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Kira Meru and the Comfort Women

Kilana2

Vice Admiral
Admiral
As we all know, Dukat took a liking to Bajoran women. One of them was Kira Nery´s mother. A comfort woman.

They were a kind of mistress for their Cardassian masters. :cardie:Dukat spared their families in return. What do you think about these women?

They could have refused and being taken violently, their families mistreated. So they complied to protect their loved ones.

Nerys was shocked when she learned the truth.
 
This is an ongoing issue of contention between various East Asian countries and Japan since the Pacific War.

For women who were subjected to that, there is much shame in even talking about the issue. So it's no surprise that Kira grew up not knowing that happened.

Kor
 
Given human history, I would assume that (1) not all comfort women would live in luxury or in safety and (2) the practice supported broader sexual exploitation of Bajorans. However, it might also push into those "gray" areas, wherein the distinction between collaborator and victim are blurred. The problem with any such system is that the point in which one's "sacrifices" cease to be meaningful, and they are simply perpetuating the system. YMMV.
 
Comfort women are not at all like collaborators. A colloborator aids in the occupation of his or her own land. Comfort women are coerced into sex, they are raped, exploited. They do not have a function in the mechanics of occupation.
 
Comfort women are not at all like collaborators. A colloborator aids in the occupation of his or her own land. Comfort women are coerced into sex, they are raped, exploited. They do not have a function in the mechanics of occupation.
No quite what I was trying to say. In the context of the show, they are called comfort women once. Thereafter, they are manipulated more than coerced. And in spite of what you think of Kira calling Meru a collaborator, women who consorted with the Nazi is occupied France, regardless of what they thought of the the merits of their actions, were often called collaborators.
 
Comfort women are not at all like collaborators. A colloborator aids in the occupation of his or her own land. Comfort women are coerced into sex, they are raped, exploited. They do not have a function in the mechanics of occupation.
No quite what I was trying to say. In the context of the show, they are called comfort women once. Thereafter, they are manipulated more than coerced. And in spite of what you think of Kira calling Meru a collaborator, women who consorted with the Nazi is occupied France, regardless of what they thought of the the merits of their actions, were often called collaborators.
Manipulation is another form of coercion. Con artists do it to people all the time, it can be very subtle. In the case of "comfort women", historically and fictionally, refusal to cooperate could have meant death.
 
The thing is, the situation in the episode is not one that should be associated with the term "comfort women" one-on-one, especially not in the narrow context of the Japanese WWII practice.

Or at least it should not be automatically associated. Let's for argument's sake take the facts of the episode for granted (even though it's just an Orb hallucination and may actually be counterfactual in part!).

1) When Dukat first taunts Nerys, he flat out says that Meru chose to be with him; this is certainly collaboration rather than coercion.
2) Then Nerys "time travels", and sees that Meru is dragged away by armed Cardassians; this is certainly coercion rather than collaboration.
3) Then Dukat plays good cop to Basso's bad cop, and Meru falls head over heels for his... Well, is it his charm or his power/wealth, or is there a difference? This is coercion and collaboration at play simultaneously.
4) Dukat then plays fair and square in keeping Meru's family well fed. So collaboration pays off. We know Dukat stays well stocked in Bajoran lovers in general, and even breeds with several of them. But all of that is between him and his women; none of it touches upon the issue of occupation. Dukat wouldn't show more or less mercy to the planet if the comfort women chose suicide over servitude, and probably wouldn't even be noticeably more or less busy in his duties of oppression.

The other way to approach this is to assume that the Orb showed Nerys what it believed Nerys must see, regardless of the facts of the matter. We know Dukat had one "fair and square" Bajoran lover at least, as expanded upon in "Indiscretion"; Meru could have been another one of those. Or she could have died at the Singha camp, and Dukat made the story out of whole cloth. Or perhaps Dukat tried to force her to cooperate at gunpoint, but she didn't. There's no telling.

As for the broader issue of liaisons with an occupying power, it can well be argued that those do much more good for the occupied country than the efforts of the so-called "freedom fighters" who keep on killing and getting killed to no useful purpose. War at its most typical is just a silly hobby for testosterone-crazed males; that there would be something inherently evil about occupation by powerful group B rather than the previously powerful group A is something to be proven case by case.

Heck, the original Bajoran rulers of Bajor don't really sound any better than the Cardassians at their worst; we get no hint of public representation, there's this oppressive caste system in place, and freedoms are probably at a minimum overall given how little contact Bajor has with the outside universe despite its long history. I won't say good riddance to them, but Kira Meru well might.

In Earth history, it's extremely rarely that an occupation would "end". Conquerors hold on to their conquests forever, that is, until driven out by the next set of conquerors. Exceptions to this only really appear in the most recent century, where industrialization, and the resulting anchoring of wealth to the soil like never before, makes everybody love status quo so much that even the defending of the weak against the strong, a previously insane position, suddenly starts looking attractive.

We might well view Kira Meru as the only true patriot in this particular story, almost regardless of which of the above interpretations of the facts we choose to believe in.

Timo Saloniemi
 
In one of the Teror Nor novels we learn that

Meru fell from Dukat´s grace when she fell seriously ill
.

And we all know of Dukat´s Penchant for Bajoran women. It´s not shared by his buddy Damar, though.
 
In Earth history, it's extremely rarely that an occupation would "end".

Um? Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Gustafus Adolphus, the Roman Empire, the English in France in the 100 Years War, ...

I would say it's unusual that an occupation survives more than a generation after it begins. Either the occupying power battles over its own succession, or another occupying power takes over, or the resistance makes it so unpleasant that the occupying power leaves semi-voluntarily.
 
^The best comparison is with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, when none of those conditions held.
 
Okay?

Where were the comfortmen?

Were there no female Cardassians working at Terrok Nor, or dare I suggest no male homosexual Cardassians?

"Sigh"

So the gay Cardassians had to pretend that they liked sex with the sex slaves otherwise they end up in a hard labour camp somewhere?

Ridiculous.
 
Perhaps the female and gay Cardassians had no interest in coerced sex and so didn't come to those, um, parties? Or more likely Bajor and Terok Nor were considered hardship posts where male Cardassians wouldn't bring their families, and more male Carassians went into their military or into the combat branches of their military.
 
IIRC, the Cardassian military was generally non-discriminatory - females could ascend to command positions as well as the men could. So it would seem likely that Bajoran men might be 'recruited' as the women also were.

(This is assuming that Cardassian women would be interested in Bajorans to begin with. That may or may not have been the case.)
 
Um? Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Gustafus Adolphus, the Roman Empire, the English in France in the 100 Years War, ...

I would say it's unusual that an occupation survives more than a generation after it begins. Either the occupying power battles over its own succession, or another occupying power takes over, or the resistance makes it so unpleasant that the occupying power leaves semi-voluntarily.

These are great examples of occupation never ending. In the English-French-Burgundy-whomever conflict, conquering forces only departed when others drove them out - this was not liberation but a chain of oppression, often a case of the "French" oppressing the "French" (as there was little in the way of nationhood back then). Raiding was a more typical form of warfare, though, and did not count as occupation... Alexander left permanent occupation forces basically everywhere he went, and while some were driven out just a generation later, this was by new conquerors, not by any sort of "native uprising" or "liberation of natives" or "native" anything. And no lands held by Romans were ever returned to their pre-Roman owners: all of Europe was shaped anew by the successions of conquests.

While Napoleon brings us closer to industrialization and the concept of superpowers that can play chess with smaller "independent" nations, his wars also led to continuing occupation of eastern European peoples. And when the Soviet bloc collapsed, it left borders that enforced old lines of occupation.

Even in the past century, are there any examples of an occupying force being driven out by the occupied people? Liberation of western Europe in WWII clearly doesn't count; the natives played no real role in that. Vietnam clearly doesn't count; one occupation followed another there. Afghanistan only counts in the sense that the occupying force went bankrupt - but the force that took power afterwards was quite distant from the one that had held power before the occupation.

Whether Bajorans played any real role in the liberation of Bajor, it's impossible to tell by the episodes alone. There are at least four sides to the issue: roughly speaking, Bajoran freedom fighters, the rest (i.e. the government) of Bajor, Cardassian Central Command, the rest (i.e. the government) of Cardassia. All hold different views on the issue.

IIRC, the Cardassian military was generally non-discriminatory - females could ascend to command positions as well as the men could.

The sciences field supposedly was highly discriminatory, there being little or no room for males there. The same seemed to go for the intelligence business - perhaps Garak only made a career by being deliberately effeminate?

A major factor here is that Cardassians supposedly held family ties in great respect, greater than any known human culture. We saw little of this "supposed" state of affairs, but we were explicitly told that Dukat's philandering was highly exceptional and condemnable. Quite possibly only a very small clique of extreme perverts engaged in the comfort women business, then, and an even smaller one took native lovers - and this was only possible as long as the Prefect was "one of them", a ringleader of rare perverts. Sheer probability might result in lack of comfort men, then.

One thing of note about Terok Nor is that it is in many ways a "small" affair: as per "Necessary Evil" and the like, few Bajorans are employed there, these being something of an elite rather than among the more oppressed classes. Many collaborators are to be found there, obviously enough, as those would have reasons, incentives and clearances to work close to their oppressing overlords. That a practice of sex slavery and an associated (but not very closely associated) practice of liaisons with natives may thrive there is possibly very poor indication of it going on elsewhere on Bajor, or in the Union.

Timo Saloniemi
 
It's a pretty big gray area. It's hard to pass judgment on them completely but also hard to excuse them.

It's true Meru could have flat out refused, and then she would have been sent out to work in the mines and her family would not have been fed. How do you separate out her own personal windfall from the situation, living in comfort while the rest of her people suffered, from the fact she was also helping her family? You could call her a collaborator because her complicity gave comfort and legitimacy to the invaders, but not quite as much a collaborator as that Bajoran guy who was rounding up attractive Bajoran women for the Cardassians.

Historically occupations end all the time. Occupying a foreign country is expensive. The moment you can't afford it you move on.
 
It's true Meru could have flat out refused, and then she would have been sent out to work in the mines and her family would not have been fed.
Considering what we saw of this Basso character, her fate might have been more gruesome than that, though. "The terms of the deal" would not have applied to Bajoran scum, not in his worldview - unlike was the case with Dukat who was in a position to grant "rights" and "respect" to his toys to buy their loyalty or at least services.

Historically occupations end all the time. Occupying a foreign country is expensive. The moment you can't afford it you move on.
If you occupy it, it's not a foreign country any more. It's only in the past century or two that there would have been a major difference between territory where you rule over your "own" people and territory where you reign over "others" - few would have felt any allegiance to you no matter the location, and indeed your "native" subjects would have been more likely to arrange for an effective uprising.

Militaries of yore were expensive, but keeping them in occupation duty was not markedly more expensive than keeping them in some other duty. You really didn't need them for "occupying" - you needed them for keeping the next conqueror-to-be from taking over. And if you were going to support an army, better do it in the periphery where they could freely pillage local resources, rather than in your own heartland. C.f. the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands, where uprisings indeed were a problem, but mainly in the sense of being financed and supported by competing hegemonial hopefuls.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Um? Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Gustafus Adolphus, the Roman Empire, the English in France in the 100 Years War, ...

I would say it's unusual that an occupation survives more than a generation after it begins. Either the occupying power battles over its own succession, or another occupying power takes over, or the resistance makes it so unpleasant that the occupying power leaves semi-voluntarily.
These are great examples of occupation never ending. In the English-French-Burgundy-whomever conflict, conquering forces only departed when others drove them out - this was not liberation but a chain of oppression, often a case of the "French" oppressing the "French" (as there was little in the way of nationhood back then). Raiding was a more typical form of warfare, though, and did not count as occupation... Alexander left permanent occupation forces basically everywhere he went, and while some were driven out just a generation later, this was by new conquerors, not by any sort of "native uprising" or "liberation of natives" or "native" anything. And no lands held by Romans were ever returned to their pre-Roman owners: all of Europe was shaped anew by the successions of conquests.

While Napoleon brings us closer to industrialization and the concept of superpowers that can play chess with smaller "independent" nations, his wars also led to continuing occupation of eastern European peoples. And when the Soviet bloc collapsed, it left borders that enforced old lines of occupation.

Even in the past century, are there any examples of an occupying force being driven out by the occupied people? Liberation of western Europe in WWII clearly doesn't count; the natives played no real role in that. Vietnam clearly doesn't count; one occupation followed another there. Afghanistan only counts in the sense that the occupying force went bankrupt - but the force that took power afterwards was quite distant from the one that had held power before the occupation.

Whether Bajorans played any real role in the liberation of Bajor, it's impossible to tell by the episodes alone. There are at least four sides to the issue: roughly speaking, Bajoran freedom fighters, the rest (i.e. the government) of Bajor, Cardassian Central Command, the rest (i.e. the government) of Cardassia. All hold different views on the issue.

If you define all governments prior to the late 1700s-early 1800s enlightenment as "occupations" and then exclude industrialized societies, it does indeed leave no examples of an occupation ending. But I don't think those are very useful definitions.

For industrialized examples, how about the post-WW II occupation of Germany and Japan? Democratic civilian government returned, western allied military bases remained but the government could order them out anytime they felt the western allies were a greater threat than the USSR.
 
If you occupy it, it's not a foreign country any more. It's only in the past century or two that there would have been a major difference between territory where you rule over your "own" people and territory where you reign over "others" - few would have felt any allegiance to you no matter the location, and indeed your "native" subjects would have been more likely to arrange for an effective uprising.

A matter of semantics. The occupying forces considered it that way but it doesn't make it so, not until the inhabitants of the era consent to be ruled. And you can't tell me that England considered all of its territories to be considered equal citizens to those who resided in England. If a country is occupied by another country, but the citizens there are not considered equal citizens of the state, then it's clear the occupying country did not consider the occupied land to really be part of their country.

Militaries of yore were expensive, but keeping them in occupation duty was not markedly more expensive than keeping them in some other duty. You really didn't need them for "occupying" - you needed them for keeping the next conqueror-to-be from taking over. And if you were going to support an army, better do it in the periphery where they could freely pillage local resources, rather than in your own heartland. C.f. the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands, where uprisings indeed were a problem, but mainly in the sense of being financed and supported by competing hegemonial hopefuls.

Timo Saloniemi

Depends how much the locals fight back. Algeria certainly made the cost of occupation very high for France.
 
A matter of semantics. The occupying forces considered it that way but it doesn't make it so, not until the inhabitants of the era consent to be ruled. And you can't tell me that England considered all of its territories to be considered equal citizens to those who resided in England. If a country is occupied by another country, but the citizens there are not considered equal citizens of the state, then it's clear the occupying country did not consider the occupied land to really be part of their country.

This does not create a difference between "country" and "occupied foreign territory" until very recently. Oh, the Romans donated citizenship for free at one stage, for very pragmatic reasons. But for most of human history, the people being ruled by a nation or a comparable political entity were not its citizens. They were subjects, treated unevenly, downtrodden to various depths of mud. There would have been no national unity that could be "liberated" after being "occupied".

It's not a matter of declaring all those old political units "occupations", but of recognizing that they were internally shattered things being held together by the force of, well, force. Parts of them, geographically and socially, were being occupied, often by the other parts. If the occupier changed, the status of the occupied often did not, and there would have been no great desire for liberation, and of course no means for such.

It's the constant moving of borders of yore that we must recognize as being fundamentally different from the moving of borders of nations let alone "pure" nation-states today. The borders were one of the least important things dividing people to "us" and "them", and restoring status quo borderwise did not count as "freedom fighting" for the parties involved.

Depends how much the locals fight back. Algeria certainly made the cost of occupation very high for France.

That's with modern standing armies. An ad hoc army of yore would have dealt with the issue in terms that did not cost the motherland all that much.

Timo Saloniemi
 
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