Cultural Studies essay
Sep. 2nd, 2007 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bagheera_sanSomeone expressed interest in these, so here's the first of my essays for my Cultural Studies course on Star Trek. The topic is Cold War, Vietnam and the original Trek series. Grammar corrections are highly welcome, as it's not yet handed in ;)
Cold War
Mark Lagon lists five central themes in the original Star Trek series which work as commentary on and allegory for American foreign policy at the time the original series aired. These themes revolve about the Cold War with Soviet Russia and America's relationship with Third World countries, in particular the Vietnam War. The first theme is Captain Kirk's eagerness to spread the values of the Federation. Since the Federation is Star Trek's allegory for democratic America, or in a wider sense, for the United Nations and the Western world, Kirk represents the aggressive, missionary tendencies in US foreign policy which aim to spread their values and destroy "non-democratic foes". The second theme is the opposing tendency in US foreign policy to isolate themselves and to respect the sovereignty of foreign nations. The Star Trek allegory for this policy of non-intervention is the Prime Directive, the most important directive of the Federation and Starfleet, which prevents the intervention of Starfleet personnel in the affairs of pre-Warp civilisations, that is civilisations not yet capable of faster-than-light travel. These small, isolated worlds stand for the Third World nations of Earth. A common theme in Star Trek is the necessity to ignore the Prime Directive and intervene with these civilisations, which often leads to conflict, but usually when the protagonists of the series break the Prime Directive, it is seen as the right or unavoidable thing to do.
The third central theme is the belief that all civilisations develop in the same patterns and at the same pace. Most of the alien cultures the Enterprise encounters strongly resemble Earth at various historical stages. The same views were prevalent in regard to the development of Third World countries, which were expected to sooner or later naturally evolve in the same way as the western first world country. Political and social development was here equalled with economic and technological development, so if a nation was less developed in one aspect, for example poorer than the US, it was also expected to be less developed in the other aspects. Sometimes this holds true in Star Trek, but at other times it is proved to be a faulty assumption. The fourth theme is the relationship between the small worlds of the Federation or the pre-Warp civilisations the Enterprise visits and the two superpowers of the Federation and the Klingons, which is an allegory for the competition between America and communist Russia to "convert" Third World nations to their political philosophy and establish a "zero-sum" balance of nations belonging to the one or the other ideological side. This relationship between small worlds and bigger political entities is seen as a patron-client relationship; where the bigger powers offer protection, but also act manipulatively or patronizingly, often by posing as natives. The final theme is the way the Vietnam War was represented in the series, with the philosophical debates between Kirk and his first officer Spock representing the ongoing debate among America's intellectual elite about intervention versus non-intervention. In the course of the series, it moves from a standpoint where the war is seen as a necessary evil to a far more critical and pessimistic position. In the three episodes "Errand of Mercy", "A Private Little War" and "The Omega Glory", most of these five themes can be observed.
"Errand of Mercy" is an episode mostly concerned with the Cold War. At the beginning of the episode, the Enterprise travels to the planet Organia, a world seemingly inhabited by a pre-Warp civilisation, to offer them protection from the Klingons. The Klingons are a hostile alien species, and they and the Federation are at the brink of war. But the Organians refuse the Federation's help and soon their planet is invaded by Klingons, and Kirk and Spock find themselves stranded on Organia. Kirk tries to teach the peaceful Organians how to resist the Klingons, but in the end it turns out that the Organians are far more developed and powerful than both the Klingons and the Federation. They enforce a grudging peace between the two interstellar superpowers by turning all their weapons hot – an obvious metaphor for the danger of a "hot" nuclear war instead of a "cold" one. From the beginning of the episode, non-intervention is not an option for Kirk and his crew: they come to Organia with the order to intervene and offer protection. The situation is urgent, but as usual Kirk displays more "missionary zeal" than Spock in his struggle to get the Organians to stop being passive in the face of Klingon occupation. However, the Federation still respects the sovereignty of the Organians. They do not simply enforce their protection, but send Kirk to negotiate with the Organians. All in all, their strategy is more subtle and manipulative than that of their enemies. While the Klingons operate with brute force, Kirk tries to establish a patron-client relationship with the Organians; although he is fairly straight-forward about this. He and Spock dress up in Organian fashion not to manipulate the Organians, as Lagon asserts, but to hide – unsuccessfully – from the Klingons.
The episode is also an obvious critique of the assumption that Third World nations are "under-developed" and need aid in order to evolve the same way First World countries did. While Kirk is blinded by his quest to teach the Organians resistance, Spock finds it very odd that the Organians apparently have not developed at the same pace as other cultures, or indeed developed at all. The readings of his tricorder and the look of Organia make it appear to be economically and technologically under-developed, so the natural assumption for Kirk and Spock is that they are politically and intellectually under-developed as well. In the end, the Organians prove to be the most developed of the three civilisations and not at all in need of aid. It is a clear warning to the First World that sometimes first impressions of other countries can be wrong, and that not everyone needs or wants our help.
"A Private Little War" is more clearly an episode about the Vietnam War, because here the conflict does escalate – not between the Klingons and the Federation themselves, but between their clients, which are used as helpless and unwitting pawns in the conflict between the superpowers. The Enterprise visits the planet Neural, an isolated world where the natives live primitively but peacefully. Kirk, who has lived there before for research purposes posing as a native, describes the world as paradise. Since Neural is perfect, violating the Prime Directive could only mean contamination and corruption. So in this episode, Kirk's "missionary zeal" is very muted, almost absent. But while Kirk was gone, contamination has already happened. The Klingons have supplied one village with guns, and the armed villagers are killing the people of Tyree, a man Kirk befriended on his last stay. When Kirk sees Tyree's people walking into a trap, he very nearly violates the Prime Directive, and only Doctor McCoy's warning keeps him from firing his phaser and giving away the fact that they are technologically advanced aliens. Spock is wounded in the ensuing fight and taken back to the Enterprise. For the rest of the episode, the more emotional McCoy serves as Kirk's counterpart in their philosophical debates. But while Spock with his rational arguments might have had a chance to convince Kirk not to intervene, in his absence Kirk soon decides that intervention is necessary.
At first, when Tyree and his partner Nona discover that Kirk and McCoy have advanced weapons, Kirk refuses to supply them with phasers. He explains, although vaguely, the Prime Directive to Nona and justifies it by claiming that in the past, weapons have sometimes become "faster than wisdom", meaning that the risk that involvement ends in disaster is simply too great. Later, when he changes his opinion and teaches Tyree's people to fire guns, he justifies himself to McCoy by reminding him of the "Brush Wars of the 20th century", which obviously means the Vietnam War and perhaps the Korea War. However, at the time the episode aired, the Vietnam War had not ended yet, and the series predicts are far more positive end to it, so that Kirk can cite it as a positive example of a war that ensured a balance of powers.
Kirk's decision to intervene only happens when he discovers that the Klingons are involved, which means that the planet is already irreparably contaminated and their sovereignty has been violated. Before that, he is baffled that the people of Neural managed to develop guns this quickly. Again, his surprise is based on the assumption that all civilisations develop at the same pace, and that Neural simply could not develop firearms at this early stage in their development. This time, the assumption proves to be right.
In the end, both the Klingons and the Federation have established a patron-client relationship with different factions on Neural. Forced by the Organians – or without the metaphor, by the threat of nuclear war - to refrain from direct conflict, they carry out their war vicariously through the people of Neural, destroying their lives in the process. While Kirk seems to be convinced that this is their only option if they want to save Tyree's people from certain extinction, the mood at the end of the episode is bleak: even if the outcome is a victory for Tyree's people and therefore the Federation, the Federation's methods are no better than the Klingons' methods. The Vietnam War is not yet represented as a failure, but it is represented as a terrible price to be paid for an ideological victory.
"The Omega Glory" finally carries the criticism a step further. In this episode, the Enterprise comes to yet another pre-Warp planet. In orbit around the planet, they find the deserted Starfleet ship Exeter. The crew is gone; soon they find out that all have died of a virus they were infected with on the planet. Since they have also caught the virus, Kirk and Spock must beam down on the planet as their only hope for survival. There they meet the only survivor of the Exeter, her captain. He is a man Kirk highly respects, but soon it turns out that he is violating the Prime Directive by supporting one of two warring parties of the planet's natives, called the "Khoms", an Asian looking people who are at war with the "savage" Yangs. The captain of the Exeter has found out that the Khoms become incredibly old, and he is supporting them not out of ideological reasons, but simply out of greed: he wants to secure the "fountain of youth" he believes to have discovered for the Federation. Kirk refuses to help him and he and Spock are put into prison. But McCoy finds out that the Khoms merely become this old as a result of biological warfare in the planet's distant past. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock discover that the "Yangs" have an almost religious reverence for the term "freedom". They figure out that in the planet's distant past, the "Yangs" were "Yankees" and the "Khoms" communists. The planet was an identical parallel to Earth up until that point, but then developed radically differently because the war escalated. After centuries of war, the Yangs have become nothing more than uncivilized savages, who have forgotten all their values. In the end, Kirk reminds them of these values in a passionate speech about the constitution.
"The Omega Glory" begins as an episode about intervention versus non-intervention, with Kirk first arguing a policy of non-intervention by invoking the Prime Directive. The Khoms appear as the standard Third World country allegory, and the captain of the Exeter poses as their patron in a patron-client relationship. Intervention is presented as a thoroughly negative thing motivated by greed and Kirk rejects it. When he decides to intervene on the side of the Yangs, he does so merely to keep the captain of the Exeter from winning – to establish a balance of power.
In the ironic twist of the episode, the Khoms and Yangs turn out to be something quite different. Again the idea of parallel development is necessary to explain how this is possible. They are not metaphors – and particularly not metaphors for Third World countries – but they are Americans and communists themselves. Criticised is not the effect of the Cold War on client nations, but the effect on the patrons, in particular on the Americans with their democratic values. While in "Errand of Mercy" both the Federation and the Klingons were portrayed as people with firm ideological values and a code of honour, and in "A Private Little War" it was only the underdeveloped clients who were corrupted by the war, in "The Omega Glory" it is the Federation – in the person of the captain of the Exeter – and America who are corrupted by it.
The "end justifies the means" philosophy Kirk displayed in "A Private Little War" has been carried into the extreme by the Yangs. Their "end", the values represented by the constitution and the American flag, have lost all meaning throughout the long war. These values motivate the enthusiasm with which both Kirk and the Yangs defend them. But while Kirk can still back them up with rational philosophy, for the Yangs "freedom" and "democracy" have become empty, ritualistic phrases, emotion without reason, religion without philosophy. From an ideological conflict, the war has turned into a mere struggle for territory and existence. The Yangs are manipulated by their leaders, who use the constitution as a sacred artefact rather than a property of all people. Kirk reminds them – and at the same time the American audience – that the constitution is written for the people by the people, and that they are supposed to understand and cherish the values they defend in their war rather than blindly follow their leaders' invocations of these values. The war itself, which was still seen as noble and unavoidable in "Errand of Mercy" and painful but necessary in "A Private Little War", has become meaningless. The Klingons are absent and the Khoms are no more "evil" than the Yangs. The message in "The Omega Glory" is, "Remember who you are. Remember what democracy means."
Interestingly all five of these themes have lost none of their actuality. Since the nature of the enemy is never very distinct – the Klingons hardly resemble communists – "Cold War" can easily be replaced by "War on Terror" and "Vietnam" by "Afghanistan" or "Iraq". "The Omega Glory" in particular works uncannily well as an allegory for the current situation considering the way religious rhetoric is dragged into political debate and the way some politicians pit "democracy" against "Islamic fundamentalism" as if religion and politics are basically the same thing. In the same way, the "fountain of youth" the captain of the Exeter believes he has found can easily be read as another natural resource: oil. In the forty years since it first aired, the original Star Trek series has hardly become less topical; the essential debate about intervention and foreign policy is still the same, the issues still unresolved.
Cold War
Mark Lagon lists five central themes in the original Star Trek series which work as commentary on and allegory for American foreign policy at the time the original series aired. These themes revolve about the Cold War with Soviet Russia and America's relationship with Third World countries, in particular the Vietnam War. The first theme is Captain Kirk's eagerness to spread the values of the Federation. Since the Federation is Star Trek's allegory for democratic America, or in a wider sense, for the United Nations and the Western world, Kirk represents the aggressive, missionary tendencies in US foreign policy which aim to spread their values and destroy "non-democratic foes". The second theme is the opposing tendency in US foreign policy to isolate themselves and to respect the sovereignty of foreign nations. The Star Trek allegory for this policy of non-intervention is the Prime Directive, the most important directive of the Federation and Starfleet, which prevents the intervention of Starfleet personnel in the affairs of pre-Warp civilisations, that is civilisations not yet capable of faster-than-light travel. These small, isolated worlds stand for the Third World nations of Earth. A common theme in Star Trek is the necessity to ignore the Prime Directive and intervene with these civilisations, which often leads to conflict, but usually when the protagonists of the series break the Prime Directive, it is seen as the right or unavoidable thing to do.
The third central theme is the belief that all civilisations develop in the same patterns and at the same pace. Most of the alien cultures the Enterprise encounters strongly resemble Earth at various historical stages. The same views were prevalent in regard to the development of Third World countries, which were expected to sooner or later naturally evolve in the same way as the western first world country. Political and social development was here equalled with economic and technological development, so if a nation was less developed in one aspect, for example poorer than the US, it was also expected to be less developed in the other aspects. Sometimes this holds true in Star Trek, but at other times it is proved to be a faulty assumption. The fourth theme is the relationship between the small worlds of the Federation or the pre-Warp civilisations the Enterprise visits and the two superpowers of the Federation and the Klingons, which is an allegory for the competition between America and communist Russia to "convert" Third World nations to their political philosophy and establish a "zero-sum" balance of nations belonging to the one or the other ideological side. This relationship between small worlds and bigger political entities is seen as a patron-client relationship; where the bigger powers offer protection, but also act manipulatively or patronizingly, often by posing as natives. The final theme is the way the Vietnam War was represented in the series, with the philosophical debates between Kirk and his first officer Spock representing the ongoing debate among America's intellectual elite about intervention versus non-intervention. In the course of the series, it moves from a standpoint where the war is seen as a necessary evil to a far more critical and pessimistic position. In the three episodes "Errand of Mercy", "A Private Little War" and "The Omega Glory", most of these five themes can be observed.
"Errand of Mercy" is an episode mostly concerned with the Cold War. At the beginning of the episode, the Enterprise travels to the planet Organia, a world seemingly inhabited by a pre-Warp civilisation, to offer them protection from the Klingons. The Klingons are a hostile alien species, and they and the Federation are at the brink of war. But the Organians refuse the Federation's help and soon their planet is invaded by Klingons, and Kirk and Spock find themselves stranded on Organia. Kirk tries to teach the peaceful Organians how to resist the Klingons, but in the end it turns out that the Organians are far more developed and powerful than both the Klingons and the Federation. They enforce a grudging peace between the two interstellar superpowers by turning all their weapons hot – an obvious metaphor for the danger of a "hot" nuclear war instead of a "cold" one. From the beginning of the episode, non-intervention is not an option for Kirk and his crew: they come to Organia with the order to intervene and offer protection. The situation is urgent, but as usual Kirk displays more "missionary zeal" than Spock in his struggle to get the Organians to stop being passive in the face of Klingon occupation. However, the Federation still respects the sovereignty of the Organians. They do not simply enforce their protection, but send Kirk to negotiate with the Organians. All in all, their strategy is more subtle and manipulative than that of their enemies. While the Klingons operate with brute force, Kirk tries to establish a patron-client relationship with the Organians; although he is fairly straight-forward about this. He and Spock dress up in Organian fashion not to manipulate the Organians, as Lagon asserts, but to hide – unsuccessfully – from the Klingons.
The episode is also an obvious critique of the assumption that Third World nations are "under-developed" and need aid in order to evolve the same way First World countries did. While Kirk is blinded by his quest to teach the Organians resistance, Spock finds it very odd that the Organians apparently have not developed at the same pace as other cultures, or indeed developed at all. The readings of his tricorder and the look of Organia make it appear to be economically and technologically under-developed, so the natural assumption for Kirk and Spock is that they are politically and intellectually under-developed as well. In the end, the Organians prove to be the most developed of the three civilisations and not at all in need of aid. It is a clear warning to the First World that sometimes first impressions of other countries can be wrong, and that not everyone needs or wants our help.
"A Private Little War" is more clearly an episode about the Vietnam War, because here the conflict does escalate – not between the Klingons and the Federation themselves, but between their clients, which are used as helpless and unwitting pawns in the conflict between the superpowers. The Enterprise visits the planet Neural, an isolated world where the natives live primitively but peacefully. Kirk, who has lived there before for research purposes posing as a native, describes the world as paradise. Since Neural is perfect, violating the Prime Directive could only mean contamination and corruption. So in this episode, Kirk's "missionary zeal" is very muted, almost absent. But while Kirk was gone, contamination has already happened. The Klingons have supplied one village with guns, and the armed villagers are killing the people of Tyree, a man Kirk befriended on his last stay. When Kirk sees Tyree's people walking into a trap, he very nearly violates the Prime Directive, and only Doctor McCoy's warning keeps him from firing his phaser and giving away the fact that they are technologically advanced aliens. Spock is wounded in the ensuing fight and taken back to the Enterprise. For the rest of the episode, the more emotional McCoy serves as Kirk's counterpart in their philosophical debates. But while Spock with his rational arguments might have had a chance to convince Kirk not to intervene, in his absence Kirk soon decides that intervention is necessary.
At first, when Tyree and his partner Nona discover that Kirk and McCoy have advanced weapons, Kirk refuses to supply them with phasers. He explains, although vaguely, the Prime Directive to Nona and justifies it by claiming that in the past, weapons have sometimes become "faster than wisdom", meaning that the risk that involvement ends in disaster is simply too great. Later, when he changes his opinion and teaches Tyree's people to fire guns, he justifies himself to McCoy by reminding him of the "Brush Wars of the 20th century", which obviously means the Vietnam War and perhaps the Korea War. However, at the time the episode aired, the Vietnam War had not ended yet, and the series predicts are far more positive end to it, so that Kirk can cite it as a positive example of a war that ensured a balance of powers.
Kirk's decision to intervene only happens when he discovers that the Klingons are involved, which means that the planet is already irreparably contaminated and their sovereignty has been violated. Before that, he is baffled that the people of Neural managed to develop guns this quickly. Again, his surprise is based on the assumption that all civilisations develop at the same pace, and that Neural simply could not develop firearms at this early stage in their development. This time, the assumption proves to be right.
In the end, both the Klingons and the Federation have established a patron-client relationship with different factions on Neural. Forced by the Organians – or without the metaphor, by the threat of nuclear war - to refrain from direct conflict, they carry out their war vicariously through the people of Neural, destroying their lives in the process. While Kirk seems to be convinced that this is their only option if they want to save Tyree's people from certain extinction, the mood at the end of the episode is bleak: even if the outcome is a victory for Tyree's people and therefore the Federation, the Federation's methods are no better than the Klingons' methods. The Vietnam War is not yet represented as a failure, but it is represented as a terrible price to be paid for an ideological victory.
"The Omega Glory" finally carries the criticism a step further. In this episode, the Enterprise comes to yet another pre-Warp planet. In orbit around the planet, they find the deserted Starfleet ship Exeter. The crew is gone; soon they find out that all have died of a virus they were infected with on the planet. Since they have also caught the virus, Kirk and Spock must beam down on the planet as their only hope for survival. There they meet the only survivor of the Exeter, her captain. He is a man Kirk highly respects, but soon it turns out that he is violating the Prime Directive by supporting one of two warring parties of the planet's natives, called the "Khoms", an Asian looking people who are at war with the "savage" Yangs. The captain of the Exeter has found out that the Khoms become incredibly old, and he is supporting them not out of ideological reasons, but simply out of greed: he wants to secure the "fountain of youth" he believes to have discovered for the Federation. Kirk refuses to help him and he and Spock are put into prison. But McCoy finds out that the Khoms merely become this old as a result of biological warfare in the planet's distant past. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock discover that the "Yangs" have an almost religious reverence for the term "freedom". They figure out that in the planet's distant past, the "Yangs" were "Yankees" and the "Khoms" communists. The planet was an identical parallel to Earth up until that point, but then developed radically differently because the war escalated. After centuries of war, the Yangs have become nothing more than uncivilized savages, who have forgotten all their values. In the end, Kirk reminds them of these values in a passionate speech about the constitution.
"The Omega Glory" begins as an episode about intervention versus non-intervention, with Kirk first arguing a policy of non-intervention by invoking the Prime Directive. The Khoms appear as the standard Third World country allegory, and the captain of the Exeter poses as their patron in a patron-client relationship. Intervention is presented as a thoroughly negative thing motivated by greed and Kirk rejects it. When he decides to intervene on the side of the Yangs, he does so merely to keep the captain of the Exeter from winning – to establish a balance of power.
In the ironic twist of the episode, the Khoms and Yangs turn out to be something quite different. Again the idea of parallel development is necessary to explain how this is possible. They are not metaphors – and particularly not metaphors for Third World countries – but they are Americans and communists themselves. Criticised is not the effect of the Cold War on client nations, but the effect on the patrons, in particular on the Americans with their democratic values. While in "Errand of Mercy" both the Federation and the Klingons were portrayed as people with firm ideological values and a code of honour, and in "A Private Little War" it was only the underdeveloped clients who were corrupted by the war, in "The Omega Glory" it is the Federation – in the person of the captain of the Exeter – and America who are corrupted by it.
The "end justifies the means" philosophy Kirk displayed in "A Private Little War" has been carried into the extreme by the Yangs. Their "end", the values represented by the constitution and the American flag, have lost all meaning throughout the long war. These values motivate the enthusiasm with which both Kirk and the Yangs defend them. But while Kirk can still back them up with rational philosophy, for the Yangs "freedom" and "democracy" have become empty, ritualistic phrases, emotion without reason, religion without philosophy. From an ideological conflict, the war has turned into a mere struggle for territory and existence. The Yangs are manipulated by their leaders, who use the constitution as a sacred artefact rather than a property of all people. Kirk reminds them – and at the same time the American audience – that the constitution is written for the people by the people, and that they are supposed to understand and cherish the values they defend in their war rather than blindly follow their leaders' invocations of these values. The war itself, which was still seen as noble and unavoidable in "Errand of Mercy" and painful but necessary in "A Private Little War", has become meaningless. The Klingons are absent and the Khoms are no more "evil" than the Yangs. The message in "The Omega Glory" is, "Remember who you are. Remember what democracy means."
Interestingly all five of these themes have lost none of their actuality. Since the nature of the enemy is never very distinct – the Klingons hardly resemble communists – "Cold War" can easily be replaced by "War on Terror" and "Vietnam" by "Afghanistan" or "Iraq". "The Omega Glory" in particular works uncannily well as an allegory for the current situation considering the way religious rhetoric is dragged into political debate and the way some politicians pit "democracy" against "Islamic fundamentalism" as if religion and politics are basically the same thing. In the same way, the "fountain of youth" the captain of the Exeter believes he has found can easily be read as another natural resource: oil. In the forty years since it first aired, the original Star Trek series has hardly become less topical; the essential debate about intervention and foreign policy is still the same, the issues still unresolved.
