I simply cannot stand how current Star Trek treats Section 31 as some hypothetical moral quandary.
“What if we needed a secret extrajudicial organization to commit crimes to protect us?” We already had one, it was the Cold War CIA, and do you know what it did? It instigated holy wars. It installed dictators. It authorized kill squads to make goods just a little bit cheaper. You’re asking a question that has already been answered and the answer was “When you give people a lot of power, zero accountability, a mission statement of doing awful things for ‘the right reasons’, and a mentality that people are either sheep to be controlled or wolves to be slain, they do not protect anyone. They just kill and hurt and destroy, and even the people they claim to protect just suffer all the more for it.”.
Section 31 was created when CIA declassifications made clear what had been done in our name and with our money. That’s why in its native DS9, its primary purpose was to be rejected as a concept and defeated by our protagonists, why the Federation has to be saved from its rampant, thoughtless cruelty. Section 31 is not a sci fi concept. It is not a “what if?”. It is an allegory for a very real organization and ideology that has harmed billions of people, that will take decades to root out and further decades, possibly even centuries, to heal from. It is evil, it was modeled on evil, and the impulse to defend or lighten it is not a politically neutral one. It has no place in the Star Trek future, just as it’s real world equivalents have no place in our society, and anyone who says otherwise is deceiving you or themselves.
Portraying Section 31 as morally grey or worse, necessary, is a lie. It is repackaged military propaganda used to justify and whitewash its real world equivalents by creating a fantasy where such an organization is anything but evil, to make it easier to sell that same fantasy in real life. I can accept and even enjoy moral quandaries and flawed characters in Star Trek. I will not accept being lied to.
