Fans, maybe, but not me. The Empire from Star Wars had a terrifying black warrior with faceless minions capturing a vessel, shooting its non-masked defenders, and harassing a noble young woman in its opening scene. Before an hour of screen time had elapsed, they'd murdered an entire planet. That's some palpable evil.
But Firefly's Alliance? From what I've seen, they mostly came across as bureaucrats - maybe bureaucrats on the wrong side, though the matter of sides was always extremely vague, with the nature of the war almost entirely undefined - but in no way an obviously evil empire, even if some elements did some bad things now and then.
I mean, the Alliance in
Firefly/Serenity comes across as a complex society in which there are both major positives and major negatives. For instance, in, if I recall the episode title correctly, "Ariel," when the crew steals important medical supplies from a hospital, they are utterly unconcerned about it hurting patients -- because apparently the Alliance's health care system is so advanced and efficient that those supplies can be relied upon to be replaced very quickly.
On the other hand, we're also talking about a government that attempted to medically re-engineer human nature, accidentally killed thousands if not millions of colonists on Miranda, covered up their mass-death blunder, and unleashed the Reavers on the periphery of the System.
We are also talking about a government that engaged in a war of conquest against the independent worlds out the Rim who did not consent to be part of the Alliance--which seems to me to be no less a war crime than George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. To say nothing of the hypocrisy involved in formally annexing a territory yet refusing to administer it properly.
And of course we cannot forget that this government also does things like abduct teenage girls (their own citizens, to boot) to conduct unethical medical experiments on them without their consent; employ special operations forces that engage in summary executions (the doctor at the beginning of
Serenity) and mass murder (the numerous towns and villages the Operative exterminated in
Serenity); and contracts with corporate mercenaries who routinely engage in acts of murder against even Alliance law enforcement personnel (the Blue Hands murdering Alliance law enforcement officers in "Ariel").
And perhaps most strikingly, the Alliance is a government that allows both indentured servitude ("The Train Job") and outright slavery ("Shindig"), at least on its periphery. And indeed, "Jaynestown" establishes that practical conditions for indentured servants on some of the Rim planets are
de facto systems of slavery. (In fairness, the complicating factor is that the implication of episodes like "Ariel" is that such practices do not exist on the well-developed Core worlds that initially formed the Alliance.
And that's setting aside other illiberal traits, such as the pervasive surveillance system in place on the Core worlds.
All of which is not to say that the Alliance does not also have its benefits. Alliance education systems and medical systems seem to be highly advanced, and what little we see of quality of life on the Core worlds seems quite high. The presence of a Parliament (established in
Serenity) implies that the Union of Allied Planets (the Alliance's formal name) is governed by at least a pseudo-democratic system. The Operative's words at the end of
Serenity about the consequences of the word getting out about Mirand, seem to imply that the Alliance has a system that protects the right to freedom of speech and of the press, and that the Alliance Parliament either responds to public pressure or is outright accountable to the public in some way. The numerous different religions we see implies that the Alliance has a system protecting freedom of religion. And so far as can be discerned, the Alliance seems to lack systems of racial supremacy or subordination.
But it's fair to say that the Union of Allied Planets has a
severe human rights deficiency on a level that even the modern imperium of the United States does not match.
Heck, the US does terrible things far too often, but I don't jump from that to calling either our entire military or country "evil".)
On the other hand, some of the fundamental pillars of our society are deeply oppressive. White supremacy is in the long-term process of being dismantled, but it is pervasive and deeply entrenched in American cultural values--just look at how controversial it is when black people say that cops should stop murdering them. And of course capitalism, our fundamental way of life, is built on oppressing and exploiting the working class. Is the United States "evil?" I don't think you can categorize an entire society as "good" or "evil," but our culture is often deeply abusive and oppressive to those who are poor or who are women or who are ethnic minorities.
I would contend that we're doing better than the Alliance, though. We don't allow outright slavery and indentured servitude. (Though we
do make use of prison labor, which is not a whole lot better than slavery.)
And the crew of the Serenity are such smug, self-interested, oh-so-"witty" drifters that anyone gunning for them have something of an inherent appeal in my book. Whedon may have seen them as his children and been in love with them, such that he assumed we'd hate their opponents even without compelling reason, but I for one wasn't on board that train.
I think one of the interesting things about the very second episode, "The Train Job," was Mal realizing he needed to return medical supplies he had stolen from Alliance forces, because those supplies were going to be distributed to people on a badly-impoverished world suffering a disease outbreak. The Alliance is often deeply oppressive and abusive on the Rim worlds, but it's also providing both physical and political infrastructure that those worlds badly need.
FPAlpha said:
It's as you said akin the the USA.. enough bad things done in the name of freedom and national security but still a better place than say North Korea.
Exactly, and by our analogy, this show was asking us to root for a ragtag group of true believers in the North Korean ideology.
I don't think this analogy works at all. The Independents cannot really be compared to North Korea by any meaningful standard, because we have no particular sense that they're a totalitarian movement, nor even that they were particularly unified amongst themselves. The various Rim worlds we see in
Firefly seem fairly diverse in terms of their different cultures--as near as I can tell, the only thing the Independents all had in common was that they didn't want to be annexed by the Alliance.
I would make the argument that if we're going to compare the relationship between the Independents/Rim worlds and the Alliance/core worlds to anything in real life, we need to look at situations where wealthy, well-developed (in terms of technology and infrastructure) cultures invaded and annexed the territories of less-wealthy, less-developed cultures--and where those imperial cultures may have imparted to their colonies kinds of infrastructure that those cultures may have needed, yet were also deeply abusive to them. So the British Empire in India, or the United States in the Philippines. Or, if we want to be more contemporary, the United States in Iraq.
The Iraq comparison may well be illustrative. It's all well and good to condemn a hypothetical show asking us to root for North Koreans who believe in
juche. But what about a show about a former Iraqi insurgent who fought against the American invasion and occupation of his country because he believed in Iraq's right to self-determination and independence? Is he necessarily a bad guy? Is that a point of view we can sympathize with (even as we recognize that we, as Americans, certainly cannot tolerate or accept the killing of our own people)?
I think that's Mal. We know from episodes like "Our Mrs. Reynolds" that, whatever his flaws, Mal does not approve of a lot of cultural practices on other Rim worlds -- the violent theocracy-lite in "Safe," or the misogyny in "Our Mrs. Reynolds." And yet, Mal still believes that it was the right of those worlds to decide for themselves if they wanted to be part of the Alliance or not.
I want to know for what cause these people thought killing others was justifiable, and the show's vague intimations that "they were being nosy meanies" wasn't cutting it.
I mean, I've outlined several different human rights abuses we saw routinely during the show and the films. And "we meddle" is just an argument against paternalistic imperialism.
ETA:
I really wish we had learned more about the Alliance's formal government. If there's a Parliament, does that mean they have a Prime Minister? What kinds of Chinese influences does the Alliance government have--maybe they have a Paramount Leader on top, and a Prime Minister running things day-to-day? Is the Alliance Parliament a real parliament, or is it a rubber-stamp legislature like the National People's Congress? Is it a multi-party system, or a single-party system? What's the relationship between the Chinese-dominated planets and the American-dominated planets, and how do their planetary governments compare? Is everyone enfranchised, or is the right to vote restricted, or is it restricted on some worlds but not others?
