Someone in STSP asked me to elaborate on an offhand comment that William RIker was propagandized. So here is the exhaustively nerdy thing I type-vomited in response. I've thought about this stuff for a long time, lol.
Ok I am sorry this got SO LONG but clearly I have Thoughts about this, haha.
( Read more... )People who have spent their entire lives inside the Federation know only what they have learned from educational resources approved and controlled by the Federation. So everything Riker thinks he knows, he learned from these tightly controlled sources. He is not an unbiased or fully-informed source.
Having watched Trek since childhood, with a very long view and an indigenous POV, I see the Federation as an authoritarian empire which uses propaganda to control people and determine what is and is not socially acceptable. The views of Trek are pretty uniformly based on western privilege and imperialism, so the Federation is also based on those.
Federation leadership is heavy on humans, and the Federation appears to value human cultural ideals above those of other members.
Western vegans telling indigenous people all over the globe that we should just become vegan in order to solve the problems *created by imperialism* is an excellent example of these values. The assumption of those westerners (usually Americans) is that the choices of privileged westerners are inherently superior to traditional knowledge and lifeways.
In DS9 we learn that within the Federation, the desire to eat vegetables that grew from the ground, instead of being replicated, is socially unacceptable. People who want to grow their own food are considered deviants and at least one entire colony of them left the Federation in order to have the freedom to eat food grown in nature. We also learn about the existence of section 31 and its role in controlling the people of the Federation.
Riker says "we don't enslave animals for food purposes." Who is "we?" Clearly, he doesn't mean "the Federation," he means "humans." Because we see Klingons still value hunting and eating animals, yet they are members of the Federation.
But eventually we learn that the entire reason tribbles became a problem was human experimentation in an attempt to make them a more sustainable food source. Then there's the existence of Cetacean Ops, which is never thoroughly explored.
What Riker doesn't say is that the combined wars of the 21st century resulted in the extinction of 600,000 species of animals and plants, the death of at least 30% of the human population of earth, and was followed by decades of famine, genocide, the destruction of large portions of the planet (due to radiation) etc. This chaos persisted well into the 22nd century. Were there any animals left to eat? Was not eating animals a choice that humanity consciously made, or was it a necessity, borne of human destruction, that was later framed as a choice? The tribble situation makes it appear to be the latter.
One great example I saw in a Trek novel many years ago: a Federation crew member who was not from earth asked the Federation computer how English became the dominant language of earth. The computer checked its history files and told him that it was because English was just so infectious and appealing that people all over the planet chose to adopt it. But in reality, in the real history in which you and I live, colonial forces used violence to enforce the use of English. I mean, kids were beaten to death for speaking their native languages. Clearly, the version of earth history that the Federation is teaching is not an accurate one, but a propagandized one.
From a certain POV, Starfleet is the jackbooted foot of the imperialist empire that is the Federation.
I love Trek and it's fun sometimes to submerge myself in the fantasy, but it's also fun and, I think, important, to see it through a different lens.
Thank you for coming to my indigenous Ted Talk.
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