Yes, the UN invited the principles of the television sci-fi program Battlestar Galactica to a forum that included discussions of human rights and the ethics of war. [Just in case you haven’t been watching BSG the show is the story of humanity’s last remnants, fleeing across the stars to escape a genocidal nuclear war that destroyed their home and most of the human race.]
Of course some of the comments I read on the stories about the BSG event slammed the United Nations for inviting actors and TV writers to speak about weighty issues like war crimes, saying it was another example of how the organization is a waste of time. But I think the UN deserves a lot of praise for holding this forum since it helps to shake the (American) image of the UN as just a collection of diplomats and policy-wonks collected in a fancy building on the East River and uses pop culture to bring their important work to a much wider audience (this forum was the second in the UN’s new Creative Community Outreach Initiative, the cast of Law and Order was on hand for the first).
Battlestar was an excellent choice for the Initiative, it is a show that has shaken the notion of sci-fi as ‘kid’s stuff’ and used their story of humanity’s plight as a way to tackle head-on such weighty issues as freedom of religion, reproductive choice and even the ethics of suicide bombing. Take for example the character played by actress Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Rosyln – one of Battlestar’s heroines. She was a sympathetic character, a school teacher who unexpectedly became president, yet she was also someone who ordered the summary execution of prisoners, forged an alliance with a known terrorist and attempted to rig her own re-election. They were actions, McDonnell argued that should be considered when viewing this world’s autocratic leaders. “People who are taking these actions — that are unacceptable — are sometimes in positions where they don't see the solution,” she said at the forum, presenting a much more nuanced worldview than the black-or-white, good-or-evil one popular during the past eight years.
Her co-star, actor Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama in Battlestar) took the UN to task for their use of the term ‘race’ in key documents like their Universal Declaration of Human Rights (he argued there is only one ‘race’, the human race, other racial terms are artificial ones that just promote division among people) and questioned why UN troops haven’t been dispatched to provide security in Mexico – which the United States has identified alongside Pakistan as the two most endangered countries in the world.
Not bad arguments, I’d say, from ‘just some actors from a sci-fi show’…
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