It is perhaps useful to remember that there are no civilians within the Borg collective when discussing this. I'm not sure that it is genocide. Would Picard hesitate to use an antibiotic to kill a virus? Probably not, and just because Borgs were once-upon-a-time individuals and happen to be mainly humanoid in form, does not mean we should see them as anything other than a multi-cellular virus.
Was Picard wrong in I,Borg?
- Thread starter indolover
- Start date
I disagree if the entire Federation is at stake which is billions of lives this shoulc and could have been justified. The borg where hell bent on assimilating the Federation. Picard made the wrong choice.
Why?
I don't know but there is no reasoning with the borg they will not negotiate peace I still would have sent the virus.
DontFeedPhil
Fleet Captain
They're called a "casualty of war"...
Why dont we think about this as if Star Trek is a real version of our future. So now that it affects you...do you think he made the right decision? I dont. We need to take every opportunity to whipe them out...Its us or them...
If your essential point here is "it did not matter who won World War Two" I am not going to bother debating the point, clearly we are coming from completely different points of view.
Defeating the brutal, evil, genocidal dictatorship that was running Germany and creating as a result the peaceful coalition of nations that now comprises Europe (eventually) seems to me in every way worth the blood spilled, on both sides.
Except in WW2, where the allied powers as a whole lost vastly more lives.
Pseudo-philosophical horse-poop. While a direct exact definition of good and evil is difficult to judge the Nazis were evil, plain and simple. That is not to say the allies did not do bad things in achieving victory, and war itself is a brutal abomination, but to just let the Nazis win would have been horrific. Apart from anything else they would have set about racially pirifying a continent. All untermensch would have been exterminated.
I just hope I got the wrong end of your post Timo normally I have a lot of time for your opinions but this one baffles me.
No German would have surrendered before the end of 1943 or so, by which point much damage was done. The war could have ended in 1944 had the Nazi leadership been removed, but the damage would have been almost as bad.
Hindsight is 20-20. Looking back, the death of Hugh's branch of the Borg would have been better for the UFP than what happened--the Borg force following Lore, and attacking the Federation and...
Bottom line: There are no easy answers in war. Many times, a nation finds itself having to go against "principles" in order to defend itself--or to end the war as quickly as possible. To be morally consistant, in the end, runs the risk of tying your hands...so that they can exploit your barriers.
Bottom line: There are no easy answers in war. Many times, a nation finds itself having to go against "principles" in order to defend itself--or to end the war as quickly as possible. To be morally consistant, in the end, runs the risk of tying your hands...so that they can exploit your barriers.
Well, see, now (IMHO) you're talking about two different things.
In the case of Picard it was a "less active" war situation. At that point the Federation was pretty much in a "cold war" with the Borg. The Federation had defeated the one ship sent to attack Earth and after that point the Borg had done nothing else to the Federation.
For all intents and purposes they were "even" in the war which had gone cold.
If Picard had implemented the program the war would've gone hot again and, since it's unlikely it would've wiped out all Borg, it would've likely just prompted them to step-up their efforts to assimilate the Federation. The retaliation from the Borg may have been something that couldn't of been stopped.
^And yet they did NOT retaliate when a "virus" of individuality struck the Borg. Surely if the Collective could trace a destructive virus to the UFP, they could do the same with what happened.
And yet...either the Borg didn't know...or didn't care.
And yet...either the Borg didn't know...or didn't care.
The "individuality virus" was less an intented attack and more a side-effect of Hugh being out of the collective for a period of time. The Borg likely wouldn't see that as an attack and would do what they did, dispensed with the defective drones.
Attack because of the "individuality virus" would be like Russia attacking us because one of their citizens visited America and then came back singing the Star Spangled Banner and quoting Washington. It was less "attack" as it was just an effect of the change of setting.
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
It's a matter of numbers.
If a Borg walks around the corner, you kill it. Then another one comes, you kill it. Another one, you reset the harmonics or whatnot and kill it. What if another one comes? A whole cube? Do you refrain from killing it because you don't want to kill too many?
Picard was hiding behind morals, in the sense that even if he knew it was bad, he could do it as a sacrifice of himself ( not his life but of his conscience) and rid the galaxy of the Borg.
He could go home and cry about it while the rest of the galaxy builds statues and renames whole planets in his honour.
If a Borg walks around the corner, you kill it. Then another one comes, you kill it. Another one, you reset the harmonics or whatnot and kill it. What if another one comes? A whole cube? Do you refrain from killing it because you don't want to kill too many?
Picard was hiding behind morals, in the sense that even if he knew it was bad, he could do it as a sacrifice of himself ( not his life but of his conscience) and rid the galaxy of the Borg.
He could go home and cry about it while the rest of the galaxy builds statues and renames whole planets in his honour.
Exactly and another point is that Janeway did not hesitate to infect the borg with a virus in Endgame.
^Yup. She leaned from Picard's error--an error he confessed to in "Descent".
I think, in that ep, Picard was shaken into reality. For too long, he was so caught up in Nothing Can Exuse Going Against Our Federation Values, he condemned Riker, in "Silicon Avatar", for advocating killing the chrystaline entity to prevent further attacks.
But as he found out, sometimes the "moral" thing isn't necessarily the "right" thing.
I think, in that ep, Picard was shaken into reality. For too long, he was so caught up in Nothing Can Exuse Going Against Our Federation Values, he condemned Riker, in "Silicon Avatar", for advocating killing the chrystaline entity to prevent further attacks.
But as he found out, sometimes the "moral" thing isn't necessarily the "right" thing.
Yes this adittude was shown very well in FC where he said the crewman assimilated by the bor are as good as dead and by killing them, you are doing them a favor!
Yet the direct consequence of taking the war to unconditional victory was to create a brutal, evil, genocidal dictatorship for half of Europe. That happened exactly because everybody was so eager to wage war. Giving the Nazis a little bit of that famed Western thing they call mercy would have saved millions from the horrors of communism, while still winning the war, ending the Nazi evils, and making the world think a bit.
Not really "except". The victors spilled more blood. Much of it just happened to be their own.
Who said anything about letting the Nazis win? Suffering would have been avoided by not letting the Allies win. That's completely different from giving victory to Hitler.
Armies up till the 19th century understood that perfectly well. But it seems that when the United States got to play real war for the first time, on somebody else's turf, it didn't bother to find out how it's properly done. "Unconditional surrender" is not a valid goal of war, and is completely unassociated with "victory".
Most of the suffering in the big 20th century wars really comes from the US not knowing how to wage war. "Winning" is a goal for little children, and for the deranged who think war is a game.
By 1944, said leadership would have been perfectly willing to negotiate with the West, in the unlikely situation where the West would have stopped to think and listen. They were humans, after all, not Borg. A cease-fire for negotiations where the Nazis would be crushed would have had the side effect of stopping war on the other front as well, through stiffening German resistance and then through political pressure. The result: one Europe saved from most of the destruction, which had been minimal during Germany's expansion phase. In Europe, that is.
Somebody from Ukraine or Russia, hurt by that expansion phase already, would be far from satisfied with such an outcome, of course. I'm just telling why the eventual outcome really sucks from my European point of view, and why the idea of "taking wars to their conclusion" is not the antithesis of Nazi atrocities for me, but their direct continuation.
Timo Saloniemi
Picard had weapons armed and ready to go if their attempt to communicate with the entity failed. He was willing to kill it, but he figured they may as well try to talk to the damn thing first.
A
Amaris
Guest
After just watching the episode, I can honestly say I don't know. Both sides have a good point, but I just can't decide at the moment. I do want to note that hearing the words "race" and "species" from Crusher was just annoying.
No. For a single human being to unilaterally decide to destroy an entire species would be not only abhorrent but dangerous.
Arguably, if any other species recognized afterward that human beings granted authority and agency to individuals capable of such things, that species would be fully justified in committing genocide against humanity and wiping us out to the last man, woman and child - for their own protection against us.
Arguably, if any other species recognized afterward that human beings granted authority and agency to individuals capable of such things, that species would be fully justified in committing genocide against humanity and wiping us out to the last man, woman and child - for their own protection against us.
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