by Susan J. Paxton
“I came from a world where the people believed that the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery, and that strength, strength alone, can support freedom.”—Captain Apollo, from Experiment in Terra by Glen A. Larson
The name of peace is beautiful, and peace itself is a blessing. Yet peace and slavery are very different things. Peace is freedom tranquilly enjoyed, slavery is the worst of all evils, to be repelled, if need be, at the cost of war and even of death.—Marcus Tullius Cicero, Second Phillipic Against Antony
Throughout the one year, seventeen episode
run of the original Battlestar Galactica series, one theme in particular cropped
up with great frequency; the necessity for any people who prize their freedom to be
willing to defend that freedom with their own blood, to stand up against tyranny and
resist the phony allure of pacifism. It is a theme that appears to have preoccupied series
creator Glen Larson, as his best BG scripts concern themselves with various
facets of the subject, namely the premiere, Lost Planet of the Gods, The
Living Legend, War of the Gods, Greetings from Earth, and Experiment
in Terra, with colleague Don Bellisario adding The Hand of God. It is
notable that it is these episodes, which deal most directly with the theme of armed
opposition to tyranny are, with the exception of the two dealing with Terra, which are
widely considered unsuccessful, are the finest of the series.
The very premise of the series is that peace is not the opposite of
war, as the underlying cause of it all is the Cylon destruction of the Colonies under the
guise of a false treaty of peace. After a thousand yahrens of war that they made not have
tried hard enough to win, the Colonial people and government were tired of paying for
freedom with blood and were eager for what they felt to be the natural opposite of war,
peace. Most of them found their peace in death. Later in the premiere episode, the
hedonistic Sire Uri, faced with the choice of a long, arduous journey or luxurious peace,
chooses peace and attempts to convince the pitiful remnant of surviving Colonials to throw
down their arms in the hope that the Cylons will no longer see them as a threat and permit
them to live out a life of sybaritic bliss on Carillon. The Cylons use, this moment of
uncertainty to launch another attack, which is only defeated thanks to Commander
Adama’s suspicions. The first episode therefore demonstrates in no uncertain terms
that eternal vigilance must be maintained; if something seems too good to be true, it
probably is.
In Lost Planet of the Gods, the Colonials are once again
faced with an offer of peace, this time from their own betrayer, Count Baltar. Baltar
tries to convince Adama that the Galactica, alone, can penetrate to the heart of
the Cylon empire and bring it down. Adama is too intelligent to be taken in and once again
the Colonials barely escape with their lives, in a broad restating of the themes of the
first episode.
The Living Legend presents the opposite of peace in the
guise of Commander Cain, a famed Colonial military leader of the final yahrens of the
Thousand Yahren War. Cain, in fact, is too much the opposite of peace. His love of war
leads him to make foolish, dangerous proposals that Adama cannot entertain. Cain appears
to have forgotten that the first duty of the military must be to protect civilian lives,
not go off adventuring and inviting disaster. In the end, however, Cain redeems himself
and sacrifices himself and his ship to give the Galactica and her convoy a chance
to escape the Cylon attack force. Living Legend, then, focuses on the primary
reason for the existence of a military force; the protection of civilian lives.
War of the Gods stands at almost the midpoint of the
series’ run. In this episode we meet the Beings of Light, who seem to represent the
other side of the war/peace argument, although this very well may not have been Glen
Larson’s intention. The Beings of Light are absolute pacifists, at least to the
degree that they will not dirty their own hands by stopping the evil depredations of Count
Iblis, a fallen member of their own race, or, later, stopping the coming nuclear war on
Terra. The Beings of Light are passive, sterile, lacking in individuality. They show no
signs of great creative or intellectual activity, and seem to be satisfied to float about
the cosmos at will. The Beings suggest that someday the human race will evolve into
something similar, creatures of pure thought with no material concerns. What a sad fate
that would be. The Beings’ refusal to stop evil and tyranny, their silly blather
about free will and noninterference conceal a lack of moral courage. If they had had more
contact with them, the Colonials, instead of admiring the Beings worshipfully, would have
seen them as the pathetic creatures they are.
Soon after War of the Gods, we were treated to the three
Terra episodes, two of which, the disastrous Greetings From Earth, and the third,
Experiment in Terra, bear on our theme. Terra seems to be a miniature version of
the Colonial/Cylon conflict (and indeed a miniature version of the US/Soviet conflict
which in this case has gone from Cold War to hot). On one side is the fascist Eastern
Alliance, making phony peace overtures even as they destroy Nationalist colonies and moon
bases and prepare for a final thermonuclear assault. On the other side is the Free
Nationalist state, willing to accept the peace offers to avoid the horrors of war, hoping
that the Eastern Alliance will live up to their side of the bargain. It is only thanks to
the intervention of the Galactica that the Eastern Alliance’s nuclear strike
is intercepted and destroyed (a curious premonition, incidentally, of the Strategic
Defense Initiative). Once again the underlying themes of vigilance and the willingness to
fight to defend liberty are restated, most memorably in Apollo’s speech quoted at the
beginning of this article. It is no surprise, incidentally, that Battlestar Galactica
was banned in the Soviet Union.
The final episode of the series was Don Bellisario’s Hand
of God, in which Adama finally discovers that the odds are, for once, in his favor,
and chooses to take on and destroy a Cylon base ship rather than avoid the confrontation.
It is possible that this episode was partly inspired by critical complaints that the
Colonials avoided combat too often, but whatever led to it, it is widely felt to be one of
the series’ finest moments. For the last time, it is stated in no uncertain terms
that a free people must be willing to fight and die in order to save their ideals and
their civilization. In one glorious day at the battle of Salamis the Greeks stood up to
Persian oppression and saved their civilization for posterity. When the Romans were no
longer willing to fight for their way of life, it collapsed and died, leaving behind a
memory of glory and a thousand years of darkness. The time of judgment is coming upon our
own Western culture as well, and once again we will likely be forced to fight the powers
of darkness to save the Greek and Roman heritage that is the light of the world.
Historically, peace has only been bought by men of war. We may, in the future, be able to change that. It may be, as some say, that we have no choice. It may be that peace can and must be bought with some coin other than the blood of good soldiers, but there is no evidence to show that the day of jubilee has yet come.—Jerry Pournelle, preface to There Will be War
Indeed, the day of jubilee has not come, for
the Colonials or for us, and it may never come. Until it does, we must remember, as
Captain Apollo and his creator do, that the opposite of war is not peace, not yet.
�1986, 2000, Susan J. Paxton
Originally published in somewhat different form in ANOMALY 9, 1986