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The Great Teleport Debate
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Blake's
Seven Blake's Seven is an interesting piece of unpretentious Sci-Fi that typifies a lot of the genre. For some reason everybody seems to be in favour of “progress” but whenever they produce any fiction about the future it always seems a rather nasty time to live.
In the future there will be a single World Government, or a government that extends out into space, and this government will be evil. The heroes are always the rebels who fight against the government.
Very strange.
The idea that this is the inevitable future of the species makes the task of trying to build a united peaceful World community that much harder. People think that resisting this is the right and heroic thing to do.
Why can't people realize that in real life democratic governments are not evil forces trampling on the faces of the people but the embodiment of the will of the people? Or at least as close as we are ever likely to get to such an ideal.
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The government in 'Blake's Seven' was in no sense meant to be 'democratic'. The originator of the series, Terry Nation, conceived it as the hi-tech interplanetary successor to regimes such as Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Both Stalinist Communism and National socialism believed that 'democracy' was inefficient, decadent and outmoded. They described their respective ideologies as being based on 'scientific progress'. The continuing implication in 'Blake's Seven' is that the Federation is as deluded as its ideological predecessors. Fiona |
I'm not suggesting that The Terran Federation was meant to be democratic. My point is that so much Sci Fi does show the future as being dominated by evil global or universal governments that it is putting the cause of world peace back by suggesting that somehow the continuing existence of separate nation states is some kind of Good Thing. The idea is put about that by keeping old style sovereign nations in place freedom is ensured. This is nonsensical. Nations, we know, are capable of suppressing individual liberties and the idea that a nation is sovereign works to ensure that a tyrant can rule indefinitely as long as he doesn't upset too many of his neighbours or get in the way of those corporations who have the ear of the US government. I can see no good reason to assume that a world government is any more likely to be tyrannical than a national government, and both are so much larger and more powerful than the individual that to resist the larger of the two because it is too big makes as much sense as fearing that you stand a bigger chance of being drowned while swimming in an ocean rather than a sea. |