Klingon Empire
- Thread starter JoeZhang
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Yes. In the TNG episode "The Mind's Eye," the Klingons are established to have conquered a world called Krios (apparently a different world from the Krios seen in "The Perfect Mate"). There's a rebellion on that world against the Klingons, and at one point the Federation is accused of helping them, IIRC.
I guess it also makes sense that more of their conquered worlds would be in the areas more distant from the Federation. In disputed areas, before the Organian treaty, I imagine the Federation actively opposed as much of that as it could.
It does seem pretty conclusive that representatives of other species which may be part of the Empire are not allowed to serve in the Klingon Defense Force or anything like that.
It does seem pretty conclusive that representatives of other species which may be part of the Empire are not allowed to serve in the Klingon Defense Force or anything like that.
Not necessarily. Rura Penthe is definitely near the Federation border, and iirc its purpose was known to Fed officers. This suggests that enslavement of alien populations, or at least the deportation of dissidents and "criminals" (tellingly, at least in TUC we see no Klingon prisoners that I recall on Rura Penthe), is not something the Klingons felt they needed to particularly hide from the Feds. At the same time, Penthe is in a terrible location for the Klingon gulag, since any uncloaked starship with a bad Klingon interpreter could penetrate the border and stage a rescue attempt (granted, as long as the rescuee managed to get out from under the transporter scrambler's footprint), and skip across the Fed border to likely political asylum.
At any rate, following the Khitomer conference, the Federation no longer appears to have cared about the fate of the Klingons' subject peoples. It begs the question why they bothered attempting to curb Klingon expansion in the first place, if not out of their stated ideological goal of preserving freedom, and the only answer is that considerations of realpolitik trumped doing the right thing and continuing to oppose the Klingon Empire militarily. Not exactly nice, or even consistent (look at how the Feds treat the Cardassians and Romulans), but realistic.
It is possible, I concede, that the Feds continued to apply soft power in the hope of reforming the Klingon Empire, but their influence seems to have been rather negligible, given the fact that the Klings, at least before the Dominion War, seem to resent the Federation and all it stands for and still consider it an enemy of the Empire, in spite of or perhaps because of the aid (and the strings attached to it) given after Praxis, or at Narendra.
This resentment you mention as a fact is somewhat unfamiliar to me. We saw a Klingon ship with the Federation symbol alongside the Klingon symbol on its bridge, we heard dialogue suggesting the Klingons had "joined" the Federation (though obviously not in a literal sense), there was an exchange program between the KDF and the Starfleet, and a Federation representative served an important role in a major political succession within the Empire. The Narendra III incident you have mentioned was claimed to have dramatically improved relations between the two powers.
Given this, I would think the Klingons could not have been engaging in too much brutality toward subject peoples, or the strong contrast to Federation principles would have prevented such improvements in the diplomatic relationship. The shapeshifters certainly did their work and got the relationship off track in the years leading up to the Dominion War, but I imagine it is righted once again.
My suggestion about what happens on the far side of the Empire was intended to allow for a little wiggle room here; maybe the Klingons play ball in the areas where their expansion has been curbed and the Federation would probably stick their noses into really ugly stuff, but things are a bit more rough and tumble in the Empire's deeper Beta Quadrant reaches. Maybe I am not giving the Klingons enough credit and the Empire is more participatory in nature these days, but that would be highly speculative.
Well, I think one thing to consider is that, ultimately, the Federation and Klingon Empire came into conflict throughout the 2200s because the Klingon Empire's stated goal was to conquer the Federation. It's not like the Federation was out there purely out of altruism -- they were trying to keep themselves from being the next jeghpu'wI (Klingonese for "conquered people").
For what it's worth, the novel Star Trek: A Time for War, A Time for Peace by Keith R.A. DeCandido explores the political controversy within the Federation that is the Federation's status as a Klingon ally. It features a presidential election between a man named Arafel Pagro of Ktar and a woman named Nanietta Bacco of Cestus, and whether or not the Federation should remain allies with the Empire emerges as the key issue in the election. Pagro favors severing the alliance because of the Klingons' imperial nature, whilst Bacco favors continuing the alliance and using soft power to continue to peacefully persuade the Klingons to eventually give their imperialistic ways up.
As for allegations of inconsistency -- not exactly. I mean, the Federation apparently never stepped in to end the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, after all. (Of course, both DS9 the series and the novel Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers establish that the Bajoran government during the occupation was comprised of traitors who invited the Cardassians in and ruled as their puppets, which means that the Federation couldn't intervene under the Prime Directive.)
I think that you're severely over-simplifying things. The Empire has many different factions with many different opinions about foreign policy, and whilst there are certainly those who resent the Federation and want to severe the alliance and add the UFP to the list of cultures to be conquered, there are other Klingons who do think that the alliance has been beneficial to the Empire and will continue to be essential to the Empire's future.
For more of an overview of the different attitudes of different Klingon factions towards the Federation over time, I'd suggest picking up The Lost Era: The Art of the Impossible, also by DeCandido, which covers the years 2328-2346.
The resentment is clear--the Klingons, probably unprovoked, waged war on the Federation in the alternate timeline apparently because the Enterprise-C did not defend a Klingon outpost from the Romulans, which it was under no duty to do. Gowron, who iirc only acheived power thanks to support from the Federation, was willing to attack and even wage war on his benefactors. Gowron was hesitant to stop this war, even when it became obvious that he had been manipulated into it by the Dominion!
Admittedly less impressively, Kor's stories about killing Federation citizens are warmly received by Klingon soldiers, although given Klingon mores, if Kor's stories were about killing anybody, they'd probably have been warmly received.
There is also an inference we can draw from Enterprise, during the Augments arc, and Insurrection that the Federation annexed Klingon territory, particularly Klach d'kel Brakt, aka the Briar Patch. If they did so, it was probably post-Khitomer, as the price for economic aid, since there was never a war between the two powers until the brief conflict over Organia. Perhaps the Briar Patch is the Archanis Sector which Gowron was so obsessed with carving from the Federation rump. Although I concede that it is possible and maybe even preferable to understand Soong's Briar Patch and the B'aku/Son'a's Briar Patch as two different areas of space.
The early TNG evidence for closer relations is problematic, at best. But iirc it is also mentioned that Riker's posting is the first officer exchange between the Klings and Feds--this eighty or ninety years after peace. I want to think they also act quite rudely toward him, but it's been years since I've seen that ep.
There is definitely room for argument, but I think there's a tremendous amount of evidence of Klingon resentment toward the Federation. You don't go to war with your friends just because they don't assist you in your own wars of conquest.
Not necessarily. The Federation has been shown to be pragmatic in not questioning internal arrangements in allies and even Federation members. Cf. The Cloud Minders (who let you people into the UFP?
). Even in the 24th century, during the DW the Federation countenances and begs for an alliance with the Romulans, despite the fact of the Romulan track record for annihilating planetary populations from orbit during active campaigning. If the Klingon detente is good for the Federation, politically, militarily, or economically, I suggest that they would accept behavior from the Klingons they would not accept for a moment from their own constituent governments, but would do their best to try to influence the Klingons away from brutality.There just isn't enough evidence to say that the government which repealed all civil rights on Organia and threw people into the mines on an unliveable prison planet has changed its ways, except to placate the Federation, which seems at best only mildly insistent that they do so. I think the Klingons likely find this wishy-washy meddling insulting to their dignity and ultimately backed up by nothing they can respect, namely the willingness to use military force.
The Founders only brought out what was there--a deep and abiding desire to attack the Federation, rid itself of the hand feeding it (and keeping it down), and restore the Klingon Empire's honor and self-determination.
I do think, post-DW, relations between the Klings and Feds are as you suggest they've been all along. Firstly, if Sloan's opinion can be given weight, the Klingons have again been put in a position of tutelage to the more resilient Federation, and need to play nice in order to get the aid from the Federation they need again. Secondly, they've seen that the Federation is far from the glass house they'd prefer to characterize it as, and willing, in the final resort, to annihilate a neighboring government. That is to say, the Feds too can be warriors, every bit as fearsome and respectable as the Klingons--and as such perhaps their ways are worthwile, and they are good allies to have after all.
It seems unlikely, since even within the Klingon species itself class divisions are an important fact of life, according to Martok. I think the history of Fed-Kling relations between Praxis and the Second Klingon-Federation War is a history of the Federation pushing the Klingons, and the Klingons giving up as little as possible, as one would expect from a aristocratic, unfree, and socially recalcitrant regime.
Sci, I'll reply to your post momentarily.
Very interesting. KRAD's actually quite good, although I've only ever read Q&A (I just recently got back into reading the books, after such a long hiatus I don't even really recall when I stopped). I'm familiar with Bacco from Destiny. I didn't realize she was from Cestus--too bad she's not a naturalized Gorn.
I like to think the Federation tried! There's actually a lot of evidence that the Federation lost the war with the Cardassians, or at least that the wars had been so costly that they actually accepted territorial loss instead of continuing--perhaps not realizing that the Union was on the verge of internal collapse due to the exertion of its military-industrial machine against the far more objectively powerful UFP. Bajor would have been liberated if the Cards had been pushovers, but they weren't, or did not appear to be.
All of the different factions have one thing in common--the maintenance of the Klingon state. Ultimately, the way the state appears to be constituted prevents major changes in the status quo, and anyone operating in that milieu, whether Gorkon, Duras, Km'Pec, or Gowron, is going to try to hew closely to that status quo of warrior/noble-rule and alien second-class citizenship. Some will respect the Feds more than others, to be sure, but all, by their nature, must draw the line somewhere. I think that Martok, as an outsider, might well have different priorities than his predecessors, all those chancellors that Worf couldn't respect.
I might just do that.
I can't remember if we actually saw those Kriosans or not. Though I will point out that this seems to me unlikely, and that the recent novel Klingon Empire: A Burning House established them to be a species the Klingons had conquered.
I always thought the war broke out because the Enterprise showed up at Narendra III and then *vanished*. The Klingons must have thought that the dirty Federation cowards packed up and left, giving up on their 'allies'. So I can understand why they'd be pissed in that timeline.
One would think the most rational assumption upon the disappearance of the E-C would be that it was destroyed by the Romulans. I guess they would be upset if a Fed starship violated their territory, if they assumed they were in concert with the Romulans (maybe even using a cloaking device).
It struck me more that only the E-C's affirmative sacrifice could have righted relations between the Klings and Feds.
It struck me more that only the E-C's affirmative sacrifice could have righted relations between the Klings and Feds.
The only "local" we saw was the Klingon governor: none of the rebels made an appearance. But Klingons are known for being fiercely opposed to being ruled by perceived inferiors, so one would think that Klingon rebellions would be regular occurrences in the Empire, both at the core worlds and at the colonial fringes.
In that sense, I'm not sure I like the interpretation of the new novel. OTOH, while we lack canon examples of subjugated alien species in the Empire (as the Organian expedition came to naught), the novels have usually handled their own examples of such things well. I'm looking forward to the Empire series in that respect...
Yup. So it would seem that the Klingons on the planet had some means of observing the space battle, even if they couldn't actively participate. In the timeline where the ship spectacularly exploded under Romulan fire, Klingons were pleased. In the timeline where she just slipped into that strange spatiotemporal fold without any associated kaboom, they were pissed off, probably thinking the ship had escaped to warp or cloaked or otherwise dishonorably decided to go on surviving.
And it does make sense that a Klingon colony would have the means of observing space battles - unless the Romulans bombarded that ability out of them...
The follow-up question is obvious, though: when the E-C disappeared, then the Romulans probably had their way with the colony. Who would have survived to tell the tale of Federation cowardice? Did the Romulans spread that tale, to their own political ends?
In contrast, when the E-C returned to the past to go kaboom, this supposedly allowed the colony to survive - perhaps Klingon reinforcements arrived. The spreading of the story of heroism is easy to explain in that case.
Timo Saloniemi
I don't think it was the Narendra incident that LED to war, I think it was what averted it. It's possible relations were at a bad point back then and it was the Ent-C incident that caused the Klingons to reconsider their stance since there was now proof of Federation honor.
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