Was Eddington the wrong leader for the Maquis?

[Yukaphile]

Inspired by the discussion taking place on the other thread. I think the consensus seems to be Eddington had big flaws and made the situation worse for personal reasons not related to the Maquis so much as his own hero complex. That said, would somebody more moderate have suited them? What did they think would be the end result to what the Maquis were doing? It was always going to involve the Cardassians crossing the line where they had had enough, especially given they themselves were the victims of an unjust and unprovoked invasion. That served as a great moral high-ground rallying cry to join the Dominion, and the Maquis helped make it possible by further escalating the conflict. I could understand wanting to "sleep with a phaser under your pillow," as Nechayev had put it, but she was 100% right when saying they were escalating it to an unreasonable degree, clinging to old hatreds and fueled by nationalistic fervor.

[Winter]

For me I think the Maquis were always going fail in their task as they had few leaders who were skilled in Gorilla Warfare, Thomas Riker and Hudson were both thinking like Military leaders who had several resources to call upon if something went wrong. If the Maquis were to survive they would have needed someone like Kira to lead them, someone who was use to hit and run tactics and getting by with what little they had and would have needed help from the Federation to put political pressure on the Cardassians to give them their homes back.

Keep in mind that people like Picard were instrumental in helping the Bajorans in getting rid of the Cardassians. The Maquis, while they were in the right to want to have their homes back and Not be murdered for the crime of entering the Cardassians line of vision, there was no way they were going to win, at least not in the short term.

Their first few leaders were little to no help in this battle, the Bajorans couldn't help as they were still recovering from their war with the Cardassians, and Eddington help was hampered by his unneeded rivalry with Sisko which got the Federation involved by having them come in on the Cardassians side when they were, for the most part, natural.

It didn't help that Eddington solutions were all short term and didn't prepare the Maquis if something greater came after them. Now in Eddington's defense there wasn't much anyone could have done against the Dominion and the Maquis would likely have been destroyed by them no matter what.

However, the issue here is that the Maquis were already being taken out when Sisko decided to take things to the next level and beat Eddington at his own game by bombing/poisoning Maquis worlds. And that was when the Defiant was crippled and not working at full capacity, imagine what would have happened if the Maquis went up against the Enterprise.

We may all like to poke fun at the Enterprise crew but they have proven, time and again, that they are every bit the equal to the Original Enterprise crew and the DS9 crew and they have the most advance ship in the fleet.

Eddington had an advantage against the Defiant as he had worked on that ship and was there for able to plant that virus on her and new how she worked so knew where to hit her. He would have no such luck against the Enterprise or even Voyager. And remember, Star Fleet were pulling their punches. Even Sisko's bombing was him playing with the kid cloves as he was just trying to get Eddington and didn't care about the rest.

To answer the question, the best choice for someone to lead the Maquis would have been Kira or someone like her and the Maquis needed to change they tactics. Stop thinking in terms of, get the Cardassians off our worlds and instead, make it to much of a hassle to keep our worlds and try to get the Federation on our side.

Had Eddington NOT deliberately antagonized Sisko and had instead try to remain on somewhat friendly terms with him, had stopped attacking Federation ships who were sending aid to the Cardassians AND gotten someone who could teach them Gorilla Warfare then the Maquis might have won. In about 50 years or more.

Chuck will likely cover this himself when he gets around to reviewing Eddington's betrayal proper and maybe even in a Eddington Character video as I think he really deserves one. But as it stands, as someone who spends my days thinking up entire worlds and wars are fought, from my POV, no matter how you slice it, the Maquis were doomed from the moment they began their war. They were alienated any and all possible allies and had no longer term solutions in place should forces like the Federation or worse come into the battle against them.

Eddington my have thrown gasoline on the fire but no matter what, the Maquis were doomed from the start.

[Yukaphile]

And that's actually quite ironic given that Kira was trying to be the voice of reason and in the end, seemed to have disavowed the Maquis come Season 5, while she was initially sympathetic, I think like me she realizes they crossed a point that went too far.

This is another thing I take issue with the Maquis for. They really were clinging to a fantasy. Sisko was right to say it's not so simple they can go back to their homes and they need to accept that. It's why I seriously think they should have just taken the sweet deal and resettled. And I tend to think the Maquis were great at winning in the short term, but failed to see what the long-term consequences would be because, again, they just wanted to go back home, failing to see how much that had changed as they were sold false promises by a man who had not even grown up in the disputed area of space. In his own way, Eddigton was a lot like Dukat. Big on rhetoric and grandiose displays, short on substance.

I don't get the sense the Bajorans would have helped once they were back on their feet anyway. As much as I take issue with this, I gotta agree with those who say the Maquis were on their own. That said, you still have to respect the rule of law if you're gonna strike out on your own. And that wasn't my point, my larger question was if Eddington was the wrong leader? That they needed somebody more moderate, not a fanatic with hero fantasies. His help basically amounted to blind idealism over pragmatism. And Kira is hardly a "moderate."

Eddington was on DS9 for the entire time the Dominion was a threat. He knew they wanted to expand into the Alpha Quadrant. All they cared about was their own little isolated bubble of the world, and not anyone outside it.

It really seemed by that point the conflict had escalated so much, that Starfleet was sending a whole fleet in to the zone now, precisely what Dukat had feared back in "Defiant." Eddington also struck me as a damned hard-liner. He stole replicators meant to feed starving populations, and then flat-out threatened Starfleet to stop interfering. That set the tone for his leadership style. Again, like Dukat in his own way.

Does anyone deny they were?

Actually, in "For the Uniform," he is shown to be quite adept at using guerrilla tactics on Starfleet ships, most likely given his background, further proving what a serious threat they had become to the Federation. Eddington is a bad leader when he's motivated by racism and sees himself as the "good hero" fighting the "noble battle" against the "evil" Cardassians.

I dunno, Kira was a good soldier, but she's an extremist in her own way. That said, as I pointed out, she had finally come to disavow the Maquis in the later seasons. That should tell you how fanatical they had gotten.

I still think putting so much pressure on the Cardassians wouldn't have stopped Dukat from trying to seek out an alliance with the Dominion. But yeah, deliberately antagonizing Sisko and the Federation and unarmed civilians with his racism and threats and hard-line views to satisfy deep-seated psychological needs set the tone, as I said. He wanted to wipe out every Cardassian down to the last man, woman, and child and take over their territory.

That's the tragedy of the Maquis. Still, I wonder what Chuck thinks of us debating all this? I wonder if he'll mention any of it in his vids? Then again, he's been a fanboy since the 1990s, so I really doubt it's something new he hasn't heard a thousand times over before.

I can agree they were doomed from the start, which is why it would've been nice not to cling to religious mumbo-jumbo and actually leave the land. Even Picard was talking about how sometimes you need to make sacrifices for the greater good, and while the Indian chieftain made claims about how he could see that, they never struck me as anything more than being selfish. They were doomed the second those natives inspired others to stick to their homes even though they knew it meant what would happen and had a better alternative elsewhere.

[CharlesPhipps]

I think the Marquis "sweet deal" is something that is overstated because the Cardassians showed repeatedly that they weren't willing to abide by what were done as peace treaties. We have Bajor to illustrate what the Cardassians thought about the negotiated sovereignty of Bajor as they tried to take back the planet numerous times under dubious pretexts. The Marquis also successfully drove the Cardassians back multiple times and if not for the Klingons overthrowing the Democratic council, maybe could have negotiated a better deal with them.

The Klingons and Dominion were game changers.

A bigger issue is, to me, why the Federation abjectly refused to acknowledge them as a sovereign power in their own right.

[Yukaphile]

Because they weren't a sovereign power? Eddington would have gone full-blown Fascist against the Cardies and kicked them all out. That was proven. So the Dominion was his much-deserved slap in the face. While Cardassian imperialism played a part, I've said over and over that unless we had actual proof the humans were the first settlers, then the Cardassians absolutely had every right to be there. Hell, it is MORE likely the humans were recent newcomers, given how old the Cardassian Empire is and just how recently humans had gone into space. So, this just strikes me as trading Cardassian imperialism for human imperialism. No one wins.

[Thebestoftherest]

Wait Yukaphile I need to asked you a question, does Eddington cares for Maquis and their political strife or does he see them as a ladder for him to rise on?

[Yukaphile]

I think it's both, tbh.

[Yukaphile]

He cares about them and their struggles, sure, but he also cares just as much about being a heroic leader.

EDIT: Aloo, woo-hoo! Six thousand posts!

[Winter]

Wait Yukaphile I need to asked you a question, does Eddington cares for Maquis and their political strife or does he see them as a ladder for him to rise on?

A little of A and a little of column B. I do think he cared for the Maquis, he did give himself up to save them from Sisko's wrath but at the same I think he also wanted to see himself as the hero of the story. Eddington did likely start out wanting to help the Maquis for good reasons but as time went on and he continued to do a job that he was clearly unhappy with he likely began to see the Maquis as a way to escape a life he had grown to hate.

Same thing with the other Maquis leaders we meet in DS9, all are someone who have no real family or is so estranged from the family they have they might as well not have any family and are all married to a job they've come to hate for deeply personal reasons.

Eddington was just the most extreme in his methods and was the most adept at making the Maquis a serious threat to not only the Cardassians but to Star Fleet as well. Like I said in the other Eddington forum, Eddington had likely already pictured Sisko as his nemesis and said the one thing that would get Sisko to come after him personally.

Like Dukat, Eddington is not someone who can be so easily summed up as good or evil, he did escalate things beyond what was needed and he did push things to far by unnecessarily antagonizing Star Fleet and Sisko. But at the same time, he did try to make life better for the Maquis while asking nothing from them in return and he did give himself up when he realized that he was only going to make things harder for them.

That's the great thing about DS9, characters are more complex and nuanced which helped to make things more morally grey. I may think that Eddington was a idiot for what he said to Sisko but I still hold that he was very well written and that he is one of the most underrated antagonist in all of Trek.

[Yukaphile]

Well, tbf, he did drive the Cardassians to the Dominion. Right alongside Chancellor Gowron and the Changeling shapeshifter.