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Taear posted:I...are you trying to say the Cardassians are like the Soviets because what? They're absolutely primarily inspired by the Soviet Union. It's not like the holodomor never happened. Gulags. Executions by quota. The Katyn massacre.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:12
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No, it's that Cardassia was never really a comparison the USSR. They're a proxy for every fascist government. If anything, they're Space North Korea.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:12
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Zurui posted:No, it's that Cardassia was never really a comparison the USSR. They're a proxy for every fascist government. If anything, they're Space North Korea. Yea that's how I'd call them. The soviet union is in theory based on equality of all people. Alright yea that never happened but I wouldn't call it a military dictatorship in the way the Cardassians are. They're just generic military dictatorship, a mash up of many of them. And like Mark mentioned before they're very heavily imperialist.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:15
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Zurui posted:No, it's that Cardassia was never really a comparison the USSR. They're a proxy for every fascist government. If anything, they're Space North Korea. The surveillance state aspect was certainly more associated with the USSR in 90s America than it was with North Korea.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:15
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Pick posted:They're absolutely primarily inspired by the Soviet Union. It's not like the holodomor never happened. Gulags. Executions by quota. The Katyn massacre. In Star Trek it was the holo-holodomor
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Apr 25, 2019 15:16
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Taear posted:Yea that's how I'd call them. Oh, you don't like it because you're a tankie. If you recall, the Cardassian civilian government (the Detapa Council) decided to take and to rescind control of Bajor; it was explicitly not a decision made by the military.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:17
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I always figured Cardassia occupied that weird moebius loop part of the political spectrum where the extreme right and the extreme left sorta blend together. Regardless of fascist or stalinist, the Cardassian Union is first and foremost an authoritarian society taken to the extreme.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:18
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Even having women in the military at all was associated with the USSR, and that was included going back to Gul Ocett in TNG.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:20
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Pick posted:Oh, you don't like it because you're a tankie. Yes, and the military were mad because for the most part they were in command. I don't see it like Glasnost. And I'm not a tankie, I don't support the USSR - I just don't feel a military dictatorship is what they were or what they represent. Americans always go to Nazis when they think of a state like that and I get it. But they're absolutely not the USSR.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:20
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These days* we Americans should just see ourselves *all of the days
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Apr 25, 2019 15:21
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*flies a Bajoran lightship into Red Square*
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Apr 25, 2019 15:24
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Pick posted:Oh, you don't like it because you're a tankie. The Cardassian civilian government is there for show, and to take the blame for unpopular actions.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:29
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Pick posted:The surveillance state aspect was certainly more associated with the USSR in 90s America than it was with North Korea. Oh definitely. But there are other parallels to NK, most aptly that they are generally treated as a "lesser son" state and the Federation has an exceedingly tenuous cease-fire and DMZ. Also (unintentionally) that there was apparently a military conflict that isn't mentioned while it's happening.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:38
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I always feel like the Romulans were more meant to be the USSR with a roman cover over them.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:41
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Romulans were originally conceived of as being Communist China iirc. But that was back in the 60s.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:43
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Mike the TV posted:The Cardassian civilian government is there for show, and to take the blame for unpopular actions. If it were, Gul Dukat Would not have needed to take action to subvert his political rival in the civilian government.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:43
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It is also very conspicuous that of all the major powers, Cardassians seem to be uniquely irreligious, and are often shown in conflict with subjugated populations that are trying to maintain their faith. Again, a narrative closely associated with the Soviet union. In fact, Cardassians seem to be the only ones that don't even apparently maintain any kind of ritual. The closest is that they seem to have service metals, but that's a pretty different thing.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:51
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Star Trek: They're ALL the USSR
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Apr 25, 2019 15:54
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Pick posted:If it were, Gul Dukat Would not have needed to take action to subvert his political rival in the civilian government. There can be people with power in the civilian government, and occasionally they will flex it, but at the end of the day the military leadership has the true power in Cardassia. The whole point of the civilian government is to be the bumbling scapegoats for the military and secret police. It has two benefits: to prove that no matter what decision is made, that "the government" is correct, and as a demonstration to the population that their leadership is a joke compared to the armed forces. I wouldn't be surprised if the civilian leaders are regularly executed.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:55
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Drone posted:Romulans were originally conceived of as being Communist China iirc. But that was back in the 60s. This does get said, but I’m not sure I really buy it. The Romulans in TOS are portrayed much less negatively than in the rest of the franchise. They’re hostile and can be devious and aggressive, but they’re portrayed as much more like humans than are Klingons, who get to bear a total mess of contradictory Bad Thing concepts touching on Sovietphobia, militarism, “yellow peril” type stuff, etc. The Romulans are highly civilized, dutiful, courteous, ambitious — hardly Cultural Revolutionaries, they’re obviously modeled on ideas of ancient Romans.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:01
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Romulans: Roman Empire + USSR Klingons: Vikings + Mongols + pirates + USSR Cardassians: Nazis + USSR Species 8472: USSR, due to sleeper villages Borg: applies to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" taken to an extreme for any country, but especially seems to allude to the USSR in space zombie form The episode "Unity" even involves a planet of former Borg in a post-USSR breakup metaphor galenanorth fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Apr 25, 2019 |
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Apr 25, 2019 16:05
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Again there aren't really the "nazi" tipoffs for Cardassians except for the same things that apply to all authoritarian governments, such as North Korea (and frankly South Korea for a good while). Bajor is a good stand-in for Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and of all potential real-world analogues for Bajor, the closest. But literally they swill kanar like political cartoons of Boris Yeltsin. And obviously he's "post" but was contemporaneous with DS9 itself.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:17
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The borg aren't Soviet-esque in the slightest.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:21
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The first time Bajorans appeared on-screen, it seemed very much like they were going for an Israel/Palestine dynamic between Cardassians and Bajorans, with the special attention the episode paid to the conspicuous Bajoran religious accessory that other cultures don't appreciate and the conversation about the difference between the rich respectable Bajoran resistance guy who doesn't have any real influence but is popular among Federation audiences vs the rough guy in the refugee camp and the straight-up terrorist who hold real power among Bajorans. They kinda dropped that angle in every other appearance, though.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:29
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FlamingLiberal posted:The Cardassians had all sorts of death camps, I don’t think the Nazi comparison is inappropriate Oh I'm not saying it's inappropriate to make comparisons, it's just that while they are evil and murderous Cardassians are never as evil or as murderous as the Nazis were. They didn't want to outright genocide Bajor, or if they did they were really bad at it. Though Dukat at least does get unhinged and goes full Hitler in the end I suppose. I don't remember death camps though, are you sure about that? Death camps are different from concentration camps, though some like Auchwitz were both in one. A death camp like Treblinka was somewhere new arrivals would be killed immediately, they were for genocide. I just remember the cardassians having concentration camps/ labour camps. Pick posted:The borg aren't Soviet-esque in the slightest. The Borg, like the Cybermen they are ripoffs of, represent the fear that Communism will steal all our individuality and sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:30
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marktheando posted:Oh I'm not saying it's inappropriate to make comparisons, it's just that while they are evil and murderous Cardassians are never as evil or as murderous as the Nazis were. They didn't want to outright genocide Bajor, or if they did they were really bad at it. Though Dukat at least does get unhinged and goes full Hitler in the end I suppose. There were death camps mentioned in the show, but the actual number of dead given for the occupation is actually incredibly low, so one would imagine that only political dissidents or people of importance were actually sent to them. For the most part, Cardassians didn't want to commit genocide, the feeling instead was that they were naturally superior, and thus were naturally entitled to Bajor and that the Bajorans should be happy to be subservient. It doesn't get brought up much, but it has closer ties to the American Western expansion than Germany during WW2.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:35
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Mike the TV posted:For the most part, Cardassians didn't want to commit genocide, the feeling instead was that they were naturally superior, and thus were naturally entitled to Bajor and that the Bajorans should be happy to be subservient. It doesn't get brought up much, but it has closer ties to the American Western expansion than Germany during WW2. Cardassia had poo poo natural resources and so the only way they could be a galactic power was via conquest and exploitation. So in that aspect they line up well enough with the Japanese Empire. It's almost as if Star Trek aliens are convenient pastiches of pretty much any historical power on Earth. (I'm pretty sure they also definitely didn't mind the genocide bit as long as they got their minerals)
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Apr 25, 2019 16:40
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Mike the TV posted:There were death camps mentioned in the show, but the actual number of dead given for the occupation is actually incredibly low, so one would imagine that only political dissidents or people of importance were actually sent to them. Yes the justifications we hear for the Cardassian occupation are more like what you would hear from a right wing British politician talking about the Empire, than the kind of thing you would hear from a nazi. Both Cardassians and modern apologists for British Imperialism say we were a civilising influence, we brought technology, we modernised your barbaric customs, sure we were hard on terrorists. Racial element obviously there but not said out loud. Exploitation and theft and murder presented as some benevolent act.
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Apr 25, 2019 16:43
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Tbh you can also make a pretty strong argument that Cardassia is the United States so  (But, as an important distinction, that was absolutely not the intention.)
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Apr 25, 2019 17:23
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Regardless of what the Cardassians were stand ins for, and I think they probably were at the same time, stand ins for the Nazis, the British, and the Israelis in different ways, Duet was based on The Man in the Glass Booth, which is about this Holocaust survivor who's kidnapped by Mossad and put on trial in Israel for really being a concentration camp commander, only for it to be discovered he was actually a camp survivor all along who forged the evidence against himself .
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Apr 25, 2019 17:32
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Personally, I think the cardies are just a metaphor for the Pharaohs and how they enslaved the Hebrews due to a resource shortage.
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Apr 25, 2019 17:46
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AlBorlantern Corps posted:In Star Trek it was the holo-holodomor
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Apr 25, 2019 17:47
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Hope the Picard show features an O'Brien cameo where he laments to a visibly uncomfortable Picard that his daughter is dating a Cardassian.
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Apr 25, 2019 17:49
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Conspiracy is the only one I usually recommend without caveat. TheDiceMustRoll posted:the one where they resolve the issue by loving killing everyone with phasers????? I've always loved that the alien's last words were literally "We mean you no harm. We seek peaceful co-existence!" and then Picard and Riker blow up its head with phasers. Explain that one to the Starfleet First Contact Commission. "Well yes, it was expressing an interest in dialogue, and it outright stated a desire to live in peace with us... but don't you understand, it said it all CREEPY like!" e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Vr9LnogLM
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Apr 25, 2019 17:54
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the best part is the Captain's log Picard makes immediately after doing that where he says he laments having to destroy life after all these years of being taught to respect it or something
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Apr 25, 2019 17:55
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Powered Descent posted:I've always loved that the alien's last words were literally "We mean you no harm. We seek peaceful co-existence!" and then Picard and Riker blow up its head with phasers. Similarly the Borg just want to improve quality of life for all species. It's the intent that counts, right?
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Apr 25, 2019 17:55
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Star Trek: He puts the holo in Holodomor
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Apr 25, 2019 18:02
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What this simulation needs is a holo Damar
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Apr 25, 2019 18:03
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Tighclops posted:the best part is the Captain's log Picard makes immediately after doing that where he says he laments having to destroy life after all these years of being taught to respect it or something "...but drat did he blow up good." "..." "Computer, delete last sentence."
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Apr 25, 2019 18:04
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The British invented concentration camps, but they're not who comes to mind when you depict them. Ignoring the clear holocaust references of the episode and claiming that Cardassians is in no way a Nazi analogy is really silly, as is calling people tankies online because they don't agree with your take on a Star Trek culture.
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Apr 25, 2019 18:17
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