“The Maquis de Sade,” or “‘They Bitched Ineffectually, Blew up the Wrong Shit,

and, Finally, Got Their Asses Kicked. It Doesn’t Get More French than That’”

Recently, I was asked, “Do you sympathize with the Maquis?” and attempted to answer the question with thoughtfulness and restraint.

Bet you know how far I got with that, or how far that got me.

I replied, “I sympathize ... but not to the point of endorsing their cause.

“This is in part a philosophical problem, in my opinion. Does the quasi-mystical concept of ‘Home Sweet Home’ really matter in a Socialist Utopia? The Federation seems fairly homogenized (and, to an extent, sterilized) in the late 24th-century; I can't imagine it would be tremendously difficult to uproot and move.

“If home is where the heart (as opposed to the hearth) is, then gather up your spouse, kids, ol' grandpa, teddy bear and fiddle, then get the fuck outta dodge. Take your head out of your ass and make a new home somewhere else—other than on the Cardassian border, that is.”

Well, the response to my comment surprised me.

“So you don’t believe in property rights, or self determination?”

I read that twice … blinked … and then read it a third time.

Huh?

Instead of my usual knee-jerk, kick-ass, take-names reaction, though, I decided to put some thought into my second reply. This is what I eventually ended up with:

“What I believe, insofar as relates to the here and now, is entirely immaterial. We're not talking about land issues on 21st-century Earth, but in a Federation spanning ‘over 8,000 light years.’

“There are ideals, and there is pragmatism.

“My question: What, other than outright obduracy [and downright idiocy], motivates the people of that reality to move into an area that is a bone of contention between two powerful governments? I might have had more sympathy if it had been implied that these planets/systems were in the only locale un-colonized by the Federation ... but that's clearly not the case. The UFP is vast, with thousands, if not millions, of potentially habitable planets. To decide, ‘Well, we like the plot of land near the dragon's lair,’ and then be, as Milton would say, ‘thunderstruck and astonisht’ when the wyrm awakens and claims everything close to the cave's mouth isn't too freakin' bright, now is it? In addition, more than once Picard and others state that these people were warned beforehand that the area was in dispute.

“The writers unsuccessfully tried to address this ‘I have a mystical connection to my home’ idea in the TNG episode ‘Journey's End.’ It didn't at all ring true because the most powerful of the traditional arguments—the one that relies upon having ‘dwelt in harmony with the land’ for so long that it and the people had formed a permanent, unbreakable bond—had little validity when they'd been there, what was it, 22 years [and I freely admit that my factoid here may well be inaccurate]? Give me a break.

“Sympathy isn't invariably an all or nothing affair; for me, in this case, it's a matter of degree. As I've previously said, I do sympathize to a certain extent with the Maquis (and even more so with the people they were trying to protect). But challenging an oppressor that has invaded and occupied the home world upon which you evolved (as the Bajorans did), and fighting a government that has been given legal title and authority over an area long in dispute—an area in which a more prudent and discerning group would have avoided settling—are two entirely different things.

“I do hate the idea, in principle, that innocents can simply be pressured or rousted off their land. [So would anyone who’s not working for the Sheriff of Nottingham ]. But these people were warned what the Cardassian government was like. And when those warnings proved prescient? They decided, instead of taking it as an object lesson, cutting their losses, and finding a place where they could live in peace, to take up arms and do exactly what the Cardassians were doing—drive their opposite numbers out of the area. Once you start dropping bio-toxins on civilians who've got nothing to do with oppressing you—and I'm sure there were plenty of Cardassians who just wanted to farm their land and be left alone, too—much of my sympathy takes a long walk out an airlock a short distance away.

“If you or I are forced off our land, we might well lose everything; thus, our decision to stand and fight would have tremendous legitimacy. But one cannot convincingly live the Libertarian ideal in what has been established as a Socialist Utopia. They could have just left and flipped the Cardassians the bird as they did. They instead decided to fight.

In this case, they had other viable options. That's why, while I don't have a dearth of sympathy, I don't have an abundance of it, either.”