Over the sci-fi show's first two seasons, many conservatives saw it as a pitch-perfect metaphor for the United States' post-9/11 battle against Osama bin Laden and his Muslamonazi horde. Galactica, which has become something of a surprise hit on the Sci Fi Channel, takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe where humanity has been decimated by a nuclear strike launched by an enemy race of robots known as the Cylons. Most of the action revolves around a noble band of 50,000 survivors who hurtle through space searching for a new home planet. Along the way, they have had to deal with Cylon sleeper agents, suicide bombers, and even a sinister pack of left-wingers who use violence to try to force humanity to make peace with their enemies.
“The more I watch the new Battlestar Galactica series, the more the Cylons seem like Muslims,” wrote “Michael,” the author of the Battlestar Galactica Blog, back in March. “They believe they are killing humans for their god. This is very much like the Muslim concept of jihad, which instructs Muslims to spread their religion through war.”
National Review's Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica's politics on NRO's group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica's anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?
But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America's three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers. Needless to say, this did not go over very well in the Galacticon camp.
“The whole suicide bombing thing … made comparisons to Iraq incredibly ham-fisted,” wrote a frustrated Goldberg, who had hoped the struggle against the Cylons would look more like Le Resistance than the Iraqi insurgency. “The French resistance vibe … is part of what makes the Iraq comparison so offensive. It's a one-step remove from comparing the Iraqi insurgency to the (romanticized) French resistance.”
Fellow Corner writer John Podheretz shared Goldberg's assessment, and chided conservative fans of the show who were still in denial about its sudden leftward drift. “Message to BSG fans on the Right,” wrote Podheretz sternly. “You cannot … come up with some cockamamie explanation whereby it's not about how we Americans are the Cylons and the humans are the ‘insurgents' fighting an ‘imperialist' power.”
Even hardcore devotees like Michael the Battlestar Galactica Blogger found this new Cylons-as-Americans development hard to stomach. “Has this show jumped the shark?” he wondered. “The writers are … putting the humans in the position of being the terrorists.” Like Goldberg, he also took exception to the use of suicide bombings, which he said wouldn't work against Cylons because “terrorist tactics only work against the United States and Israel because we're too good to wipe all of them out.”
In a way, it's understandable why Galactica's new political bent has created such a stir among some conservatives. As President Bush's approval ratings have steadily slid down since the 2004 elections, and as violence in Iraq has continued to surge, many of the Galacticons have turned to science fiction and fantasy as the basis for their policy ideas. The most recent example comes from soon-to-be-ex-Senator Rick Santorum, who compared the Iraq war to the fight against Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” said Santorum, who went onto explain that the Iraq war had drawn the “eye” of the terrorists away from America. “It's being drawn to Iraq, and it's not being drawn to the U.S. And you know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
Sadly, Santorum was only the latest in a slew of right-wingers to base policy arguments on shameless dorkery. Last year, a Star Trek rerun inspired Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist and warblogger James Lileks to concoct a plan that would eliminate any liberals who opposed abusing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. “It's time to institute Disintegration Chambers in our major American cities,” wrote Lileks, referring to a Star Trek episode that featured two tribes who preferred to fight wars by disintegrating their own people rather than sending them into live combat. Even though the episode was actually an allegory about the perverse methods governments use to shield their people from the brutal costs of war, Lileks took quite a fancy to the idea of forced disintegration, especially for his ideological foes.
“Here's the deal,” he wrote. “We decide what constitutes torture, and identify it as the following: insufficient air conditioning, excess air conditioning, sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, and other forms of psychological stress … Those who disagree with these techniques must sign a record that registers their complaints. When a terrorist finally spills the details on a forthcoming attack on, say, Chicago, the people who signed the register and live in Chicago are required to report to the disintegration chamber.”
Of course, even this bloodthirsty rant pales in comparison to the dorkofascist musings of Jonathan Last, the Weekly Standard editor whose review of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was a love letter to imperialism. “The deep lesson of Stars Wars is that empire is good,” wrote Last, who justified his Empireophelia by arguing that the old Galactic Republic had become “simply too big to be governable,” and that the galaxy needed an empire to fill the void. Last acknowledged that the Empire was “sometimes brutal” but that acts of planeocide weren't so bad “when viewed in context.” Last also showered praise upon Emperor Palpatine, whom he dubbed “an esoteric Straussian” and “a dictator ... but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet.”
The most notable thing about the Galacticons is that even when they aren't directly referencing science fiction, they still sound like total space cadets when discussing American military power. As they understand it, America is an omnipotent level-20 Warmage with 19 Strength and 20 Charisma who can wipe out entire armies of mariliths, gold dragons, and goblinoids with the flick of a wrist.
During a recent debate on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked former GOP House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich if having 130,000 of our troops stuck in Iraq had reduced our ability to deal effectively with Iran and North Korea. “Only in our minds,” Gingrich replied. Glenn Reynolds, the prominent transhumanist conservative blogger, once wrote that the problem with Bush's approach to the war on terror wasn't that he got our military stuck in an Iraqi civil war, but rather that he “hasn't been vigorous enough in toppling governments and invading countries in that region.” And William Kristol, one of America's preeminent sci-fi foreign policy thinkers, said in the aftermath of Israel's failed bombing campaign against Hezbollah that American should take the opportunity to launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” asked the dweeby Galacticon sage. Such fantasies of military conquest are particularly galling since the Galacticons really don't seem to think that waging multiple preemptive wars would have any adverse consequences. The world, it seems, is their Risk board.
Of course, it's easy to talk tough about invading multiple nations if you're not the one doing any of the work. The thrill the Galacticons get from watching the Iraq war on their TVs is the same thrill the typical Mountain Dew-swilling reject feels watching Battlestar Galactica; it's only fun for them because they're not going through it themselves. But this is sadly what characterizes much of Bush's approach to the war on terror, which has been less about real sacrifice than cheap voyeuristic thrills and empty feel-good platitudes -- combined with foolhardy notions of American omnipotence in the world. While the outright buffoonery of the Galacticon jingonauts is certainly amusing, the overall Galacticazation of American war policy is anything but.
Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. He blogs frequently at Sadly, No!.
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