Viewing posts tagged power of the daleks
Posted by:
Jack Graham
6 years, 3 months ago
Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall's office. He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony. It can end their labour problems, their economic problems...
all their problems.
"It can do many things," agrees the Doctor, "but what it does best is exterminate human beings! It destroys them... without pity..."
He continues. And the machine speaks too.
"I - AM - YOUR - SER-
VANT," it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection. It says this again and again and again.
The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.
The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it's a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.
The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.
Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it's the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen's orders.
It turns to Bragen.
It has a question. The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen's own, the social-Darwinist that ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
9 years, 5 months ago
What follows is a substantially rewritten version of something I wrote AGES ago and originally posted at my old site. The original version struck me as woefully inadequate (and embarassingly gushy... which is a fault of mine) when I reread it recently.Is ‘The Power of the Daleks’ a parable about a democracy destabilised by fascists or about an authoritarian society destabilised by liberals, or even people who think of themselves as leftists? Well… the answer is, of course, yes.
If this is about the rise of fascism, there are some problems with it. Bragen works as a sort of fascist, scheming to replace a relatively soft regime with an authoritarian one which he will rule with an iron fist. But the presence of the Daleks muddies this, separating the barbarism of fascism from fascism as a political movement. The Daleks have always been symbols of totalitarianism so, when they turn on the astonished rebels, it makes it hard to see the rebels as analogous to the Nazi party. If the rebels are Nazis, it should be they who are persecuting the ethnic minority in the colony… and that’s the Daleks! And the depiction of fascism is inadequate anyway ...
