OPINION: A History Lesson Star Trek Gave Us 57 Years Ago That We Failed to Learn

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“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.” — William Tecumseh Sherman

On February 23, 1967, the twenty-third episode of the original Star Trek, A Taste of Armageddon, first aired on NBC.

It was a great episode, one of many great episodes from that series that resonated with viewers. Perhaps not remembered as a game-changer as many of them should have been, but without question, it has become more relevant and timely over the years. A delicate blend of entertainment and in-your-face commentary on how screwed up our world had become.

So, why is it still relevant 57 years later?

Because War is hell.

It’s not a video game or a movie, no matter the budget spent on CGI.

It’s never legendary or thought-provoking, even with romanticized names like the Hundred Year War, or the War of the Roses. It’s Armageddon—a day of reckoning.

And yet we still speak of war in terms of right and wrong. We elect charismatic leaders; who shout and stomp and utter words that resonate as the aches and pains of society are rounded up and presented back to the same people as if they’re seeing them for the first time.

Here’s injustice.
Here’s your job going to someone else.
Here’s what we should be doing.

As the words echo endlessly and begin to "make more and more sense," terms like fight, defend, and war enter the narrative as if opposing ideals are enemies at the gate that must be repelled.

The Backstory

The basic premise of this episode is that the Starship Enterprise visits the planet Eminiar VII on a diplomatic mission and unwittingly finds themselves embroiled in a war that’s been “raging” between Eminiar VII and its rival Vendikar for generations.

These two planets have “evolved” their conflict and now eschew actual physical violence and destruction.

They achieved this by engaging, not in a real war as we all know it, but in a computerized simulation — where those “killed” are instructed to proceed to elimination chambers where they are removed permanently and quietly from society as casualties.

All neat and orderly, destruction is replaced by calculus and statistics, and life continues without all the chaos and inconvenience associated with wars in the past.

Unfortunately, while orbiting the planet, the Enterprise and its crew become casualties of war and are ordered to immediately proceed en masse to an elimination chamber — thank you very much.

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. Napoleon Bonaparte

The outcome of the story in typical Star Trek and James T Kirk fashion is that the residents of Eminiar VII and Vendikar are pushed to the brink of actually suffering the extreme losses and insanity of war unless they change and face what they doing and find a way to resolve it.

They do, when the alternative is no longer a summary sheet of causalities checked off, but real blood and devastation filling the streets.

The special effects back then weren’t over the top — shoestring budgets meant shoestring effects. But we didn’t need to see large chucks of the planet hurtling out into space. The idea was the important part. The concept that war could be sanitized down to a chessboard was abhorrent to Capt. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise. Wars were fought out in the open.

They are disgusting, inhumane, and no doubt intended to scare the participants into thinking twice before doing it again.

There’s a scene in the movie, Gladiator, where Russell Crowe’s character (Maximus) talks to one of his commanders, readying for battle, and says, at my signal, unleash hell.

Isn’t that what it's supposed to feel like?

History is filled with not-so-great reasons for beginning one. A crazed politically motivated man shot and killed an Archduke and his wife in 1914 and weeks later World War I started.

Because that was the only solution.
Because that was the honorable thing to do.

We’re like that. Humankind. We punch our way out of a paper bag rather than just taking it off.

It’s 2024 and we still have Pirates roaming the seas around the Arabian Peninsula. We still have Russia fighting wars to reclaim what it lost because the system didn’t work.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. I guess that saying had to start somewhere.

Wars don’t work. History is littered with ones that started and stumbled along for years before the warring sides reached a truce. Not a solution. Not a resolution to the original problem. Just a time-out.

Why?

Because wars are not started by those who fight them.

If they were, if the soldiers got to sit at the table and ask themselves should we or shouldn’t we, how many wars would actually be fought?

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. “ — Dwight D. Eisenhower