Grand Blog Tarkin

Today’s post is by guest blogger Matt Ford, who blogs at Basic Illusions and can be found on twitter.

The Enterprise has seen better days.

(If you think this won’t have spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness, you’re out of your Vulcan mind.)

Roddenberry’s dream lives on.

This might come as a surprise to many; it certainly came as a surprise to me. I wrote in my first post on BlogTarkin some months ago that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, with its grim but brilliant take on Roddenberry’s utopia, nevertheless eroded the Federation’s moral edifice with “the slow poison of necessity.” J.J. Abrams’ first foray into the franchise in 2009, with only an oblique reference to Starfleet as a “humanitarian and peacekeeping armada,” seemingly abandoned Star Trek’s vaunted position as the moral high ground of popular science fiction.

Did Star Trek Into Darkness bring the franchise back to its roots? It depends on what those roots are. Much of Star Trek’s enduring popularity comes from the chemistry between its diverse crew. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and their shipmates met even the wildest expectations in building this camaraderie. At the same time, Star Trek has always represented a moral and social paradigm to which we could aspire. That utopian vision, however, is often presented fully-formed to the audience without any perspective on the work that went into building it. Into Darkness tackles this weakness.

There are occasional allusions to destructive conflicts and world wars. Upon pursuing a Borg invasion to late 21st century Earth in First Contact, Data is able to estimate “from the radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere” that they had arrived a decade after World War III. “Makes sense,” Riker muses. “Most of the major cities have been destroyed. Very few governments left. Six hundred million dead. No resistance.” And yet, in the ashes of the society in which you and I currently live, Zefram Cochrane builds a starship out of a nuclear missile, travels faster than the speed of light, and ushers in a new era for human civilization. In Star Trek, dystopia precedes utopia.

But this is as far as Star Trek’s depiction of the late 20th and early 21st century goes. The franchise envisions humanity without racism, poverty, disease, or war, but never showed what must be done to achieve it. This leap is like jumping from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the birth of American hegemony after World War II without addressing the slaughter of the Civil War or the desperation of the Great Depression in between. Roddenberry showed us the far future’s promise in the 1960s but gave almost no indications about mankind’s imminent challenges.

Except for Khan.

Khan Noonien Singh, introduced in the 1967 episode “Space Seed”, is a genetically-engineered superman who conquered most of Eurasia in the 1990s before his Napoleonic exile into cryogenic sleep. More than just another villain, Khan is faster, stronger, and smarter than Kirk and his crew could ever be. The 20th century tyrant is never bested by strength or intellect alone in the Star Trek films: only Kirk’s greater familiarity with starships in Wrath of Khan and Spock’s knowledge from the future in Into Darkness allow them to gain the upper hand. Khan is, as the elder Spock gravely observes, the most dangerous foe the Enterprise ever faced.

But Khan’s significance goes deeper than just clever plot devices. Star Trek, at its most fundamental level, exalts the limitless nature of human potential; Khan subverts that ideal by combining the heights of human endurance and cunning with a brutal amorality. This ruthless “savagery,” as Khan himself describes it to Kirk, is so utterly absent from 23rd century humanity that Starfleet must resurrect it from their ancestors to use against the Klingon Empire. Most damningly, Khan isn’t a medieval European king or bygone Asian emperor who ruled at a time when such brutality was expected. He came to power in the mid-to-late 1990s. He’s one of us.

Into Darkness may have lacked grand soliloquies on philosophy or visions of gleaming utopia, but it did counterpoise Kirk and the Enterprise against contemporary societal issues. Since the last Star Trek film alone we’ve seen a Starfleet more militarized after its failure to defend Vulcan, whose upper echelons are even willing to use untraceable missiles to kill fugitives. Our heroes ultimately reject targeted killings, threat inflation, societal militarization, and the worldview that Khan and the Starfleet admiral who awakened him represent. Crucially, Kirk’s final position is influenced by Spock’s cool logic and McCoy’s folksy wisdom but not framed by either. Instead the Starfleet captain from Iowa relies upon a much simpler argument: that’s not who we are.

Americans, especially millennials, can understand this. The destruction of Vulcan in the first film changed Kirk and Spock’s timeline; 9/11 changed ours. How many young Americans learned Arabic and Pashto or studied counterterrorism and international relations because nineteen men flew three planes into a building and one into the ground, killing thousands? The September 11th attacks prefaced a decade marked by the proliferation of Islamic terrorism, long and painful wars in the Middle East, a toxic and divisive political climate in the United States, weakened protections for civil liberties, and vast expansions of government power. Is that who we are now? Is that who we want to be from now on?

Granted, Into Darkness doesn’t provide flawless comparisons. Whereas Starfleet doesn’t bother telling the Klingons they’re going to kill a fugitive on their homeworld with advanced missiles, for example, the U.S. government’s targeted killing program almost certainly operates drones in Pakistan and Yemen with those governments’ secret permission. And as Kirk and the audience also later discover, a Starfleet admiral orchestrated the entire terrorism campaign to provoke a war with the Klingons. The parallels with contemporary American society aren’t perfect, but the trajectory is unmistakable.

To what extent must we reshape our society to confront threats, real or imagined?” As far as Star Trek’s questions go, it’s not as dramatic as “Should we use a morphogenic virus against the Founders?” or as philosophical as “Are androids entitled to the equal protection of the laws?” But it is more pertinent. Kirk gives us his answer in the film’s closing monologue, a eulogy for those who died in Khan’s final devastating attack.

There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. Our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. But that’s not who we are. When Christopher Pike first gave me his ship, he had me recite the Captain’s Oath. [“Space, the final frontier…”] Words I didn’t appreciate at the time. But now I see them as a call for us to remember who we once were and who we must be again.

Will Barack Obama, a Trekkie, heed this call? The president signaled a willingness to change course in his State of the Union address earlier this year. On Thursday, he’ll give a speech at the National Defense University on the drone program, Guantanamo Bay, and counterterrorism where he might outline those shifts. Already Obama has overseen significant broader shifts in American foreign policy by emphasizing multilateralism and a widely-touted “Asia pivot,” with varying degrees of success. But Obama, unlike Kirk, has so far failed to recast the current conflict in his own terms or to bring it to a close.

Thus the psychological burdens remain. George W. Bush framed the struggle against al-Qaeda as a “war on terror” and the imagery remains fixed in the American collective consciousness. But this level of indefinite conflict is mostly unfamiliar to the American historical experience. Britain recognized independence after Yorktown, Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Berlin fell to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell in Berlin. Without a capital to seize or an army to defeat, bin Laden’s death might be the closest American society can come to closure. That’s why, instead of the macabre triumphalism that some commentators described with revulsion, the street celebrations and public jubilation following bin Laden’s death should be seen as a societal catharsis too long denied. When Obama announced the raid in Abbottabad, another dark chapter in American history seemed ready to close. It hasn’t yet, of course, but the onus is now on us. When it comes to ending the war on terror, the first step is choosing to take one.

Perhaps there’s still room for Star Trek to set the example for us after all. Kirk tells us to remember not only who we once were, but that we must be them again. The film ends with the characters embarking upon the five-year mission of exploration that made them legends in another timeline. Balance is restored and history is (mostly) returned to its rightful trajectory.

The Enterprise is leading us not into darkness, but out of it.

Ed: This piece comes to us from repeat Blog Tarkin contributor Don Gomez, whose writings can be found at Carrying the Gun

A skyscraper-sized Reaper descends to dominate a planet.

This event, entirely fictional, is inspired by chapter 33 of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In it, Lawrence lays out his vision for how the Arab Revolt  might defeat the Turks in Arabia. In this, I lay out the counter-insurgent’s dream, a fantastical imagination of the introduction of the Reaper, a la Mass Effect fame, as the ultimate weapon in counter insurgency.

This guest essay by notorious airpower theorist and New York Times columnist Guilo Douhet. In his words: 

This is a response to the April 1, 2013 post at “Danger Room” by one Andrew Exum, a thinker of moderate intellect and exceedingly conventional vision. The issue in question regarded a series of scenarios describing possible wars between “Tennessee” and “Georgia,” apparently  pair of your American states. After exhaustively researching the histories and capabilities of these two nations, I have set forth a series of events far more likely to take place, and considerably more interesting to the strategic theorist.

A Tennessee Air National Guard C-5A Galaxy

The causes of the war of August 2014 are not interesting or relevant, apparently involving some sort of trivial dispute over water. The logic of modern warfare applies independent of the political exigencies of any particular conflict.   Regarding the order of battle of the two antagonists, the only weapons relevant to our analysis air the air fleets that each could access. Fortunately, the government of Tennessee had the foresight to initiate a set of agreements with Federal Express that allowed the conscription of FedEx planes and pilots in case of invasion from Georgia or Kentucky. These agreements would prove critical in the end stages of the conflict. Altogether, Tennessee would eventually call on the following fleet of aircraft:

• Airlift Squadron: 5 C-5 Galaxy
• Airlift Wing: 6 C-130 , 12 MQ-9 Reaper
• Air Refueling Squadron: KC-135R
• Fed Ex Express:
• 35 A300
• 18 A310
• 28 757
• 8 777
• 3 MD-10
• 21 MD-11

Georgia pursued a different path, eschewing the difficult work of developing relationships with the many airlines operating out of Atlanta International Airport.  Instead, Georgia concentrated its efforts on small aircraft and helicopters, the better to support the advance of its ground forces into Tennessee. In addition to a plethora of such small craft, Georgia was able to draw on some large aircraft from the Georgia Air National Guard.

• Air Control Wing: 6 E-8C Joint Stars
• Air Lift Wing: 6 C-130H
• 250+ helicopters and small aircraft

Fundamentally, this war represented the cleanest collision of the air-minded and the ground-minded.  Consequently, it also represented the clearest vindication of the principles that I had set forth in my volume Command of the Air.

Georgia’s land offensive made initial progress, but bogged down as bands of primitive East Tennessee hill people ambushed and harried Georgian columns and logistical trains. Tennessee had wisely invested in only minimal land forces, relying on the inherent savagery and fighting prowess of the Appalachian tribesmen to sufficiently slow the Georgian advance until airpower could prove decisive.  Regular Tennessee National Guard forces prepared a defense-in-depth in the outskirts of Chattanooga, allowing the Georgians their initial prize while working with the tribesmen to make them pay for it. However, this defense would not have held for long in the face of a renewed Georgian offensive if airpower had not won the day.

Georgia foolishly squandered the airpower available to it in by dissipating its aircraft and pilots across a variety of secondary missions.  Georgian C-130s supplied operational air mobility and some close air support, but could not sufficiently break open Tennessee’s defenses to allow penetration into vital areas. The fault lay not with the airmen (who were surely brave and skilled) but rather in their employment in service of a land offensive that could not possibly produce decisive results in the brief period before Georgia’s cities began to burn.

The aircraft appropriated by the government of Tennessee were not designed as bombers, which reduced their effectiveness.  In the future, state governments should take care to arm their Air National Guards with dedicated bomber wings.  Nevertheless, the courage, tenacity, and technical know-how of Tennessee’s air guardsmen allowed the conversion of these cargo craft into strategic bombers, albeit often in awkward, dangerous fashion. Given the ad hoc nature of the Tennessee Air National Guard offensive, a robust air defense system, supported by pursuit aircraft, might have prevented or at least substantially delayed the decisive blows of the war.  Unfortunately, Georgia devoted so little attention to air-centric matters that it failed even to mount the most tepid air defense.

The first fire-raid came on August 20, as over 40 Tennessean bombers appeared over the city of Athens.  Renowned for its cultural significance, Athens proved little match for the 2000 tons of incendiaries dropped by the “Volunteers.” Additional raids devastated Roswell and Macon, with a follow up raid against Athens throwing the region into chaos on August 30.

On September 1, 2014 the decisive moment came in a pre-dawn raid against the Georgian capitol of Atlanta.  4 C-5, 4 C-130s, 25 A300s, 13 A310s, 20 757s, 6 777s, 1 MD-10, and 18 MD-11 delivered nearly 5500 tons of ordnance onto the city and surrounding suburbs.  Tennessee’s attacks concentrated on the downtown financial districts as well as on wealthy outlying areas. The municipal capacity of Atlanta was overwhelmed, with fires continuing to burn for days.

The timing of the strike was no accident. Coming 150 years to the day after the burning of the city of Atlanta by a band of Northmen, this raid proved a political masterstroke, shattering the will of Georgia’s political class to continue the conflict. Georgia responded with a desultory attempt to bomb Knoxville, but apart from gutting a few square blocks of the University of Tennessee, the attack had no serious strategic impact. Their homes in ruins, soldiers in Georgia’s advanced ground elements began to desert and mutiny against their officers.

At this point the details of the conflict become uninteresting to the historian, allowing us to shift to strategic lessons learned.  Tennessee won this war because of a culture of airmindedness.  It had prepared (through laying the groundwork of a relationship with Federal Express) to acquire an air force capable of strategic action. Tennessee then used this air force to strategic effect, rather than dissipating it for ephemeral battlefield advantage.  The smoking ruins of urban Georgia attest to the folly of yoking airpower to conventional ground thinking.

Ruins of Atlanta deopt after burning by Gen. Sherman’s troops, 1864

March 19, 2013 marks the International Hindsight Day–a day in which Internet pundits sit back, reflect, and inform the world that they were against the Iraq War the whole time.  Unfortunately, news articles from 2003 paint a far different picture–one in which the war enjoyed far greater popular support. 

Of course, it’s not the first time pundits have distanced themselves from ill-fated military adventurism.  Gene Rodenberry supported the Vietnam War through an allegorical proxy war with the Klingons in a Star Trek episode which aired in February 1968.  Kirk’s insistence that the Federation continue to arm a primitive race with weaponry reflects what many felt was a need to keep the Communists in check in Southeast Asia.  Or “staying the course” as we’d say these days.

Of course, no one remembers being for escalating the Vietnam War.

Dear Katniss,

If you’re reading, please consider this humble treatise as a token of my affection. Time and again, our love has been tested, equally by Peeta’s noble heroism as by your detractors’ defamatory bile. The latest such knave, Scott Weiner, emerged yesterday from his trollish cave, penning a condemnable screed against your revolutionary insurgency. Weiner references your revolution as a “post-Orientalist” phenomenon, which he views as a reflection of liberalism’s exploitative underbelly. As you and I have discussed, however, your laudable violence is hardly liberal, and instead reflects an abiding commitment to Frantz Fanon‘s liberationist violence.

Before your arrival, Panem was a seething, festering sore of political governance. As residents of District 12, we were underresourced, underfed, and underappreciated: our women were poor, our children emaciated, and our men rarely able to manage the psychological, social, and financial burdens of family upkeep. Our wages were low, and scarcely commensurate to our invaluable contribution to Panem’s militaristic, decadent economy. My grandfather Karl‘s warnings were prescient, and bore remembering: in Panem’s pre-revolutionary economy, we laborers risked dehumanization: alienation from ourselves and, perhaps most importantly, from our collective consciousness of common dignity.

When you returned from your triumphant Hunger Games, you inculcated our people with a sense of pride, a fierce urgency of revolutionary upheaval. Your violence was a model of rebellion, and your image an icon of our anti-imperialist politics. Where Gale–the erstwhile object of your flirtation, and now a Panem official in District 2–compromised his humanity, you rejected the prospect of political conformity, opting instead to cast off the yoke of your oppression, and of ours. Through your liberationist violence, you imagined a new Panemian humanity: where our industrial labor is duly compensated, and where each District’s profound creativity is heralded as representative of Panemian civilization. Contra Weiner, your violence was hardly a form of self-empowerment, so heralded in Ms. Winfrey’s antiquated texts. Rather, it was a vessel for humanity, for the manifestation of dignity in a liberated politics.

Where Panem’s prior revolutionists imagined a hierarchical vision of a new society, you refused exclusion, prompting a notion of egalitarianism that has inspired widespread, liberating revolt. You acknowledged Panem’s lumpenproletariat, the invisible society of District 13, as a revolutionary force, a dormant opportunity for liberationist mobilization. In your embrace of District 13, you also embraced your mockingjay identity, a palpable demonstration of your resilience and revolutionary leadership.

As Dan Nexon observes, however, your liberationist violence had its consequences: your post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of your trying management of revolutionary authority, has become increasingly apparent throughout the past weeks. If you’ll let me, I’d like to help you, to enable Panem’s liberation to continue. Call me, maybe?

May the odds be ever in our favor,

The Real Tarkin

Today’s guest post comes from Scott Weiner, a Ph.D student in political science at George Washington University.  He writes on state-tribe relations, ethnic politics, and the game theory behind Carly Rae Jepsen songs.

Spoilerplate Warning

A map of Panem by AimArrowsHigh

The Hunger Games trilogy presents a case study of revolution which is on the one hand instructive and on the other hand puzzling. The state of Panem (post-apocalyptic America) experiences a revolution that shares both uncanny similarities and unmistakable differences with other revolutions, fictional and non-fictional. At the center of the revolution in Panem is the heroine of the series, a teenager by the name of Katniss Everdeen, who is played in the film version of The Hunger Games by actress Jennifer Lawrence. To Western audiences, Katniss Everdeen is the epitome of a revolutionary leader. However, a critical examination of the society of Panem and its revolution should raise serious questions in this regard. While many Westerners view Katniss Everdeen as empowered heroine, a critical comparison of her actions reveals deeply troubling attitudes and beliefs at play.

A fan-made map of Panem by Helmet 31

Flaws In The Revolutionary Account

The events which take place in Panem are uncritically accepted by many as a “revolution.” However, several aspects of these events throw this claim into doubt, particularly in light of scholarly accounts of the phenomenon.

First, the uprisings in Panem are exclusively by lower-class populations. Yet Barrington Moore (1966) underscores the importance of the “landed upper class” to revolution. It is of course possible that a landed upper class exists in the Capital, but accounts make no mention of this class defecting during the rebellion. While individuals with personal ties to Katniss Everdeen make efforts on her behalf, the major force of the uprising is from the peasantry. Moore predicts than in such cases the outcome of the revolution will be fascism. However, Panem lacks the privatized corporations which would be necessary for this outcome to occur.

Perhaps then the revolutions are a case of peasant rebellion a la James C. Scott (1976). This account too is incomplete. Peasant rebellion and the “everyday resistance” Scott writes about – criminal activity committed in defiance of the State – is usually confined to the periphery. In Panem, the population is reacting to national-level events in a national uprising whose goal is the downfall of the regime. These uprisings are also largely separate from the insurgency itself, comprised of what Bueno de Mesquita et al (2004) refer to as the “minimum winning coalition” or inner circle of the regime.

Finally, the source of the insurgency is not what existing accounts of revolution predict. Humiliation is often a key variable in a person’s decision to rebel. Additionally, Ted Robert Gurr (1970) identifies the role of relative deprivation in sparking a person to rebel. He argues that it is those underprivileged members of society who interact daily with the advantaged group who feel most painfully their own oppression. However, were this the case in Panem, the instigators of the rebellion should have been the Avoxes, criminals who have had their tongues removed by the State and serve as a source of domestic and municipal labor. True, the actual instigators – former winners of the Hunger Games – faced relative deprivation upon their arrival to the Capital. However, the Avoxes experienced the humiliation of this power differential much more sharply. While the lack of civil society in Panem may be partially to blame, it is more than conceivable that Avoxes should have at least participated in the rebellion once news of it came to the Capital.

Ultimately, the revolutionary account cannot explain the puzzling dynamics of the overthrow of President Snow in Panem. To better understand the uprisings there, we must ask why this is the case. A critical perspective is most instructive in this regard.

A fan-made map of Panem by Vamg

The Post-Orientalist Explanation

The Hunger Games revolves around the heroine Katniss Everdeen. Everdeen is an strong, empowered, individualistic minority member of society. In this regard, she represents the Liberal ideal type. Liberalism has its roots in the 19th century as a European ideology stressing individual empowerment for the benefit of society as a whole. Everdeen’s credentials as a liberal are established during the Hunger Games themselves. Everdeen’s reluctance to kill, her alliance with Rue, and her compassion after Rue’s death all speak to liberal notions of empowering the self, benefiting the social benefit of all. Her decision to convince Peeta to swallow nightlock – even though they were eventually stopped from doing so – is the ultimate act of self-empowerment and cooperation. As a result, Everdeen is touted later by the rebellion as the epitome of Liberalism. However, critical examination reveals that Everdeen’s actions are anything but empowering to her victims.

Liberalism as an ideology has also been used to justify violence and subjugation of non-liberal societies, often under the pretense of “humanitarian intervention” (Duffield, 2001). Katniss Everdeen is an empowered girl, but invokes the ways the Capital limited citizens’ rights in Panem as the pretense for violence against the State and its citizens. Her nickname is “Mockingjay,” a reference to genetically altered birds in Panem which can remember and mimic complex sound patterns. However, the nickname refers to Everdeen’s role as one who travels throughout Panem, diffusing her ideology and “enlightening” the citizenry. At the same time District 2’s citizens are supposedly being liberated, Everdeen is complicit in an attack in which citizens are killed – a paternalistic exercise of her own empowerment. Additionally, when the revolution’s leaders take a vote on whether the children of the Capital should be forced to participate in a Hunger Games of their own, Everdeen votes yes. The democratic nature of this proceeding should not distract from its decidedly illiberal leanings.

In a sense, Katniss Everdeen is an post-apocalyptic Lawrence of Arabia. Critical scholars understand the political role played by Lawrence of Arabia and other Westerners who visited the region as part of the ideology of Orientalism (Said, 1979). Orientalism is the idea that Western beliefs and attitudes of superiority towards the Middle East legitimized its domination of that region. Katniss Everdeen is an orientalist for a time after Orientalism – a Post-Orientalist. Her travels are not “liberating” for Panem’s citizens but rather preserve her own superiority over them. As one who created Liberal cooperation in the state of nature which is the Hunger Games, Everdeen flaunts her credentials for personal gain. Her aim is not to liberate the citizens of Panem but to use Liberalism as a cynical cover for her aims of national domination.

~

For further reading on the political science of the Hunger Games from Duck of Minerva, please see here and here.