jwz – Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State

“A Critical Division of Starfleet Intelligence” There’s no precedent for it in the franchise; nothing that its backstory is needed to unpack or explain. Indeed, it makes the whole thing more inexplicable: societies with unchecked, unaccountable black ops and secret police forces do not, typically, resemble paradises even on a surface level — something that DS9 itself readily understood when it came to worldbuilding for the Cardassians. […] But one can, perhaps, forgive DS9 this particular indulgence; it came in the midst of a larger arc about what happens when you throw Gene Roddenberry’s humanist utopia into a major war, and it can be read in the context of that story: To what extent is…

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