So having made it through three seasons of Battlestar Galactica, I can affirmatively say that Jonah Goldberg‘s theory that the occupation of New Caprica arc was pro-suicide bombing, complaining that “The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers,” is transparently silly.
The truth is that the audience was never given a remotely decipherable, never mind plausible, explanation for this radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events. Rather, it was simply asserted in a hodgepodge of babbling dialogue. Almost immediately, the show’s protagonists are transformed into “insurgents” who have little or no compunction about becoming suicide bombers. The Cylons, for their part, are finding the human colony very troublesome. In one particularly ham-fisted scene, one of the Cylon leaders mocks his colleagues: “How did you think the humans would greet us? With— ‘Oh, never mind’?” This is, of course, a naked reference to the idea expressed before the American invasion, that the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”
Most egregiously, the human suicide bombers are not young men brainwashed in a madrassa and promised eternal life with 72 virgins, nor are they threatened with the murder of their families—the tactics used by jihadists to create their human bombs. Rather, they are decent, calm, and composed men and women fighting in a noble cause. Taken seriously, this romanticization of suicide bombers and “insurgency” has a cascade of revolting implications. The insurgency in Iraq was not an authentic resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or De Gaulle’s Free French forces. The ranks of terrorists in Iraq were overwhelmingly made up of Baathist remnants of the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda interlopers with their own imperialist ambitions for a worldwide umma.
I think it’s a mistake to view the occupation of New Caprica as a one-to-one allegory where the Cylons are the U.S. and the humans suddenly become al Qaeda in Iraq. Rather, the point is to imagine how Americans might react if they were occupied by al Qaeda.
Earlier in the piece, Goldberg praises President Laura Roslin’s banning of abortion even though it actually has no real world political application–the pro-choice Roslin does not suddenly change her mind about life beginning at conception or abortion being murder. Rather, the universe is simply running out of humans. Needless to say we’re not facing that problem–and the point of that show was not to question whether abortion is simply bad or good, but to imagine a set of circumstances in which someone with strongly held beliefs might be forced by circumstances to change their mind.
Likewise, the Cylons, who in some sense were meant to represent al Qaeda, still do, and the human colonists remain Americanized. The suicide bombings themselves are hardly portrayed as heroic–rather they’re an act of desperation made by a bitter old man, radicalized through torture and detention, who is on the verge of losing his soul. Roslin and other characters explicitly tell Col. Saul Tigh he’s crossed the line–and ultimately his brutality backfires horribly. The Cylons respond by clamping down further on the colonists, ordering the summary executions of two hundred people, as a direct result of the “moderate” Cylons losing influence, their tolerance for humans having failed to win hearts and minds as promised. Following the occupation, Tigh remains broken by the lengths to which he’s gone in order to fulfill what he sees as his obligations–all the more ironic considering he turns out to actually be a Cylon. The implication is, really, that had the Galactica not come to their rescue Cavil and the other “hawkish” Cylons would probably have just nuked the place.
The show is anti-occupation in a general sense, portraying the Cylons as arrogant and foolish in believing that they could make the humans love them at gunpoint (Brother Cavil, in one COIN-y moment, suggests “sanitation” is the key to stability). Occupation by foreign forces is an abstract concept for Americans that, literally can only be experienced through science fiction. It’s almost like Goldberg is offended at having to think about the fact that occupation might actually suck for the occupied, even though that’s kind of a banal observation.
But the point of the arc isn’t to lionize suicide bombers, it’s to force the audience to think about circumstances under which they might see suicide bombings as morally justified, even though it’s wrong. There’s a moral challenge there in the sense that it forces the audience to consider that their enemies are in fact human beings, and that anyone is capable of monstrous deeds. For someone used to dividing the world into simple moral binaries I can understand why that would be disturbing.
A lot of good art though, is disturbing–and while I think BSG got a little hand-wavy with the New Caprica storyline it’s really the opposite of pro-terrorism or pro-suicide bombing since the insurgency, absent Adama’s rescue, would have lead to the eradication of the human race. The problem with much political cultural criticism is that it reads like something written by a Soviet censor–the question is not whether the art is “good” but whether it’s “correct.”