn't "convince" Turanj of Nazi ideology; his rhetoric just reinforced what Turanj already believed, that "We must be faithful to who we are" and that inferior life forms must be hunted down rather than reconciled with. The only thing Turanj was convinced of was that he should go ahead and overthrow Karr instead of continuing to obey an Alpha whose choices he found contemptible.

 

[Ragitsu]

Granted, he doesn't literally convert to Nazism on the spot, but it is a speech rife with Nazi rhetoric that ultimately sways him to a course of action contingent on the belief in a "master race".

 

[Ragitsu]

Anyhow, the broader implication of this scene is frightening. Is there a Federation citizen "out there" being persuaded by an especially eloquent holographic Khmer Rouge partisan?

 

[Christopher]

Granted, he doesn't literally convert to Nazism on the spot, but it is a speech rife with Nazi rhetoric that ultimately sways him to a course of action contingent on the belief in a "master race".

No, that's not the part that sways Turanj. Throughout the 2-parter, Turanj objects to Karr's holodeck experiment and disagrees that the Hirogen way needs to be changed.

TURANJ: The Kommandant would have us continue this simulation until we rot. It's pointless. We should begin the hunt. He believes we must learn more about our prey, but I have learned enough.
...
TURANJ: I've become impatient. We penetrated this vessel, overcame their defences, and in the moment of the kill, you forced us to stop. Now we play these incessant games. It's time we took our trophies and moved on.
KARR: Your lust for the kill has blinded you, like many young hunters. If you took the time to study your prey, to understand its behaviour, you might learn something.
TURANJ: There is nothing to be learned.
KARR: You're wrong. Each prey exposes us to another way of life and makes us re-evaluate our own. Have you considered our future? What would become of us when we have hunted this territory to exhaustion?
TURANJ: We will travel to another part of space, search for new prey, as we have always done.
KARR: A way of life that hasn't changed for a thousand years.
TURANJ: Why should it?
KARR: Species that don't change, die. We've lost our way. We've allowed our predatory instincts to dominate us. We disperse ourselves throughout the quadrant, sending ships in all directions. We've become a solitary race, isolated. We've spread ourselves too thin. We're no longer a culture. We have no identity. In another thousand years, no one will remember the name Hirogen. Our people must come back together, combine forces, rebuild our civilisation.
TURANJ: What of the hunt?
KARR: The Hunt will always continue, but in a new way. I intend to transform this ship into a vast simulation, populated with a varied and endless supply of prey. In time, this technology can be duplicated for other Hirogen. These holodecks will allow us to hold onto our past, while we face the future.
TURANJ: Even if I were persuaded, others wouldn't be.

Now here's the Kapitan's speech that prompts Turanj to act, with the relevant portions highlighted:

One does not cooperate with decadent forms of life. One hunts them down and eliminates them. The Kommandant speaks of civilisation. The ancient Romans were civilised. The Jews are civilised. But in all its moral decay, Rome fell to the spears of our ancestors, as the Jews are falling now. Look at our destiny. (the flag behind the bar) The field of red, the purity of German blood. The blazing white circle of the sun that sanctified that blood. No one can deny us, no power on Earth or beyond. Not the Christian Saviour, not the God of the Jews. We are driven by the very force that gives life to the universe itself. We must countermand the Kommandant's orders, stay and fight. We must be faithful to who we are.

The Kapitan does not sway Turanj to Nazi ideology. After all, Turanj stated earlier in the scene that "I am tired of this simulation... and these holograms are becoming annoying as well." He doesn't consider the Kapitan a person, so he's not going to be paying any attention to a holographic character's rants based in some alien ideology from centuries ago. What Turanj is paying attention to is the ongoing situation outside the holodeck, where Karr has announced that he's brokered a cease-fire with Janeway. Turanj objects to that, but he's still hesitant to defy the orders of his Alpha. The only thing the Kapitan's speech does is give Turanj a slight nudge to go ahead and do what he already wanted to do.

So, no, the point was not that the Kapitan converted Turanj to Nazism. The point was that Turanj was already a kindred spirit to the Nazis in his eagerness to prey on other races, to favor violence and conquest over peace and compromise. Turanj represented the dark side of the Hirogen that Karr was trying to change.

 

[Ragitsu]

I rewatched the scene, because transcripts alone do not always paint a complete picture. The core of the Kapitan's speech - what one might call "spin" - commanded Turanj's attention. He wasn't idly listening for the majority of the time (which you might expect if he was solely focused on the beginning and end...parts that spoke directly to his ego); he was definitely consistently intrigued. Even if the particulars of Earth history/propaganda were lost on the Hirogen, the overall delivery by the hologram still had an appreciable effect. Had Turanj ended up victorious, I can easily imagine him revisiting the program for more "pointers" that he would adapt for his own aims.

 

[Christopher]

Had Turanj ended up victorious, I can easily imagine him revisiting the program for more "pointers" that he would adapt for his own aims.

I don't see that. Turanj was contemptuous of the program, of the whole idea of using holograms. He saw no value in the technology, because he was a purist closed to new ideas. That was the entire point of his character. He believed in the Hirogen's millennium-old traditions and was hostile to any change or innovation.

Again, the only reason the Kapitan's speech affected him is because it resonated with what was already in his head. The point was not that he was "converted" to Nazism, but that he was already a kindred spirit to begin with. He just needed an excuse, a way to talk himself into turning against his Alpha, and the Kapitan's speech gave him that excuse.

In drama, you generally can't get into a character's head, so it's often useful to give a character a foil they can play off of, a way to externalize their inner thoughts for the audience's benefit. That's the purpose the Kapitan served. It wasn't about the allure of Nazism or anything like that. There was no deeper philosophical point to it. It was simply a dramatic device to illustrate Turanj's internal debate for the audience.

 

[spinagogue]

Yeah. Broadly, I think Nazi fascism didn't have any particular appeal to the Hirogen; they just loved hunting, and this was an interesting new story/scenario for them to experience. Not that fascism was necessarily inconsistent with Hirogen culture. I just think it itself wasn't meant to take on any particular importance to the audience.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah. Broadly, I think Nazi fascism didn't have any particular appeal to the Hirogen; they just loved hunting, and this was an interesting new story/scenario for them to experience. Not that fascism was necessarily inconsistent with Hirogen culture. I just think it itself wasn't meant to take on any particular importance to the audience.

It wasn't even about the fascism, it was about the genocide. Turanj wasn't interested in politics, just in preying on beings he considered inferior.

 

[spinagogue]

It wasn't even about the fascism, it was about the genocide. Turanj wasn't interested in politics, just in preying on beings he considered inferior.

No yeah, I think you're right and totally agree. Evidently I was unclear. I didn't see any evidence of it being about the fascism. Just playing "devil's advocate", I was conceding that it wasn't necessarily inconsistent, i.e., it's not as though they repudiated it.

 

[Ragitsu]

It would have been fascinating to see a Hirogen sect that - while still concerned with "the hunt" - took on characteristics of Nazi ideology; completely unintentionally, ugliness from the Alpha Quadrant would manage to find its way to the Delta Quadrant.

 

[Christopher]

It would have been fascinating to see a Hirogen sect that - while still concerned with "the hunt" - took on characteristics of Nazi ideology; completely unintentionally, ugliness from the Alpha Quadrant would manage to find its way to the Delta Quadrant.

Considering how much Nazi ideology is spreading here in the United States right now, I'd find that more depressing than fascinating.

 

[Ragitsu]

Considering how much Nazi ideology is spreading here in the United States right now, I'd find that more depressing than fascinating.

Any old (failed?) ideology centered around the worse aspects of humanity also works; be it the focal point of a set of episodes wrestling with The Prime Directive or a one-off episode where the PD isn't even mentioned in passing, it has potential. Either way, a new dimension is added to the holodeck.

 

[Christopher]

Any old (failed?) ideology centered around the worse aspects of humanity also works; be it the focal point of a set of episodes wrestling with The Prime Directive or a one-off episode where the PD isn't even mentioned in passing, it has potential. Either way, a new dimension is added to the holodeck.

Sorry, I just don't buy it. Despite what "A Piece of the Action" claimed, cultural influence just doesn't work that way. I did my college thesis in history on how religions spread to new societies, and what it basically boils down to is that people won't adopt an outside idea unless it fits with what they already believe or serves some agenda they already have. If it doesn't fill some existing need, they'll have no reason to be swayed by it.

So I don't see it as adding a dimension to the holodeck, because it wouldn't be the holodeck that was responsible, any more than, say, video games or action movies are responsible for provoking violence. People often try to blame violent acts on those things, but that falls apart when you consider that the vast majority of the audience for those things is not provoked to violence. It's only those few people who are already predisposed to violence who are going to act out. By the same token, a holodeck program won't change people's thinking from what they're already looking for. At most, it will affect the form and surface trappings of their beliefs, not change the underlying essence of them.

 

[Ragitsu]

I'll buy it. For one, the realism inherent to the holodeck is far beyond anything we have today. Secondly, an alien species/culture need not perfectly emulate humanity in terms of psychology and/or sociology.

 

[Christopher]

I'll buy it. For one, the realism inherent to the holodeck is far beyond anything we have today.

Which has no bearing on the issue, because historically new ideas were brought by live human beings like missionaries, and it didn't make any difference.

Secondly, an alien species/culture need not perfectly emulate humanity in terms of psychology and/or sociology.

Which would defeat the purpose of science fiction as an allegory for human experience. Even when they do think differently, it should be in a way that logically arises from their own evolutionary process, that's a plausible adaptive behavior rather than just an arbitrary handwave by a storyteller. Which is basically what I'm saying -- that memes (in the original sense of transmitted concepts, not the vernacular sense of Internet jokes) work equivalently to genes, in that their propagation depends on whether they serve some adaptive function that suits a population's needs -- with the proviso that a meme that benefits one subgroup may be harmful to others within the same species (e.g. racism was propagated because it benefited wealthy plantation owners reliant on slave labor).

No well-written alien species (aside from a hive consciousness like the Borg) is going to be just some uniform, undifferentiated mass whose individuals all think the same way and who blindly adopt an idea in lockstep because it's convenient for the writer (and yes, many Trek aliens are guilty of this). Giving them individual variations and differences is not just more realistic, but more interesting to the audience. That's what works in "The Killing Game." Karr and Turanj are affected by the holodeck in different ways, because of the pre-existing differences in their worldviews and goals. Karr had a need for change and reform, and Turanj had a need for embracing the status quo. So they reacted to the same stimulus in ways that fit their opposing needs. The holodeck didn't change them, just catalyzed what was already within them.

That's what you have to keep in mind -- that there are two sides to the interaction. You have to consider not just the nature of the influence, but the nature of the ones being influenced. If you reduce them to just passive blank slates that absorb human ideas with no agency of their own, that's playing into the same racially condescending cargo-cult stereotype that gave us the Iotians. It also makes them stereotypes rather than characters. I'm all for aliens thinking differently than humans, but not if it's just an excuse for lazy writing.

 

[Ragitsu]

I can understand the parallels drawn between the holodeck and conventional (modern) electronic entertainment, but leaving the holodeck as "a really advanced video game" and nothing more is a bit limiting; by the same token, I get why Star Trek aliens are essentially separate elements of humanity given emphasis, but keeping them as exaggerated examples seems overly restrictive. "Delta quadrant alien gets inspired by ancient Earth philosophy of racial supremacy" is a much more compelling development than "Delta quadrant alien is incidentally motivated to follow through on an already contemplated course of action."

 

[Christopher]

"Delta quadrant alien gets inspired by ancient Earth philosophy of racial supremacy" is a much more compelling development than "Delta quadrant alien is incidentally motivated to follow through on an already contemplated course of action."

As I've explained, though, it's deeply unrealistic to expect that anyone would be so easily swayed to start believing something they weren't already predisposed to believe. That's just not the way people work. You can't just assert that someone would be inspired that way because you want it to happen. You need to justify why an alien would be inspired by Nazi belief rather than repulsed by it, or simply confused by it. Different people are going to react differently to the same stimulus, and that's going to be because of their individual differences in personality and predisposition. Nobody's going to be inspired by Nazi ideology unless there's already something about their mental state or their life situation that makes them susceptible to it, that makes it appealing to them instead of repugnant.

So I disagree entirely. There's nothing compelling about arbitrarily having a character do something for no reason -- that's just bad writing. What's compelling is exploring why a character is motivated to adopt a certain belief or course of action. What matters is not the belief itself, but what it means to the character.