Friday, January 11, 2019

A Rough Excerpt of "My Own Utopia: An Examination of Space Utopianism in Wartime"

What follows is a rough idea of the themes and ideas I’m planning on exploring in one of the chapters of One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy on the series The Omega Men by Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda as well as the approach it will take. It was commissioned by Aleph Null through Patreon.

…But what makes it all the more galling is that one of Trek’s major influences explored this territory so much better. That influence being the Dirty Pair. For those unaware, Dirty Pair is a series of light novels, anime, and comics about a pair of trouble consultants who work of the World Welfare Works Association (3WA) named Kei and Yuri, who are hired for various jobs from investigating the disappearance of a child in a city owned by a corporation who does weird experiments involving the remains of a long dead race of aliens to infiltrating the mob to chasing a cat around the city as The Lovely Angels. It should be noted that their escapades typically end in high body counts as a consequence of completing their missions, giving them the derogatory nickname “The Dirty Pair.”

The society depicted in Dirty Pair is typically read as a utopian one, albeit in the Omelas sense as opposed to the typical Trek sense. That is to say that while socially, humanity has improved immensely over the years, there are still some of the lingering economic concerns of the era be it the ability of the uber-rich to do whatever they want, regardless of the ethical implications or the political corruption that allows patently evil people to remain in power. [FOOTNOTE: This is perhaps best exemplified in the episode Love is Everything! Risk Your Life to Elope!!] People still die horribly and the guilty don’t always get caught in the end. Indeed, the Lovely Angels work on a paycheck to paycheck basis, sometimes even for exposure. As I have said before, capitalism is a utopia. It just depends on where you look at it from.

But in terms of the themes of this chapter, it’s perhaps best to look at the episode Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! There are many similarities between the episode and The Omega Men. Both involve members of a, for lack of a better term, space police entering a relatively internal matter focusing on a group of rebels going up against a government for a better life. Both involve the complex nature of child solders as a background theme and the ways in which those in power will try to destabilize a situation for their own benefit.

Where they differ is in the scope. Omega Men deals with an entire federation of planets having a civil war over the cruelties of the system done largely for financial gain whereas Red Eyes is invested in a singular backwater planet being manipulated by forces outside the conflict for financial gain. And yet, Omega Men, for all its scope, is a more personal story. One focused on the experiences of those within the conflict from the guilt-ridden murder bots to the disillusioned pacifists to those who use rebellion for their own gain. Whereas Red Eyes takes a more overview look at the situation at its current stage, not even glancing at the causes and motivation of the war. [FOOTNOTE: This is most likely due to the length each story is provided. The Omega Men is a twelve issue series whereas Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! is a single half hour standalone episode of a 10 episode series.]

And yet, from both there’s a sense of disillusionment at the very nature of war within them. Both stories view the war as a pointless slaughter that only helps the cruel and breaks those who want a better world. There is no Mekon to be slain, no barbarians hounding at the walls of this world we call Utopia, no Spiders throwing bombs from a far off land. Not even a Section 37 keeping the peace from the shadows. Merely people in a bind forced to make deals with the worst kinds of people who see war as a means to an end. Everyone else just gets consumed and the survivors are left wondering why.

Nowhere is this clearer than in both stories endings. In The Omega Men, after Kyle tries desperately to convince everyone that there is a better way to deal with this than just killing the bad guy and succeeding with almost everyone, the Princess cuts off the villain’s head, “winning” the war. Disillusioned, Kyle returns to Earth and is debriefed by some member of the government about what’s happened since he left Vega. To keep it short, everything’s gotten bad, if not worse than before. Some have fallen because of the power they wield while others are on the run because of what they did for the greater good.

Indeed, the general tries to frame the war as a battle with a literal evil empire as part of his pitch to Kyle to be on his side in the next war. While this statement is true in that the Viceroy was involved in massive genocide as well as general fascist tendencies, the statement that he led an evil empire is to simplify the war Kyle just fought in order to make joining the next one much simpler. It ignores the people who fought on both sides being anything more than slabs of meat to be thrown at one another, as if being a star war makes the war any less horrific. That the people holding a gun at your face aren’t as afraid to shoot at you as you are at them. [FOOTNOTE: For more on “The Enemy,” see The World Haters.]

It is perhaps fitting that Kyle’s response is to reject the notion of the enemy and the ally, of Us and Them, of, to use his words, the savage and the civilized. In effect, he keeps the same perspective he had at the start of the story: the world is more complicated than just goodies and baddies. People are people in the end and he is one of them. But the invocation here, in this final moment, on the eve of yet another sodding war, sparks an edge of rebellion.

But Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! offers a bonfire. When the dust settles and everyone’s dead, it’s revealed that the person behind the titular Killing Squad was an arms merchant who has been prolonging the war by kidnapping veterans and brainwashing them into being emotionless killers who will not stop. They do not feel pain, do not want for food, lack any mercy or empathy. They are the perfect soldier, the terminator of worlds. [FOOTNOTE: As an aside, there’s an interest in the series with the Terminator. In the second episode of the OVA series, No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party, taking the piss out of the famous robot by having it bum around the City it’s in while still being demonstrating its status as a threat. Affair of Nolandia, the first Dirty Pair film, has its Terminator analogue as a massive threat and a physical representation of the cruelty the corporation at the heart of the story does to gain power. And What?! The Boy in the Mansion is a Terminator, the penultimate episode of the original series, used its Terminator analogue as a metaphor for how loss can bring good people to do bad things.] One who will follow orders no matter what, even if it means killing a child.

In truth though, there’s not much difference between these kidnapped men and a typical soldier. As Morrison notes, most people didn’t volunteer to fight in WWII. “People,” Morrison said, “are afraid when a guy says to you “Mr. Morrison, we’ve got a war here, and you’re a person we want to fight for us – will you please come and fight for us?  If you don’t come, you’ll get a fine, or you’ll be put in prison.  You’ll maybe get ten years.  We might even shoot you.”   I think it’s easier without the Emergency Powers, like they had during the war, to protest, but in this country, despite all the talk, we don’t protest easy.  We allow a £10 fine to deter us.  But with a ten years prison sentence, or a prison sentence that’s indefinite, like some of the COs got – a year in prison, ready to come out, give them another year – that kind of thing, and pile it on, I would suggest that’s more of a deterrent than the fear of possibly dying.  It was the threat that they knew, rather than the one they didn’t.  Take it from me, if Churchill instead of his Blood, Sweat and Tears thing had said “Any man or woman in the forces who would like to give it all up and go home, can” – he wouldnae have got the microphone out his mouth before he’d been trampled to death in the rush.  That’s a fact.” (Grafton, Looking Back) Really, the only significant difference is that these men were kidnapped and brainwashed with machines rather than coerced and indoctrinated.

But this difference is enough to enrage the Lovely Angels and, as their name implies, they bring their wrath upon the war profiteer. And so, they kill him. Given the ambiguous nature of the ending and the nature of the series as a bunch of standalone episodes that don’t necessarily follow one from the other, it is plausible to say that the Lovely Angels died at the end. But they died taking down one arms merchant. One. There are other arms merchants like him out there. The idea of using other people like machines to kill other people for the sake of making a buck is not a new one. Indeed it’s the very foundation of war. None of these stories offer a means to escape from this cycle.

Is this the best we can hope for? To bend the knee to powers we know are monstrous and cruel because they wear the aesthetics of Utopia? That there needs to be cruelty in this universe because without it, we would be seen as weak and be consumed by the barbarians at the gates? That the only way to keep a Utopia afloat is for us to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight while the frozen mask just smiles? That the only acts of useful rebellion that are possible… merely a reference only we’ll get and the ability to take them down with us? Are we trapped forevermore in this binary cage we call Endless Wartime?

Well…

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