Starfleet - war criminals? (Sisko and Starfleet Command)

Only if your a rootless cosmopolitan or your move every few years and don't happen to have a family, have never worked the land and taken pride in its growth.

 

@Voth commando1 dude, you keep trying this argument, it keeps being false.

Starting a war that someone else has to fight on your behalf is not a legitimate way of keeping a makeshift home that isn't legally yours anyway. It is irresponsible and selfish. In this case it was also illegal. These people hadn't built lives, they were living out of standard issue colony kits in caves. They were upset they hadn't received protection from starfleet when they had no right to expect any.

The maquis were in the wrong, the Cardassians were also in the wrong, Eddington was in the wrong and in this case Sisko was in the wrong.

 

So then they were exactly like the Pilgrims!

 

There were no indigenous inhabitants on the world's they settled, at least not that we no of so comparing it to European settlement of the New World is false.

And the Maquis didn't demand the Federation fight their war in their behalf-I imagine not by the end.

We have statements from both Hudson and Eddington, a scene of a Maquis village around season 4 I think. They weren't just set up colonies-it's clear a lot of resources and work had been put into it.

But it's clear what you and I view as moral or causes worth dying for are very different. Hence this discussion has exhausted its intellectual potential.

 

There's certainly the possibility that SF intelligence WAS arming the Maquis, or some other Federation Organization was.

If the Federation was okay with just moving every colony off these border worlds, why did they spend 20 years fighting over them? Why did they write a treaty establishing a clear border with a buffer zone?

If the Federation just took their citizens, put them on a nice comfy M-Class world elsewhere, and abandoned the planets to the Cardassians, the Cardassians would just continue encroaching further outward. Or would the Feds just maintain the DMZ as a Neutral Zone and allow the Cards to fully inhabit it?

 

I thought humanity no longer had the need to pursue material possessions?

 

The bigger problem was the collaboration between current and former SF members and human colonists.

Is the sense of place solely a matter of possession? Nomadic peoples can show attachment to a region, or a set of places, without owning it in the way European would want.

 

There were no nomadic aliens in the region or indigenous species on the DMZ worlds.

Surely if their were they would have been mentioned.

And most SF officers had the sense to resign their commission before joining the cause Edington waited until he had gotten everything he needed from SF

 

This is true, but I'm just speculating to the TNG mindset, were humanity has evolved.

So, in addition to being a terrorist, he is also traitor, and possibly a megalomaniac.

I see nothing wrong with this combination.

 

There's no indication the fight was over the colonies.

They wrote a treaty establishing a clear border. Then they changed it into one featuring a buffer zone, apparently to appease the colonists - suggesting the colonists had not been any sort of a concern in the treaty, the peace or the war until that time.

What is this nonsense about "values worth dying for"? Nobody has a problem with people dying for sentimental attachment, or greed, or belief in Pink Cabbage. Good riddance and shallow graves to them. The problem is with some idiot killing for such things.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Which is fair. However, the Weltanschauung of TNG leaves a lot to be desired, imposed by fiat, lacking details as well as a sense of how one gets from the 20th to the 24th C. As evolved as humanity is supposed to be, humans still have attachments and preoccupations that sometimes verge toward the irrational. People, like Ira Graves and Paul Stubbs showed unusual, excessive attachment to what they saw as their "life's work." Humans haven't been changed emotionally; their priorities have been rearranged. Of course, TNG puts emphasis on how one's identity is related to what they do or how they affect the world, which seems more neutral than defining oneself by either power or possessions. The emotions that goes along with attachment seem to continue to exist, and might still affect humans in areas that are more anthropological--like the sense of place--than cultural.

ETA: Don't let's forget that the motivation for an entire series in the franchise was based on the desire to return to a single place: Voyager.

 

The "Border Wars" were fought on the Cardassian/Federation border. The fighting took place on these border colonies. The DMZ was designed to end the war, and keep both side's militaries out of this contested border area. If the war was not fought here, the DMZ would have been elsewhere.

And Timo, where's your profile pic? You're an Admiral for Pete's sake.

EDIT: You too, Commodore.

 

That's all relevant points, and certainly an interesting one. However, not to disagree with your Voyager comment but the concluding remark that Harry Kim makes is "Maybe's it's not the destination that matters-maybe it's the journey." Not saying you're wrong, more that there is more to the story.

Secondly, even if the people are more irrational about their attachment, does that make them "right" in the face of an interstellar war.

First thing I think of with the "Commodore" comment:

 

This is an intriguing idea, especially in light of the existence of Section 31. Plus it has a real world parallel with various US covert missions such as Iran-Contra.

 

This is an interesting issue indeed. Note how Bajor, right next door to Cardassia (as we later learn), is in the middle of "neutral" space, rather than in the middle of the Cardassian Union. Supposedly, it's also on the "UFP side" of the Cardassian Union or else our heroes would have quite a bit of difficulty accessing it. Yet the UFP and the CU share a border that is never indicated to be right next to Cardassia Prime.

It does seem to me that the war wasn't fought near the as such worthless colonies at all, but on Cardassia's doorstep, with the victorious UFP "liberating" every planet on their path till they reached Bajor and decided that enough was enough and that further "liberation" would result in an Okinawa-scale bloodshed to no gain. Thus, there's a giant pit carved on the side of the Union, with Bajor at the bottom, and with planets formerly associated with Cardassia and still sympathetic to it and hostile to the Federation.

But no hole carved in the colonization area that would eventually become the DMZ, and little or no interest in doing anything to that part of the border except using it as a pawn in negotiations. After all, travel from the UFP to Cardassia doesn't involve travel through the DMZ - and apparently travel from either to the DMZ involves a detour. It's very literally a sideshow, and the fights over places like Setlik or Minos Korva may have been in the area of that "pit" instead.

Sorry about that - I don't do social media, really, not even 'em old-fashioned things like avatars or tags or .sig lines.

(Also, I'm a Fleet Admiral now? Who demoted me? In the terms of TNG era fori, that is.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

I have an emotional attachment to the house I live in, I've raised three kids here. However it is a long term rent and at some point that will come to an end. No amount of emotional investment makes it mine or gives me legal recourse to stay should my land lord sell up. At that point I will have to move, no matter how invested I am.

If I steal my neighbours Porsche and fall in love with driving it I'm emotionally invested. It's still not my car and I deserve to be arrested.

If I become obsessed with an acquaintance and start stalking her I'm emotionally invested. That does not make us a couple and she is within her rights to get a restraining order.

Emotional investment means precisely squat, those makeshift colonies were illegal and the colonists had no right to stay there.

It may gain the colonists some viewer sympathy, but it does not justify their actions, on the contrary it is exactly what is blinding them to the massive harm they are doing to much more responsible people who are put in the position of having to deal with the mess they had created.

We neither know that nor for these purposes should we care as it is a strawman argument. No one has claimed here there were or weren't indigenous populations, they have merely stated the settlers were not such. That is sufficient for the case being presented that the settlers had no special claim to those sites.

They set on a course that was almost inevitably going to end in a war the federation would have to fight and everyone else could see it. That's exactly the problem.

 

"Feelings aren't positive and negative, they simply exist. It's what we do with those feelings that becomes good or bad."

 

Does causing interstellar war fall on the good side or bad side?

 

depends if you win most likely