08-09-2021, 05:46 PM
(06-06-2020, 08:23 AM)Ghost Wrote: 1T started in 1945.
2T started in 1963.
3T started in 1980.
4T started in 2001.
I'm going to guess that 1T will start when the coronavirus is no longer a problem. Maybe 2022.
I think you are right. COVID-19 reminds me of a fabricated Klingon proverb from Star Trek:
"Only fools fight in a burning house".
Obviously an Earthling (Gene Roddenberry or some subordinate scriptwriter) penned that saying in the Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove". A Klingon Warrior was trapped on the Enterprise...
Quote:
- [url=https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000638/?ref_=tt_ch]Captain James T. Kirk : [to the alien entity] Get off my ship. You're a dead duck here, you're powerless. We know about you, and we don't want to play. Maybe... maybe there're others like you around, maybe you've caused a lot of suffering, a lot of history; but that's all over. We'll be on guard now, we'll be ready for you, so ship out! Come on, haul it!
Dr. McCoy : Yeah, out already!
Kang : Out! We need no urging to hate Humans. But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house. Out!
- Captain James T. Kirk : Go to the devil.
Kang : We have no devil, Kirk. But we understand the habits of yours.
- Kang : We need no urging to hate Humans. But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house.
- Kang : For three years the Federation and the Klingon Empire have been at peace. A treaty we have honored to the letter.
Captain James T. Kirk : We took no action against your ship, Kang.
Kang : Were the screams of my crew imaginary? What were your orders, Kirk? To start a war? You've succeeded! To test a new weapon? We shall be happy to examine it.
Captain James T. Kirk : There was a Federation colony on this planet. It was destroyed!
Kang : By what? No bodies, no ruins. A colony of the invisible?
Captain James T. Kirk : Yes, a test of a new Klingon weapon leaving no traces. Federation ships don't specialize in sneak attacks.
- Kang : When I take this ship, I'll have Kirk's head stuffed and hung on his cabin wall.
- Captain James T. Kirk : YOU received a distress call? WE received a distress call!
Kang : I don't propose to spend the rest of my life on this ball of dust arguing your fantasies! The Enterprise is MINE!
- Kang : What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory?
- Kang : Kirk, my ship is disabled. I claim yours. You are now prisoners of the Klingon Empire against which you have committed a wanton act of war!
- Chekov : Filthy Klingon murderers! You killed my brother, Pyotr. The Archanis IV research outpost. A hundred peaceful people massacred! Just like you did here. My brother - you killed my brother!
Kang : And you volunteer to join him. That is loyalty.
- Kang : With your death, we win!
Captain James T. Kirk : Nobody wins. Have any more of your men died? We can't be killed! There's an alien aboard. It wants us alive.
Kang : Then, no doubt, you will reassemble after I have hacked you to bits!
- Kang : I have captured your Engineering section, and now control the ship's power and life support systems. I have deprived all areas except our own. You will die of suffocation in the icy cold of space.
[power on the Bridge is cut]
Who would seek to go on a military campaign into a country infested with a plague?
The end of a potentially-martial Crisis Era comes when war becomes too horrible to continue, its objectives are met, or no further campaigns can attain any victory worthy of the cost. Maybe such enemies as Nazis wage war until they are annihilated because they know that they will be humiliated and annihilated in defeat. But the "Colonials" in America assure the British that they can keep the rest of their Empire intact (except for losing Florida, which neither the British not the inchoate United States recognize as desirable... the Spanish somehow want it). The Union side assures the recent Confederate enemy that they can keep their real estate if not their strange form of property which is all too human for such use. Italians realize that they can remain Italians -- just not the fascist @$$holes that Mussolini and his clique were. Germans who knew that they had to toe the Nazi line to be attorneys, teachers, librarians, or printers find that they can be free of the repression and corruption of Nazis... and the fear of the Gestapo. The Japanese found that they could restore all institutions except those necessary for creating a bloodthirsty order of conquest and enslavement -- and prosper like never before after beating their swords into plowshares.
The risk of further war is the destruction of what remains -- and of all hope... or of conquering a lifeless, wrecked terrain in which all resources are unusable. Farmlands without peasants to feed the conquerors and administrators? Worthless. Industrial plants turned to rubble without the labor to even collect the rubble for reviving the industry? Worthless. Or maybe the industrial, commercial, and residential assets are intact but permeated with radiation as is Chernobyl and thus unusable? That too is worthless. (Chernobyl is not a Crisis-Era event and is not the result of war, but you get the general picture). When that happens, the Crisis is no more. It is not by design that the Crisis ends; it is because the Crisis loses its grasp on human necessity. When people no longer need to fight to survive, then the Crisis is over.
Klingons are modeled after some totalitarian society on Earth, whether fascists or Commies... maybe Commies because Commies at the least value their own lives. Nazis and their Japanese partners in crime were nothing but death.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.