Section 31 and Star Trek

There's a brand new Star Trek movie out, it's called Section 31 and stars Michelle Yeoh. And I have not seen it and probably will not. This isn't an outraged fan boycott, I didn't have much interest in the project when it was announced, and nothing I've seen since has grabbed my attention and made me reconsider. Many people don't like it, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't, I just have more things to occupy my free time.

Instead of talking about the movie, I am interested in discussing the focus (I assume it's the focus, since it's the title) of the movie, the titular Section 31. Section 31 is a shadowy and unethical intelligence service affiliated with the Federation and is quite old. It first appeared in Deep Space Nine, and there's a subplot in Enterprise that places them or a precursor were running in the days before the Federation was officially founded.

I liked the idea and execution of them in Deep Space Nine, so I'm not opposed to them getting a movie/show focused on them. Though I have seen the quote by Alex Kurtzman who is essentially running the modern Star Trek franchise and I find it depressing and alarming. 

In order for that vision to exist, in order for the light to exist, you need people who operate in the shadows. And it's a yin and yang. You can't have one without the other.

I'm struggling to figure out where to start with what's wrong with this view of the show and frankly in general.  I don't agree that the Federation of Star Trek is a Utopia, I know it feels like one compared to our quite troubled lives and world, but they're not the same thing. The people of the Federation and the crews of the ships we watch on TV have struggles and imperfections and flaws, both as individuals and as societies. They accomplished much and made significant progress in many areas that our real societies are in danger of backsliding on. But, importantly, that progress was shown to have taken years of hard work and sacrifice, and in a number of episodes is challenged and shown to be not as advanced or as secure as first thought.

I agree that Rodenberry and Fontana et al. created a franchise and world that is optimistic, but its optimism isn't founded just on good feelings and naivety, as Kurtzman suggests with his views on the show. In the days of Kirk and Spock, the Klingons are an enemy and possibly existential threat to the Federation. By the end of the old period of Trek some 40 years later, the Klingons and Federation are allies and are working towards a stable and lasting peace and building a better relationship. That progress was shown throughout the movies, The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Those stories involved sacrifices, resources, ships and quick thinking. And it wasn't a path of uninterrupted progress, the path to peace was met with stiff opposition from both societies, and animosities and cultural misunderstandings would on occasion cause rifts and opportunities to exploit into renewed conflict.

Take away the make-up and costumes and turn the starships into naval vessels, and you have a fairly grounded show about tense situations and diplomacy. The message of Star Trek is essentially, these wonderful things can be ours too, if we try and commit to the undertaking.

So, then, where does Section 31 (S31) fit into this optimistic future of hard work and risk paying off in the long-term? Well, in the old Trek shows S31 was ultimately an antagonistic force, their first appearance is an episode where they subject a main character Doctor Bashir to interrogation, accusing him of being a traitor, which is revealed to be a form of job interview to recruit him into their operations. Bashir and the main cast are appalled at their methods and existence. 

They remain antagonistic and unscrupulous, another highlight of theirs was manipulating a rival power in the Romulans, in the process framing a Senator and getting her killed. They also engineered a bioweapon that infected the entirety of the Changelings, the leaders of the Dominion, another rival power. Their justification for existing is that they wish to protect the Federation and will do "whatever it takes" to get the job done. S31 is ultimately destroyed in Deep Space Nine, and peace between the Dominion and the Federation is reached when a cure for the disease S31 created and is given to the Dominion.

I'm glossing over many things in this short recap, the important thing to understand is that S31 despite their justifications are not a Yang to the Federation's Yin, they're out of control and needed to be destroyed and its existence and relationship to the Federation was a stain on the latter. Some fans make excuses for the disease that infects and will kill an entire species because of the actions of the Founders and the Dominion, which to be clear were horrific. No sympathy or tears for them, but, but, the reason they're so horrifically awful is because of a history of them being on the receiving end of actions like S31's. Their actions are justified on the assumption that someone will poison them all if given the chance, so they make sure they never give anyone a chance. And what stops the war in the end ultimately isn't the cure itself, it's being given the means to save themselves and finally being convinced that some aliens might be trustworthy to a degree after all.

Again, achieving that result took multiple seasons and an intergalactic war. S31 did nothing to prevent the conflict nor did their weapon actively stop it once it started, it'd just increased the body count. And to give new Star Trek its due, this lead to what's known as "blowback". In the third season of Star Trek Picard, the antagonists are a small group of Founders who were experimented on by S31 to develop that weapon. They did not forgive nor forget, and embarked on a plot that nearly wiped out the entirety of the Federation. 

Apart from being good television, this plot line reveals something about S31, like groups in fiction and reality. The "dirty but necessary" and "pragmatic" option often creates more problems than it solves. If you believe that S31s actions during the war with the Dominion were necessary, then at best they traded one existential threat for another down the line. Or like how the CIA and MI6 leant support to the movement to overthrow Prime Minister Mossaddegh in Iran in 1953 which kept the Shah in power and the oil flowing, and also cemented the West as hostile powers for Iran's reformers and strengthened the reactionary clergy (who also supported the downfall of Mossaddegh) contributing heavily to the rise of the Islamic Republic which is still a headache for Washington to this day.

Or how the Russian security services in the 1990s targetted and killed Chechen and other nationalist leaders in the Caucuses while provided support to Islamist rivals to split their opposition has now led to a large and very dangerous current of Islamic terrorist movements including affiliates of Islamic State. Or how the Russian Federation intervened in Syria to assist the Assad dictatorship in the brutal destruction of democratic opposition forces and brutalise the wider population into submission, only to galvanise the majority of Syrians into supporting an offensive that toppled Assad and expelled Russian forces from the country, led by a group that was previously affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Again, I have not watched the S31 movie, and perhaps it is unfair to have written this without doing so, but I don't see how someone who thinks S31 as it existed in both old and new trek is necessary for the good things in Star Trek to exist would produce something that would add to this subject in a way that's meaningful and in keeping with the wider Star Trek vision.

I will say I like this poster, does it fit Star Trek? No. Does it suit a hypothetical Section 31 movie that does the topic justice? Also, no. Does Michelle Yeoh look cool as hell? Yes.

Looking at an Old Lie

 

The Company Sign, by Jacobus Belsen

 

One annoying thing about historical research on Hitler and the Nazi party is, the never ending game of hot potato. This week, one Elon Musk hosted a discussion with the leader of the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD). It provided a platform for the AfD's controversial views and rhetoric, which puts the party firmly in the far right of the Bundestag. In addition to lamentations over immigrants, Musk and the leader of the AfD declared that that Hitler bloke was a Commie.

On Thursday, Elon Musk agreed with the leader of a far-right German political party that Adolf Hitler was a communist and that left-wing groups who support Palestinian causes have more in common with Nazis than with her own party.

The deeply weird and disinformation-filled conversation between Musk and Alice Weidel, the leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), took place on X. It came after weeks of Musk’s efforts to boost the far-right party, which has deep links to neo-Nazism and has been surveilled for suspected extremism by Germany’s own intelligence services.

“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right[-wing] and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,” Weidel said. “He wasn't a conservative, he wasn't a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite.”

“Right,” Musk responded.

These quotes come from Wired, who have done an excellent job of debunking this absurdity. 

This is not an isolated incident there is a vocal minority out there who hate Hitler and the Nazis, not out of disgust for his views and policies but because Hitler and the World War II Fascists have given them the mother of all PR disasters. They know they're lying and to an absurd degree, they also know many people will be appalled at such flagrant disregard for historical fact, including Hitler's own words, but this is aimed at their own base of support and the members of the public who aren't engaged and forgotten what they were taught in schools.

If you're an AfD member or voter, you know have an authority figure to appeal to when you repeat such nonsense. If enough people repeat this nonsense, eventually it will have an impact on some other people and serve to shift blame from groups like the AfD to the opposition. Is this a key plank of their propaganda? No, but it's part of it and if it's left unchecked it will take root in some soil like a weed.

Casting Hitler as a socialist is already popular amongst the US far right and Republican fringe, so it can gain traction elsewhere. 

The Wired article dissects this specific example better than I could, so check that out if you're curious. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leader-weidel-hitler-communist/

What I will do instead is comment on the general thrust of this tactic historically. It's a terrible argument to bury, since there really isn't anything to it beside the name. The name of course is National Socialist German Workers Party NSDAP or Nazi for short. Now aside from the name containing the word Socialist, there's nothing more to pin the label on. 

 Argument 1, It's on the Tin!

The usual rebuttal to this is to sarcastically ask if North Korea is a Democracy, since its official title in English is The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). But we don't need to go outside Germany to find a similar corner example. At the same time the Nazis were knocking about you had the KPD which stood for Communist Party of Germany, and you also had the KAPD the Communist Worker's Party of Germany. Does that mean that the KAPD was the party for workers who were Communists and the membership of the KPD solely made up of non-working Communists? Sticking with this for a bit longer, the A in KAPD and NSDAP was the same, it stood for Arbeiter which is German for worker. If the S means they were Socialists, then the A must mean the Nazis were workers, so how do we explain the factory owners who members like the famous Oskar Schindler? 

And to take yet just one more example of the name game being deficient, we have the SPD. The SPD was the largest of the German Socialist parties, and yet the name didn't include Socialism it used Social, Socialist for the Nazis comes from Sozialistiche, but the SPD used and still uses Sozial for Sozialdemokratische Partei Deustchlands. So I guess the SPD the party which included Kautsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Bebel, Engels and Marx amongst its membership wasn't socialist at all, they were the Socials. 

Let's move on in time to modern Germany, we currently have two curiously named parties in the Bundestag, the CDU and the Greens. The CDU are the Christian Democratic Union, a conservative party, based on their name we could expect them to discriminate and only allow Christians to join them but this is not the case. The name comes from when they were founded by socially Conservative groups attached to Germany's Protestant Christianity. The Greens are widely understood to be a party representing people concerned about the environment, but they aren't called the Ecology/Environment party they're called the Greens. Which should mean that they should militant colourists campaigning to pass legislation at the state and federal level to promote Green and ban other colours.

The past three paragraphs are confused nonsense because they're addressing a confused argument on its own merits and applying to other examples. The point is to demonstrate that the name or title aren't enough to prove anything.

Argument 2, they said they were for workers X speech and Y pamphlet

"German socialism is not an economic doctrine but a profound Weltanschauung [worldview] that is adhered to almost religiously, a spiritual movement which also catches hold of our thoughts and feelings and renews us, and will make better men."  Carl Riedahl 1921, published in the Völkischer Beobachter

Yeah, that's the point of political propaganda, to appeal to an audience. One important caveat though, they never actually appealed to workers for support, they always appealed exclusively to German workers, and by German workers I do not mean workers living and working in the borders of Germany, I mean the specific narrow and racially defined group of workers. Jewish, Polish, Czech minorities within Germany were not appealed to, they were often targetted within the same appeals to the "Pure" German workers. They never once abandoned their nationalist views, even rhetorically. This predates Hitler joining the party, the founder of NSDAP, back when it was just called DAP its founder Anton Drexler declared that his party was the true champion of the workers in Germany because he believed the SPD was controlled by Jewish and other foreign interests. So, from the start, the appeals to workers were rooted in a nationalist world view. Here's what Hitler thought of Drexler's work

"In his (Feder's) little book he described how his mind had thrown off the shackles of the Marxist and trades-union phraseology, and that he had come back to the nationalist ideals."

 As Jacobus Belsen pointed out at the time, Nazi propaganda was crafted for specific audiences, so it isn't strange to see Nazi party spokesman and news-sheets aimed at working class districts to play up ideas and policies that appeal more to that demographic. If you're curious, the cartoon says "for the proletarians" in the top and "for the affluent circles" with the name of the party emphasised differently for each audience. That's what you do when you want to win support. The UK's Labour Party has been doing something very similar, it talks to the Trade Unions about plans to end zero hours contracts, improve workers rights and make it easier for Trade Unions to operate, it then goes to the heads of British Trade and Industry groups and talks about its plans to stimulate growth of the economy and how it won't be increasing taxes on the rich. It's a common tactic, political parties can't build a path to power in a nation solely by appealing to one or two parts of society, they have to draw from many, often competing groups. 

So, if we can't trust what they say, how then can we know what they actually stand for? Well, by looking at what they did and do. Hitler allowed industrialists to be party members, and build alliances with them and conservative institutions and parties, e.g. the Catholic Church and the DNVP (German National People's Party). Did he do the same with the workers associations and political parties? No, in May 1933 Trade Unions were outlawed by his government, the KPD and SPD weren't banned yet but their leading members were being arrested, the bans came in July. The bans applied to all parties that weren't the Nazi party including his friends in the DNVP, but their leaders were allowed to join the Nazis and its paramilitary wing, members of the left wing parties were not allowed to join and were often arrested. 

So, we have a political party that talks to both sides while touting for votes and members, but then once in power firmly leans to the big business and conservative right once in power, and even sweeping policies that affect all of Germany make exemptions for these groups so long as they're willing to collaborate.

Experience of sharing this image has taught me I need to translate this banner, it reads "Death to Marxism" and its carriers are members of the Nazi Party SA paramilitary

Argument 3, okay he wasn't a Marxist, but he was still a lefty!

 Well I agree he wasn't a Marxist, aside from a tiny circle of fundamentalist Christians in the United States I don't think anyone would claim Hitler was a Marxist. It's easy to find passages in Mein Kampf disparaging Marx and Marxism, and also Communism and even Socialism. So, where do we go from here? If we accept the argument that the Nazis were socialists (and to be clear I do not accept that) then that would mean that the Germany of the 1920s-30s was the most socialist nation on the earth. In addition to the Nazis we also have the KPD, KAPD, SPD and other smaller groups not previously discussed, but just sticking with the KPD, SPD and NSDAP that gives us a combined population in the tens of millions all clambering for the same thing.

Well, this argument acknowledges that there are degrees of socialism, but that just raises the spectre of what actually is socialism? What is the germ or seed of socialism? Depending on the dictionary you bought, you may get a definition along the lines of state involvement in the economy, but that definition makes every political leader of a nation a socialist to a degree as they all direct some form of state/gvoernment entity, and would in the case of the Nazis make them less socialist than the Weimar Republican governments as they privatised large parts of the economy. 

A better definition involves the phrase workplaces/industry/economy operated by the workers themselves with an added descriptor of self-organisation. Some argue that this alone is not enough to make a socialist society and I agree but without something close to this as a foundation there's nothing to build from. A loose version of this definition includes the German Council movement, the early Soviets in the Russian Empire, the Wobblies strategy of "Building the new society from within the shell of the old" the collectives in Spain during the revolution and civil war etc. 

There isn't an equivalent to point to for Nazi Germany. In addition to selling stocks and stakes in previously government owned companies to wealthy individuals they also banned independent workers associations. The only legal representation a worker in Germany had (reminder, these are the "pure" German workers) was the Germand Workers Front DAF. The DAF was a Nazi party organisation whose loyalty was the the Nazi party and not the workers. A lot is made of the DAFs luxuries and gifts to German workers, package holidays, medals for productivity, credit schemes, radios etc. All these good things were run by the Nazi party and came with other changes, the restoration of piece rate work where pay was based on how much work you did per day, observation and monitoring, and the radios were set to recieve only authorised channels with unauthorised usage punished severly. 

I'm not seeing any socialism here, I certainly see nationalism, and I see paternalism, a system where the workers of Germany are brought under the benevolent tutelage of their rulers. Its certainly different to the laissez-faire style of capitalism popular in our current climate where the worker is free on their time off but also completly unsupported, but is socialism really holidays, radios and medals for achieving targets?

Of course not, we're only supposed to think of the "good" things the Nazis did once the political atmosphere has changed enough that comparisions to the goose-steppers is no longer taboo. For now we must think the Nazis are scarier because they are allegedly an example of the  Red Terrorists. So, labour camps and secret police.

Well, forced labour and powerful police forces were certainly a feature of the Nazi society. Just like they are for many societies some of which are led by declared socialists and most are not. No, this isn't whattaboutery I acknowledge and oppose the repressions of working people in all countries regardless of the colour of the flag or party name and logo. My point is that if like the "government doing stuff" repression is the defining standard of socialism than we must conclude that all nations on the planet are socialist to one degree or another, they all have institutions for coercion and control, they all used coerced labour. No, I'm not equating my employment to prevent homelessness to building the White Sea Canal or an Autobahn towards the Polish border, but that's the underlying social relationships, the workers do not have control of their own economic or social lives.

Its why the only definition of socialism that makes sense is the one I stick to above.

TL:DR

Hitler and the Nazis are socialists when the word has lost all meaning.

WOMEN ANARCHISTS HAVE BECOME THE TERROR OF WORLD'S POLICE

 

1908 New York newspaper clipping, text reads:

WOMEN ANARCHISTS HAVE BECOME THE TERROR OF WORLD'S POLICE

Their Daring Crimes Are Said to Have Outstripped the Deeds of Brothers of the Red

Search for the Woman is Becoming a Safe Rule in Crimes Proceeding From Anarchistic Violence - The Guardians of the World Nearly Always Find a Woman Implicated When a Ruler is Stricken Down - Emotional Women Lose Sense of Fear.