Axes of Evil and Reaping the Whirlwind

Cardassia and Israel, the Dominion and the US, and the destruction commitment

What remains of Al-Najma Square, Rafah, Gaza, April 4, 2025.

Art imitates life, or so the proverbial “they” have said. But really, isn’t it more accurate to say, “Art imitates life and life imitates art because powerful people lack the imagination necessary to see themselves without power or wielding it in domination over others?” People who get used to possessing wealth and power are truly boring. If they had any ability to think in counterintuitive and multifaceted ways before they rose to power, they’ve burned it out of themselves once taking on the mantle of conqueror. Because of that spirit-consuming evolution, the powerful are soulless, and those they align with become soulless as well. They can only imagine gaining more wealth and power for its own sake, or losing both in the midst of complete destruction. There is no in-between, for them, for their allies, or for those they attempt to subjugate.

The one parallel in art that is a gloomy reminder of the self-fulfilling prophecy of such thinking on the part of the United States and its white supremacist ally in Israel would be Seasons 5-7 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9). The story of the Cardassian Empire, the Dominion, the United Federation of Planets, and other worlds is the story of a powerful empire only committed to conquering and subjugation for its own sake. For leaders like one Gul Dukat (played by Marc Alaimo), every setback is a slight, every loss a betrayal, every compromise a pretext for war. Whether it was the loss of the planet Bajor as a colony — one Cardassia ruled for 50+ years while killing at least 50 million Bajorans — or the treaty with the Federation with colonies inside Cardassian space — all Dukat and many Cadassians saw was loss of their former glory.

Season 5 of DS9 is a roller-coaster ride toward war between the Dominion and the Federation, with Cardassia caught as a useful pawn. The Dominion of Founders — shape-shifting beings who evolved away from solid humanoid form — wanted to destroy “The Solids” because they craved safety above all else. At least, a safety that comes with iron-fisted rule and an autocratic need to oppress those not like them and to conquer or even destroy whole civilizations who could possibly compete with them. Cardassia in general, and Dukat specifically, saw in the Dominion the possibility of reclaiming its own lost glory, maybe even reclaiming its favorite colony in Bajor.

After seizing power in Cardassia and making his alliance with the Dominion known to the galaxy in the episode “By Inferno’s Light,” Gul Dukat broadcasted to Cardassia and to the rest of galaxy the following

Compare Dukat’s self-serving propaganda to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July 2024 speech to a joint session of the US Congress.

Netanyahu, like Dukat — both war criminals — pledged to destroy his enemies, with the help of his version of the Dominion, the US.

Both Dukat and Netanyahu imagine their enemies — the people they have oppressed and subjugated for generations — as terrorists and barbarians. They and their allies always represent all that is good in the world — they can never do any wrong.

As Netanyahu has said in one way or another in joint sessions with Congress, whether in 1996, 2011, 2015, or 2024,

Gul Dukat has no problem with his moral compass in justifying mass death with Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) in “Waltz” (S6:E11). This was months after his capture in the re-taking of Deep Space Nine, months after the Dominion and Cardassia went to war with the Federation, occupying Bajor and the space station in the name of peace. For context, Dukat is still reeling from his daughter’s death at the hands of his right-hand man in Damar, still barely sane from the loss of Bajor and DS9 and the pressures that came with having the Dominion as his ally. Him and Sisko have crash landed on a remote planet in the Alpha Quadrant’s Badlands, with Sisko injured during the crash. Dukat later nearly beats Sisko to death because he made an attempt to contact DS9 for a rescue (which would have also meant Dukat’s imprisonment).

Keep in mind, Cardassians slaughtered more than five million Bajorans in labor camps and in retaliations against “terrorism” during Dukat’s nearly ten years as prefect. But somehow, Bajorans were supposed to be grateful because he slowed the pace of murder against them.

Netanyahu took a similar tone in the months after Seal Team 6 took out Osama Bin Laden, at another joint session of Congress in 2011. Although more hopeful than he would be in his speech 13 years later, Netanyahu was just as narcissistic, just as self-serving, as Dukat in his justifications for his kinder, gentler rule.

Netanyahu, the man who grew up in both Israel and in the US, could also find a way to justify a land-grab, as if a historic link to a region can remain unbroken. As long as European-born and US-born Israelis say so, their so-called ties to the region gives them a claim to land that Palestinian Christians, Baha’i, Arabs, and Jews never left, while their ancestors spent up to two millennia living elsewhere.

The death toll since the 1948 formation of Israel and the resulting Nakba that initially displaced 750,000 Palestinians is difficult to pin down. Between direct conflict, the loss of land and livelihood, starvation, imprisonment and torture, poor sanitation, and disease, the death toll from the Israeli occupation in Palestine over the past 77 years is likely in the hundreds of thousands. But clearly, since Netanyahu launched gleefully into war after October 7, 2023 to slaughter Gaza and ramp up colonizing efforts and unchecked vigilantism in the West Bank, Israel has killed at least 50,000 Palestinians alone (that does not count the Yemeni, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and others they have bombed with US support since 2023).

But somehow, whether it’s Bajorans in Dukat’s teetering mind, or Palestinians in Netanyahu’s, oppressed folk are always to blame for their predicament. They are always too dumb and inferior to accept their oppression as the only peace they’ll ever have.

When Sisko asks Dukat, “So why do you think they didn’t appreciate this rare opportunity you were offering them, hmm?,” Dukat launched into another soliloquy.

“And you hated them for it,” Sisko interjects.

“Of course I hated them! I hated everything about them! Their superstitions and their cries for sympathy, their treachery and their lies, their smug superiority and their stiff-necked obstinacy.”

“You should’ve killed them all, hmm?,” Sisko asks, deliberately egging Dukat on.

“Yes! Yes!...I’ve known it! I’ve always known it! I should have killed every last one of them. I should have turned their planet into a graveyard the likes of which the galaxy had never seen!” Then, Sisko hits Dukat in the head, knocking him out, for the viewers’ and his own personal benefit.

Netanyahu in 2011 didn’t do any better in hiding his contempt for Palestinians, who by indigeneity, by history, and by cultural heritage, could easily argue a much greater claim to the region, the opposite of his own racism.

Netanyahu justified himself and Israel’s occupation, discrimination, segregation, exclusion, and death-dealing with the idea that it is the Palestinians who hate Israel, constantly conflating their rebellions and uprisings — Intifadas — with anti-Jewish racism.

What has yet to come to an end in Gaza and Palestine is genocide. And though the murdering isn’t over, Israel’s ability to sell itself as a permanent victim is. The US’ ability to sell itself as the moral and ethical compass for the world is over, too, and, like a mushroom cloud full of dead bodies, that standing vaporized at the atomic level. If these nation-states do not get their acts together and broker a lasting peace, and soon, the violence they have unleashed will come visit them. For such are the fates of evil empires and their close allies everywhere, past, present and future.

That’s what happened with Cardassia and the Dominion, anyway. The Federation and Starfleet joined up with frenemies like the Romulans during their war, and eventually infected the Dominion’s founders with a biological weapon. At the same time, as the Cardassians lost more and more territory and lives, the military turned against the alliance with the Dominion, and a planet-wide uprising on Cardassia Prime toppled the government.

In “What You Leave Behind” (S7:E25), the Dominion leader gathered all her remaining forces and used them to “exterminate” the Cardassian home world in retaliation for the rebellion. By the time the shape-shifter Odo (René Auberjonois) had healed the Dominion/Founders leader (Salome Jens) and convinced her to surrender, her forces had leveled nearly every major city on Cardassia Prime. Afterward, characters Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and the once-exiled Cardassian Garak (Andrew Robinson) had one final chat about the future, the last time the two friends would see each other.

“800 million dead,” Dr. Bashir says. Then, caught up in the total shock over the planet’s destruction, Garak says

When Bashir attempts to cheer him up, Garak scoffs and says

The reason why art can imitate this life so easily is because the playbook for all oppressors is always the same. To quote DS9’s main Bajoran character Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), “Everyone has their reasons — that’s what’s so frightening. People can find a way to justify any action, no matter how evil…you can’t judge people by what they think, or say — only by what they do.”

One cannot know for certain the fate of peoples or nation-states. But given human history, can one really think that such wanton destruction and dreams of paving over the bodies of dead people with resorts will not reap a whirlwind of implosion and destruction for the US and Israel down the line?