I was recently rewatching the original Stargate movie. MASSIVE SPOILER FOLLOWS
In it, Ra is waited on by an entourage of child attendants, who, when he is threatened, are trained to instantly act as a human shield.
Of course, when they do that, our guys stop their attack. They're not going to shoot a bunch of children.
However, all's well that ends well. Ra is finally defeated, and Earth is saved, when O'Neil nukes his ship and kills him.
And, in the process, presumably kills those same children (and the cat).
This made me think of Hiroshima. It has been argued that the bombing was justified, because of the many more lives it potentially saved.
However, would those who ordered or carried out the attacks have considered it an acceptable loss of life if they had had to individually execute all of those tens of thousands of civilian men, women and children? Or even mow a crowd of them down with machine guns?
It seems to me that, if war is considered to be ethical at all, the more hands-on the better. If you are fighting hand to hand with an enemy who you can see (and who also has a fair chance of killing you) you know what you're doing, and you're putting your life on the line for your cause, whatever it is.
Throwing death from a distance at unseen enemies dehumanises them - and hardens you.
2 comments:
Ah, so there is a film that comes before the first series - that makes sense. I watched the first episode and it clearly had a major back story which seemed a bit much to just be setting.
Yes. The TV rights were sold, and the series is made by different people (so there are some tweaks to the mythology, and then it goes in different directions), but it starts very much as a sequel to the film, and the film is considered to be canon unless the series contradicts it.
Interestingly, most characters are played by different actors The actor playing Daniel was chosen because he did such a good impression of the previous actor, but O'Neil has quite a different personality. Only Kusuf and Skaara (the leader of the tribe and the main herd boy) are played by the same people.
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