Every great Star Trek antagonist since 1993 has made the same accusation against the United Federation of Planets. The Federation forces other cultures to live the Federation way. The Federation cannot tolerate any people, planet, or political system that refuses its values. The Federation is an assimilating empire that calls itself a paradise.
The accusation is correct. The writers know it is correct. The showrunners have said on the record that they constructed Deep Space Nine to prove it. A generation of fandom has spent thirty years pretending not to hear them.
The pattern starts with Captain Kirk and never stops.
Kirk’s Manifest Destiny
The Original Series is a weekly demonstration of a Federation starship captain landing on a foreign world and rebuilding it in the American image. “The Return of the Archons” ends with Kirk arguing the planetary computer into suicide and leaving Federation sociologists to remake the society “in a human form.” “A Taste of Armageddon” ends with Kirk destroying two civilizations’ computer war and threatening General Order 24, the order that authorizes destruction of a planet’s surface, if the locals refuse to negotiate his way. “The Apple” ends with Kirk killing the machine-god that fed and sheltered the natives of Gamma Trianguli VI, then walking away. “A Piece of the Action” ends with the Federation collecting forty percent tribute from Sigma Iotia II. “Patterns of Force” ends with a Starfleet historian’s homemade Nazi regime dismantled by other Starfleet officers, after the homemade Nazi regime had been built to “improve efficiency.”
Then there is “The Omega Glory.” Kirk lectures the natives of a parallel Earth with the Preamble to the United States Constitution, holding the document over his head like Moses with the tablets.
“Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before, or since, tall words proudly saying, ‘We the People.’”
In the same episode, Kirk says this:
“A starship captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.”
He violates it twenty minutes later. Spock asks him to his face whether intervening on the side of the Yangs constitutes a violation. Kirk’s reply: “We merely showed them the meaning of what they were fighting for.” Liberty, freedom, the American Constitution.
The novelist Michael Chabon caught the joke in 2006. “All they needed was a Captain Kirk to come and add a little interpretive water to the freeze-dried document, and the American way of life would flourish again.”
The Prime Directive in The Original Series is a fig leaf. It exists to be invoked when the captain wants to refuse aid and discarded when the captain wants to act. Every episode listed above is a Prime Directive violation. Starfleet promotes Kirk to admiral.
