Poll: Honk if you support the Maquis!!

^^
Maybe it was no "final solution" planned but the Cardassian actions actually looked like the genocide Stalin's Soviet regime committed in areas they occupied during WWII, like Estonia, Latvia, Lituania ands parts of Poland and Romania which in the long run was almost the same as a "final solution". Enslavement of that kind can actually be worse than a "final solution" and will in the long run lead to the same results.

I'm pretty sure that the Cardassians planned it all along. They wanted to wipe out the settlers in the DMZ and they had already enslaved the Bajorans and were doing their best to surpress and humiliate them.

I'm well aware of the fact that Bajor isn't in the DMZ but the Cardassian opression of the Bajorans made many Bajoran freedom fighters join or at least support the Maquis, just like many Poles and Czechs did join the British army in WWII.

 

I always liked the Maquis. I think my favorite portrayal of them was in the episode with Ensign Ro, putting a human face on their cause. Still my vote was a tentative yes, only because I would have been sympathetic but I would have maintained my status as a Starfleet wonk and held the company line on a zero-tolerance issue for the sake of peace and stability in the region. It's a rather simple cost-benefit, so any real support of the Maquis is more emotional than anything. Those colonies were better off moving. The cheapest episodes were the Voyagers that suggested most of their refusal to leave was a spiritual connection to the land.

Their downfall was obviously their cavalier attitude towards recruitment. Anybody with a axe to grind could easily move through the ranks, whether you be a Riker clone or a angry expelled teenager (Paris). I was a little confused that they weren't more suspicious towards Tuvok as an undercover operative, but they were too desperate for their own good. Ultimately the alliance between the Dominion, the Cardassians and the Breen wiped them off the face of the Earth.

So. Yes. Honk.
But tentative!

 

I don't see any evidence of even a modest-scale "cleansing" operation.

The action in the DMZ appears a case of bullying that never stood a serious chance of decreasing the Federation population - if that had been the aim, why not rain torpedoes or Galor-class phaser (referring to the gun, not the ship - see "The Maquis") death on the colonies and kill thousands with one shot?

On Bajor, there is no evidence of genocide. Cardassians used Bajorans for slave labor, so it would have been poor policy to kill them out. The only suggestion of genocide as an aim or a motivation for individual Cardassians, let alone for the occupation force or the Union in general, comes from "Duet" - first as vague accusations by our resident Bajoran resistance fighter, then as bombastic bolstering by a fraud who wants to attract attention. Gul Dukat, who would have many opportunities to brag on such a policy, never takes any of these opportunities.

Cardassians exploited, brutalized and despised, but they didn't slaughter for the sake of getting rid of the populance. Both sides to the fight agree on that in the end.

(Agreed that Bajorans would have been prime Maquis material, of course. There was Bajoran hardware in use against the Cardassians in "Preemptive Strike", for example... Unless we argue that these particular fighter designs weren't indigenous Bajoran, but that Bajorans and Maquis both got them from an outside source.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Right, Cardassia was never concerned with genocide. Genocide may have developed if the state of Cardassia became threatened by a third party sympathetic to Bajor-- but seeing as how Bajor and Cardassia are completely separate geographic entities there was never any real threat to Cardassia until the resistance, and even then the threat was losing their stronghold on slave labor and not Cardassian sovereignty or intergalactic hegemony.

 

One does wonder how serious an issue Bajor really was for Cardassia. Supposedly, the riches were all mined out by the time of the withdrawal - but Bajor still sounds like the only Cardassian conquest of note. A bit similar to India under British rule: the crown jewel of all conquests, impressive even if not factually important.

All other associates of Cardassia, such as Kressari, Xepolites or Klaestron, seem to be free peoples rather than conquered species. No Cardassian planet other than occupied Bajor is ever mentioned as having a non-Cardassian population. Now, absence of evidence is usually worth very little, but perhaps we could still say that Bajor was one of the very few conquest successes of the Union, and as such a major prestige issue even if economically or strategically less than crucial.

Of course, we could also spin a tale or two on other, similar conquests. It's not as if we ever heard the whole truth about the CU, its history or its present. Perhaps, say, Chin'toka was another "crown jewel" conquest, with non-Cardassian natives and fancy political or religious complications and whatnot.

In general, though, outright evidence of Cardassian conquests is severely lacking. In the end, our space Nazis don't seem to have been all that successful or fearsome after all. Perhaps more Mussolini than Hitler?

Timo Saloniemi

 

The planets that had UFP citizens on them - even if officially speaking they belonged to the Cardassians, which most of them didn't anyway - were NOT theirs.

The Cardassians wanted to get rid of the UFP settlers. There's only two ways you get "rid of them": kill them until they pack up and leave, or keep killing them until they are dead.

The Cardassians never expected the UFP settlers to pick up arms and fight back. They expected them to be sweethearts like Starfleet and the rest of the Federation. Then they got a rude awakening.

I did. To get rid of the Maquis, you either kill enough of them to drive them away, or keep killing them until they are all dead.

Because that would be violation of the treaty and thus an act of war. They are as yet not ready to start the next one.

With the Bajorans not, but that has nothing to do with events in the DMZ.

Any outright evidence of Klingon and Romulan conquests is also severely lacking, but anyone knows they carved out their empire by conquest and thus must have conquered and subjugated quite a few species.

The Cardassian Union is no different.

 

But you didn't see that evidence, because the Cardassians neither killed enough Maquis to make them fold, nor eradicated them. From what we see, they didn't even make a serious effort, as the government was bound by the law and treaty and AFAWK obeyed it to the hilt, and the rabble-rousers lacked the means.

No genocidal campaign is in evidence, and the debate is only over whether one was intended or not. Maquis intent to slaughter Cardassians is debatable: the one time we see Eddington in seeming genocidal action, he's doing it as part of a ploy against Starfleet, and he plays it out as if his nerve gas would only evict the Cardassians instead of killing hordes of them. However, it's quite an elaborate ploy if it's only intended to be one-time bluff; the story does seem to suggest that Eddington eventually wanted to nerve-gas every Cardassian within his reach.

Cardassian (any Cardassian) intent to slaughter UFP colonists wholesale is never mentioned, nor seen in action. Starfleet intent to slaughter either Maquis or Cardassians is only discussed once, as a ploy to capture Eddington, although apparently Starfleet afterwards has no quarrel with Sisko for his unauthorized use of genocide as a threat. Dominion/Dukat intent to slaughter just about everybody is obvious, although Dominion uses this threat in great moderation and Dukat in a lunatic quest for vengeance.

The people behind the attacks were independents, disowned by their government. Perhaps falsely so, but nevertheless, the actions of the independents would have been no more or less a violation of the treaty if they involved heavy phasers (like those used in the double ambush that Sisko and Dukat witnessed) than if they were limited to the use of hand disruptors or small explosive devices.

If the official Cardassia really wanted the UFP colonists gone by genocidal purge, it should have sponsored the independents into performing the maximum number of planet-shattering, truly genocidal attacks in the minimum number of time. That would have been well within the means of properly armed civilians, and would have caused much less political wrangling than a slow and tortuous ongoing campaign of harrassment. Nuke 'em quick, and lament afterwards that you could not contain your extremists in time - as nobody could be expected to.

Oh, that's far from said. Romulans are portrayed as xenophobic and racist, so they might simply have killed all the natives instead of subjugating them. And Klingon tradition of rule over alien subject species is verbally confirmed when we get to see our only good onscreen example, the subjugation of Organia.

Where would the fun be in that?

Surely the writers strove to make the CU as unique an adversary as they possibly could, nuanced in many ways. It just wouldn't do to summarily dismiss the idea that they might be such small-time players that Bajor is the only thing they ever managed to grab. That would certainly set them apart from those UFP arch-enemies who actually put up respectable resistance in the respective Fed-alien wars.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Illogical. If a planet belongs to the Cardassians, it *is* theirs. How could it not be?

 

Eddington is probably close to being the only human character I like deeply in the 24th century (the way I like Kirk or McCoy, I mean, admiringly), so obviously I am in the maquis camp. Doing a series about them would have kept the focus more on human issues and less on alien of the week ones, and I was always in favor of that as well. Plus, dramatically speaking, you've got a million cold-war FAILSAFE type scenarios to play out, so in addition to telling good stories, you've got a natural angle to tell compelling-to-watch ones as well. Trek sometimes does a good story badly, so that is why I'm specifying how this could be different ... easier to do this than to fuck over premises like TNG did by throwing away Dyson Spheres as plot hazards and suchlike.

 

Was Eddington's hatred towards all Cardassians explained in any way? Maybe his family had been annihilated by the Cardassians or something like that which made him hate them. On Voyager there was a Maquis crew member named Dalby whose wife had been raped and murdered by Cardassians, therefore he joined the Maquis "to slaughter as many of them as possible".

I'm not defending such actions in any way but such things do happen in wars. It did happen in WWII and in the wars in former Yugoslavia where one crime led to another and so on.

As for the Cardassians, their actions were similar to those who happened in Bosnia where certain war crimes by Serbian paramilitary units had support and even more than that from the Milosevic government in Serbia. The aim for the Cardassians was to chase away every non-Cardassian with all methods possible in the area which the Federation so shamefully abandoned.

 

Or maybe he was just a racist prick with a superiority complex.

(There is precisely zero evidence that Eddington had any past history with the Cardassians. Unless there was a Cardassian attack on Canada that I'm not aware of. )

 

lynx wrote:
Was Eddington's hatred towards all Cardassians explained in any way? Maybe his family had been annihilated by the Cardassians or something like that which made him hate them.

my response:
I think it'd diminish Eddington if he had such a basis for his position. It is better that he came to that conclusion based on his observation and service as a Starfleet officer, which is how Sisko's old friend came to be Maquis (as I recall, anyway.)

If a person is made into something by outside forces, it isn't as interesting as if he chooses that path on his own, based on his own ethical feeling about what is going on with outside forces. George Lucas could take heed on this, but as vader said, it is too late for me ...

 

Honk.