Why did East Germany side with the commies?
How Messed Up is the Prime Directive?
- Thread starter Tallguy
- Start date
3 million Russian soldiers walked into Germany with tanks and said "do what we say for the next 44 years or we will execute the lot of you you freaking NAZI sons of B$tches."
Well that'd do it. Ok blonde moment forgot about WW2
I agree with Dougherty.
That is, I don't think these people should be forcefully relocated, but I agree that the PD probably wasn't meant to be invoked in cases such as this one. (Where a society very well knows what's out there, and they colonized that planet themselves). I'd say it's more a question of who can rightfully claim the planet in question (the Baku rights seem to be older), and 'doing the decent thing' (leaving a society alone that wants to be left alone).
I will avoid moderator involvement and try to keep this as Star Trek as possible.
1) Going to the characterization of "who does the PD apply to" - Every time the writer's origins of the PF come up it's been Vietnam. Because "we" had no business interfering in "other" cultures. And of course the fear of unintended consequences and damaging those other cultures. Going back to A Private Little War: Other powers in space had a different take on the situation.
2) A single captain did not make any of those decisions either. The PD has never been put forward as "Someone should do something but this is above my pay grade."
3) That does raise a good point that the PD is a STARFLEET regulation.
4) Going back to Homeward and other extinction level events (which is a post TOS problem) maybe I don't want a single captain or ship making the call. But who will? Federation Council: "Dammit, Jean-Luc. Now we have a bunch of backwards, ignorant refugees to take care of! This was a decision above your authority."
There was at least twice on Voyager where they postulated that the Prime Directive applied to the Federation when dealing with aliens more technologically sophisticated than the Federation.
Caretaker.
Prototype.
Giving advanced tech to a younger race may alter the balance of power on a hand full of worlds, but giving any tech to an older race may alter the balance of power of the entire the galaxy.
The Moral of this story is that everyone is a bastard.
Last edited:
Sorry, still having trouble, with what exactly your objection is.
didn't the slingshot people decline to officially give Voyager the tech due to their version of the PD. its been a while since I saw that episode.
Yup, Prime Factors.
The Bizarre thing is that guy was trying to bang Janeway. He expected Kathy to enter into a sensual contract of trust, but he still thought that she was a bloody savage he would not share technology with.
Imagine that you had a dutiful fiance, that you would not share the pin number for your bank card with.
Or are you referring to the graviton Catapult from the Voyager Conspiracy?
Because the statement of the PD is that these are primitive and immature cultures and we (the advanced cultures) must not upset their balance. And then they say "Like the U.S. in Vietnam." Yikes.
I didn't realize that was such a controversial statement, but I could have just as easily made the comparison to the Soviet Union involving itself in Afghanistan and the repercussions both to it and the rest of the world because of it.
Global foreign policy has made those distinctions over the past century. There are nuclear powers and non-nuclear powers. There are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (i.e., the victors of World War II) who get special status to make decisions on authorizing force and the rest of the world that doesn't. There's the first world and the third world. And how the first world has intervened, colonized, and ignored the third world has been the subject of reams of books and multiple college courses for decades.
Beyond that, as canon, Star Trek makes that distinction. Except the technological advancement is warp drive instead of nuclear weapons. And the Federation has markers for what counts as "advanced" social development. Bajor can't have a caste system on their population and expect the Federation to give them support and Federation membership.
I do not think it should be controversial to sit in judgment of North Korea's system of government and think it's "immature." However, I also think it cuts into these arguments about the Prime Directive that if any of the world's powers were to intervene to "help" the population of North Korea, the consequences and potential blowback from that could spiral in ways that none of us might be able to comprehend. And that speaks to why the Prime Directive exists as a concept.
I don't know, I think might have more to do with the words you are choosing to describe the concept rather than any inherent bias in the concept itself. While "primitive" is often seen to have a pejorative connotation, it really is a purely relative term. It doesn't actually describe anything about Society A, other than that Society B has already experienced that stage, and is now doing something different. This is possible because we have recognized a predictable path human civilizations follow, and there aren't any odd outliers (Capitalism Vs Communism is the biggest split so far). The only reason the West describes themselves as "advanced" or "mature" is that we have no other civilizations further along to compare to.
Thanks to Prodigy we actually have the first written documentation of the PD and words "primitive" and "immature" don't appear in it.
I always knew the TNG episode Justice was a Prime Directive violation!
"Any hat." What more do you need to know?
Tasha even did did a report on the laws, as required, she just screwed it up.
Or any example of colonialism.
Really any time one civilization imposed it's rule, culture or values on another.
Vietnam is a good example because, not only were their weapons and equipment not as technologically advanced as the US, but it was the socio-political hot potato topic of the TOS era.
This is the way it should be. I’d love clever stories where our heroes save people.
I think that was essentially Our Heroes' plan in Into Darkness, but it didn't work out as intended.
I love Into Darkness!
I remember taking a really wild anthropology class in college (early 1980s) that made me look hard at the use of the word "primitive". It does and did imply a level of judgement that made it seem like colonization and all that comes with it were Good Things ("The White Man's Burden"). Further study showed that many (most?) of those "primitive" peoples had incredibly sophisticated cultures. This was being questioned in academia in the 50s and 60s, so I think that had an effect on the creation of the PD. So I think part of the confusion is the language we use to talk about it. (I disagree about the "predictable path civilizations follow" but we can get into that another time.
)@UssGlenn thank you for posting the text from Prodigy! It's always best to agree on terms when discussing something like this. However, since it was originally referred to in Return of the Archons, we also need to see what's was originally said there.
SPOCK: Captain, our Prime Directive of non-interference.
KIRK: That refers to a living, growing culture. Do you think this one is?
So, they're not to interfere in a living, growing culture. Patterns of Force shows why. Gill derailed the natural development of the planets both by introducing Nazism and by giving them advanced tech.
I agree it has a lot to do with colonialism and the growing reevaluation of it at that time. I disagree that it was about Vietnam (though A Private Little War is!). Within recent history, India and other nations had won or were fighting for their independence. I think that had a huge effect, especially given the ages of Gene Coon and many of the writers. Additionally, it's been noted many times that a difference in technology level often led to colonialism, slavery, and genocide.
It seems this was still the way the PD was looked at in first season TNG. In Symbiosis, Picard says, "The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy... and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
IMO, later writers took this to extremes, leading to the problems of Homeward and Pen Pals.
I'm not sure where the idea that warp-capable was the cutoff for tech development. Is that actually in an episode somewhere? It's never seemed quite right to me. "No reference to space, other worlds, or advanced civilizations" always seemed to refer to a pre-industrial era to me and to a culture that had not been contacted by any other world yet.
Similar threads
