Star Trek TNG reevaluated

After all these years, I'm sad to say that Star Trek TNG doesn't hold up. It's pieties and worldview are false and here's why.

 Look at the episode called Redemption, the one about the Klingon civil war. The Federation, personified by Captain Picard, are allied with the legitimate government of the Klingon empire, personified by their council leader Gowron. But the rival Klingon Duras family, backed not-so-secretely by Romulans, have launched a coup that has turned into a civil war. Picard, obsessed with the non-interference dictum known as the prime directive, refuses to involve the Federation in the fighting, despite the desperate pleas by Gowron, his ally.  Picard knows he must help or else the enemy Romulans, the power behind the coup, will control the Klingon empire. So, in keeping with the prime directive, Picard devises a non-violent solution. Set up a blockade of Klingon space to catch the Romulans bringing in aid to the rebels. Once the blockade exposes the Romulan role in the civil war, the theory goes, the Romulans will back down and the coup will fail. And this is precisely what happens.

The non-interference, non-violent policy advocated here is not far off from what is put forward by some in the world today: Expose the bad guys for what they are, but don't get involved in fighting them. War is bad. The only problem with this paradigm is that it doesn't work. And that it doesn't is something that is easily proved. Just look at a real world example that parallels the Redemption plot almost exactly: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

In Spain, there was a legitimate government, left of center, which was allied with such countries as Britain and France. A coup was launched by General Franco's rightists and a civil war ensued. Despite pleas from the legitimate and elected Spanish government (known as the Republican side), France and England and the United States refused to come to their aid, and France was even a socialist government ideologically sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans. Instead, Britian and France instituted, like Picard, an embargo on Spain to prevent any country from supplying aid to either Franco's Nationalists or to the Republican side. The idea was to let the two sides would fight it out themselves. If another country attempted to supply war materiel or aid, the embargo would expose them and presumably they would therefore back down.

But in real life the opposite occurred. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the main sources of aide for Franco, were caught many times breaking the blockade-Italian troops were even captured in Spain during battles-but naturally they didn't back down for a second. Mussolini even signed onto the embargo, but he regarded it as a joke. So did Hitler (see Guernica). German ships running the embargo even fired on British ships enforcing it, but there were no repercussions for the Germans. For the truth is that when people like Hitler and Mussolini see that you're not going to do anything to stop them except a toothless embargo, they will go ahead and do whatever they want. Eventually, the Republican side had to pay millions in gold to the Soviet Union to get their help and by that time the embargo was a joke for everyone. The ultimate result: the Republicans lost and Franco was dictator of Spain for the next thirty-six years. And that is the true lesson of Star Trek TNG's Redemption episode.