Why did Kira call Innocent Cardassians who needed to be killed "Collaborators?"

More accurate than what? Why do you refuse to engage with the fact that she never called them collaborators in the first place?

 

A Cardassian could not be a collaborator. A Bajoran who assisted the Cardassians willingly couldn't be anything else.

 

Was talking about the cardassian resistence sorry if I confused you.

 

The Cardassians who continued to work for the Dominion set themselves in opposition to the legitimate leader of the Cardassian Union, who declared that the Dominion presence was an occupation. Those Cardassians were rightfully collaborators.

 

The Bajorans set off explosives in a Cardassian facility. The Bajorans who pick up trash, and work in the kitchens, clean the bathrooms deserve to die?

Because when Kira referred to collaborators, I really think those were the people she was trying to justify killing. Just regular Bajorans.

Kira was telling the Cardassain resistance that regular Cardassain civilians might be killed in their attacks, but that was okay, because they should be thought of as "collaborators."

 

Consider the alternative: allow the Cardassians to continue slaughtering, torturing, and exploiting Bajorans without opposition.

War is a brutal, ugly, nasty thing that kills the innocent as well as the evil. It should only be waged when the alternative is worse. In this case, it was.

 

War, even a just war, can't account for individual responsibility. It must be conducted toward an end. Indeed, even if we accepted that the Bajorans were victims of the Cardassians, their deaths still might be justifiable in the context of war even if they would be exonerated of collaboration or war crimes afterward. This is not unlike Ben-Gurion and other Jewish leaders asking Roosevelt to bomb Auschwitz even though it would result in Jewish deaths: it would significantly interrupt the Nazi genocide machine.

 

One could also conclude, given the horrific conditions of Auschwitz and what the Jewish people there were enduring, a secondary reason for wanting that place bombed was to mercy kill those poor people. Given Ben Gurion was a leader of the Jewish people, if memory serves me, I can see him not only wanting the genocide to stop, but to see an end to the suffering people at that time were enduring.

With the Cardassians, Kira was totally right... any of them that were not with you, were against you. And the Dominion would definitely use civilians as shields. Hell, they didn't care much for the Cardassians, anyway. The Founders would have never forgiven them for their part in attacking their homeworld.

 

If https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cardassian_history is to be believed, the Cardassian people haven't always been so militaristic. I think it would be fascinating to see what a Cardassia returning to that, (i.e. a culture without those fascist overtones) would look like.

 

For most of her freedom fighting career, Kira is in the unenviable position of having to justify her actions even when she realizes they aren't actually helping anybody.

In human history of late, resistance has never worked, unless the oppressing or occupying force was actually under attack from the outside. In those cases, random acts of violence inside the occupation zone would tie down some limited number of troops the occupying oppressor would much rather be deploying against the outside attack - and coordinated acts of violence could be of assistance in that outside attack. But nobody was attacking Bajor from the outside.

Of course, the Federation was waging a hot war against the Cardassian Union, at least in the mid-fifties and early sixties and possibly a lot longer. But the longer, the worse: Kira would have learned to think that no concrete help was forthcoming in her lifetime, and that she'd forever be stuck killing her countrymen, -women and -children, plus the occasional irrelevant Cardassian.

When Kira is coaching the Cardassian resistance, the situation is drastically different. Kira has every confidence in there being a war effort that the actions of her nuisance brigade will crucially support, by destabilizing the very center of the local foothold of the Dominion. No matter how hopeless the fight (and it's probably a lot more hopeless than the one she fought a decade earlier), at least it's for a concrete purpose. But she has to teach the vocabulary of freedom fighting to the newbies nevertheless, and the more unnerving, the better. Damar's troops need to shake themselves loose from past doctrines, instead of just modifying them a little and hoping that their former comrades won't be offended and won't fire back much. Kira isn't formulating a manifest, she's building morale for field troops.

So Kira has twofold reason to be more callous than ever: she needs to turn utter rookies into freedom fighters, and she needs maximum effort out of them in minimum time, firstly because they won't live long, but secondly because thankfully the main fight will be decided soon. Caution served the Bajoran resistance; it won't help here.

But of course there's a third factor there, too: she will have few reservations with being callous when all the victims on both sides will be Cardassians!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Most of the camps were located in what today is eastern Poland, the distance might have been too far for the planes of the day.

 

Yes.

The novel The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack is very much about that. Essentially it is about the attempt of the old Cardassian fascism to seize control of the new democratic Cardassia, and about how a new democracy fights off its tyrannical past.

 

seems harsh. how about farmers who grow food, some of which would have been eaten by cardassians..

kill them all, let the prophets sort them out?

 

I don't think that would have been a good strategic move. The most likely outcome would be the Cardassians glassing the entire planet of Bajor.

 

Attacks on civilian population have been used in numerous wars in history. I agree it's not right, but it happens.

I agree that it would not have been a good move. Though they wouldn't have "glassed the planet", they'd just have become harsher and harsher towards the Bajorans.
But I still think the Bajoran resistance would have done it if they had possessed the means, they would have lashed out at the Cardassian homeworld. They weren't a trained military, they were a bunch of very angry and hurt lay people who were forced to fight.

 

Fair enough I Think Damar would have preffered the term collateral damage.

 

Bajoran collaborators should beware of Kira's wrath. Not even Kira's own mother got off easy.

Remember that Kira planted a bomb in Dukat's quarters with the intention of killing her own mother, after Kira discovered her mom was a collaborator, being Dukat's comfort woman. Talk about taking a hard line against Bajoran collaborators.

Granted it didn't really happen. Kira was transported back in time by one of those Orbs of the Prophets in order to answer Kira's question about what really was the situation between her mother and Dukat during the occupation. The episode was "Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night".

But that episode showed how hard core was Kira's view about Bajoran collaborators. It turned out that Kira's mother gave in to Dukat as a trade off in order to give her family, including little Kira, a better life than they would have gotten otherwise under the occupation.

Even after Kira learned why her mother collaborated, Kira still had contempt for her mother.

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Kira seemed to have an uncompromising view of collaborators, at least the Bajoran ones. I'm sure there were different degrees of collaboration. People had to do whatever they had to do to just survive during the occupation. I guess the occupation was very corrupting to the soul of everyone who had to live through it.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, Kira seemed more forgiving of Odo's collaboration with the Cardassians. Kira discovered that Odo probably sent innocent Bajorans to death during Odo's time as constable during occupation. Interestingly, Kira made the observation that anyone who lived through the occupation "had to get a little dirty".

Kira seemed to show more understanding for Odo than to her own mother.

 

I think her being harsher towards her mother could have two reasons:

1) The shock of learning that someone so close to her, whom she loved, could be a collaborator, especially one who was so close to Dukat.
2) When Kira learned that of Odo, the occupation was over and Kira could probably distance herself a bit from it, she was looking at Odo's actions as something that was in the past. When she saw her mother playing Dukat's lover she was transported back into the occupation, and lived through it again for quite a while (I can't remember how long she was on Terok Nor before Meru sent for her) so she probably had slipped back into her old mindset as a resistance fighter and old, dark parts of her psyche had become activated, making her more radicalized.

Possibly even a third one: Odo is not a Bajoran, so it might not be "as bad" in her eyes as Meru betraying her own people.

 

If they don't want to get blown up, then they shouldn't work for the invaders occupying and oppressing and murdering millions of their people.

It would make more sense to target the merchant who sells the food to the Cardassians than the farmers who cannot control the distribution of their products.

Nope. Cardassia needed the resources and wealthy the obtained from Bajor, and they needed the local population as a slave labor force. They were never going to be willing to just glass Bajor, and that restricted their options in responding to the Resistance.

 

this is the key difference, Odo is a third party with no moral obligations to either side. He tried his best to be even handed and that's all that can be expected in the situation.

I thought about that, and you are probably right, but there's a balance between the resources they get and the effort it takes to get them, and if you kill the families of the wrong people in Central command, there's a risk that the math tips out of Bajor's favor.

What's the end goal of the Bajorans? It's to make Occupation more costly than the resources being extracted. But they don't want the Cardassians taking revenge during the withdrawal, and killing the families of the men in charge is a great way to do just that.