A Faust Travesty

🔥 the Federation in star trek or something else you find more interesting to talk about <3

Both extremes of the “is the Federation imperialist?” discussion get it wrong and (like far too many things in fandom) the whole discussion is needlessly polarized toward going for a hard yes or no when it is way more interesting to recognize there are elements of both interpretations going on, especially given that we are talking about an almost 60-yro franchise that has had a lot of different people working on it over the years to tell many different kinds of stories.

Like I think it’s ridiculous to act like (to quote one bad post from a few years ago by a person I think is no longer active in the fandom) “the Federation is EVIL EVIL EVIL,” or that it is an empire in the way the Cardassians/Klingons/Romulans/Dominion are, even in more critical takes on it like DS9. I think a lot of people doing that are just looking for the most radical left take they can make, or are not good at media analysis and not recognizing that you’re not supposed to take at face value what stalwart defenders of those autocratic regimes like Garak, Quark, etc. say about the Federation but instead consider there might be something a little self serving in their responses? (Then again, people are terrible at doing that with propaganda by irl authoritarian regimes so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.)

But that’s precisely because it misses the point of what DS9 and some other shows that have played in this idea sandbox are actually saying, which is that even a lot of seemingly benign, “normal” diplomacy from democracies can have an imperialist bent, in intention or effect. Yes, the Federation has declined membership before, but they told Sisko to get Bajor to join by any means necessary. Yeah, it literally reflects an org like the UN or EU more than any single country or their present or historical empires… but that’s focusing excessively I think on how it would work in a Watsonian way when the point here is the Doylist conversation: what real world politics it’s commenting on and what it’s trying to say about them, something Trek has focused on heavily from the beginning. Star Trek has generally always been a commentary on American politics and, in its relation to other powers in the galaxy, American empire and its foreign relations. You can see this in how it's shifted as the political situation has changed: TOS for instance being a very optimistic 60s approach to a lot of that, ENT taking a lot of inspiration from post-9/11 politics, etc.

I think the whole point of Star Trek is that it gets you to ask hard questions like: where is the line between "exploring" the galaxy and imperializing it? Even Starfleet's more exploratory missions often involve them meddling in local politics more than their supposed mission statement might expect. Is some of that to be expected when you end up being personally invested in the people in a particular place and their situation? To what extent is following a strict Prime Directive, despite being a supposed guard against imperialism, not reflective of its own somewhat imperialistic "noble savage" paternalism? Etc. etc. but I think the point of especially post-Cold-War Trek and especially DS9 is to get people to recognize that the lines for these are often fuzzy, and the situations involved are often complicated and not easily solved by platitudes. It's easy to say that the Federation (and by extension, the U.S. or whatever Western imperial power you want to insert in here) shouldn't intervene in another planet's affairs until you see that planet's "culture" used to justify human(oid) rights violations that the targeted section of their population desperately wants someone to help with, and doesn't care who it is. And then conversely, you can say the Federation (and again, insert whichever real country you want here) should always intervene in humanoid rights crises... until you see it go belly-up from them intervening preemptively, with a lack of understanding of the particular political situation or culture or whatever in a way that just makes it all so much worse. With the beauty of science fiction where we can abstract it from real-world locations and all the baggage that come with them, so instead of calling the former case "Kosovo" and the latter case "Iraq," we can assign them sci-fi alien names.

Anyway, I guess my point is that I think that the desire to go for a hard "yes" or "no" on some of these questions both flattens the discussion (I've seen this in action on Tumblr) and I think also kind of misses the point of what the show is trying to say.

Also, sorry I took forever to answer this - I think it was for an unpopular opinion meme or something? - but I put it in my drafts because I wanted to take time to lay out my thoughts and then forgot it was there, only saw because I looked in my drafts today!