The economic fallacies of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor

[Xerxes1979]

Trek lore leads us to believe that Cardassia being a relatively resource poor planet motivated the military command to expand Cardassian space in search of the raw materials necessary for continued civilization.

However what exactly was taken from Bajor and why?

• 
  Was it food?

Unlikey given that by the end of the occupation Cardassia clearly posessed replicator technology and in any case deliberately or as a result of mining much of the planet's agricultural land was heavily contaiminated and rendered unusable.

• Was it a possible site for Cardassian settlement?

Again unlikely given that in Trek class M worlds are extremely plentiful and those situated along the DMZ would have been a similar or lesser distance from Cardassia than Bajor.

If Bajor itself was seen as an ideal and ready made world why not simply employ efficient mass genocide weapons such as biological or chemical weapons? Cardassia does have substanital knowledge in these sciences. It certainly would have had greater efficacy than work X Bajorans to death in labor camp approach.

• Was Bajor occupied for valuable metals?

Possibly, but how valuble is the metal uridium? Uridium apparently is used in the construction of warships and sensor arrays. But given that Cardassia had no access to any Bajoran source of the metal from the establishment of DS9 through the end of the Dominion War, Cardassia either was able to find or trade the metal in sufficient quality to enable continued operation of their warfleet. The relative scaricty of the metal is futher brought into question during the final stages of the war when the Dominion is shrunk to a hand full of star systems.

Also if uridium was so valuable an ore why were several tons of unrefined ore left in ore processing? The natural conclussion is that uridium is more like iron oxide or bauxite than gold or platinum bearing rock.

Mineral resources have never been shown to be geographically unique in Trek, although plants and medicial substances have. Dilithium is/was valuable but has been shown to exist widely across space. Why go Bajor to when space is littered with countless Regulas and other bodies "consisting of various unremarkable ores"?

• Slavery vs capitalism.

What was the point of using forced Bajoran labor? The Nazis used deathcamp labor because the material output was a useful byproduct in their main goal of wiping out the Jews. However as implied above a true and efficent genocide was well within ability of Cardassia to inflict at any time without the costly boondoggle of the occupation.

In any case, Cardassia was at least equal to the 23rd century Federation in many technological areas. Why use biological beings when you could use robots? Robots that never sleep, require no food or oxygen, oversight and can repair themselves? The administrative and resource requirements for staffing Terok Nor and Bajor with officers and security certainly came at a cost even if the labor drew no salary.

If we again turn to human historical paralells we will see that slavery runs contrary to economic progress. The American cotton industry was under threat well prior to the Civil War as it was facing price competition from British produced cotton from Egypt and India. Slavery was long abolished in the British Empire yet the costs of the goods was a threat to king cotton. Cotton clearly did not disappear as an agricultural good in the aftermath of the Civil War. Great fortunes were again made though the slavery of debt rather chattel slavery.

Given that Cardassia shows no signs of obtaining Federation level economic socialism it should be well versed in the advantages and history of using other methods in the obtaining of material wealth. Why did it chose the least efficient and painful means to an end?

 

[ClayHefner]

Good points.
it could be

1) that Bajor had some territory outside their system that the Cardies were after.
2) At one point the Cardassians may have been a small power, locked in theri own system, unable to expand for some reason .
The planets around their territory might have been sovereign powers (like Bajor), Fed colonies or sub-warp planets the Federation may have tried to protect. That could also be the reason for the first Cardassian war.
3) During an expansion phase (after the military took over?), the Cardassians may have annexed a portion of space around them, giving them what theiy wanted, and annexing Bajor, the neighboring system. was only logical. We only know what the occupation turned into. It might have been much easier for the Cardassians in the beginning to keep control, while letting Bajor go and create a hostile sovereign system inside their space might have been difficult or dangerous.

Of course the question remains how, knowing tech in the Trek universe, a spacefaring species could not have the means to even feed their people. Cardassia must really be low on something crucial.

 

[Anwar]

Bajor is in fact, VERY close to Cardassia. The continues occupation may have been justified by them just wanting to control local space and not have Bajor be a neutral planet from which an attack could be launched. By the time they ended the Occupation they may have conquered enough that losing Bajor wasn't a huge blow.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Why use biological beings when you could use robots? Robots that never sleep, require no food or oxygen, oversight and can repair themselves? The administrative and resource requirements for staffing Terok Nor and Bajor with officers and security certainly came at a cost even if the labor drew no salary.

I suppose Bajorans are cheaper than robots. For every robot miner you build, you could have built a disruptor array instead. But Bajorans come free with the planet.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Bajor is in fact, VERY close to Cardassia. The continues occupation may have been justified by them just wanting to control local space and not have Bajor be a neutral planet from which an attack could be launched. By the time they ended the Occupation they may have conquered enough that losing Bajor wasn't a huge blow.

This seems reasonable to me. The Cardassians wanted to control the local space around their homeworld for their own security. All other rationalizations for the Occupation, IMO, are just ways to cover this fact up.

Going back to real world parellels, it would be like when Hitler said that Germany needed "breathing room."

 

[USS KG5]

• Was Bajor occupied for valuable metals?

Possibly, but how valuble is the metal uridium?

Given all the stuff about strip mining and ore processing, yes it was.

Also if uridium was so valuable an ore why were several tons of unrefined ore left in ore processing? The natural conclussion is that uridium is more like iron oxide or bauxite than gold or platinum bearing rock.

Either that or the Cardassians should have taken it but were too busy smashing up the place to piss off Starfleet, quite believable.

Why go Bajor to when space is littered with countless Regulas and other bodies "consisting of various unremarkable ores"?

It was easy and they seemed to really, really want to strip mine it and use the Bajorans as slaves. They are bastards really and written in as such.

Obviously one can easily rationalise it away but it begs the larger question why would you EVER have wars in space anyhow? It seems there are plenty of planets and resources for everyone but heck, they still have a lot of wars.

What was the point of using forced Bajoran labor? The Nazis used deathcamp labor because the material output was a useful byproduct in their main goal of wiping out the Jews.

Not entirely true I'm afraid. The Nazis used lots and lots of slave workers from all parts of their new empire, including France and Holland. Generally they preferred to use "Untermensch" of one kind or another, but they would use anyone.

In the Nazis case it was sheer manpower shortage that caused this - they were fighting essentially the rest of the world, suffering massive casualties and running out of people. Slave labour helped their industrial capacity to grow to its full potential while simultaneously they were getting bombed to hell and really losing the war.

In any case, Cardassia was at least equal to the 23rd century Federation in many technological areas. Why use biological beings when you could use robots?

TV reason - Trek avoids the cute robot cliche in sci-fi.

Real reason, I guess the same as why the Ent-D has 1000 crew when only about a dozen ever actually do anything. Presumably there are a lot of jobs robots can't do.

Also - people tend to feed and maintain themselves, and reproduce without a factory. Essentially people are conceivably much cheaper than robots.

Robots that never sleep, require no food or oxygen, oversight and can repair themselves?

Well what you are saying there is "magic technology" fixes all things. Obviously true, but if you put limits on the robots (i.e. maintenance cycles, free radicals, cost) then the slave labour clause comes back into effect.

The administrative and resource requirements for staffing Terok Nor and Bajor with officers and security certainly came at a cost even if the labor drew no salary.

Well yes but that cost is the same with your large military wherever it is based. Quite simply wars have started before to give large militaries something to do (arguably part of the cause of the 2003 Iraq War) and the only alternative is a small military, which Cardassia might not want.

If we again turn to human historical paralells we will see that slavery runs contrary to economic progress.

Look again at history a bit further back from your good examples. Britain grew into a superpower initially based on two things - slavery and piracy. Later on we got moral, but it took us a while!

Given that Cardassia shows no signs of obtaining Federation level economic socialism it should be well versed in the advantages and history of using other methods in the obtaining of material wealth. Why did it chose the least efficient and painful means to an end?

Well it clearly didn't. This is a good post here but it follows a pattern based on one rationalisation of background events in an episodic TV show. As such you dont have quite enough evidence to reach that conclusion.

 

[Timo]

Considering the use of robotics, what reason do we have to believe that Terok Nor didn't run extensively on automated machinery?

The station is gigantic, easily able to hold several Galaxy starships within its docking arm envelope. And even a single Galaxy is so large that a thousand people are rattling in there like ten beans in an oil barrel. Yet when Starfleet takes over the station, only 300 people initially are employed there.

Now add a thousand Bajoran workers or whatever. That's peanuts - about 99% of the work must be conducted by machinery that doesn't require a Bajoran crewing a console every two meters, or pulling levers or pushing carts or whatever they were doing. No doubt the station was automated to the maximum degree affordable (not with silly "tin men" but with more practically shaped automatons integrated into the structures), and only after the limit was reached was this untrustworthy Bajoran scum allowed aboard the station to do the rest.

To have the refinery up in orbit, meaning you have to haul all the useless rock up there in addition to the extractable minerals, bespeaks of Cardassian paranoia: they did not dare have the refinery down below where it might be attacked, but instead chose to fuse it with their administration and domination center up in space. With that in mind, the Bajoran slave labor must have been an absolute necessity, kept at the absolute minimum - and even then, the resistance groups managed to insert their agents and saboteurs there. Cardassians couldn't have opted for slave labor for reasons as frivorous as "let's make life miserable for these stupid natives", but must instead have been operating at the edge of their technological ability and economic reach.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Bajor was Cardassia's biggest and most important interstellar endeavor, of course. It could just as well be that the factions wanting to exploit or dominate Bajor were given limited technological and economic resources, because their superiors didn't believe the endeavor was worthwhile. Indeed, when Central Command finally retreated from Terok Nor before "Emissary", it was apparently as the result of political backstabbing more than anything else, as discussed in "Cardassians". The place was already sucked dry anyway, but clearly this did not equate to Cardassia being out of luck and on the verge of new poverty - the conquest of Bajor might have been one of the many aggressive steps that solved Cardassia's economic problems for good already, giving it the luxury of later retreating and leaving behind Terok Nor (and Empok Nor, another apparent mining station judging by the design, but clearly not involved in active mining any more, if ever).

I could well see Bajor as the first and boldest step in Cardassia's new policy of aggressive expansion in the early 24th century, serving the triple goals of bolstering the military's profile, securing Cardassia's interstellar vicinity, and producing some of the needed resources (plus some early experience on how to get more). But I could just as well see Cardassia making do without Bajor when need be, never dedicating all the resources the military was requesting, and the Central Command hanging onto her purely for reasons of prestige.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

Regarding the feasibility of a Bajoran genocide, I've always suspected that between the left-leaning civilian elements of the Cardassian Union and pressure from the Federation, wholesale slaughter of the Bajorans, while easier, was probably never considered a viable option. Even a bogeyman such as the USSR would have a hard time sustaining, in the face of public and even Communist Party conscience, let alone international horror, an avowed and efficient destruction of the Afghan people.

So that I can buy.

I've never been able to buy the Cardassians using the Bajorans on DS9 to push carts of ore from one end of a space station to another, and Bajorans on the surface to push carts of ore around from one end of a mine shaft to another. Timo's supposition is great, but it's pretty clear that that's what they used Bajorans around for. And it's just preposterous. I mean, modern humans don't generally use manual labor (let alone slave labor) for that sort of thing.

I always thought it'd have been nice to have attempted to depict how a post-industrial economy might utilize the peculiar institution. "What did the Cardassians have you doing during the Occupation?" "I was a patent lawyer." "Man, that sucks. Me, I coded guidance software for the phaser kill-satellites that they used on poor neighborhoods whenever those assholes in the Resistance blew up one of their mining robots."

It would actually help explain the continued resilience of the apparently monospecies empires in the face of the facially much larger and more sophisticated Federation economy.

Also, regarding reasons for occupying Bajor, I would hate to think it was food. That there would be "agricultural regions" of an interstellar empire is an insane notion. Across interstellar distances, you move people, not food. It's not a freight train bearing dead cows from Chicago to the market in NYC. The notion here is an antimatter-driven starship carrying yams from Bajor. There is just no way that the energy cost of growing a freighter-full of yams in a greenhouse on Cardassia, no matter how far they've exceeded their planet's carrying capacity, exceeds the energy cost of synthesizing antimatter to move yams back and forth from a yam-bearing gravity well four light years away. I mean, what is this, Bajor is a Harsh Mistress?

 

[Timo]

To be sure, "agricultural planets" are as much a feature of the Trek universe as the ore carts aboard Terok Nor are. Even the Federation has those. And interstellar travel is probably dirt cheap, thanks to the magical warp drive; at least it's never suggested that our heroes or anybody else should hesitate from doing it on the basis of cost, or fuel expenditure, or anything like that.

It can be argued that it's insane today to ship beef from South America to Europe, or sheep (live, processed, or something in between) from Australia to same. Yet it happens, and transportation costs are fairly negligible in the equation. Star Trek has always operated much the same way, with antimatter-fueled starships being just as affordable as diesel-powered seagoing vessels today, and probably also a bit faster in relative terms.

To be sure, whenever we see interstellar freighters, they tend to be small, smaller than warships. This might suggest that only precious goods are carried. But dialogue explicates that ore (not minerals, but the ore containing them) is one of the goods being carried - so clearly it's perfectly economical to haul bulk, including low-cost bulk consisting to a large part of ballast (common rocks and the like). Which I guess is all good and well if star travel indeed is (literally!) dirt cheap, and if the universe holds mineral wonders that obviously aren't part of Earth's geological makeup, and may well be unique to a very small group of source planets.

On the issue of those ah-so-annoying mining carts, we don't really see them on the surface of Bajor, now do we? Our only look into a Cardassian forced labor mine would be in the photos of "Duet", I think. No ore carts there (although we did see some shovels and wheelbarrows, but even high-tech mines need their janitors and sweepers).

Some carts in the Breen forced labor mine of "Indiscretion", though - but that was a small-time illegal operation run in secrecy, apparently with minimal resources. It would make sense that the Breen wouldn't set up much of an infrastructure there. And interestingly, it does seem to be economically worthwhile to run illegal mining ops with manual slave labor, since so many are seen doing it: the Briori, the Skags, perhaps also the Preservers. Manual laborers do repair and replenish themselves if given time and some common, cheap resources. Plus, they are highly flexible, and cost almost nothing to acquire.

So we're really just dealing with the single cart seen in "Civil Defense", as part of the ore processing machinery of Terok Nor. (I think we can forget about the station's Mirror counterpart, because the Mirror Universe needn't make sense as long as it's evil and lesbian.) So I ask: why should we assume that this cart was manually operated?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Xerxes1979]

Also, regarding reasons for occupying Bajor, I would hate to think it was food. That there would be "agricultural regions" of an interstellar empire is an insane notion. Across interstellar distances, you move people, not food. It's not a freight train bearing dead cows from Chicago to the market in NYC. The notion here is an antimatter-driven starship carrying yams from Bajor. There is just no way that the energy cost of growing a freighter-full of yams in a greenhouse on Cardassia, no matter how far they've exceeded their planet's carrying capacity, exceeds the energy cost of synthesizing antimatter to move yams back and forth from a yam-bearing gravity well four light years away. I mean, what is this, Bajor is a Harsh Mistress?

I don't know, an automated freighter hauling bulk grain could probably turn a profit. The real problem is why Bajor was not conquered or made a primary trade partner shortly after the invention of warp drive. The NX class in Enterprise was a breakthrough because of its warp 5 engine, but the domain of human space was already well established for a distance of at least a dozen light years from Earth.

DS9 frequently mentions that Cardassia is a day's travel from Bajor. Even if primitive warp speeds meant that hauling resources took six months each way it might be worth the investment. Right now chemical rockets can get us to Mars in about that time and mining the large precious metal asteroids of the main belt could be one leg of a space ecomony. In the days of sail cargo often was at sea for months like the above mentioned wool trade between Austrailia and Great Britian.

 

[snakespeare]

Don't forget that Bajor colonized Cardassia thousands of years in the past using their light ships. The Cardassians will not admit it, but the people they refer to as their own ancestors (the Hebitians) in the mystical golden age were really Bajorans. So their treatment of Bajor may have had some ancestral hatred mixed in. Sisko and Jake proved it by flying their light ship to Cardassia Prime, and there isn't much more on the topic until the novel, Unity.

 

[Timo]

We shouldn't be automatically assuming that Bajorans would have been defenseless wussies. Their culture supposedly thrived for hundreds of millennia; it must have weathered worse than an expansionist Cardassia.

We could assume that Bajor, much like Earth, was in the sphere of influence of some power that didn't see fit to downright conquer the protége planet, but didn't allow anybody else to mess with it, either. Earth may have been protected by its proximity to Vulcan and its mighty warfleet; Bajor may have had similar benefactors, or then may have been the useful piece of terra nullius between competing powers.

Or then Bajor may have had warfleets of its own. All we know is that 800 years prior to the show, Bajor's spaceflight capabilities were primitive and did not feature interstellar travel, except by accident. But 300 years prior to the show, Bajor may have operated the mightiest fleet in the neighborhood, whereas Cardassia was only slowly ascending. Bajorans simply didn't advance all that fast - it wasn't in their nature, considering their ancient and thus probably extremely stable and nondynamic culture. So Cardassia caught up, sped past, and reached a position from which to initiate military conquest.

Even then, Cardassians didn't come with guns blazing. The backstory is that they opened up with insincere promises rather than with phaser blasts, perhaps because they didn't believe they could triumph in purely military terms.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

Don't forget that Bajor colonized Cardassia thousands of years in the past using their light ships.

That doesn't jibe with canon material at all. Lightships were well-known fact in "Explorers", a technology from 800 years in the past, not thousands of years. Only their journeys to other stars were legend. Unity can't be taken very seriously if it proposes that the very small number of Bajorans that could have crossed the interstellar gulf thousands of years ago (if they had the ships, which they didn't) could have grown into the dominant species on Cardassia within those mere thousands of years and (I gather) even mutated into Cardassians. That sort of a plotline simply doesn't work - at least not unless one throws in a good helping of time travel and divine intervention, both of whom are of course available in abundance to the Bajorans...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PorthosShadow]

Honestly, I've never thought to hard about it because maybe the answer was painfully obvious. Cardassia was in deep economic trouble and needed a quick fix so after looting their own world to pay for a fast military build up they robbed their nearest neighbor, Bajor and started living in their house.

They did this for two reasons, it was easy and convienent. Without thinking too much about the economics of space fareing civilizations I would say they probably made more money from raping the planet than they would have if they had not.

Despite the explanation that The Cardassians left due to political reasons I've thought that occupying Bajor was no longer economically feasible since what they took from the planet basically sured up their economy to the point where they no longer needed the planet. In fact, it's likely that they probably just kept Bajor out of cruelity and finally left when again it was convienent.

 

[Myasishchev]

Don't forget that Bajor colonized Cardassia thousands of years in the past using their light ships.

That doesn't jibe with canon material at all. Lightships were well-known fact in "Explorers", a technology from 800 years in the past, not thousands of years. Only their journeys to other stars were legend. Unity can't be taken very seriously if it proposes that the very small number of Bajorans that could have crossed the interstellar gulf thousands of years ago (if they had the ships, which they didn't) could have grown into the dominant species on Cardassia within those mere thousands of years and (I gather) even mutated into Cardassians. That sort of a plotline simply doesn't work - at least not unless one throws in a good helping of time travel and divine intervention, both of whom are of course available in abundance to the Bajorans...

Timo Saloniemi

It's a bit of pick your poison--ancient Bajoran astronauts, or magic Bajoran gametes.

Btw, I don't recall any agricultural planets in canon... there were fecund planets, of course, and farmers, but I never got the impression that there was a serious export business (except in delicacies and Klingon food--even then that was suggested to have been grown in situ, since it's live food and big tank of gagh worms could begin with just a few or two specimens, perhaps a culinary student's delight, with huge local variations in flavor and texture due to genetic drift in small gagh founder populations).

Anyway, a society that can produce significant amounts of antimatter would have the energy resources to overcome most barriers to agricultural output, just as an oil-driven economy permits far greater agricultural output than one based on the energy derived, basically, from the solar energy stored in the food itself. And once you've dropped a freighter full of food, you make an argument that you've added to the (agricultural) carrying capacity of your planet for all time. I mean, is Cardassia Prime so overpopulated that they're running out of carbon to make new people with?

Add to the fact that the Cardies had replicators and replicators are the ecological equivalent of photosynthetic primary producers, as long as energy is available, Cardassians need not be hungry. If they care so little about their own people, or are so objectivist, as to not provide Federation-like social welfare, it certainly doesn't make any more sense to invade other planets to feed the hungry.

On the other hand, if they had actually used Bajor as lebensraum, it would have been sensible. But fifty years went by and any Cardassian colonizing imperative is completely unnoticeable.

I do rather like the notion that Bajor was once a middling power in its own right, though, that didn't just appear one day in the early 24th century in Earth's virtual backyard. Captain Pike sez: "Re: First contact report regarding the Bajoran Ascendancy... bunch of religious nutjobs with crumplezone noses that we shouldn't let in the Federation if they crapped dilithium. Would prefer to see what the Klingons are doing."

 

[Sci]

I think the idea that the Occupation was actually motivated by the stated economic concerns, rather than by darker motivations, is charmingly naive.

 

[PorthosShadow]

Don't forget that Bajor colonized Cardassia thousands of years in the past using their light ships.

That doesn't jibe with canon material at all. Lightships were well-known fact in "Explorers", a technology from 800 years in the past, not thousands of years. Only their journeys to other stars were legend. Unity can't be taken very seriously if it proposes that the very small number of Bajorans that could have crossed the interstellar gulf thousands of years ago (if they had the ships, which they didn't) could have grown into the dominant species on Cardassia within those mere thousands of years and (I gather) even mutated into Cardassians. That sort of a plotline simply doesn't work - at least not unless one throws in a good helping of time travel and divine intervention, both of whom are of course available in abundance to the Bajorans...

Timo Saloniemi

It's a bit of pick your poison--ancient Bajoran astronauts, or magic Bajoran gametes.

Btw, I don't recall any agricultural planets in canon... there were fecund planets, of course, and farmers, but I never got the impression that there was a serious export business (except in delicacies and Klingon food--even then that was suggested to have been grown in situ, since it's live food and big tank of gagh worms could begin with just a few or two specimens, perhaps a culinary student's delight, with huge local variations in flavor and texture due to genetic drift in small gagh founder populations).

Anyway, a society that can produce significant amounts of antimatter would have the energy resources to overcome most barriers to agricultural output, just as an oil-driven economy permits far greater agricultural output than one based on the energy derived, basically, from the solar energy stored in the food itself. And once you've dropped a freighter full of food, you make an argument that you've added to the (agricultural) carrying capacity of your planet for all time. I mean, is Cardassia Prime so overpopulated that they're running out of carbon to make new people with?

Add to the fact that the Cardies had replicators and replicators are the ecological equivalent of photosynthetic primary producers, as long as energy is available, Cardassians need not be hungry. If they care so little about their own people, or are so objectivist, as to not provide Federation-like social welfare, it certainly doesn't make any more sense to invade other planets to feed the hungry.

To be fair, we've only seen Cardassains of the last 10 to 15 years so it's entirely possible they didn't have replicators. I hate to use Voyager as an example but the Kazon had warp drive but no replicators. I don't think the two technologies go hand in hand and it's also entirely possible that warp drive was a recent development for the Cardassians.

This would make logical sense since Bajor is their nearest neighbor. Its kind of like humans developing a warp two engine and making their way to Vulcan and plundering it then expanding their economy from there Basically the impression I get is that the Cardassians had very little in terms of advanced technology but once they reached Bajor they got rich from it.

So really prior to the destruction The Dominion brought on the Cardassian empire the strong economy The Cardassians enjoyed was probably directly a result of plunding Bajor. Btw, all those cultural artifacts that Cardassia sold off during its deep economic depression, I wonder if they got that stuff back when they got back on their feet.

 

[Myasishchev]

But energy + CxHxOxNx = food. If you have FTL, you have copious energy. If you live in a solar system, you have copious C, H, O and N.

What do you plunder from an alien planet that isn't available in large amounts in your own? Other than living space and an educated workforce?

Although it would explain why so many pre-industrial planets are rarely bothered with unless they're strategically placed (like Organia). If you have plenty of land already, there is virtually nothing to be had, except in the case of your various unobtainiums... but there are lots of Pandorans to get rid of. On the other hand, a densely-populated, innovative planet like Earth or Romulus would be a catch (and a good thing the Vulcans enslaved us instead of the Klingons) but tend to be able to defend themselves.

The only rational intestellar conquest scheme I can paint for Aggressor is a plan to take over Victim, uplift their society to the point where they could actually productively contribute to Aggressor's (no doubt technology, service and innovation based, as our own) economy, but keep Victim from ever developing the means of becoming a threat and an aggressor in their own right.

Well, the other rational alternative is extermination. But that would lead to unpleasantness at home and rapid and extreme responses from abroad, so it usually isn't done, unless you're the Borg and too big and weird to care.

 

[Sci]

The only rational intestellar conquest scheme I can paint for Aggressor is a plan to take over Victim, uplift their society to the point where they could actually productively contribute to Aggressor's (no doubt technology, service and innovation based, as our own) economy, but keep Victim from ever developing the means of becoming a threat and an aggressor in their own right.

What on Earth makes you think that these sorts of conquest schemes are rational? Or that economic considerations are the actual motivations?

Seems pretty obvious to me:

The object of torture is torture. The object of conquest is conquest. The object of power is power. The object of sadism is sadism.

The Cardassians didn't conquer Bajor because of economic desperation any more than the United States invaded and occupied Iraq because of national security. They did it because they could.

 

[Timo]

It's a bit of pick your poison--ancient Bajoran astronauts, or magic Bajoran gametes.

To be sure, the latter already has plenty of Trek precedent. Why would Bajor and Cardassia need to enjoy a special (pre-)historical connection when for example Klingons and humans interbreed without one? We already have a general solution (from "The Chase"), why try for a special one?

Btw, I don't recall any agricultural planets in canon...

In terminology at least, Worf's old home Gault was a UFP farming world. And creation of worlds of that type was the goal of Carol Marcus in the Genesis project.

The fact that relatively recently founded colonies tend to be agricultural is probably unrelated to the issue of "farming worlds", I agree. Then again, it could be that specialization does pay: certain colonies expand their original sustenance farming into an export business, while others export mineables and probably have to import foodstuffs as a consequence. Such export-dependent economies can only be abandoned after these colonies accumulate centuries of experience, wealth, population and infrastructure, after which we get something more like Deneva.

Add to the fact that the Cardies had replicators

The military did. Just because the Kirov runs on nuclear power doesn't mean there wouldn't be power outages at Omsk.

..it certainly doesn't make any more sense to invade other planets to feed the hungry.

It's a great excuse, though.

On the other hand, if they had actually used Bajor as lebensraum, it would have been sensible.

Even with dirt cheap warp drive, I find it hard to believe that even the most audacious exodus of Cardassian citizens would be anywhere as effective in controlling the population problems of Cardassia Prime as the least ambitious campaign of contraception. Colonization of space isn't a solution to population issues. It's a conquest campaign, a means of getting rid of the excessively eager, a way to reach raw materials, an issue of prestige. It's not a viable sink for great numbers of excess people.

...Really, if Cardassia did have a population excess it did care about, the obvious solution would be execution pits. But a "campaign to feed the hungry" is politically more useful - as is the idea of having hungry people in the first place.

I think the idea that the Occupation was actually motivated by the stated economic concerns, rather than by darker motivations, is charmingly naive.

As, on a directly related issue, is the idea that Bajorans drove the occupiers away...

What do you plunder from an alien planet that isn't available in large amounts in your own? Other than living space and an educated workforce?

Minerals. That's quite solidly established everywhere in Star Trek: certain substances only exist on certain planets, and by far the easiest way to get them is to go to those planets and extract them.

Replicators might get the same thing done, yes. But at greater energy costs, and at the expense of other things to be replicated. And if you manufactured your own dilithium, this would mean that somebody else would get to mine the dilithium from Motherlode IV. You can't have that sort of thing happening!

...unless they're strategically placed (like Organia).

Now that's a hairier issue than the ones about minerals or food or slave labor...

How could Organia be "strategically placed"? Why would the Klingon Empire or the UFP covet a planet that can provide them with nothing except some bedrock and air?

Are we to think that the mighty and famously independent starships can operate better if they have a constant supply of Organian breadrolls and fillet-o-mouse? If they can refresh their air supplies with Fresh Organian Mountain Air (TM)? If their crews can ravish Organian women every now and then? What strategic value could a primitive planet ever hold, except for its primitive but bountiful consumables?

The Cardassians didn't conquer Bajor because of economic desperation any more than the United States invaded and occupied Iraq because of national security. They did it because they could.

No doubt. But there would still in all likelihood be an underlying doctrine or religion or other such motivation, one that would be of dramatic interest to the audience.

Cardassians have been presented as having quite a set of intriguing motivations, from those openly declared and probably false, to those darkly implied, to those actually revealed. Klingons get a simpler treatment, but there's dramatic value to their alien desire to conquer for essentially religious reasons. Trek humans conquer for a fascinating set of reasons, too, good material for drama whether we agree or disagree.

Timo Saloniemi