Star Trek is and always has been a progressive show that addresses whatever political issues are relevant to the current times through use of allegory. Anyone who denies this is simply wrong: this is an explicit part of Gene Roddenberry’s vision for the show, and he never concealed it. You can like if if you are a conservative, you can choose to ignore the political allegory, but you cannot deny that it is there or that it is intended. That being said, its not always a one to one and while its usually pretty obvious, there are definitely things in the shows which have no obvious real world counterpart, or have multiple, or perhaps were not intended to be allegorical at all but to serve other purposes such as narrative convenience, character backstory, or simply because the writers think its cool. Thus, while any political allegory you can suss out of Star Trek has a high chance of being intended, we cannot automatically assume everything is allegory and has meaning.
The Klingons in the original series were intended to be the Russians, and the Federation the United States. Thats fairly obvious and uncontested. I think said allegory falls apart in later series, but that was definitely the intent originally. The Cardassians are the Nazis. The Bajorans and the Maquis both can serve as metaphors for the Jews, the Palestinians, the Native Americans, and the French resistance that inspired their name. The Ferengi are capitalists writ large. But… who are the Borg?
I used to think that maybe they are supposed to represent Communism, which bothered me the Federation is supposed to be a utopian, post scarcity, socialist or at the very least highly egalitarian future version of the United States, and while communism is an enemy of the United States in our time, I felt having an alien race represent the spectra of communism so directly undermine the utopian vision of what the United States could be, since although the shows are rarely explicit about the political ideology of the Federation, its no money, no greed, benefits for all ethos definitely seems Communist adjacent despite its connection to the United States. Having the Klingons represent Soviet Russia is one thing, since that is a specific political entity who not all socialists and communist necessarily think is well meaning. Communism generally though portrayed as a foe seems to be a more pointed statement, and one that did not match the supposed politics of the show to me. But that did seem the obvious connection, since US propaganda against communism often portrays it as requiring all consuming conformity and a subduction of independence and freedom, just like the Borg. But if they don’t represent communism, what do they represent?
At this point I want to make clear that I have not read any political analyses of the Borg on Star Trek. I say this both because, maybe there is some obvious, well accepted interpretation of them I am missing. This should not be interpreted as me disagreeing with such, I’m just ignorant. By the same token, though, if what I am about to say IS the standard interpretation, well, then I want credit for coming up with it independently, even if the credit amounts to, “Yeah, duh, we all knew that.”
I think the Borg are actually suppose to represent the monoculture we are indoctrinated under in late capitalism through mass media and social pressure to conform. That was a big concern in the 90s, when the Borg were introduced, that mass culture was forcing conformity on people, that we were all being forced into the same boxy homes and the same tedious jobs and buying the same products and watching the same TV shows. Night of the Living Dead is about this, and the Borg are basically just zombies in space, with the added theming if technology, making them even more apropos for the comparison. You could probably narrow it even to American monoculture and its spreading over the world, bulldozing native cultures and appropriating elements into its own. Resistance is futile, your cultural and technological uniqueness will be added to our own, and so on and so forth. This does make the fact that the Federation, usually a proxy for the US, is facing them a little odd, but as noted, the allegory need not be 1:1, and the Federation itself is an idealized vision of the US, so it makes sense if one thinks that mass culture threatens the possibility of a utopian version of the US that you’d make a villain based around it, just like the Ferengi represent the threat capitalism poses to Utopia.
Honestly I thought I’d have more to say about this, but now that I have written it out it seems 1) plainly apparently true and 2) I don’t have much more to say since I didn’t watch any episodes in preparation for this, so I cannot really easily point to an example and say, “See?” I also suspect that this allegory probably does loosely hold for the danger they represent, but past their initial introduction it would not surprise me if they get used in ways that don’t track with this, particularly in Voyager. Since I am rewatching that now, maybe I’ll revisit this theory when I get to those parts of Voyager.
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