GALACTICA

The more I watch the new Battlestar Galactica, the more the Cylons seem like Muslims. Now the detractors of this argument will say that it only seems that way because the Muslims are our enemy of the moment, and the Cylons are the enemies of the humans in the show, and there's nothing more to it than that. However, I see a lot of other similarities.

The Cylons are religious. They believe that they are killing the humans for their god. This is very much like the Islamic concept of jihad which instructs Muslims to spread their religion through war. The humans also have religion, but most are secular and don't seem to spend a lot of time thinking much about it. This sounds like the United States.

When the Cylons die in war, they don't just vanish, their conscious is reborn in a new body. This is similar to the Islamic belief that those who die in war will ascend to Paradise. The resurrection ship isn't exactly Paradise, but the point is that for both Muslim and Cylon, death in battle doesn't mean the end of existence.

In the last episode of the season Number Six kills herself by detonating a nuclear bomb, taking out several ships in the process. Obviously similar to how the Muslims use suicide bombers to attack their enemies.

The Cylons have a plan, or so we are told. It's a long term plan. Unlike the humans, the Cylons are very patient. Similarly, the Muslims have a plan to take over the world by spreading all over and gradually edging out the other religions. The West doesn't take the plan seriously because of the long term nature of it. Pat Buchanan writes a book pointing out that if demographic trends continue, Europe will be majority Muslim before the end of the century. Most in the West laugh at Pat and call him a reactionary, because their focus is too short term. But the Muslims see it as part of their long-term plan to take over the world.

For the same reason there can be no peace with the Cylons, there can be no peace with Muslims. Both have a religious belief that their duty is to kill the infidels and become the only religion in the galaxy/world.

People have been talking about how the events of Battlestar Galactica relate to real world politics.

First of all, I point out that the original 1970s series was clearly a conservative show. This is pretty rare because most people from Hollywood are liberal. But Glen Larson, the producer of the original series, is a Mormon and those guys probably represent the United States’ most solidly Republican group.

The original series was very clearly an analogy to the Cold War, with the humans being the United States and the Cylons being the Russians. And in fact it was nearly a perfect analogy. The Cylons were machines, and this represented the cold machine-like nature of communism. Communism, though not economically efficient, was very efficient at building a big military capable of destroying the West.

The 1970s were a time of many peace treaties and arms reduction treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Conservatives believed that these treaties were really ploys by the Soviet Union to gain the upper hand, because they would cheat on all of the treaties anyway. In Battlestar Galactica, the final destruction of the humans happened because Baltar (who was a politician and not a scientist) convinced the Colonies that the Cylons wanted to sign a peace treaty, and this tricked the humans into lowering their guard, allowing the Cylons to be victorious in a deadly sneak attack. Humanity was destroyed by its hunger for peace.

The new series on the Sci Fi channel has tried to take a more traditional liberal Hollywood spin on things. This is why in the new series, the bad of humanity is constantly shown. This is because the humans still represent the United States, and the hardcore left believes that the United States is a bad nation and full of evil.

In the original series, Starbuck was the closest thing there was to a bad guy among the main characters, and we all knew that his heart was always in the right place, his only problem was that he was a little too impulsive. In the new Battlestar Galactica, bad guys abound. The original Apollo was a loyal son and a good father to Boxey even though Boxey wasn’t his biological child. Lee “Apollo” Adama, on the other hand, is constantly at odds with his father, sleeps around, consorts with prostitutes, and he is basically set up as the show’s conscience. Throughout the series there has been rape, torture, murder, just about everything you can think of that is bad about humanity has been the subject of at least one episode.

Despite all this, by loosely basing the storyline on the original series, the basic conservative theme remains and we have finally seen it revealed this season.

(1) Roslyn represents George Bush. She’s anti-abortion, she believes in a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo, she tried to fix an election (the left wing believes that George Bush cheated in Florida in 2000), she doesn’t believe that the Cylons (who represent Muslims here) are human so she has them thrown out airlocks and killed without any due process. And when it came to settling down on a nice planet, or living in a state of fear, Roslyn was right! The Cylons were out there, and as soon as humans let down their guard, it only took slightly longer than a year before they were conquered.

(2) Baltar represents John Kerry. They both have funny hair and funny accents. The left believes that John Kerry is smarter than George Bush (even though it’s a lie), and Baltar is certainly smarter than Roslyn. But it’s intelligence without wisdom. Baltar wants to believe that the Cylons are people too, reasonable people who he can have sex with and who won’t come hunting down the last remnants of humanity. But of course Baltar is wrong.

(3) Bill Adama represents the military, naturally. Bill Adama was right about everything. And incidentally, the senior Adama is the character who has come off as having the highest integrity of anyone on the show. He can’t be seduced by women, he doesn’t abuse alcohol like most of the other officers, and when he found out about the election fixing, he was mad about it. His fear of the Cylons (who represent the Muslims) was not institutional based paranoia (what’s the purpose of a military if there’s nothing to fear?), it was based on the wisdom of a man who understands the nature of the world.

Wow, I was completely not expecting it to turn out that way.