Okay so straight off the bat, this article is 3 years old at this point, I randomly came across it yesterday and it got me thinking about the show a lot and I thought it may be an interesting discussion, so let's dive into it, these are simply my opinions of his opinions.
Here is the article:
https://nationalpost.com/entertainm...r-to-take-star-trek-deep-space-nine-seriously
So, upon further reflection, I can get where the author is coming from, but I think what he's missing, is the real context for the show, he's retroactively applying context to what happened after the show, namely 9/11, to some of the points the show was making.
But what I think he's missing is that the compromises required to protect a free society in the context of the show and the terrorism and genocide aspects, cannot be retroactively applied to 9/11, these things are allegories of the Holocaust, of things like the French and other European resistant movements during WWII and hard moral choices like killing your fellow citizens who collaborate and the fact that in the context of the show, the Federation is fighting another, for lack of a better word, conventional military force, there's nothing in DS9 that can be necessarily applied to something like the Iraq or Afghan war, at least as far as the Federation is concerned, obviously there are parallels you could draw elsewhere and certainly things like Section 31 and some of there actions, Homefront and Paradise Lost, you could stretch and maybe apply some of them to the post 9/11 world but again, you can't blame the show for not having a context that could be applied after the fact.
Anyway, what are your thoughts?
This article did give me pause to consider what it had said and if there's an aspect I'm not remembering that supports the Authors points that you find, I would be very interested to hear that point of view.
Here is the article:
https://nationalpost.com/entertainm...r-to-take-star-trek-deep-space-nine-seriously
So, upon further reflection, I can get where the author is coming from, but I think what he's missing, is the real context for the show, he's retroactively applying context to what happened after the show, namely 9/11, to some of the points the show was making.
But what I think he's missing is that the compromises required to protect a free society in the context of the show and the terrorism and genocide aspects, cannot be retroactively applied to 9/11, these things are allegories of the Holocaust, of things like the French and other European resistant movements during WWII and hard moral choices like killing your fellow citizens who collaborate and the fact that in the context of the show, the Federation is fighting another, for lack of a better word, conventional military force, there's nothing in DS9 that can be necessarily applied to something like the Iraq or Afghan war, at least as far as the Federation is concerned, obviously there are parallels you could draw elsewhere and certainly things like Section 31 and some of there actions, Homefront and Paradise Lost, you could stretch and maybe apply some of them to the post 9/11 world but again, you can't blame the show for not having a context that could be applied after the fact.
Anyway, what are your thoughts?
This article did give me pause to consider what it had said and if there's an aspect I'm not remembering that supports the Authors points that you find, I would be very interested to hear that point of view.
