Making a few replies I've been meaning to post...
Aw, thank you! You're too kind.
Well, I think you bring up a valid point here. And my response is that security organizations, such as police, the armed forces, and intelligence services, inherently carry the potential for fascism. They are, by necessity, authoritarian organizations -- they have to be. You can't be egalitarian when you have to order people into combat. Moreover, they are authoritarian organizations that serve, and must therefore venerate, the state.
What makes these organizations morally legitimate and non-fascistic is that they serve the liberal democratic state but do not seek to undermine its liberal democratic ethos -- thus they are answerable to the democratically-elected government and abide by a liberal constitutional order, with its due processes and individual rights and so forth. This endows the security organizations with virtue.
The key thing that distinguishes Section 31, in my view, is that it not only actively resists accountability to the legitimately-elected democratic government and actively violates the liberal system of individual rights -- but that I suspect it of seeking to subvert the fundamental liberal democratic social order, to transform the Federation from a Rechtsstaat into an Unrechtsstaat.
I base this conclusion on their consistently seeking autarky, on their agents' participation in the Khitomer conspiracy, on their role in the Min Zife affair, on their attempts to raise a private army of Jem'Hadar loyal to them as gods, and on their 23rd century Abramsverse counterparts' openly stated desire to provoke a war with the Klingons so that their leader could "lead the Federation" to victory. (I implicitly interpret Admiral Marcus's goal as being to become the de facto military dictator of the Federation, given his line to Kirk about "who's gonna lead us.")
Well, we know a few things. We know they're called "Control"--which sounds pretty darned authoritarian, if not outright megalomaniacal. We know that Control issues binding orders to their subordinates. We also know that Alexander Marcus, who was apparently the "Control" of the Abramsverse 2250s, wanted to lead the Federation to victory in a war against the Klingons he provoked.
Absolutely my interpretation could be contradicted by a later novel. But to me, given the larger context of Section 31's other activities, it all sounds an awful lot like Führerprinzip.
Well, I think you should give yourself more credit here. Nothing I've argued is particularly unique -- it's basically just a slimmed-down version of ideas found from European political philosophers of the 17th through 19th centuries. John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, etc.
And God knows there are plenty of Americans out there whose ideas about political legitimacy boil down to, "Jesus gave George Washington the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, so we should all be good Christians and obey our white presidents (when they're not dirty commies)." Which is essentially just a white nationalist version of the divine right of kings.
We Americans may have a constitutional order based on the Enlightenment, but a lot of us are damn ignorant about it. Europeans have no monopoly on Completely Missing the Point.
Yeah, I don't necessarily view the goal of establishing a liberal democratic Commonwealth to have justified Memory Omega's massacres of Cardassian civilians. On the other hand, however, I think we should bear in mind that the perpetrators of those massacres paid for their crimes with their lives when Supreme Legate Damar ordered the deaths of all Vulcans within Cardassian space. And even if I were to agree that, say, Director Saavik should be indicted and tried as a conspirator to commit mass murder, that, to me, does not invalidate the right of Memory Omega to exist as an institution.
On the other hand, I don't entirely think Omega's actions vis a vis those mass murders were unjustified. All of Cardassian society was complicit to some degree or another in the enslavement and oppression of dozens of species--billions of individuals. And if Omega could conceive of no other way to fight back... I have a hard time condemning it, necessarily. This is a state of lawlessness and of oppression on a level that has only rarely been reached in human history, and it's occurring on a level that has never existed in real life. I'm not quite sure what I think.
The closest comparison I can imagine is this: What if, instead of Vulcans on Cardassia, it had been African Americans in the Antebellum American South? Would a systematic, large-scale rebellion of African Americans have been justified? Such an act would almost certainly have involved killing many thousands of white American Southerners -- their particular oppressors, captors, and abusers, yes. But likely also many thousands of innocents, both white and black, would have been killed in the chaos. And yet... I have a hard time saying that such a rebellion would have been morally unjustified, because the American system of slavery was so uniquely evil.
My pleasure. And I hope I've done justice to your very valid points.
I wonder if Sarina's S.I. handler is part of the "Kirk Cabal" organized against Section 31, of which Vaughn was a part?
SUCH A GOOD BOOK OMG.
*coughs*
Sorry.
That is a very concise summation of the same idea I was trying to convey in my long-winded ramblings!
Hm. I don't know, I didn't really get much of that. To me, Bashir already had that lesson in humility, of realizing that it's not a game, in the episode "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges." It's that final scene, where he's realized how badly he's been played and that he's utterly helpless to do anything about it. Sloan appears to him; he calls Security, and then cancels his call. It's almost like he's realizing that there's darkness in the Federation after all.
If Disavowed had any flaw to me, it's that, to me, it didn't really feature Bashir going on a journey of fundamental emotional change, unless you count his willingness to subject himself to Mirror!Dominion authority and then his realization that the Mirror!Dominion genuinely believes in the rule of law rather than the rule of men. (Or of Changelings.) He began the story in a position of moral certitude vis a vis Section 31, and he ended it there, too.
Which is fine -- not every story has to be about fundamental change in the primary character. And maybe I'll re-read it and see an emotional journey I didn't get the first time. But after the major changes in his character Julian underwent in Zero Sum Game and A Ceremony of Losses, his relatively more emotionally static arc was noticeable to me.
Well, they've been building to this for 13 years now, ever since Cloak was published....
I seriously considered making a reference to Kaos and Control from Get Smart in my initial post, but I decided not to. I thought it might be too obscure and no one would get it. Now others beat me to the punch.
I suppose you could say I... missed it by that much!
Aw, thank you! You're too kind.
Well, I think you bring up a valid point here. And my response is that security organizations, such as police, the armed forces, and intelligence services, inherently carry the potential for fascism. They are, by necessity, authoritarian organizations -- they have to be. You can't be egalitarian when you have to order people into combat. Moreover, they are authoritarian organizations that serve, and must therefore venerate, the state.
What makes these organizations morally legitimate and non-fascistic is that they serve the liberal democratic state but do not seek to undermine its liberal democratic ethos -- thus they are answerable to the democratically-elected government and abide by a liberal constitutional order, with its due processes and individual rights and so forth. This endows the security organizations with virtue.
The key thing that distinguishes Section 31, in my view, is that it not only actively resists accountability to the legitimately-elected democratic government and actively violates the liberal system of individual rights -- but that I suspect it of seeking to subvert the fundamental liberal democratic social order, to transform the Federation from a Rechtsstaat into an Unrechtsstaat.
I base this conclusion on their consistently seeking autarky, on their agents' participation in the Khitomer conspiracy, on their role in the Min Zife affair, on their attempts to raise a private army of Jem'Hadar loyal to them as gods, and on their 23rd century Abramsverse counterparts' openly stated desire to provoke a war with the Klingons so that their leader could "lead the Federation" to victory. (I implicitly interpret Admiral Marcus's goal as being to become the de facto military dictator of the Federation, given his line to Kirk about "who's gonna lead us.")
Well, we know a few things. We know they're called "Control"--which sounds pretty darned authoritarian, if not outright megalomaniacal. We know that Control issues binding orders to their subordinates. We also know that Alexander Marcus, who was apparently the "Control" of the Abramsverse 2250s, wanted to lead the Federation to victory in a war against the Klingons he provoked.
Absolutely my interpretation could be contradicted by a later novel. But to me, given the larger context of Section 31's other activities, it all sounds an awful lot like Führerprinzip.
Well, I think you should give yourself more credit here. Nothing I've argued is particularly unique -- it's basically just a slimmed-down version of ideas found from European political philosophers of the 17th through 19th centuries. John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, etc.
And God knows there are plenty of Americans out there whose ideas about political legitimacy boil down to, "Jesus gave George Washington the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, so we should all be good Christians and obey our white presidents (when they're not dirty commies)." Which is essentially just a white nationalist version of the divine right of kings.
We Americans may have a constitutional order based on the Enlightenment, but a lot of us are damn ignorant about it. Europeans have no monopoly on Completely Missing the Point.
Yeah, I don't necessarily view the goal of establishing a liberal democratic Commonwealth to have justified Memory Omega's massacres of Cardassian civilians. On the other hand, however, I think we should bear in mind that the perpetrators of those massacres paid for their crimes with their lives when Supreme Legate Damar ordered the deaths of all Vulcans within Cardassian space. And even if I were to agree that, say, Director Saavik should be indicted and tried as a conspirator to commit mass murder, that, to me, does not invalidate the right of Memory Omega to exist as an institution.
On the other hand, I don't entirely think Omega's actions vis a vis those mass murders were unjustified. All of Cardassian society was complicit to some degree or another in the enslavement and oppression of dozens of species--billions of individuals. And if Omega could conceive of no other way to fight back... I have a hard time condemning it, necessarily. This is a state of lawlessness and of oppression on a level that has only rarely been reached in human history, and it's occurring on a level that has never existed in real life. I'm not quite sure what I think.
The closest comparison I can imagine is this: What if, instead of Vulcans on Cardassia, it had been African Americans in the Antebellum American South? Would a systematic, large-scale rebellion of African Americans have been justified? Such an act would almost certainly have involved killing many thousands of white American Southerners -- their particular oppressors, captors, and abusers, yes. But likely also many thousands of innocents, both white and black, would have been killed in the chaos. And yet... I have a hard time saying that such a rebellion would have been morally unjustified, because the American system of slavery was so uniquely evil.
My pleasure. And I hope I've done justice to your very valid points.
I wonder if Sarina's S.I. handler is part of the "Kirk Cabal" organized against Section 31, of which Vaughn was a part?
SUCH A GOOD BOOK OMG.
*coughs*
Sorry.
That is a very concise summation of the same idea I was trying to convey in my long-winded ramblings!
Hm. I don't know, I didn't really get much of that. To me, Bashir already had that lesson in humility, of realizing that it's not a game, in the episode "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges." It's that final scene, where he's realized how badly he's been played and that he's utterly helpless to do anything about it. Sloan appears to him; he calls Security, and then cancels his call. It's almost like he's realizing that there's darkness in the Federation after all.
If Disavowed had any flaw to me, it's that, to me, it didn't really feature Bashir going on a journey of fundamental emotional change, unless you count his willingness to subject himself to Mirror!Dominion authority and then his realization that the Mirror!Dominion genuinely believes in the rule of law rather than the rule of men. (Or of Changelings.) He began the story in a position of moral certitude vis a vis Section 31, and he ended it there, too.
Which is fine -- not every story has to be about fundamental change in the primary character. And maybe I'll re-read it and see an emotional journey I didn't get the first time. But after the major changes in his character Julian underwent in Zero Sum Game and A Ceremony of Losses, his relatively more emotionally static arc was noticeable to me.
Well, they've been building to this for 13 years now, ever since Cloak was published....
I seriously considered making a reference to Kaos and Control from Get Smart in my initial post, but I decided not to. I thought it might be too obscure and no one would get it. Now others beat me to the punch.
I suppose you could say I... missed it by that much!
. I have never really followed any of the books from the TOS era but because of Mr Mack I had started reading the Vanguard series and now am about half-way through the series. Can’t wait for Control to be released to see what happens next.
.
