My favourite part of DS9 was when the Cardassian citizens finally got tired of living in a decaying power under military dictatorship and ousted them to form a civilian government, and were promptly invaded by the Klingons who said they'd been taken over by Changelings.
The same Klingons who espouse honour and courage in everything they do, but fly cloaked ships, massacre civilians, and live under a blatantly corrupt oligarchy.
Klingons are Americans.
I think the key to understanding the Klingons in TNG and DS9 is understanding that without a definitive external enemy the Klingon Empire starts devouring itself - the Klingons devolve into internal strife and petty piracy. Remember that while Star Trek canon can be fairly squishy (not even counting whatever bullshit nu-Trek is doing), peace between the Federation and the Klingons was imposed by god-like aliens (how long that mandatory peace lasted is up for debate). You could make the argument that the Klingon Empire, which was presented as a fairly unified structure in TOS, started to fall apart when they could no longer fight the Federation.
They do talk sometimes about how the Klingons have enslaved a ton of worlds, but don't really show it
Yes. Cardassians are a supremist species who colonize, pillage, and enslave local populations for their own gain. On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a key component of the show is the end of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, a planet where the very religious population was enslaved for fifty years until a withdrawal could be negotiated. It's been interpreted as an allegory for Nazis/Jews, Israel/Palestine, and other genocides, though it was always meant to be vague and not a 1:1 parallel to one specific thing.
In Deep Space 9, the plot centers around federation relations with the Bajorans, a species who just freed themselves from the Cardassian Empire (the guy in pic.) cardassian society is basically a military dictatorship. So in the context of the show this meme is really mocking the sort of apologists for British and European colonialism like that one Quillette fucker whose name escapes me than Holocaust deniers.
reading the Cardassians as European colonialists might be a little generous to the writers, they are space nazis who committed a space holocaust is how they are set up in S1, then it gets a lil' deeper but idk if it gets that :CommiePOGGERS:
Maybe just because I'm a communist the themes the show deals with to me seemed broad enough to apply to any Imperial power. They weren't particularly prosecuting a specific group of Bajorans or anything, so I never really read the Cardassians as space nazis And the themes of Bajor trying to deal with its own nationalism and trying to decide what sort of society they wanted to become, really feels like an analogue for what a lot of former colonial countries had to deal with.
Idk, rewatching the show, I've been thinking Bajor could be a Ireland analogue.
After all, the British Empire killed more people than Nazi Germany (wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of the French and the Dutch). And Gul Dukat likes to talk about how much better they made Bajor, just like the Brits constantly say for their former colonies.
I think it's supposed to parody race-realists, and other odious figures, that go on Joe Rogan?
"Lots of people will tell you that the pah-wraiths are evil. What they won't tell you is that they were merely acting in self-defense. Sure, they attempted to overthrow the prophets and destroy the celestial temple, but that is meaningless when you consider that the prophets were busy interfering with the Cardassian occupation of Bajor!"
It's basically the same size on my screen as hexbear. You need to zoom in or something.
