View Single Post
Old June 1 2012, 06:26 PM   #38
Lieutenant Commander
naverhtrad's Avatar
Re: The Dominion War brought out the worst in Starfleet

Temis the Vorta wrote:
That's one of the elements which makes DS9 the strongest of the Trek shows, IMHO. TNG feels dated nowadays when I go back and watch; everyone is just too nice, and they tend to agree on everything in the end. DS9 was all about getting to the meat of real philosophical and personal disagreements (particularly ones which were not always immediately commensurable), starting from the end of Season One, in 'In the Hands of the Prophets'.

sonak wrote:
that's why I said relative peace.
Thing is, relative compared to what?

Europe was at peace from 1945 to 1989, even though you had two opposing blocs staring each other down straight down the middle. The actual violence was constrained, on the threat of MAD, to proxy wars in non-aligned states. Not exactly peaceful, but not exactly war, either. And you didn't have the concept of the 'failed state', because even states with tenuous and vague institutional systems were propped up generously by either the US or the USSR.

Compare that to what you had after the Soviet Union collapsed. To back what Ezri D and MacLeod have been pointing out, the breakup of Yugoslavia (and the street violence and ultranationalist militias slaughtering people on all sides) occurred just when the idea that a land war in Europe was, to many military and academic minds, unthinkable. (Of course, the violence in Yugoslavia was egged on by the Western 'advisors' and international bodies who wanted to see the last Communist country fall apart, but that's another point...) Somalia broke down. Rwanda ripped itself apart and killed (conservatively) 800,000 people in the process. Afghanistan became, under the joke that was the Peshawar Accord, a proxy-war playground between the Saudis and the Iranians.

So the question is, which is more 'relatively' peaceful? Are we speaking in objective terms, or in subjective ones?

My hypothesis is that it is only because we - in the United States and Europe, primarily - do not now feel actively threatened with immanent destruction lest we make a wrong step that the world feels more peaceful (or did in the '90's).
naverhtrad is offline   Reply With Quote