I've never really thought of Nero as a terrorist. Sure, his actions invoke a great amount of terror, but he's not doing it for any ideology or any real political goal. He's doing it purely because he's just really angry.
How was Nero's anger going to save Romulus?
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I've never really thought of Nero as a terrorist. Sure, his actions invoke a great amount of terror, but he's not doing it for any ideology or any real political goal. He's doing it purely because he's just really angry.
Somebody attacks an American naval vessel, executes the captain, and destroys the ship. Years later, he nukes New York. He says he’s going to destroy Washington next, then St. Paul, and all major American cities, one by one. He explains to a captive American captain that he’s doing this to avenge America’s crimes against his homeland, and to create a world free of America, the only way his homeland can ever be truly saved.
Is he a terrorist?
There are a whole lot of cosmic catastrophes that can happen which can destroy entire worlds. In real life.
If you can identify with Biff it's because you're a sorry excuse for a human being, by no means "normal." Mainly this is because Biff doesn't have any character traits OTHER than being the token bully and no aspirations other than this either. He is utterly irredeemable and it is made clear that all is right with the world ONLY when he is a complete nobody who has to take George McFly's crap.
You're NOT supposed to identify with Biff. You're supposed to identify him as the archetype of every smug, egotistical, self-important asshole you ever knew in high school and then smile fondly when you see him reduced to a looser in the alternate timeline.
Nero is capable of complexity?
You've already said you somehow manage to "identify" with Biff, so it isn't really surprising you somehow manage to do this with Kruge and Ruafo and the Borg Queen as well.
Which is pretty much the underlying motivation of MOST terrorists, and one of the things that leads one to turn to terrorism instead of, say, activism or politics.
What is his homeland? What crimes? What ideology is he fighting for? What does he hope to achieve and why?
All of these are relevant factors in deciding this.
Also, a big part of terrorism to me is the scale. Terrorists wouldn't be capable of destroying America, much less entire worlds. That seems beyond terrorism.
Identifying with doesn't mean agreeing with or approving of. It means you can understand aspects of a character and how they've come to be, and that perhaps if your circumstances were similar that you could end up the same way. It's about believability and common experience. Everyone has run into characters like Biff. People like Nero don't really exist, and if they do it's incredibly rare.
As I've said, "identifying" might not be the right word, but I don't think "understanding" quite covers it either. Feel free to keep ignoring that though.
By all means he should be considering the power at his disposal.
Traditionally his homeland is unnamed, but in Season 8 it’s the Islamic Republic of Kamistan.
Oh, please. If this were happening, do you doubt everybody watching the news would consider him a terrorist? How could he not be a terrorist?
Ryan, I don’t understand what’s going on with you. You said Nero’s a bad character because his behavior is unrealistic and has no explanation beyond the all-purpose excuse “He’s insane and that can explain anything.”
I disagreed. I pointed to many examples of real-world behavior that is similar to Nero’s. You said none of the examples is exactly like Nero’s situation, so they’re immaterial.
I labeled him a terrorist. He does the kind of things terrorists do, he gives the kind of justifications terrorists give, and he fits the profile of real-world terrorists as described in WBATAW.
I moved the action from the 23rd century to a more familiar early 21st-century setting. I figured this behavior would be recognized by anyone as terrorism. Now you ask for details of the 21st-century Nero’s story, apparently hoping that in the details I give you you’ll find some kind of technicality that disqualifies him from some narrow definition of terrorist and invalidates the whole analysis.
I don’t want to kick blindly at moving goalposts. Let’s come to an agreement of what terrorism is. You reject WBATAW’s characterization of terrorism, so tell me how you define it.
You’re really grasping at straws.
If al Qaeda acquires a WMD technology that can destroy American cities, they won’t use it because that’s “beyond terrorism”? Is that what you’re saying?
I think we have established that people like Nero do really exist, they just don’t have the same kind of weaponry at their disposal.
I can understand that you believed at the beginning of this discussion that people like Nero don’t really exist. I have provided ample evidence that behavior like Nero’s does exist and is not exceptional. It’s not inconsistent with reality, it’s only inconsistent with the understanding of reality you had at the start of the discussion. What I don’t understand is why you don’t modify your understanding of reality to incorporate the real-world evidence presented in this thread.
Two definitions I came across:
Seems to me Nero's intention is not to use terror. That's just a by-product of his revenge/extermination goals. So I agree, he's not a terrorist.
Why just terrify them when you can exterminate them?
He's doing what al Qaeda would if they could, for the same stated reasons (to avenge perceived crimes against their people, and to create a better world for their people, free of the enemy) and psychological drives (as described in WBATAW).
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If China made the same attacks on America, would it be terrorism?
More so, I am asking for Nero of this story's details through your analogy. We don't get it in the movie, and we have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make something work sensibly that probably wasn't given that much thought to begin with. It seems fairly clear that they went with the simplistic madman archetype, but without supporting the character in any way.
I understand your points, and I think you've argued them well, but I just don't think I can agree with them.
I don't think that's going to happen. I don't even think there is any absolute agreement by all people of what terrorism is (especially depending on what side you're on). You think it's dependent on the severity of the actions, but I think it's dependent on the motives, reasoning, and scale.
Which is part of my point. No one has ever had such an opportunity to date, so we have no exact model to point to. We can at best hypothesize what people might do if they were in that situation, but personally I find it hard to believe at current that anyone could even be in that situation, much less act the way he does if they were. The circumstances for him are far beyond realistic.
Al Qaeda has been trying for years to acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them in American cities. They want to do to New York and Washington what Nero did to Vulcan.
We can at best hypothesize what they might do if they had the capacity to do what they’re trying to do?
Is it too far beyond suspension of disbelief for a Hollywood action film to suggest that they would do it?
I don't doubt that Nero shares some commonalities with terrorists but his basic motivations appear to be different. It seems to me terrorism is a psychological weapon used to try to achieve particular goals in much the same way conventional weapons are. But that doesn't include genocide unless there is some advantage in terrorising the people you intend to exterminate. It didn't seem Nero did anything special to terrorise the people of Vulcan or Earth.
The way I see it, if your assumption about al Qaeda is right, then they aren't terrorists either.
there's a difference between being a mass murderer and being a terrorist. Terrorism implies there's a political goal or ideology at the heart of the violence. Nero was a mass murderer, but not a terrorist by the commonly accepted definition. He had some vague notion of going after the UFP to empower the Romulans but it was so vague and like all of his motivations, made too little sense to really describe it as a coherent ideology.
(2008's "Dark Knight" made the same mistake in lazily referring to the Joker as a "terrorist" to make him seem more scary. The Joker was just a mass murdering psychopath, not a terrorist. Same goes for Nero)
(2008's "Dark Knight" made the same mistake in lazily referring to the Joker as a "terrorist" to make him seem more scary. The Joker was just a mass murdering psychopath, not a terrorist. Same goes for Nero)
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Perhaps from a dictionary definition, there is a difference between a mass murderer and a terrorist, but much like any truly radical group with the goal of killing others, the main reason for the killings tends to be unthinking hate, plain and simple.
If the KKK and other groups can still recruit members to willingly hurt others just because they look different or come from a different faith background, then I have no problem believing that a man who just watched his planet get destroyed due to what he believes is the inaction of another group, that not only would he want revenge, but that he could find enough others with a similar mind-set to crew a mining vessel.
In a world (universe) where people can be convinced to walk into weddings with bombs strapped to their chests or using a fertilizer and diesel fuel bomb to blow up a daycare center, convincing a small group that they would be in the right to destroy a far weaker opponent because they allowed your entire world to be leveled doesn't seem like a far stretch at all.
If the KKK and other groups can still recruit members to willingly hurt others just because they look different or come from a different faith background, then I have no problem believing that a man who just watched his planet get destroyed due to what he believes is the inaction of another group, that not only would he want revenge, but that he could find enough others with a similar mind-set to crew a mining vessel.
In a world (universe) where people can be convinced to walk into weddings with bombs strapped to their chests or using a fertilizer and diesel fuel bomb to blow up a daycare center, convincing a small group that they would be in the right to destroy a far weaker opponent because they allowed your entire world to be leveled doesn't seem like a far stretch at all.
No they're not. They're relevant factors to understanding WHY he is doing this, but none of them would change the fact that he IS a terrorist.
That's what I mean. Because there are no aspects of Biff's character OTHER than those of the egotistical bully. No explanation is ever made or even attempted as to how he got this way, although it's implied that this is a genetic trait and that the Tanners are just a family of complete jerks.
I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events, but this country has just spent the last ten years engaged in a protracted guerrilla war with people who are EXACTLY like Nero. The Israelis have been fighting these types for even longer; the Gaza Strip is infested with them. Columbine High School became famous for being attacked by two of them.
They are people consumed with rage at the expense of reason, people who are feeling pain, and can't think of any better solution than to try and share that pain with those they perceive as their persecutors.
Power and complexity are two different things. Destroying things is very simple. Building things is complex. This is another difference between a terrorist and an activist: the former is defined by what he wants to destroy, the latter by what he wants to create.
I personally think it would've been nice to know that Nero did indeed save Romulus in the new timeline. It would brought a nice sense of symmetry between universes and could've been done with a simple background line about the Hobus star unexpectedly collapsing into a black hole.
Considering the Hobus Event doesn't take place for another hundred and twenty six years, seems like we have plenty of time for that aspect of the story to materialize on its own. Once again, this story wasn't about Nero OR Romulus, it was about Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise. There's clearly more to this than we've seen, but THAT is for another time.
They will never revisit any element of this film on the big screen. Throw us a bone showing us that Nero has at least a bit of common sense.
Why? He's a genocidal maniac, not a Romulan hero. If anything, SPOCK should be the one to retroactively take care of Hobus since he now knows it's going to explode a century from now. And to be perfectly honest I don't care enough about Nero to be bothered by the lack of character redemption in his doing something right for a change. Like Osama, I'm just glad he got what he deserved.
Let fanon fill in the blanks like we've always done. That's what we're here for, isn't it? If anything it's fertile ground for a new wave of treklit.
Let fanon fill in the blanks like we've always done. That's what we're here for, isn't it? If anything it's fertile ground for a new wave of treklit.
I got the impression of a family tradition passed down through the generations.
Dammit, now we’re going to have a dispute. The films should have told us more about that. It could have been done with a simple background line about Biff’s identical twin raised separately.
