You don't have to be a Star Trek nerd to grasp the real point of this post. I don't count myself as one. For this bit of insight I'm going to retrofit something that Spock famously said in the 1982 movie The Wrath of Khan with one of the original series episodes.
No, it's not the episode in which Khan appears. It's one of the ones some fans consider the greatest episode of all: The City on the Edge of Forever. This one involves not just romance and saving the universe but time travel and a difficult decision to make in a form of galactic trolley problem.
This post will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen this yet and want to first see it, go ahead and then return to this post.
The story gets going pretty quickly when Dr. McCoy stumbles through a time portal and ends up saving a woman named Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins) from being run over in what turns out to be Chicago in the 1930s.
This is not an alien version but the real past with major consequences for the future.Those consequences soon come to light.
Here's the clip in which Spock shows what happens in this alternative timeline:
The way to hell was paved with good intentions
When Edith is spared the accident, she goes on to found a peace movement that is influential enough to prevent the US from entering WWII when it did. Germany succeeds in developing the atomic bomb first and wins the war. That's very bad with consequences that extend to the present of the Enterprise crew.
So even when Kirk declares, "I believe I'm in love with Edith Keeler," Spock responds, "Jim, Edith Keeler must die."
While he doesn't invoke the Vulcan saying, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ... or the one," as he does in the 1982 film, this is definitely what's understood. One woman's life cannot outweigh consideration for the lives of billions of people under a monstrous regime that is extended many years and retains influence on generations.
When war is the only moral option
Star Trek is set in a more enlightened future in which humans have advanced beyond engaging in war themselves, though they do still have to fight to defend themselves from hostile alien forces. However, as the show was actually produced in the early 60s, its creators and actors had first-hand familiarity with the horrors of WWII and the possibly-well-intentioned-yet-still-deluded people who were pushing to avoid war at any cost.
The thing about that "any cost" is that it can end up being an even more terrible price than the war itself, horrendous as it was. A regime bent on genocide becoming a world empire is worse, as they see from the way the sustained ramifications of the change in history.
In fact, there were highly influential people like this, ranging from Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler for what he thought was the assurance of "peace for our time" to isolationists who may have really had antisemitism as their motive like Charles Lindbergh. Then there were countless others who were still haunted by WWI and believed that anything had to be better than that.
They fell into the same mistake that Edith Keeler does, and in reality the US entered the war very late only when Pearl Harbor forced it to take direct action. Over those years of delay, Germany continued to gain ground, and the people of England suffered terribly. Plus the Final Solution got underway, and 6 million Jews were killed, along with 5 million other undesirables, including the Roma people.
In the early 1960s, people were well aware of this relatively recent history, and that is reflected in this Star Trek episode. It comes to the clearly logical conclusion that even a good person end up doing something devastatingly wrong and has to be stopped for the sake of the many and many generations. Though it breaks his heart, Kirk prevents McCoy from preventing Edith from stepping in harm's way, thus allowing her to die as predetermined and for history to take the right course without Germany winning WWII.
The moral imperative to combat the evil of terrorism
So what has this got to do with the present? In a situation in which one set of people feels justified in attacking another because they feel slighted or they just want what they have, or they believe in jihad, it is an untenable position to say that the attacked people cannot fight back because war is bad.
Yes, war is bad, but allowing evil to grow and flourish is even worse. Taking a passive stance, as so many Europeans did when Hitler extended his empire, make you complicit in evil.
That's the point of that episode. It was not acceptable to just let this alternative time line run its course. Kirk had not only allow an innocent woman to be killed but take an active part in preventing her from being saved. That was the only moral action under the circumstances. Refusing to do it would have been immoral, condemning billions just to be able to say, "I didn't kill anyone."
When people declare that the 9/11 attack was justified because the terrorists who did believed the United States needed to be taken down a peg, they are being immoral. An attack to kill thousands of innocent civilians simply because they are associated with an entity you hate is evil. Certainly, the United States went after the people behind it, and no one accused it of a war crime.
Dangerous naivete or just a double standard for Jews?
But when it comes to Israel, suddenly there's an impossible standard to meet of putting the lives of the attacking side ahead of your own men, women, and children. People seriously say that Israel may not bomb Gaza because civilians, including children are there. They may be as well-intentioned as the fictional Edith was, but what they propose is just as damaging.
"How can you (correctly) condemn the recent attack on Israeli citizens but say nothing about bombing civilians in Gaza.
Civilians whose food & water supply is cut off and who cannot escape.
HOW."
Chawla is presenting the false argument of two wrongs don't make a right here. That's not the case in war. Certainly, Israel will not rape, torture, and mutilate women, children, and civilians and make snuff videos of such events.
But to expect them to supply electricity and water to the people who continue to hold hostages they threaten kill on video and who continue to lob rockets at civilian areas and who slaughtered 400 cows to destroy the country's milk supply and who bombed the storehouses of food to create a shortage is frankly immoral.
It's literally empowering the people sworn to destroy you to do so because of some mistaken idea that Israel's own children's lives count for less than any other children's lives. Are they to be allowed to continue to perpetrate such atrocities unchecked because they use their children as human shields? That leads to more and more violence -- not peace.
Get the context right to understand the heinousness of what happened this past Saturday. Children were deliberately targeted and most brutally slaughtered, not to mention the women who were raped, and the other tortures and mutilations applied to the 1200+ victims of the most savage attack since the Holocaust.
And do not dismiss this with a naive thought like "Well, yes, that was terrible, but it already happened. Vengeance will not bring back the victims."
You think the worst is over? Think again. While this attack is definitely the worst to date, there's nothing final about it.
In fact, over 700 admitted Hamas supporters openly held a live meeting today on Twitter (X). I took a screenshot of the group the session called "I refuse to condemn the Palestinian resistance." Taking lessons out of Goebbels' playbook, they rationalize exterminating, torturing, and raping Jews. The Nazis claimed to have reasons for their genocide, as well.
What Churchill said
This is evil that must be checked. The Allies had to bomb Germany and harmed many civilians, including children, in order to win the war. It wasn't pleasant. They didn't relish the bloodshed, but they certainly celebrated the victory over evil forces, and this is the same situation in which Israel is at present.
This is why the rhetoric coming out of Israel right now that people are deliberately misconstruing as a call for genocide at worst or collective punishment at best is really an echo of what Churchill said during WWII.
"Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.
"If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.
"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, 'this was their finest hour'."
House of Commons - 18 June 1940
There is no ethical imperative to keep your citizens in danger of murder, rape, torture, and being taken hostage to avoid any civilian casualty on the other side. No one would ever dream of demanding of anyone other than Jews who have barely made it through the 20th century genocide attempts.
Espousing a false moral code to limit what people can do to check evil allows it to flourish and for more innocent victims to fall prey to it. That is not the way. It's putting the needs of the few ahead of the many, to the ultimate devastation of all. That's the real lesson here.
In the 1964 picture below, the computer is on the right, and her name is Melba Roy She went on to become Program Production Section Chief at Goddard Space Flight Center. The machine next to her was referred to as an IBM then.
Melba Roy does not appear in the film Hidden Figures, which concentrates its attention on just three of the African-American women who worked as computers in the space program, though she is mentioned in Margot Lee Shetterly's book on which the movie is based. The book covers a much longer span of time and more characters than the main three: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.
One female of color who doesn't make it into either the film or the book is Janez Lawson. In fact, it's hard to find anything about her at all beyond what has already been unearthed by Nathalia Holt in her book The Rise of the Rocket Girls. In truth, I found Shetterly's book a faster read, but there is more information in Holt's about women in the industry and how the role of computer became a sort of pink collar career.
In fact, though, you need to go even further back in time to see women employed as computers. And they were also focused on the stars. That's the topic of Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Sky.Working painstakingly through photographs of telescopic view of the heavens, these computers observed differences in spectra and worked out the classification system that shifts the alphabet around. The mnemonic device became "Oh be a fine girl, kiss me." New discoveries have contributed to new letter placement, leaving some question as to how to complete that famous mnemonic. I have to admit this book can be slow going, though it does have some nice photographs to illustrate the history, something that is also in Holt's book but missing in Shetterly's.
Another thing in those two books that Shetterly doesn't detail are some details about what the women were paid. One of the key women in the Observatory notes that she was only paid $1500 when men in comparable positions were paid $2500. Other women employed as computers were paid hourly, at the rate of 25 - 30 cents. This hourly rate must have remained the standard, as Holt says that's how the women working at NASA got paid. As a result, some of the women earned more than their husband because of the long hours they had to work.
In contrast, Shetterly's book always states their earnings in yearly amounts, and the film indicates that Katherine would not have been paid any more for staying later at work. It is possible that her pay grade was changed even though she was still called a "computer."
As the Hidden Figures book picks up the history of the computers in the 40s, it includes Miriam Mann, a contemporary of Vaughan who is described as a woman as petite and fearless. Mann repeatedly ripped down the paper sign designating a section of the cafeteria for the "colored" women. It would go back up, and she'd rip it down again until it stayed down.
Katherine Johnson with celestial Training Device
Pic from https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/katherine-johnson-at-nasa-langley-research-center
If you've seen the film, you'd realize how her defiance was translated into a somewhat different context with a great deal of dramatic license. For instance, Katherine Johnson achieved major recognition as the first female computer to get her name on a report as early as 1959 (published in 1960) that predates the movie. But as the center of the film, her character is subjected to Jim Crow practices in ways that didn't happen in real life. In the book, she is the "unflappable" Katherine who was never driven to an outburst about the bathrooms because she acted on the assumption that she had the right to use the restroom in the building in which she worked. There's no indication that she was prevented from doing so in the book. I
In point of fact, it was Jackson who experienced that kind of humiliation. But she only put up with it once (Shetterly 108). Once was enough to get her to rant about her situation (not in a room full of people) in front of one man who offered that she work for him. She accepted.
Another cool thing about Jackson's achievement as an engineer was not breaking the color barrier at the school for her classes, but serving as an inspiration for her children. It's a pity the movie didn't include this episode in the book. When Jackson's son won the Virginia Peninsula Soap Box Derby, he declared, "'I want to be an engineer like my mother'" (200).
Dorothy Vaughan gets a lot more coverage in the book than in the film, as she began her computer career about two decades before the the movie opens. She actually did earn official recognition as head of the West Ara Computers unit" but lost it at the end of the decade when the unit was disbanded. It's ironic to note that near the end of the book (264) Shetterly notes that Vaughan never learned to drive, making the carpooling scenes thrown in to show the closeness of the characters to have been historically impossible. The library book event is not in the book either. FORTRAN was actually taught to the employees, and the on-site classes were open to all races (139). But again, that's dramatic license for you.
Dramatic license isn't necessarily bad, one just has to realize that events were a bit different in fact. On the plus side, the film is very engaging and actually presents the story in a way that works well as an introduction of the subject that can work even for young children. They would not be subjected to hearing racial epithets and they won't even see a single character smoke, though the sixties was a time when most people held a cigarette at some point during the work day.
BTW the title's Star Trek reference is deliberately placed because Shetterly refers to the popularity of the show with the NASA set as well as with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She refers to his encouraging Nichelle Nichols to stick with her role as Lt. Uhura when she wanted to quite the show because he saw her as such a positive role model. That's something the actress recounted in her autobiography and even gets quoted the Wikipedia entry about her. Fictional characters can be inspiring, but sometimes real people prove equally impressive.
