You know, this discussion about Spock's morality reminded me a bit of something. About two and a half years ago, I was watching the German film
Der Untergang (released in English-speaking countries as
Downfall), which is about the final days of the Third Reich as all of Germany was crumbling around Hitler and the senior leaders of the Nazi Party. And I remember feel so utterly disgusted with the society that the Germans had allowed Hitler to build that I thought to myself, "This society, this culture, is so utterly corrupt that they deserve this. They deserve to have the whole thing destroyed, gutted, completely torn down. It has to be destroyed because it's so evil it can't be allowed to go on, and then they can rebuild Germany into something decent."
And I found myself really disturbed by the fact that I'd had that thought. I mean, that's an
incredibly dangerous thing to think -- that an entire society can be so corrupt that it needs to be destroyed, that an entire culture needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. If taken to refer not just to
political culture or the practice of social customs and values, but instead to refer to the people themselves, it's the sort of logic that can condone genocide. It's the sort of thought process that Naomi Klein rails against in her book
The Shock Doctrine, where she associates it with a desire to destroy existing cultures in order to create pseudo-libertarian utopias in their wake.
And yet, to this day, I still sometimes think to myself that maybe it was a good thing that Germany was smashed to the ground before being allowed to rebuild.
So, at least for me, Spock's plan basically plays into a question I've wondered about before:
Is it possible (from the perspective of somebody who values liberal democracy and human rights and liberty) that a society can be so fundamentally corrupt, so thoroughly tyrannical, so abusive, so violent, so
evil, that the whole thing needs to be destroyed? That the whole slate needs to be wiped clean so that something decent can be built on top of it?
Was the Terran Empire so fundamentally horrific that it needed to be destroyed, its people enslaved, its culture and values dismantled, before something good could rise from its ashes?
