From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos   
   From Address: jsavard@ecn.ab.ca   
   Subject: Re: Vulcan Racism Vs. IDIC?   
      
   On Jan 19, 8:17aam, Anim8rFSK  wrote:   
   > Archer the Executioner should have been shown to have inspired it, after   
   > his genocidal actions in "Dear Doctor"   
   Archer was simply deferring to the advice of other races with longer   
   experience in dealing with other species.   
   I agree that his actions in that episode were morally indefensible.   
   Refraining from assisting actual individuals in escaping from death,   
   merely because of a supposition about the future - that the other race   
   with which they shared their planet would develop and progress, where   
   the other, dominant race, which was dying, was stagnating - is a kind   
   of act which our moralities strongly condemn. It is "playing God"; it   
   is akin to the murderous violence of anarchists and revolutionaries   
   who claim they are doing it in the name of a future paradise, but who   
   always only create wretched dictatorships.   
   That episode only represented an extreme illustration of a moral view   
   which had been presented on more than one occasion in Star Trek: The   
   Next Generation, and even, to a very limited extent, in the original   
   series.   
   That was the viewpoint that the natural development of a race takes   
   precedence over the well-being of individuals.   
   So the Prime Directive forbids Picard and company from rescuing the   
   people of a technically unsophisticated people who are about to be hit   
   by a comet... because it is better to be exterminated than to have   
   one's development cruelly twisted by becoming disadvantaged inferiors   
   on the same planet as others who are technically competent. Like many   
   indigenous people at present on Earth.   
   And so euthanasia is the appropriate way to deal with the mentally   
   retarded... oh, sorry, that was Nazi Germany. Perhaps the events of   
   "Patterns of Force" have a less contrived explanation than we thought.   
   Unfortunately, there _is_ a disturbing note in Star Trek of preference   
   for a system of ethics which contains disturbing parallels with that   
   of Nazism to the ethical system of our society, as derived from   
   Christianity, which constrains people to give precedence to the   
   immediate and direct consequences of their actions to other   
   individuals over possible long-range global considerations.   
   Then there was the famous Green Lantern/Green Arrow cover, inspired by   
   the trial of the Chicago Seven, where that comic tried to point the   
   way to balancing these two views of morality - the Guardians of the   
   Universe holding the Star Trek one, and Green Lantern having acted   
   impulsively on the Earth one.   
   John Savard   
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