Jarroc as a Betrayer Essay example -- Star Trek Defecting Essays Paper

Jarroc as a Betrayer Defection is a word which Americans have been taught to fear, from the days of Joseph McCarthy to Moscow on the Hudson. In our collective consciousness, we viewed defectors as both fascinating and repellent. Defectors from outside the convivial allied sphere of North America and Western Europe--persons from those Communist places, especially--served a useful purpose because of what inside knowledge they held, and at the same time frightened us because they carried the taint of the traitor, and the strange, cold foreignness of the "other side". The "other side," if not monitored closely, was coming to bomb us all, and break the world as we knew it. Defectors from the United States, on the other hand, had no redeeming qualities. They were those who had sold their own souls, traitors agreeing to spill the closely guarded secrets which would keep us safe from the Enemy to the enemies themselves! By the nature of the act, defection was inexorably intertwined with national betrayal. (I use the terms "betrayer" and "traitor" interchangeably, since they are synonymous in meaning. A traitor is one who has betrayed.) American defectors were the worst possible kinds of criminals, and worthy recipients of the death penalty. Yet then, as now and in all times, there are a myriad of contexts in which any given situation can be considered and defection, like most things, is a crime to some and an honorable act of conscience to others.Who is the ultimate judge of such actions? What determines which context the acts truly fall in? During the Cold War, when a Soviet defected, it was viewed very differently by officials in his own country than it was here. In the U.S.S.R, he... ... it for nothing," he whispers bitterly. "My home, my family....all for nothing." (12/30/89) Jarroc commits suicide rather than live with the pain of this stigma. Is Jarroc then a hero, or a defector-betrayer? He must necessarily be both. There is no sidestepping the role in which Romulan history will pigeonhole him, and no denying the reasons they have to do so. Yet among those persons in the Federation who knew his true reasons for divulging the information, he was a man of great courage. As Jarroc himself noted, '"One world's butcher is another world's hero." The same thing could also be said of the defector. Works Cited Smith, Greg. Interchange on The Defector. Interchange. 30 January 1996. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus. Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1988.. "The Defector." Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 3, Episode 58.