It was really hard to read without the formatting, so I’ve fixed it below:
One thing Star Trek could never do today is introduce one of its main characters as an unrepentant anticolonial terrorist, and then spend seven seasons stubbornly refusing to make her apologize for having been one.
Major Kira Nerys grows enormously over Deep Space Nine. She learns that individual Cardassians aren’t interchangeable. She befriends some of them. She confronts things the Bajoran Resistance did that were ugly. So the show gives her every opportunity to arrive at the comfortable conclusion you’d expect. She never does.
In Season 5, a Cardassian civilian confronts Kira about a Resistance bombing that killed twelve Cardassians, including the family of the military officer who lived there. He asks whether she feels guilty, and Kira’s answer is astonishing from a modern perspective:
“None of you belonged on Bajor. It wasn’t your world. For fifty years you raped our planet, and you killed our people. I don’t care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty, and you were all legitimate targets!”
Kira isn’t some villain whose radicalism exists so Captain Sisko can spend the next five minutes explaining the enlightened Federation position. She’s not an extremist who eventually realizes that both sides went too far. She’s not even a former terrorist who has matured enough to be embarrassed by her younger self.
She is the first officer of Deep Space Nine. She may be a complicated hero, but she is objectively a hero. Over the course of the series, Kira changes her understanding of people without ever fundamentally changing her understanding of power. She accepts that an innocent Cardassian doesn’t deserve to die solely because he’s Cardassian. But the Cardassian occupation of Bajor was maintained by an entire colonial society, not merely the soldiers holding rifles – and Kira still believes the Bajorans had the right to make that occupation unbearable.
That’s an incredibly uncomfortable distinction, and DS9 lets it remain uncomfortable. Which is probably why Kira feels like a character from another political universe now.
After 9/11, American television certainly didn’t stop making complicated or even sympathetic terrorist characters. But the terrorist became a problem to explain: How was this person radicalized? Can they be redeemed? Have they renounced violence? Are they secretly still dangerous?
What they don’t do is show terrorist characters saying “yes I did it, and I’d do it again” while remaining the hero.
Nana Visitor herself noticed the difference years later. Talking about whether Kira could exist after 9/11, she said she couldn’t imagine playing her quite the same way. Other shows could have complicated terrorist characters, she observed, but the audience was always being asked to question them. “Kira, never.”
And that’s the genuinely subversive thing about her. DS9 doesn’t ask us to discover that Kira was secretly right about everything she did. It shows us innocent people harmed by the Resistance. It lets victims call her a murderer. It lets Kira herself recognize moral boundaries she didn’t always recognize before. But it never requires the colonized person to condemn her own resistance before we’re allowed to consider her a hero.
By the end of the series, Star Trek does something even stranger: when Cardassia itself falls under Dominion occupation, the former Bajoran terrorist is sent to teach the Cardassians how to become terrorists. The imperial power that once hunted Kira’s resistance suddenly needs exactly the knowledge her resistance produced.
Eventually the people who called her a terrorist needed her to teach them how to resist an occupation. Turns out terrorism looks a lot different when you’re the one being occupied.
orignal source: Facebook
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