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No, Really, New Caprica Was Not Iraq

Goldberg, as far as I can tell, entirely misread the series. There’s no big shift where he sees one. Yes, I’m sure Ron Moore was conscious of what was going on in the real world while he put together his series (and I’ve only occasionally read interviews with him, so I don’t know what he […]

Goldberg, as far as I can tell, entirely misread the series. There’s no big shift where he sees one. Yes, I’m sure Ron Moore was conscious of what was going on in the real world while he put together his series (and I’ve only occasionally read interviews with him, so I don’t know what he thinks he was doing), but as far as I can see it’s just perverse to assume that the human insurgency against the Cylons he was so upset about was supposed to represent the Iraqi insurgency against the US, with Americans cast as the evil Cylons [bold mine-DL]. ~Jonathan Bernstein

This was my view at the time. It is almost five years since I watched the third season for the first time, and I know full well how disappointing the series proved to be, but I still believe that it was always absurd to read an Iraq war analogy into the occupation of New Caprica. Obviously, there were parallels, because the experience of occupation and insurgency is going to have some common features that all depictions of these conflicts share, but it’s ridiculous to push it beyond that.

As Bernstein explains, Ron Moore has been working with these themes for years before the invasion of Iraq:

As I’ve said before, the two shows have a lot in common; BSG is basically, in its themes, a DS9 with much, much, better acting and without the constraints of the Star Trek universe….And you know what? In that series, made well before the Iraq disaster, insurgency/occupation is a major recurring theme. Indeed, the specific things that Goldberg thinks are transparently about Iraq (insurgents as good guys, imperial overlords who can’t quite believe that the natives can’t appreciate them) are very much present in the earlier, pre-Iraq show. One of the central characters in DS9, real white hat, is a former terrorist — indeed, that’s the word that’s used to describe her.

Indeed, the insurgency/occupation aspect of DS9 was one of the more interesting and creative things about the show. The station itself was a holdover of past Cardassian occupation, and as Bernstein says the Bajoran liaison officer was a former resistance fighter/terrorist who had fought to kick the Cardassians out. The Maquis subplot was an interesting one that forced the audience to think about the unintended consequences of peace agreements and the legitimacy of armed resistance to unjust rule, and it confronted the audience with the conflict between maintaining international peace and supporting the aspirations of people who had once been fellow citizens. The use of the name Maquis to refer to the anti-Cardassian resistance was perhaps a bit too heavy-handed of a WWII reference, but it was an obvious and intentional one.

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