What would have happened on Earth after a Dominion victory, if the Dominion didn't eradicated it?

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

What i also wonder about is why the Changelings didn't replace Dukat sometime after the admission of the Cardassians into the Dominion. That way they could have governed Cardassia exactly like they wished without needing to make concessions to Dukat or later to Damar...

The Cardassians are a totalitarian folk with a bit of a strong men fetish.
They tend to rally around their leader and the founders realized they needed to entertain Dukat/Damar for the support of the whole of Cardassian.
As soon as the Bremen entered the stage, they stopped relying on Damar.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

The Cardassians are a totalitarian folk with a bit of a strong men fetish.
They tend to rally around their leader and the founders realized they needed to entertain Dukat/Damar for the support of the whole of Cardassian.
As soon as the Bremen entered the stage, they stopped relying on Damar.

What i meant with replacing was doing the same thing they did with Martok and Bashir: Taking Dukat away and replace him with another changeling.

This way they could have their cake and eat it, too. The Cardies would still have their glorious leader and the Dominion total control...

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I see.
Maybe no Changeling felt able to fake such a big ego convincingly.

 

[kkt]

What i meant with replacing was doing the same thing they did with Martok and Bashir: Taking Dukat away and replace him with another changeling.

This way they could have their cake and eat it, too. The Cardies would still have their glorious leader and the Dominion total control...

The real Dukat was cooperating with them very well, until "Sacrifice of Angels". The Dominion had very limited numbers of changlings in the Alpha Quadrant. They probably felt using them as spies where they had no cooperative solids was a better use for them.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

The real Dukat was cooperating with them very well, until "Sacrifice of Angels". The Dominion had very limited numbers of changlings in the Alpha Quadrant. They probably felt using them as spies where they had no cooperative solids was a better use for them.

He cooperated well until this episode but it was a risk to let him stay in power because of his big ego and troubled personality. He was a bomb about to explode. It would have been wise to spare a changeling and replace him after one or two months or at the latest when the war began.

 

[at Quark's]

^Couldn't they just as easily make Dukat suffer a tragic accident and replace him with someone more docile and with less of an ego? Why commit a changeling to playing him? It's not as if he was an irreplaceable leader that commanded a unique loyalty from the military and/or general population, as far as we know ....

 

[Unimatrix Q]

^Couldn't they just as easily make Dukat suffer a tragic accident and replace him with someone more docile and with less of an ego? Why commit a changeling to playing him? It's not as if he was an irreplaceable leader that commanded a unique loyalty from the military and/or general population, as far as we know ....

Maybe, but it would have given raise to suspicion about the trustworthiness of the Dominion in the eyes of the cardassian population. Something they might have tried to avoid at that time.

 

[at Quark's]

Perhaps, perhaps not. Cardassian power politics already seemed quite fascist and not above such replacements a long time before the Dominion ever got involved, so it's quite possible they wouldn't consider it too much out of the ordinary (except that now a foreign power also is involved).

 

[Spot261]

More importantly would they have a referendum to leave?

 

[at Quark's]

More importantly would they have a referendum to leave?

Sure, why not? I think the ballots would look like this:

Should our world remain a member of the Dominion or leave the Dominion?

with the responses to the question to be (to be marked with a single (X)):

Remain a member of the Dominion (things stay as they are now)
Leave the Dominion (possible side effects may include incineration of our homeworld and colonies, immediate extermination of every member of our species, or the introduction of a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease into our species' genome).

 

[Lynx]

It would have been total slavery.

 

[HugeLobes]

Haven’t watched watched the episode in a while, but Bashir and his genetically enhanced peers predicted the Federation would eventually rise up and defeat the Dominion after being conquered. Not infallible, but if we assume they knew what happened to conquered planets I guess it stands to reason that things would be bad enough to provoke resistance but good enough to ensure strength to rise again.

Personally though, I imagine the Dominion would have gutted Earth. Throughout Trek, there’s always that idea that humans value freedom of choice and self-determination more than most other species. If there’s one group I’d stamp out as the Dominion, it would be the humans. Probably the same with the Klingons, then most other planets would simply be relatively unwilling members of the Dominion.

 

[Nyotarules]

Sure, why not? I think the ballots would look like this:

Should our world remain a member of the Dominion or leave the Dominion?

with the responses to the question to be (to be marked with a single (X)):

Remain a member of the Dominion (things stay as they are now)
Leave the Dominion (possible side effects may include incineration of our homeworld and colonies, immediate extermination of every member of our species, or the introduction of a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease into our species' genome).

The opponents of Leave would be crying FAKE NEWS all the way to the death camps

 

[Prax]

Has anyone posted this yet? Bashir and his school for gifted youngsters came up with the "certain and irrefutable" outcome of a Dominion victory:

"If we fight, there will be over nine hundred billion casualties. If we surrender, no one dies. Either way we're in for five generations of Dominion rule. Eventually a rebellion will form, centring on Earth. It'll spread, and within another generation, they'll succeed in conquering the Dominion. The Alpha Quadrant will unite and a new, stronger Federation will rule for thousands of years. Since we can't win this war, why don't we save as many lives as we can? I know it's difficult to accept."

-from "Statistical Probabilities"

 

[HugeLobes]

Has anyone posted this yet? Bashir and his school for gifted youngsters came up with the "certain and irrefutable" outcome of a Dominion victory:



-from "Statistical Probabilities"

This is what I was referring to, but I think there are some problems. Bashir seems to imply the Dominion would have been lenient if the Federation surrendered. That works for the main question of the episode, but I doubt the Dominion would have been so forgiving.

 

[at Quark's]

^
Also, there's the simple fact that they were wrong with their projection that the Dominion war could not be won in the first place. And it was won without (as far as we know) direct intervention by the Prophets since that projection, since Statistical Probabilities occurs after Sacrifice of Angels. If they were wrong about that, how can we be sure they would have been right in their projection that "no one dies"?

 

[Prax]

Yes, I suppose he was wrong on every detail.

Didn't the Dominion start planning to wipe out Earth in one of the last episodes? And if they didn't, and earth started a rebellion years, we've seen how the Dominion handles rebellions on a few occasions. For minor uprisings, they send plague, for major ones, they send the Jem Hadar to annhilate whole worlds.

Planet earth does not fare very well in a dominion victory. I bet the Vulcans are spared, however.

 

[tafkats]

How the conquered people are treated is an effect of what motivates the conquerors ... which makes administration by the Founders a little hard to imagine because their motives are so far removed from most of what we've experienced in our own history.

If Earth were under Cardassian administration, as the Dominion promised at one point, it's easy enough to predict ... policy would be aimed first at extracting Earth's natural resources as efficiently as possible for the benefit of Cardassia, and second at satisfying the material, physical and psychological desires of the occupiers. So there would be labor camps, but aimed more at resource exploitation than at extermination; there would likely be mass starvation because nearly all resources would be sent offworld; and men like Dukat would doubtless take human women as sex slaves.

The Founders' motives are a little harder to translate into policy because they're more alien. They seem mostly motivated by an intense need to impose order on the universe, with relatively few desires beyond that. It's hard to say if they would more or less leave the populace alone -- figuring that would be the best way to prevent resistance -- or do something like massacre the entire population as an example to every other Federation world. Probably whatever their statistical models indicated would have the highest likelihood of success ...

 

[Timo]

^
Also, there's the simple fact that they were wrong with their projection that the Dominion war could not be won in the first place. And it was won without (as far as we know) direct intervention by the Prophets since that projection, since Statistical Probabilities occurs after Sacrifice of Angels. If they were wrong about that, how can we be sure they would have been right in their projection that "no one dies"?

It's an interesting question - why were they wrong?

That the Jack Pack got surprised and betrayed when trying to do their thing isn't an answer, or even the beginning of one, despite our heroes offering it as such: they hadn't committed their exceptional smarts to predicting the outcome and pitfalls of their own efforts. But they failed to predict key twists and turns in the thing they did try and tackle in full, that is, the war, because we know the outcome was different from what they presented. Why? Or perhaps, what twists and turns?

Might be they simply were stupid and both their prediction technique and their self-diagnostic technique (the one telling them they weren't wrong and stupid) fundamentally flawed.

Or might be they erred on their key assumptions. None exhibited knowledge of S31 and its unorthodox methods that ultimately resulted in the Alpha Axis victory; S31 would be news several episodes down the line in Season 6. The other variable would be the surprisingly interventionist nature of the Prophets, but on that the Jack Pack already had data, from the preceding "Sacrifice of Angels". What other factors could stand out as so totally surprising that they would differ from the general vagueness of necessary assumptions about, say, Dominion policymaking or industrial capacity or Klingon homefront stamina or whatnot? What else could have taken the Jack Pack utterly by surprise?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkt]

The Romulans entering the war?