Here's an objective view on the Third Reich: They were a bunch of goddamn muderous, racist assholes.
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Episode of the Week : Patterns of Force
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Here's an objective view on the Third Reich: They were a bunch of goddamn muderous, racist assholes.
Apparently back in the 1960s people had this idea that Nazi Germany was some kind of super-efficient state with a great economy and all that. It wasn't til later more research was done that made it clear how inefficient it really was and most of their efficiency was an illusion created from how records were edited, money and productivity came from what they were doing to the Jewish people (or anyone they deemed political enemies), etc.
So watching this episode now it just makes it look like John Gill was this Neo-Nazi lunatic who decided to become a Dictator while saying it was all for their own good.
Wouldn't surprise me if it turned out the real reason Enterprise was sent out there was because someone on Earth looked at anything Gill wrote and realized "Uh-oh, this dude is nuts. Better send someone out there to make sure he isn't doing anything crazy!"
So watching this episode now it just makes it look like John Gill was this Neo-Nazi lunatic who decided to become a Dictator while saying it was all for their own good.
Wouldn't surprise me if it turned out the real reason Enterprise was sent out there was because someone on Earth looked at anything Gill wrote and realized "Uh-oh, this dude is nuts. Better send someone out there to make sure he isn't doing anything crazy!"
Lol, yeah, sure!
Maybe I should have gone a little further and said that it sparked enough interest in history for me to go and really find the facts. For what it's worth (for clarification); I don't believe that WW3 or the Eugenics War took place in the 1990's!!!
Maybe they could, but apparently they didn't.
Since the Amazon series premiere I reread Man in the High Castle (1962). It touches on this idea- Nazis weren't nearly as efficient as the propaganda made them seem. Prosperity for the Fatherland was made possible by incredible amounts of unpaid labor, confiscated land, money, precious metals, etc. In the fiction, this war/pillage economy continued to the 60's.
An Aside-
The Man in the High Castle is some damned good TV.
This. It had been only twenty years since WWII ended, so not everything we know now was out yet. The episode itself makes it fairly clear that Melakon is the cause of the racist hatred, and for that he has to die.
The Twilight Zone had also done an episode dealing with neo-Nazis, "He's Alive", with a young Dennis Hopper in 1963. George Lincoln Rockwell was making headlines in those days with his American Nazi Party. While the script for "Patterns of Force" was being developed, Rockwell was murdered by a former member of his own party.
I've always enjoyed this episode. I don't think it's far fetched at all to believe that someone would use fascism, thinking they'd "perfected" it. Hell, it still goes on today to some extent, but it's just not cloaked in Nazi symbols.
. . . everything I learned about history, I learned from Star Trek . . . Best history teacher I ever had
LOL, I have to admit that I too learned a lot about history from Trek
Being a child of Star Trek gave me a great vocabulary, from Spock in particular, but also Kirk. For history, I think the show only suggested things to go and look for.
Umm, what other interpretation would have been possible, even back then?
It's not as if we're supposed to feel sorry for Gill. If he's a Nazi, then he's a bad guy - note how the episode makes zero effort to create a sympathetic Nazi character or an unsympathetic enemy of the Nazis. Kirk just has trouble accepting that his hero is in fact a villain, but the audience never is supposed to wonder. The bad guys have no redeeming qualities, and nothing about the purported "efficiency" shows up in a positive light.
Objectively speaking, that applies to every side in that old conflict.
Timo Saloniemi
. . . everything I learned about history, I learned from Star Trek . . . Best history teacher I ever had
LOL, I have to admit that I too learned a lot about history from Trek
Being a child of Star Trek gave me a great vocabulary, from Spock in particular, but also Kirk. For history, I think the show only suggested things to go and look for.
I hope you know I was being facetious, although the series was more than just entertaining to me as youngster in the 70s but I did learn from the subtle morality of social issues intertwined with the sci-fi. I can't say that I realized it as I was watching but those themes for social equality have stuck with me.
I gave this episode an 8. I acknowledge its flaws, but it is still one of my favorite "planet" episodes. It is also weird seeing Jewish actors (Shatner and Nimoy) pretending to be Nazis.
link added
As a child, Clary was actually held in Nazi concentration camps until he was freed when the war ended and his parents and other family members died while in a concentration camp. He was the only surviving member of his immediate family. It has been a while since I read it but he talks of it in his autobiography and also here in this interview.
http://www.vvdailypress.com/article/20140730/NEWS/140739981
As a child, Clary was actually held in Nazi concentration camps until he was freed when the war ended and his parents and other family members died while in a concentration camp. He was the only surviving member of his immediate family. It has been a while since I read it but he talks of it in his autobiography and also here in this interview.
http://www.vvdailypress.com/article/20140730/NEWS/140739981
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It was a foolish choice by an old man who should have known better.The chances and indeed, likelihood, that such a construct in all its applications would be prone to manipulation and devolve to simple demagoguery should of dissuaded such a renowned intellect from being sanguine in thinking that the society would easily remain under the control of a benign "father figure".
Factor in as well that the culture was characterized before his arrival as being warlike and prone to internecine struggles. A judgement that this society, which likely had a long history of brutal power mongering despots would benignly and in an orderly process, accept and accede to such an idealistic model was unrealistic. Gill's determination to make this calamitous decision may have been ultimately dictated by a desire to no longer be just a theoretician, but actually place his own stamp on history, as long as he was in charge, of course.
One brief thought about the Nazi's efficiency; they certainly didn't manifest that with any consistency in implementing various weapon systems. Personality conflicts and Hitler's intervention delayed, derailed, or negatively modified a number of aircraft designs to the definite detriment of achieving much more significant battle space successes with brilliant designs that could have made substantive differences otherwise.
Factor in as well that the culture was characterized before his arrival as being warlike and prone to internecine struggles. A judgement that this society, which likely had a long history of brutal power mongering despots would benignly and in an orderly process, accept and accede to such an idealistic model was unrealistic. Gill's determination to make this calamitous decision may have been ultimately dictated by a desire to no longer be just a theoretician, but actually place his own stamp on history, as long as he was in charge, of course.
One brief thought about the Nazi's efficiency; they certainly didn't manifest that with any consistency in implementing various weapon systems. Personality conflicts and Hitler's intervention delayed, derailed, or negatively modified a number of aircraft designs to the definite detriment of achieving much more significant battle space successes with brilliant designs that could have made substantive differences otherwise.
Some were better at it than others.
I'm not sure there should be any difference between "simple demagoguery" and "father figures" at any level, practical or conceptual...
The way the episode presents Gill's case, the only error the old man seems to have made is not creating sufficient safeguards against his right-hand men (such as having enough of such men to keep each other down). Otherwise, he had the father figure act down pat; what we don't quite learn is how long he himself was able to reap the benefits, and when exactly usurpers like Melakon took all the fun away...
Yup. That's how you win wars.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes, and the homemade laser scene was fun. I also liked seeing the communicators disassembled.
Isak (Richard Evans) always reminds me of the Rankin/Bass "Little Drummer Boy" puppet, with his dark, soulful eyes. I'm not sure he'd appreciate that.
http://www.viralnova.com/creepy-christmas-movies/
I guess I'm going back to the use of the word benign in describing Gill's vision of how he was going to run things. A figure that through a wisely conceived strategy that didn't inherently require coercion, fear mongering, race demonization, and mass murder to accomplish the goal of unifying the culture in the realization of the fruits of a common good. Perhaps through the mix of moral suasion, market incentives, the primacy of the rule of law, etc. Thinking about it, in the realm of Star Trek, at least those parts that I'm most familiar with, one would have to say that it's hard to find an example that actually jibed with what Gill intended, from Landru to Tieran to, on a rather larger stage the Founders or Sphere Builders.
In our own history though, I think it's reasonable to point out Washington as someone, who at the beginning of the republic would have had more opportunity to shape the leadership of the country in a more draconian manner in regards to domestic trouble spots, but on the whole didn't, and is justly still regarded as a father figure.
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