I'm a huge military history fan, but Vietnam is one war I have never really looked into the reasoning behind. When Spock justified arming the villagers just to even out the technology that was being given by the Klingons, it got me thinking. Now this means the Star Trek creators thought we were only arming the South Vietnamese because the Communists were arming the North. The itch to go fight back was furthered by our already in place hatred for Communism. The authors clearly thought that we were arming them to get even with the weapons given by the Communists. The thing is, our weapon aid evolved into us dumping masses of soldiers to go die fighting in Vietnam. It makes me wonder where the authors would have gone if they had to expand on this episode.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Vietnam, But in Space
I really found it interesting how clear of an analogy to the Vietnam War Star Trek was making in "A Private Little War". Given the ban, basically, on political topics that was enforced in pop culture, this was a pretty risky parallel to draw. I also was drawn into the reasoning behind Kirk arming the peaceful villagers.
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Yeah, I wrote a little about the idea of a "proxy" war on my blog, too. Strategically, I guess the idea is to arm someone else so that your own people don't have to die fighting. You point out that this doesn't really last in Vietnam. Even the idea seems so gross to me, though--it's okay that other people die, just not OUR people? Eew.
ReplyDeleteLuckily nobody takes this view in Star Trek, unless you consider the Klingon's to have it. Neither Jim nor Bones wants to use these people.