Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

I binge watched the show some time around 2003-2004, when the US had gone to war with two nations, established a Department of Homeland Security, and was generally being more than a little authoritarian under Bush Jr and Cheney.

In that context, Babylon 5 felt to me like a bad parody, taking cheap shots at the political landscape in the US at the time. For example, their equivalent to the DHS was something like the Earth Alliance security division, and just like how US senators were wearing little "USA flag pins" on their lapels, the politician characters in the show started wearing similar little pins on their lapels.

"I get it, you watch the news, stop making it so obvious." was what was going on in my mind for every second scene. It felt almost obnoxious... until I realised the show was made in the 1993 – 1998 time frame, years before any of the things it was showing had happened!

Suddenly, it blew my mind how prescient it was, how it was showing a society's journey down the road to military fascism, and how half the world was following the same path.

Around the same time I read someone's "Ten steps to a fascist society." article (also pre-2001!), and I realised that the B5 TV show was at step 8, and the United States was at step 7 and eagerly beginning work on the next step.

Then, Obama won the election. Whew.

The showrunner has since commented explicitly about how the show was specifically critical of fascism in this way.

https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1322031158113103872

https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/986502756700569600

JMS had unique leeway as a showrunner because he wrote every episode of the show in seasons 3, 4, and 5. (Except for a guest spot for Neil Gaiman in season five.)

Those were long seasons, 22 episodes each. The total is basically an epic novel written for TV. Nobody gets to do that today. Even author-driven shows like "The Last of Us" feel truncated at only 8-9 episodes with no guarantee of renewal.

> Those were long seasons, 22 episodes each.

22 episodes of 42 minutes each used to be standard for a season. 24 episodes was also pretty common. Granted, not all written by one person, but JMS had been planning a 5-season series for a long time before any network picked it up.

Are you thinking of Umberto Eco’s fourteen features of fascism? It’s from a 1995 essay:

https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism

The first one though :

The cult of tradition for example. If they really whorshipped traditions, facist movements wouldnt regularly destroy their whole environment and society, uprooting all that was before.

Take ISIS and Nazi Germany, they pretended to be pro Traditions, but at the same time destroyed all that had come before completely and utterly.

I found the "states regressing to tribal society und pressure while wielding a industrial economy" to be the better description of the problem.

Though in that criteria, ISIS was not that facist, as they never had the debt loaded industrial economy that defines a full scale non-local regression.

to have a working cult of traditions, you have to invent them first. And to invent them, you have to destroy the traditions that were invented before, but are old enough to have evolved, sprawled, and gone out of control. The newly invented ones are much easily controllable.

Side reference, but of course historian Eric Hobsbawm is the central name here, who wrote "the invention of traditions" about how this happens.

It's also easy enough to mythologise and claim you're going back to the real traditions of your society that have been erased by degeneracy - you have have to upend and destroy the social order in order go "back" to the traditions of an imagined past.

The Fascists of Italy were all about casting themselves as returning Italy to the glory of Ancient Rome, right down to the basic symbolism of the party.

It just means that traditionalism is a core part of the narrative. It's about appearing as if you respect traditions, and frequently bringing them up as justfication for this or that.

You can find the original essay online, and it's not much longer than what's in that link.

A good read. Eco opens with how he know about fascism -- he was a kid in Italy when WW2 happened, and talked about how he won a child essay writing contest about the New Fascist Man, something he dwells on. But then he struggles to nail down what a New Fascist Man really is, and delves into his list.

Had to read it in college, worth the extra paragraphs.

Ironically both Rove and Bush were fans of the show (according to Bruce Boxleitner’s wife who headed the actors guild at the time and met with them at the White House). JMS said he had to lie down for a while after hearing that. I love JMS but he did tend to view anyone to the right of Mao as reactionary. How him and Jerry Doyle (who was later a conservative talk show host) didn’t kill each other is a testament to how great the cast and crew were.

People forget now, but department of homeland security - with all its B5 connotations was originally a Democratic Party idea, which Bush resisted until he started getting beat up politically for not doing more to unify the intelligence and security functions post 9/11.

As for the telepaths - well that’s a different story..

"until I realised the show was made in the 1993 – 1998 time frame, years before any of the things it was showing had happened!"

I see the use of the badges and uniforms, for example the NightWatch armbands as a thing that repeats itself in history. For example the Nightwatch armbands are clearly modelled on Nazi uniforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_symbolism has some other examples

It's necessary for these things to happen first in the mind (often through literature in the past, and now in the movie age... on the screen) before they can happen in real life. See also Heinlein.

Always a chuckle to see how elementary and vacuous the median political analysis of the "intellectual" HN readership is.

They should move to the biggest continent on earth and be smug there... We need to peacefully separate from these annoying borgs.

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