^Well, they did reveal themselves to Bashir. Although...Sloan noted he was confident that, "In time, you'll come to agree with me."
Who knows about Section 31's involvement in the war?
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Of course they are. They want their authoritarian fantasy to stay intact.
How is it incompetent to decapitate the enemy's leadership, especially when they are all genocidal assholes? Sure, the morphogenic virus wouldn't kill them all quickly and there would be higher Federation casualties in the near term, but in the long term, it would've removed the Dominion as a major threat. Odo managing to get the Female Changeling to stand down was a fluke, given how the Founders ignored all of his experiences when they linked with him at the end of season 4.
Factually wrong as the Dominion wants to dominate solids, not eradicate them. Not that it matters as "counter-genocide" is just a thinly veiled excuse for genocide.
I am familiar with this fascist logic, the Jews endanger the German people so we have to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Different package, same shit.
I am familiar with this fascist logic, the Jews endanger the German people so we have to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Different package, same shit.
But they are not all genocidal assholes. It is a canonical fact that there are infant Founders; are you saying it's okay to kill children now? And we don't know enough about the internal politics of the Great Link to know that every adult Founder agrees with Dominion policy.
Don't be absurd. It just would have destabilized the Dominion, with either factions of Vorta claiming the mantle of Dominion leadership for themselves, or the Jem'Hadar being loosed on the galaxy with no one left to control them. If anything, committing genocide against the Great Link would make the former Dominion a greater threat, both to the Federation and to independent worlds like Bajor.
It's a debate we've had a million times already, Kestrel. I and others have pointed out the contrary argument more times than I can count, in prior threads.
For the simple reason that there are far too many of them in the universe to eradicate. But as the build-up episodes (the episode with the holographic villiage comes to mind), as well as episodes like "The Quickening", make clear, they are not above genocide as a tactic. They have no qualms about such things--they are only "solids", after all. If they could, they would.
The implication is--there is a groupthink in the Link, as far as the solids are concerned--not genetic (Odo, of course, disagrees), but as a culture. This groupthink is absolute in the Link--otherwise, we'd have seen defectors on the Founder end, not just the Vorta end (a la "Treachery, Faith...").
Okay...let's recap:
First, the Jem'Hadar are addicted to the White. They literally can't survive without it. The Vorta oversee the production.
Second (and more importantly), I refer you--and all others using the argument of their being "turned loose"--to "The Ship". Recall how it ended: When the Founder died, the Jem'Hadar crew charged with defending him/her committed suicide. Is is absurd to hold that the Jem'Hadar en masse would probably do the same, were the Founders to die?
It's really hard to project how the Dominion would fare if the Founders died, because we've seen Vorta show little patience for the Jem'Hadar's schtick and a willingness to kill them all, along with Jem'Hadar willing to disobey the Founders on their own initiative in addition to the suicides in response to a Founder's death. For all we know, killing the Founders would've caused a Dominion civil war as any surviving loyal Jem'Hadar dealt with less loyal Jem'Hadar before being killed by the Vorta poisoning the White supplies.
It would be an interesting to see a Myriad Universes story explore the consequences of the Founders dieing earlier in the Dominion War, since it would radically alter the politics of the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants.
Yeah, that's why the Dominion is a Founders only club, that's why kill all the solids in the Gamma quadrant.
Propaganda about the enemy being oh-so-wicked. More fascist shit coming up the toilet. When do we reach the part where the Founders or the Vietnamese eat little babies?
The reason why the Jem'Hadar soldiers in "The Ship" killed themselves is because they failed - they were the personal guard assigned to save that Founder, and they didn't do it. The Founder died because they didn't do their jobs to protect it. That's why they committed suicide.
If the entire Founder race died, we don't know what the Jem'Hadar would do.
If the entire Founder race died, we don't know what the Jem'Hadar would do.
We do not know that. We absolutely do not know how decisions are made in the Link, or how to apply our culture's idea of "individual responsibility" onto the Founders. You're talking about exterminated a species population that we know includes infants, and whose decision-making process is unknown to us. You can't make these kinds of assumptions.
Yes. You can't reasonably expect all, or most, Jem'Hadar to think alike. Expecting all Jem'Hadar to have the same reaction to the Founders' deaths would be like expecting all Christians to be part of the same church -- it'll just never happen. The Jem'Hadar are people, not machines, and people respond differently to the same events depending on their personalities.
Yeah, that's why the Dominion is a Founders only club, that's why kill all the solids in the Gamma quadrant.
Propaganda about the enemy being oh-so-wicked. More fascist shit coming up the toilet. When do we reach the part where the Founders or the Vietnamese eat little babies?
To be fair, given Weyoun's stated intention of exterminating the sentient population on Earth in order to prevent a rebellion against Dominion rule from originating there, I think it's fair to say the Dominion and its leadership is genocidal.
The difference being that Dominion genocide tends to be restricted to individual planetary populations, rather than having an overall goal to commit species-wide genocide the way Section 31 tried to. Dominion genocide is planet-by-planet; Section 31 genocide is species-by-species.
There's absolutely no way of knowing that.
What do you base this on? The only Founder we ever saw aside from Odo and Laas was "the female Changeling" - there may well have been other founders arguing within the Link we never met. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
The Jem'Hadar aren't stupid - and the only thing keeping them dependent on the Vorta is the Founders' commands.
The ones in The Ship were a personal bodyguard whose specific mission, which they failed, was the protect the Founder; not true for Jem'Hadar en masse.
The Jem'Hadar are charged with serving the Founders--and that includes defending them. The en masse death of the Founders would mean the greatest failure of all, for them--failing to protect the Founders from death. Hence...mass suicide.
Except a defector from the Link would be, for all intents and purposes, one of the grestest turmning points in the entire War--especially with the sort of information they'd have provided. Further, it's almost a given Odo would have interacted with said defender.
Believe me, we'd have heard about it.
Further, we're going by canon--and the evidence thereof. By saying, "Oh, but there's no evidence against a defector"--well, there's no evidence against a lot of theoretical scenarios that are based on pure conjecture. For one:
Moving on...
The Vorta aren't stupid, either. As bullethead noted, it's a bet they'd have tried to have poisoned the White before such a rebellion would have occured.
But here's something I find amusing, regarding the argument of the other side:
They say wiping the Founders out would've angered the Jem'Hadar and caused them to launch a full-scale war.
As though that weren't already being waged in the first place.
Here's the difference, though: were the other side driven to all-encompassing rage--blinding them to all other concerns--that leads to irrational tactics, thus leading to instability, thus leading to defeat.
And what of the White? Even if the Vorta weren't to poison the White, and were the Jem'Hadar to rebel against them, etc.--that means there is no way to replicate the White, which means the Jem'Hadar eventually en masse fall into withdrawl, which makes them decidedly incapable of waging a full-scale revenge war.
Plenty of cultures in real life have venerated their emperors and other rules as living gods. Guess what? The Romans didn't commit mass suicide when the last Roman Emperor was toppled. The Japanese did not commit mass suicide when Hirohito renounced the idea of imperial divinity. Mass suicide does not usually follow when the emperor turns out to be naked.
I see no reason to think that all, or even most, Jem'Hadar are going to react in the exact same way a handful of them did, once. Jem'Hadar are people, not machines; you can't stereotype them like that.
The Romans weren't programmed and/or drugged to worship/serve the Emperors.
The Japenese weren't programmed and/or drugged to worship/serve the Emperors.
Drugged and programmed clones, free will thereby drugged and programmed out of them. As the Jem'Hadar First in "Hippocratic Oath" found out the hard way, he was the tragic exception, not the rule.
Kestral's point is not that there was a defector, but that there's no evidence that all Founders think alike and support genocidal policies. We have no idea what kinds of decision-making mechanisms occur within the Link, or whether or not there may be some form of dissidence.
And if not all Founders think alike, that hurts the idea that they all deserve death.
No. We've said that it would leave the Jem'Hadar in chaos, loosing them on their galactic neighbors with no stabilizing force. I'm less thinking "full-scale war with the Federation" than I am "long-term asymmetric threat that can't be stopped with a traditional war."
Who said that was the inevitable reaction of the Jem'Hadar? I would be as concerned at the thought of ambitious Jem'Hadar Firsts setting himself up local warlords, with no Vorta around to curb their tendencies towards extreme violent repression of the peoples they rule (thereby further spreading long-term instability in the Gamma Quadrant).
Right, 'cos it's not like there's any possibility of rebellious Jem'Hadar maybe figuring out how to create White by themselves or anything.
If those "non-genocide" Founders do not try to put a stop to those policies--knowing full well what is going on--than their guilt is even greater than those that support those policies. Why? Because they "know" that their bretheren are committing atrocities--and are doing nothing to stop it.
They do not have the courage of their convictions, and their disagreement is purely "armchair".
And their lack of stabilization would not be an advantage to them--at all. Just the opposite. Without rationality, there is no rational planning.
I thought the "idea" was that their agenda would be to avenge those who killed off the Founders?
Right, 'cos it's not like there's any possibility of rebellious Jem'Hadar maybe figuring out how to create White by themselves or anything.
And...how would you think them capable of such things? Need I remind you of their programming? Need I remind you of the episode with the young Jem'Hadar, programmed to be violent, with a need to destroy--and no desire to create?
Even putting the programming aside, how would they be able to do that before the White runs out? The Vorta would almost certainly destroy all the White factories in anticipation of the full-scale rebellion you propose. Or do you propose Jem'Hadar scientists to come up with the formula?
Further--the Jem'Hadar would be on their own. Who would ally with them, and why, with no one to oversee them and negotiate with other races.
In fact--a civil war between the Jem'Hadar and the Vorta would work to the Allies' advantage. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The anti-Dominion forces would be at the advantage--and the allies of the Dominion would abandon them, seeing no benefit.
Maybe. But that doesn't mean they deserve to die for it, either.
A hell of a lot of Americans knew about and did nothing to stop the war of aggression in Iraq in 2003. Others knew about the torture of innocent Iraqis in places like Abu Graib. That doesn't mean they share the same guilt as those who perpetuated those crimes.
You can't paint an entire race in one brush.
Stability as in political stability, not stability as in "individual emotional stability."
No, and I don't know why you would jump to that conclusion. Factions of rogue Jem'Hadar can be plenty dangerous in the long term, to the Federation Alliance and to other Gamma and Alpha Quadrant worlds, even if the Jem'Hadar have no desire to "avenge" the Founders.
Right, 'cos it's not like there's any possibility of rebellious Jem'Hadar maybe figuring out how to create White by themselves or anything.
And...how would you think them capable of such things? Need I remind you of their programming?
What programming? They're born with an urge for violence, a dependency on Ketracel-White, and are taught to worship the Founders as gods, even though some Jem'Hadar don't believe the Founders even exist.
Meanwhile, they're trained as professional soldiers from the time they're young. That means they are trained to think creatively and problem-solve. They are not blind automatons incapable of independent thought. There are any number of scenarios under which a Jem'Hadar faction, loosed from Dominion domination, could find a way to secure and manufacture its own supply of Ketracel-White independent of the Vorta, including simply capturing the production facilities from other Vorta-loyal Jem'Hadar, or trading with the Son'a, or obtaining the information on how to produce it and then establishing their own production facilities.
Congratulations, you've proven that Jem'Hadar teenagers are seemingly violent and irrational. So are 16-year-old boys. I'm unpersuaded that this proves the Jem'Hadar would be unable to secure their own supply of White.
The Germans thought that about the Russians in World War I.
It came back to bite them in the ass in World War II.
And here we come to the fundamental problem:
The Jem'Hadar aren't people to you, just biological machines that will always react a certain way to a specific stimulus. They're all just the same.
Except that's nonsense. We know for a canonical fact that the Jem'Hadar are not all the same, do not all think the same way and have the same reactions to things. We know that there are internal divisions between Jem'Hadar bred in the Alpha Quadrant and Jem'Hadar bred in the Gamma Quadrant ("One Little Ship"). We know that not all Jem'Hadar believe in the actual existence of the Founders, and regard them instead as a myth promulgated by the Vorta to justify their domination of the Jem'Hadar ("The Search"). We know that many Jem'Hadar secretly hate their Vorta masters ("Rocks and Shoals") or otherwise look down upon them as cowards ("By Inferno's Light") even as they generally continue to obey them because of a strong sense of duty to the Dominion ("Rocks and Shoals"). We know that some Jem'Hadar are born without a dependency on white ("Hippocratic Oath"), and we know that they venerate the wisdom of elder Jem'Hadar. We know that some Jem'Hadar have gone rogue in the past, such as the group that obtained the Iconian Gateway ("To the Death").
The bottom line is that the Jem'Hadar are a people, not machines, and that they have free will. Yes, they have a strong genetic predisposition to violence; so what? Humans have a strong genetic predisposition to sex, but that doesn't mean they lack free will. And there's no evidence the Jem'Hadar are as unthinkingly worshipful or incapable of creative thinking as you seem to be implying. These are sentient people, not racial caricatures.
