#blowback

Tricky

"If you wanna try to tell me that nobody cares about the politics of the quarterback, then I need you to explain to me why Donald Trump thought it was worth having the quarterback at his rally."

I had an epiphany the other day while I was out walking: Section 31 fairly reliably has never demonstrably "saved" the Federation on screen that I can recall. On the other hand, literally no good ever seems to come from its obsession with its epistemology that only Section 31 can preserve the Federation's wholesomeness and decency through doing the unethical things your average Starfleet officer cannot and must not do.

In modern espionage, there is a much discussed concept called "blowback." Blowback is a euphemism for the unintended consequences of an action or policy that seemed like a good idea at the time, but has ripple effects that may or may not be foreseeable.

The Fourth (?) Borg attack on Earth and the almost certain many thousands of casualties is an example of blow back. Now in Section 31's defense, the chain of consequences meanders quite a bit and heated arguments over whether this constitutes a black swan or gray rhino are not entirely unjustified.

But the fact remains, that without the assistance of Vadek's rogue Changelings, the Borg Queen clearly did not have the assets to execute her plan to infiltrate Starfleet and set conditions for the assimilation via transporter of Starfleet's junior crew.

Vadek and her Changelings were motivated by vengeance. Vengeance for the torturous experiments they were subjected to by Section 31 and, although its not clearly spelled out, almost certainly the near extinction of the Changeling species by a Section 31 bioweapon. This Vadek would have known about when she rejoined the Great Link, if not before when she and her crew killed the researchers experimenting on them and may or may not have had access to other Section 31 files in the process.

Classic blowback.

I may have misjudged the streaming era of Trek and its handling of Section 31, because while it has normalized it in some ways, that so many problems are caused by Section 31 in this era of Trek does not seem to be an accident. I don't like the normalization as a worldbuilding aspect, but I do appreciate its function as the provocation for cautionary tales.

The cognitive dissonance induced by anticommunism was staggering - you have all these US government officials talking about the loathed enemy, unable to really articulate what they were fighting and why, and why they thought the people they were supporting were better, besides their shared opposition to communism.

A particularly stark example of this comes up in this season of Blowback when the CIA director was flirting with a plan to try and get Soviet soldiers to defect. To shoot down the plan, other CIA operatives showed him evidence of Mujaheddin sexual violence against Soviet prisoners, which elicited a response along the lines of "I see your point, there's no way any of the Soviets would ever ally with those subhuman monsters." But those were the same people the CIA were funding, training, and arming!

oh cool what other books has she written or been featured in?

wait is that....

Blowback covers the Iraq war, US involvement in Cuba, Afghanistan occupation, the Korean war, our bombing runs (among other things) in Cambodia, and the US involvment/support of South Africa while Angola fought for their freedom. They put in the work to find sources and interview locals who lived through these occupations, along with politicians and academics.

It was my first into to the scope of US imperialism and it's made very accessible to those just starting out in their political learnings. There were a couple times when I had to google certain events/names because I didn't have much of a leftist education on my first listen, but honestly that just inspired more curiosity and never happened enough to deter me from listening

Record Label History: 4AD Records (TAD 2015)

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