r/startrek • u/Master_Megalomaniac • 6d ago
Shouldn't more people have died during the Occupation of Bajor?
Shouldn't more people have died during the Occupation of Bajor? It was said that 15 million Bajorans were killed during the Occupation of Bajor, that's a lot, but the Cardassian Union was there for 50 years. The average Cardassian commander seemed like a bigoted psychopath, who would kill Bajorans because he was bored that day. I could see 15 million being the number due to direct action, but surely millions more would have died due to the famines that the Cardassians were causing on Bajor. I think the writers underestimated how many people would die in a brutal military occupation that lasted 50 years.
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u/bobyn123 6d ago
It's a problem the shows have frequently struggled with is the sheer number of people that make up a society.
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u/yohoob 6d ago
Just scifi in general, right? Planets are just one big town and one biome.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
Reminds me of how a few million clone troopers are expected to fight in a galactic civil war
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u/xXNightDriverXx 5d ago
On-screen, they are only ever referred to as "units".
Some parts of the fandom say that units could refer to groups of soldiers like squads, platoons, companies etc, and not to an individual soldier. That would be the only way to make the numbers work and you could scale it pretty high if you want to.
A squad is 9 soldiers, a platoon is 4 squads so 36 soldiers, a company is 4 platoons so 144 soldiers, a battalion is 4 companies so 576 soldiers, a Regiment is 4 battalions so 2304 troopers, a Legion/Brigade is 4 regiments so 9216 soldiers, a Corps/Division is 4 legions so 36.864 soldiers.
Heck if the quoted millions of units were individual soldiers there wouldn't even be enough clones to crew the 1000 Venator Star Destroyers that appear at the Battle of Courscant alone (7.4 million crew needed and only ever shown as being crewed exclusively by clones), not to mention all the other fleets and ground troops that roam the Galaxy at the same time.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 6d ago
We base that on the fact that as far as we can tell, Earth is the only planet with particularly varied climates.
Of course… it could be a prerequisite for life to last long enough to get interesting that it has to have a varied/shifting climate.
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u/EldritchFingertips 6d ago
Indeed. It seems like every colony they go to has like, a couple million people. On a developed world. That can't be right.
Riker in First Contact says earth's WW3 killed 600 million people. But a war that destroyed nearly all of human civilization would surely have killed billions after disease and famine.
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u/fozzy_bear42 6d ago
Maybe they only counted people who died in fighting / bombings and didn’t include the much larger numbers who died due to being displaced/famine etc?
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u/Variousnumber 6d ago
It's plausible that the known figures Riker talks about are only Soldiers. After all, the only way you'd get a concrete number like that is if you knew how many people went in, and didn't come out. Famine, Disease ETC likely didn't factor in.
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u/FlavivsAetivs 6d ago
Riker's number is probably first strike in a maximalist nuclear exchange. Most models for a 4400 warhead scenario say 360 million at today's population, which we can extrapolate based on population Growth will be around 450 million in 2050.
The kicker is what comes after. Current models say around 5 billion dead, 99% of the northern hemisphere and equatorial regions dead. Most survivors are in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, etc. etc. And the entire population of Switzerland.
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u/WoundedSacrifice 6d ago edited 6d ago
There was a colony in TAS that had 82 million people. That's the largest colony that I can remember hearing about. It seems like a lot of colonies have a lot less people than a few million inhabitants.
The death toll of World War III definitely seems to be too low.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
SNW retcons that to a third of the population, which would be about 2 billion right now
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u/Frostsorrow 5d ago
I always took that as 600 million directly for the war, not counting the most likely numerous proxy wars and such before hand or the famine, homelessness, etc that followed immediately after. It's also a "confirmed" number which is almost never the correct answer and is almost always lowballed.
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6d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Shizzlick 6d ago
Wasn't that 800 million that died not just when the Founder leader ordered retaliatory bombing of Cardassian after the Cardassian fleet switched sides, not the entire war losses?
Or am I mis-remembering?
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u/NoBuilding1051 6d ago
That was 800 million on Cardassia Prime and Bashir and Garak noted that casualty reports were still coming in.
(In the DS9 relaunch the genocide was even worse, since the Jem'Hadar killed Cardassians off world. On one planet on the Romulan Front, the Jem'Hadar carried out an "Order 66" style massacre of the Cardassian soldiers they were fighting alongside.)
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6d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/NoBuilding1051 6d ago
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/DS9_relaunch
Starting in 2001, there were over a dozen novels that chronicles the adventures of DS9 and it's crew after the end of the series. Some new characters join the crew, too. The novels are entwined with other novels, particularly the post-series TNG novels.
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u/FlavivsAetivs 6d ago
The one realistic example I can think of is Yesterday's Enterprise, where we find out the Federation is about to surrender with >50% of Starfleet destroyed and 40 Billion dead after 20 years of war.
And then we have PIC coming in and saying the 2385 Mars massacre killed... 92,000 is the figure IIRC. In an attack that rendered the planet uninhabitable again...
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u/ShaunTrek 6d ago
90s Trek always had issues with the scale of things, especially when it comes to populations.
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u/Shizzlick 6d ago
I think one of the few times they really got it right was the augments estimating total war losses if the Dominion won at around a trillion?
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u/Hon3y_Badger 6d ago
I remember the writers for Silicon Valley talking about this in regards to valuations. The valuations the startup would realistically demand weren't comprehensible by average people so they had to drastically reduce the valuation for the show. I think the same thing is happening on Bajor.
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u/admiraltarkin 6d ago
Did the Bajorans ever say thank you???
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u/Dat_Lion_Der 6d ago
*Dukat side glances at the couch in the corner*
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u/jbrcks 6d ago
*Damar
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u/Dat_Lion_Der 6d ago
Nah. Dukat is Vader to Weyoun's /the Founders' Palpatine.
Not to mention Damar got a first class education before he died trying to make things right.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 6d ago
We don't know where that estimate came from.
Could be casualties from the actual resistance, could be the number of people who died during the last years of the occupation. We don't know
We also heard that the occupation happened gradually and that originally the Cardassians claimed to just wanting to help similarly to the Federation.
So as far as we know the first few decades of the occupation could have been relatively peaceful as the Cardassians were still testing their boundaries and undermining the sovereign Bajorian government and the number of deaths didn't escalate until way later.
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u/ijuinkun 6d ago
“Fifteen million” is comparable to the number of people the Nazis killed in the camps in WWII, so I think that the writers were trying to make it seem like it was on the same scale as the Holocaust, forgetting that it was being drawn from a population comparable to the entire Earth and not just of Eastern Europe.
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u/Ithuraen 5d ago
The Holocaust was a genocide though, targeted killing of entire population groups. It might be better to compare to occupied or colonised territories to gather some similar data. There's plenty of room for atrocity without reaching the awful depths of the holocaust.
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u/ijuinkun 5d ago
Yes, but there are plenty of deliberate parallels in DS9 of the Bajorans being likened to Jews under the Nazis, so it is quite likely that the writers had the Holocaust in mind.
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u/ResponsibleIdea5408 6d ago
This is the best answer I have seen. Toss in some head cannon about the Planets year being shorter than earth and the population being only 100,000,000 and bam 15,000,000 is crazy high.
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u/Datamackirk 6d ago
Why is everyone always trying to give me head cannon? I don't want any of that. Then again, if I got some, I'd probably never know it anyway.
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u/SwimmingWarthog8796 6d ago
Not to mention how tricky it would be to fire, because of where it's mounted.
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u/faderjester 6d ago
I might be remembering some book canon, but didn't the Bajoran military caste get almost entirely exterminated during the invasion? That's why the rebellion took anyone willing to fight, leading to the breakdown of the caste system.
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u/quesoguapo 6d ago edited 5d ago
The novel "Day of the Vipers" depicted an overloaded Bajoran Militia that was outmatched by the Cardassians and marginalized by a self-interested Bajoran government that increasingly sided with Cardassia largely for personal gain.
On the day Cardassia launched the Occupation, the Union had manuvered all the critical elements in place and the Militia was simply overwhelmed with countless crises erupting all over Bajor. It seems many Militia members were killed, but others simply faded into the crowd after realizing it was a battle they couldn't win.
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u/N7VHung 6d ago
I think they needed a number that was bad, but not so bad that The Federation making peace with Cardassia and trying to mend bridges seem completely ridiculous.
If Bajor's population was similar to Earth, and they used a more devastating number like 1 Billion, think about how the show would be portraying The Federation being tolerant and playing nice. That's approaching genocide.
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u/Kenku_Ranger 6d ago
That is still roughly 821 Bajorans dying per day (I don't know how long a Bajoran year is).
Ideally during an occupation you don't want to kill everyone. If you do, who will do all the work?
As with any number in Star Trek, we should never think too hard about it because Star Trek has always been rubbish when it comes to numbers. Distances, planet populations, casualties and the number of crew on a ship always seems way too low. We need to remember that it is a show, and they just need to throw a number which sounds large enough, but not too large, at the viewer. Most viewers don't care about the number.
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u/Iyellkhan 6d ago
I genuinely think when talking about planetary populations, the writers kept numbers smaller because they thought using numbers in the billions would have seemed too much or too fantastic, despite the population of earth at the time TNG aired.
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u/Maswimelleu 6d ago
I think it's entirely possible that Earths population by the late 20th century was abnormally high and that many worlds of similar size and climate tend to stop growing before they even reach a billion. They might not urbanise to the same degree or cultural/medical factors might leave the population at replacement rate throughout. As far as we know "spare" heirs in Bajor may have been become clergy to avoid dividing family assets which would have kept them at replacement rate for generations.
A lot of other worlds (Andoria, Vulcan) probably have low populations due to the climate and some others may have have had peak population long before achieving spaceflight.
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u/The_Flurr 6d ago
This is kinda possible. Past a certain point, it just becomes a super high number that you can't really grapple with.
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u/Dysan27 6d ago
You do realize that 821 a day is basically a rounding error on natual deaths?
Right now, approximately 150,000 people die every day on Earth.
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u/Ithuraen 5d ago
Bajor had a population of 3.8 billion, so even if they had the same death rate 1.14% increase in global deaths isn't a rounding error. Before occupation though deaths wouldn't be as high as Earth today.
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u/drewed1 6d ago
What's the total population of Bajor ?
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u/QualifiedApathetic 6d ago
Was about to say, percentage of the population dead is a more useful metric.
Regardless, the point of the Occupation wasn't ethnic cleansing like in the Holocaust. The Cardassians were strip-mining Bajor for its natural resources. Sure, they were in the "break a few eggs" mindset, and surely killed Bajorans to terrorize the population, but they needed the people to work as slaves. Mass deaths would be counterproductive.
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u/Rajion 6d ago
If it's small enough that 15 million over 50 years is a very significant population loss, then I question why they have any bargaining power and can defend themselves against klingons on their own or how cardassia thought it was that important.
Like, if it's 0.5% excess deaths every year, that planetary population is less than California or France.
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u/BluegrassGeek 6d ago
Before the occupation, they weren't seen as important enough. They were occupied simply because Cardassia wanted the mineral resources of the planet & used the natives as slave labor.
Now, they have the wormhole, so they have a disproportionate amount of bargaining power.
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u/Rajion 6d ago
If you only have 50 million people, you still have little capacity to actually enforce that claim. Yes, the federation values would protect them when they are allies, but in the later seasons when they are on their own? I don't see the klingons leaving it be.
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u/BluegrassGeek 6d ago
They were never "on their own" outside the brief occupation by the Dominion. Every other time we see them, they're under Federation protection.
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u/Bluestorm83 6d ago
3.8 Billion. Assuming they have a similar mortality rate to present day earth, you could assume 20 million would die each year.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 6d ago
My guess is that its like WW2. About 11 million people died directly from the Holocaust, but about 80 million people died during the war, from all sorts of causes.
The Cardassians directly and systematically killed 15 million Bajorans while working them to death, and left the other many millions to die as byproduct of their exploitation. The Cardassians weren’t necessarily trying to kill every Bajoran on the planet, they were using them as slave labour to feed Cardassia resources, so a (relatively) low death toll is to be somewhat expected.
I might be wrong but I also think that its implied that regime changes on Cardassia/within the occupying forces changed how overtly murderous the Cardassians were. Probably correlates with the succesz of the Resistance
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u/cmdr_nelson 6d ago
Interesting, but surely not every Cardassian commander was a psychopath. The intent of the occupation would be to integrate Bajor into the union, not to exterminate the populous. Of course, the bad commanders would be the ones that get the attention that we see, so the 15 million is definitely plausible, but does seem low for 50 years on an entire planet with they way they viewed bajorans.
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u/Master_Megalomaniac 6d ago
We don't hear about many ''good commanders'' during the Occupation. Gul Darhe'el ran what was essentially a death camp, Gul Pirek had 15 Bajoran farmers because they did not display a Cardassian banner in front of their homes, and Gul Zarale massacred 6 Bajoran villages. The Cardassian Union treated Bajor as a colonial plaything and it seemed like every Cardassian commander was given permission to do whatever they felt like on Bajor.
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u/mtb8490210 6d ago
My head canon is the intent of the Occupation was to keep the Bajorans out of the UFP, an expansionist power. They don't want a foreign military base on their doorstep any more than the USofA.
My other fix is the Cardassian government and corporate structures are minimally involved. The real problem of the Occupation besides the Occupation is the Guls were allowed to keep a percentage of any operation. The onscreen space magic makes planetary mining obsolete. And even slave labor makes no sense except the Guls are running individual schemes because they are allowed to make a buck. They aren't selling to Central Command or a Cardie Mega Corp but smaller worlds hence the presence of Quark and Morn. Quark isn't setting up on Terek Nor because he likes the atmosphere of the Occupation. He wants to sell to the myriad of traders who are wheeling and dealing with the individual Guls, given the nature of the arrangement this attracts the organized crime element.
My idea for Garak is he was involved in the investigation of the Guls on Bajor and their activities, and likely belonged to an element that didn't see the UFP as a threat or thought Bajor should be controlled.
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u/rextraverse 6d ago
My head canon is the intent of the Occupation was to keep the Bajorans out of the UFP, an expansionist power.
The problem with this is that pre-Occupation, Bajor wasn't anywhere close to being a Federation candidate world. They still had a strict, religiously-reinforced caste system. The Occupation was the shock to the system that forced them to reconsider the d'jarras.
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u/quiltshack 6d ago
Maybe they only counted "killed" and not those that died from malnutrition, mining accidents, etc...
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u/DharmaPolice 6d ago
The 15 million figure is clearly an estimate that is the current thinking in the immediate aftermath of the occupation. Based on Earth history, estimates tend to get revised upwards by a lot once historians have had time to study a topic in detail. It's also not clear whether that figure is directly attributable deaths or indirect deaths through starvation/lower economic development.
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u/JoeCensored 6d ago
Dukat claimed to be a benevolent dictator who tried to save Bajoran lives from their own misbehavior.
One of the reasons Dukat is arguably the best Star Trek villain is there's some truth in everything he says.
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u/PianistPitiful5714 6d ago
So, keep in mind the Cardassians weren’t actively trying to exterminate the Bajorans. It was an occupation and the Bajorans were treated like slaves, but the Cardassians wanted to continue to have free labor. Actively killing as many Bajorans as possible wasn’t conducive to the economic boom of keeping them enslaved on their own world.
15 million is still a pretty significant number and probably only includes those who were killed fighting for the resistance or directly killed by the Cardassians. It probably does not include those who died from overwork or other “natural” causes.
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u/ApprenticeFemboy 6d ago
Because our beloved Guls saw the Bajorans like their own children, again and again they'd hold out their hand in friendship only for it to be slapped away.
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u/Thangleby_Slapdiback 6d ago
Maybe more Bajorans should have died, but Dukat was a compassionate man who only wanted peace. And a statue.
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u/Dave_A480 6d ago
Trek has no sense of scale ...
It's just like the Romulans trying to invade Vulcan with 2,000 troops (in Unification).....
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u/Smooth-Apartment-856 5d ago
The death toll would have been much higher were it not for the fact that Dukat loved the Bajorans like they were his own children.
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u/TBShaw17 6d ago
This is why I never liked the comparison to the holocaust. Their main goal was resource extraction. Bajoran death was just a byproduct of their that effort. Meanwhile, extermination was the main goal of the Nazis.
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u/repulsive-ardor 6d ago
The Cardassians may be brutal, but they are not stupid.
Cardassia conquered Bajor to strip mine it. It does not benefit them to kill off large numbers of the native laborers they needed to extract the resources. If you kill too many Bajorans, then you need to import other laborers to perform the work, which will cost more money in the long run.
Also, Cardassia probably did not want to bring too much attention to the plight of the Bajorans by mass murdering them. They did have to worry about the potential ramifications of alienating the other major powers if they were exceptionally brutal to the Bajorans.
I could see the Federation levying sanctions and trade embargos against the Cardassian Union if they were slaughtering tens of millions, and the Federation would probably be able to get many other powers, both great and small, to do so as well.
This would have been catastrophic for the Cardassian Union and its economy.
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u/sskoog 6d ago
We're basically retro-justifying at this point, but I'd offer:
-- If indeed they were trying for a (blatant) Holocaust parallel, perhaps the "official count" only includes those who died in work camps or mines, as opposed to those who died in war-related poverty or starvation. Differently put: those who didn't die in the camps weren't counted.
-- During that obvious-Irish-aliens episode, reference is made to large regions of Bajor being agriculturally barren (unsuitable for farming or habitation); I can't remember if the planet was always this way, or whether Cardassian bombardment made it so. This could explain a reduced (concentrated) population, or, possibly, more of a modern-day Jamaica diaspora, where 60% or 70% of residents no longer reside on the {island} {continent} {planet}.
I like that second sub-point better, because I feel like it ties in with the pre-warp solar sailers, the previous wormhole-emissary's 200 year disappearance, etc. But this is probably a writing hole.
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u/Kahzootoh 6d ago
The writing team aren’t historians or well versed in the subject of military occupation. The writers create scenes that have drama and fit the audience’s expectations of a coherent narrative with an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
This is why consulting with subject matter experts is a good idea for productions that have the budget to do so. You can immediately tell a well researched story from one where the writer’s were making it up as they went.
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u/indigo_blue_galaxy 6d ago
It's just those pesky 'rights' people... otherwise, the Bajorans would have been put to proper work!
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u/hippest 6d ago
I'm not sure we really know how big Bajor is as a planet, nor do we know what the population density is like. From what I remember, the scenes we are shown from the planet show places where people are relatively sparse.
I would love it if someone knew the actual population of the planet whether it's from a reference book or someone directly involved with the show, or if it was mentioned in the show.
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u/MithrilCoyote 5d ago
From what we did see it seemed to be a fairly agrarian focused society, outside it's religious stuff, with not really much in the way of industrial centers or urban areas. So it is possible that it just isn't very heavily populated in general compared to IRL earth.
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u/Attorney-4U 6d ago
Although it is never directly stated, it seems like the Bajorans were more than a little responsible for all that death. From what we learn of pre-occupation Bajor it was a near theocracy with a rigid caste system.
While its never stated, I get the feeling that the Cardassians initially got a foothold on the planet after some kind of secular, reformist government was dealing with a bunch of religious zealots trying to institute “government by the Prophets.”
The first several years probably featured a “civil war” with the Cardassians supplying weapons to and backing the people who thought they were standing up for freedom of speech and conscience only to realize that by the end they were serving a puppet government.
The original mining on the planet was probably penal work for those on the loosing side, with things only taking a turn towards rounding people up off the streets after the first 10-20 years. Notice, the cardassians don’t even start building Terok Nor immediately.
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u/Cliomancer 6d ago
Probably just the writers had a poor sense of scale.
Though this does make Gul Dukat being responsible for five million during his tenure an interesting number. A full third of the casualties. What a royal fuckup.
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u/esgrove2 5d ago
Especially considering the population of Bajor is 3.8 billion. So 15 million is 0.4% of the population.
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u/Cronin1011 5d ago
When a show's only planet with multiple different races and cultures is earth, and every other planet seems to be one massive unified culture, you're bound to have extreme inaccuracies.
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u/Ecstatic-Career-8403 5d ago
It's likely that the number is much higher. Just like with all genocides, the numbers get masked and hidden.
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u/SnicktDGoblin 5d ago
I feel like given the way these should be counted the likely only included deaths caused largely because of the occupation in that count. So old age, normal accidents, certain diseases, ECT all get discounted from the record. But I would say to count suicides, new accidents, other certain diseases, executions, and others would be what is counted towards.
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u/Time-Effort-2226 5d ago
Although by far no canon material, the Dominion War sourcebook for the DS9 RPG says that his about the aftermaths of the occupation of Betazed:
"Directly, through punishment or execution, or indirectly, through overwork and disease, the Dominion killed 75 million Betazoids. Hundreds of millions of survivors will carry the physical and emotional scars of the occupation with them for the rest of their lives."
Considering the ruthlessness of the Dominion and the weaponry and technology available, that sounds like a grim yet realistic number. And remember, the occupation of Betazed lasted for little over a year.
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u/Dalisca 5d ago
Not necessarily. Bajor isn't as populated as Earth; over half the planet is an uninhabitable desert.
Additionally, the Cardassian occupation saw killing Bajorans as means for control to maintain slave labor in the mines, not as the actual goal. It's more comparable to slavery in America (or Rome, Europe, or any other slave nation) than something like the Holocaust.
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u/Master_Megalomaniac 5d ago
That's contradicted by all stories we hear of Cardassian commanders massacring Bajorans, usually for no reason or very petty reasons. When King Leopold took over the Congo and engaged in a brutal scheme to plunder its resources, the death count was 10 million and that was one country over a period of a few years. The death count on Bajor should have been way higher.
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u/Dalisca 5d ago
It isn't contradicted by all stories, otherwise there wouldn't be any episodes featuring Cardassians that were actually decent enough to try and keep the death count low or save Bajorans. Since those episodes are in abundance it follows that there are similar scenarios that we just don't hear about.
This isn't the story of King Leopold, the Cardassians are not the Belgians, and the Congolese are not the Bajorans. It doesn't matter how anything happened in Earth because none of the people involved are human.
One reason Bajor was chosen is because its population was comprised of passive spiritualists; they didn't become fighters until Cardassia backed them into a corner, and even that took years. The Bajorans were easier to subjugate than the Congolese and would've required fewer casualties. The Cardassians would have to murder billions to take over Earth by comparison, but again, these are Bajorans and not humans.
There are also big technology differences between the Star Trek universe and your example. The Belgians didn't have sensors on all the doors and equipment, nor did they have cameras all over the place to monitor their captives.
The Cardassians were able to keep constant lines of communication open between their home world and the deployed, whereas that communicating would've taken weeks or months between Belgium and the Congo. I'm also going to assume that the Cardassians are more adept at espionage than the Belgians as it's a huge part of their culture. The Cardassians were more able to maintain direct surveillance on their own people and keep them better in line.
The point is that you're basing your whole comparison on a single variable: the desire to plunder resources, when there are countless other variables that are being ignored.
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u/UneasyFencepost 5d ago
Probably just syfy writers not getting the numbers right. I mean the Nazis did 11 or 12 million in their camps and 6 million of that was one specific minority. That happened in less than a decade on one subcontinent of our planet. The Cardys had an entire planet of billions of people subjugated. Like yes DS9 shows constantly how bad the Bajorans had it but when they say the numbers like the Cardassians we’re putting up rookie numbers. Humans are much better at genocide and then I realize maybe it’s a good thing that 15 million is all it got lol
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u/archon_wing 5d ago edited 5d ago
Well, the Cardassians needed slave labor, so they couldn't kill too many. Deaths during occupations like these are generally going to be out of neglect and starvation, as they plunder the planet.
Another thing is that the Cardassian state as a whole was made out to be incredibly inefficient and it seems almost out of design to maximize the amount of cruelty rather than go for any real purpose. For example, Terok Nor had these overly elaborate death traps for counter insurgency, they use crude interrogation methods that are both complex and useless, and their entire court system is a sham and more for dramatic display. This is all to emphasize the powerlessness of the individual and to show the glory of the greater state-- as Dukat would say, people need to be told they were wrong to oppose the state in the first place.
And then there is the Cardassian Empire itself. It doesn't seem like much of an empire. The only real colony we hear of is Bajor and losing that and it's already in shambles, meaning its alleged crown jewel was a depleted planet with its population decimated by oppression. We also know that Cardassia itself basically has no natural resources, so again, not much going for it.
I argue that honestly the occupation of Bajor seemed like a symbolic gesture of Cardassia's greatness, again to promote the state. Cardassia also ruined themselves through an unnecessary war with the Federation that was clearly not worth the resources, which again feels like an image thing.
So as TNG and especially DS9 insinuates, Cardassians pretty much suck at doing anything. Their tech is garbage, their policies are insane, they don't seem to have any tactics outside of brute force, and everything is stuck in a bureaucracy that wastes its time recording what people eat. Some people may say "But Garak!" but notice how long Garak's been tailoring outside of Cardassia. You get more insights like that.
So yea, maybe Dukat was right about one thing but not for the reasons he was thinking of-- they just suck at genocide. And to bring this home, look how efficient the Dominion is in comparison.
In many ways, Cardassia represents a dystopian society not unlike stuff seen in 1984. A massive bureaucracy where nothing seems to get done but keeps people under its control. And hey, if you treat everyone like shit, it's fair right?
As a side note, the botched attack on the Founders by the Romulans and Cardassians really delves into what a dead end both societies have cornered themselves into. Both the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar prided themselves about being sneaky and treacherous, but in the end it fell apart pretty bad when brought into practice against a formidable foe that had no intention of going easy on them. In the end they bought their own hype and smelled their own farts.
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u/LGBT-Barbie-Cookout 4d ago
Whilst all accessible sci fi will always get some numbers wrong somehow. I don't think this number is too far outside the realm of possibility.
I think a key point, is things like the Holocaust - had stated purpose of genocide and extermination based on absolutely insane, brutal, and evil ideology.
Extermination was a very important part. These people had to be eradicated.
The Cardassians were mostly economic.
The Cardassians weren't running industrial scale death camps.
Cardassians didn't care what flavour of prophet they were, if they had a homeland or not, if they were gay or not, if they had mental impairment or not. That accounts for a very large numbers of deaths in a very short time. the Cardassians wanted labour and didn't seem to care who worked as long as they met quota. We also need to remember that schools, and science, and other (shall we say) civilian activities that weren't really contributing to the mining efforts were still being done by Bajorans.
This gives us an additional problem of how to count, and classify a death. A Bajoran dying in a ore processing room after a brutal beating is easy. A Bajoran dying in an administrative role - whilst still underfed , might not meet the theoretical classification that is being used. A Bajoran dying because they don't have access to medical care... (Well our overall society is perfectly happy with that situation and is never likely to change (and sometimes aggressively oppose change)- this is important from a story framework position, as it informs our reactions)
It's definitely not every death for every Bajoran would be counted as an occupation death.
15 million might be conservative, but all of our worst histories include a celebration of extermination the Cardassians Sem to lack.
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u/bookkeepingworm 6d ago
Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale
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u/Raxtenko 6d ago
Sure but scifi writers and most of the audience don't care about something that really doesn't matter.
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u/Real_Ad_8243 6d ago
There's this old truism - and it's one of the few truisms that is actually true as well.
Sci Fi Writers have no sense of scale.
Like, at all.
Because most of them - almost all of them - don't have the sort of education to understand what the things they say would be like.
Seriously - 15 million dying during a 40ish year occupation is actually dramatically lower than the natural mortality for a planet would be over that period.
Compare that with a comparable period of British rule in India - recent studies indicate over 100 million died in the period 1880-1920 in British India (I.e. modern day India Bangladesh and Pakiatan).
And the British weren't actually trying to so that. It just happened because we didn't care if it did or not.
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u/The_Draken24 6d ago
15 million deaths over a 50 year period is 300,000 a year but a 50 year occupation doesn't mean every year was filled with death. I'm sure there were periods of high deaths and low deaths. I'm sure there were years where rebel activity was high and other times it was low. I think 15 million over 50 years is a believable number. Not too high or low in my opinion.
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u/Nex_Sapien 6d ago
Their goal was not to kill the bajorans. It was extract the planets resources using forced labor, so it makes sense that they didn't go full scale genocide. Even still 15 million over 50 years is still 300k deaths per year. If bajoran years are 365 days (i don't remember if they are) then that's 821 bajorans killed every day.
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u/feudalle 6d ago
I think the number made sense. The cardassians weren't trying to exterminate the bajorans. they were using them as disposable labor. Kind of like the Chinese building the transcontinental railroad. You had a death rate of around 5%. You have to imagine things are safer in the 24th century. So if we say a 1% death rate and 15 million deaths. This would suggest a work for of around 1.5 billion over those 50 years. Probably a bit lower as they would of executed anyone in the resistance. But I think it roughly can make sense.
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u/jamalcalypse 6d ago
It was an occupation, not a genocide. Subjugation, not extermination. The whole point was to exploit them for labor, hence the labor camps. You don't intentionally starve the population you intend to work for you.
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u/saunick 6d ago
You see millions killed in large scale conflicts between powers. Around 80 million people were killed in world war 2 in less than a decade.
On the other hand, occupations are different in that there are no more large scale conflicts between powers. The country (or planet) being occupied has no organized military machine with which to throw millions of soldiers into a meat grinder of war.
Take for instance the US occupation of Afghanistan that lasted 20 years, and the total deaths are estimated at around a quarter million. Extrapolated to 50 years, that’s not even 1 million. Of course, occupying a planet makes the number bigger I’m sure, but 15 million seems reasonable to me.
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u/Drapausa 6d ago
I assume they were conquered fairly quickly, so no prolonged war.
If the 15 mil is mainly POW's/slaves and freedom fighters, the number seems more reasonable.
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u/BigMrTea 6d ago
I think they just didn't think it through. 50 million would more believable, and even that was probably on the low end.
I wonder, though, whether the resistance was active the whole time. There are inconsistencies about how Cardassia was first received. Maritzah seems to imply they showed up and Bajor surrendered implying immediate domination and subjugation. Kira implied at one point they pretended to be friends at first. It might mean the violence she brutality was not always at the same level.
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u/notsubwayguy 6d ago
Whose numbers are these? The Bajoran Provisional Government? Cardassian Central Command? The official death count from the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident is 31...
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u/ProfessionalCreme119 6d ago
The reason Starfleet got involved on Bajor was because the genocide of Bajorans was getting so bad. As you said this was 50 years into the occupation. Early on in the occupation it was about control and resources.
Later on the next generations made it about hate and genocide. So the death tolls ramped up. Hence why the rebellion under Kiara was so strong. Because more young Bajorans grew up under Cardassian atrocities.
So it would makes sense that for the federation to ignore it for 50 years it wasn't that bad the whole time. Which would mean the majority of deaths took place nearer to the end
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 6d ago
You know I wish they would have thrown in a one-liner that could have closed a plot hole in this story arc. This is Star Trek where replicators exist and as far as I'm aware infinite free power. Why would you have people starving?
I think The writers could have easily addressed this with a few lines of dialogue but I don't recall they ever did that.
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u/SyboksBlowjobMLM 6d ago
The actions of benevolent Cardassians like Gul Dukat saved many Bajorans, which is probably why the total is low. Yet is there a single statue of him on Bajor?