Alien Government

In Alien: Earth, Prodigy leader Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Weyland-Yutani leader Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) face off when Boy Kavalier hijacks a Weyland-Yutani spaceship filled with alien species.

On Alien: Earth (Hulu), which just ended on a cliff-hanger, some of the most interesting plot lines involve the companies who run the Earth in 2120 (about a hundred years in the future).
In the world of Alien: Earth, the planet is controlled by five mega corporations, just as it was run by all-powerful Weyland-Yutani in 1979’s Alien, 1986’s Aliens, and 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In the Alien: Earth universe, three other companies are mentioned (Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold).
However, the two companies featured in the series, are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani.
Prodigy Corporation controls Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America (plus planets Mars and Saturn).
These companies run the planet, and control all humanity.
There are no governments.
Regular people have no guaranteed rights.
The only goals are more profit, and power, for the companies.

Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is the owner of Prodigy.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) runs Weyland-Yutani.
They each are surrounded by servants (both real humans, and artificial beings), who obey (or seem to obey?) their whims.
In the opening crawl, for Alien: Earth, artificial beings are listed as three types: Cyborgs, Synths, and Hybrids.

Medic Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther) wants to go back to school, and become a doctor. However, Prodigy Corporation has other ideas. Joe is forced to continue his work contract, and remain in a military search and rescue team.

Living conditions on Earth are extremely depressing.
There seems to be a wide division between the rich and the poor.
The wealthy elite live in giant sky-scrapers where they enjoy decadent parties.
The worker class lives in tiny slum apartments that don’t appear to have kitchens.
In episode 2 of Alien: Earth, a group of very wealthy people are having a costume party.
(The party was organized to celebrate the purchase of a famous baseball once thrown by Reggie Jackson in 1977.)
In that same city, members of the military live in drab, dark spaces with few amenities, and hang out together on a roof-top. 

As I watched the series, I wondered if Alien: Earth is the future that the leaders of Russia and America have in mind for earth’s peoples.
Do they really desire a world in which only the oligarchs have autonomy, and in which most humans are subservient to them?

250 years after 1776, does the Right want us to go back to a version of North America (the 1600’s?) run by the Company of New France, the Dutch West India Company, Virginia Company of London, The Plymouth Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company?
George III, and the British government, took over the rule of the thirteen colonies when private companies weren’t able to give British royalty the tax profits that they expected.

Star Fleet headquarters in San Francisco as seen in Star Trek from Star Trek: the Next Generation onward.

In 1966, the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) told corporate sponsors that his show would be “Wagon Train in space.”
However, what he didn’t tell sponsors is that he envisioned an Earth in which class divisions, and racial divisions, were eradicated!
In the Star Trek world, the people of earth voted for a President.
It was a democratic (small D) society. 

Thinking back, many of Roddenberry’s scripts were very “woke.”
Perhaps, that’s why the show was cancelled after three seasons.
After Roddenberry died (in 1991), new show-runners introduced the Black Ops group Section-31, and major wars against alien races, to the Star Trek canon.

Captain Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) and Dr. Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriquez) are caught up in an ICE raid (in an alternate time-line's 2024), in the season 2 “Watcher” episode of Star Trek: Picard.

In season 2, of Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), Admiral Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself transported to an alternate time-line by the godlike alien Q (John de Lancie).
In one time-line, Earth is under a Fascist government that uses alien races (like Vulcans and Klingons) as slave laborers.
Season 2 tells the story of Picard, and his team, fighting to prevent this horrible time-line from beginning by traveling back to 2024.

While Earth in the Star Trek universe is a utopia, the Alien universe can best be described as dystopian: “an imagined state in which there is great suffering and injustice.”

In the first Alien film, Ash (Ian Holm), the only artificial being in the Nostromo crew, is beheaded by Parker.

It’s clear, in the first Alien (1979), that the Nostromo crew is not valued by Weyland-Yutani.
When they learn that their cargo ship is being diverted to investigate a mysterious transmission, the crew has no say in the matter.
They must check out the alien signal, or lose their salaries (or shares).
Later, Ash (the great Ian Holm) is revealed as an android.
Ash has obviously been placed on the Nostromo to make sure that profit is valued over human life.
Similarly, in Alien: Earth, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) chooses loyalty to Weyland-Yutani, and the transport of his dangerous cargo, over the lives of his crew mates.

The modified cargo containers that housed the “colonist/workers” in 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In Alien: Romulus (2024), the young mine workers (who we meet at the beginning of the film) are being forced to extend their work contracts by Weyland-Yutani.
It seems that the teenage “colonists” are trapped in an indentured servant situation.
They work under brutal conditions, and live in squalid, modified cargo containers.
Many of the parents (who brought them to planet LV-410), have already died from overwork and a toxic environment.
The older workers died, just as generations of immigrants died, building the United States of America.

Looking at world events, I guess that the future described in the Alien stories, is a lot more likely than the future described in the Star Trek stories.
Let’s pray that this isn’t the case.

In 1381, Wat Tyler (1341-1381), leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, demanded of King Richard II, that all hierarchy be abolished (except for the king’s lordship), and that serfdom be abolished in England.
The 14-year-old King agreed to Tyler’s arguments, but soon after, Wat Tyler was beheaded, and all agreements were rescinded.
People have fought for basic rights, and an end to hierarchy, for a very very long time.
How far have we really gotten in ending hierarchy?

Around 550 years later, on February 20, 1933, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, informed a group of 25 German industrial leaders that: “We are about to hold the last election. Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”*
Does American society believe in continuing our democratic system?
Can a democracy be maintained?
How much democracy will be permitted by our AI, and human, overlords?

*Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923-1941, by Susan Ronald, page 84 (2023, St. Martin’s Publishing group, Macmillan).

Ye Olde Story of Autocrats

Henry V (Kenneth Branagh) encourages his troops to conquer France, in the 1989 movie based on the Shakespeare play Henry V.

I recently read Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, in order to fill some serious gaps in my knowledge of British history.
Jones’ book is the story of British rulers from Henry I (who ruled from 1154-1189) through Richard II (who ruled from 1377-1399). 

I learned quite a bit in this book.*
First of all, I learned why Henry V (1386-1422)—a king not covered in the book (because he was a Lancaster)—fought so hard to reclaim French land in the Shakespeare plays.
I had never understood why Henry V was invading France in 1415.
I also learned more about the Magna Carta than I ever knew from my Indiana high school history classes.
During the 1960’s, Midwest high schools emphasized American history.

The Plantagenets fought to gain back land in France because they were from a royal house that originated in France.
The Plantagenet Kings and Queens only spoke the French language, not the English language, until the very late 1300’s.
For generations, most English Barons possessed land in both England and France, and traveled back and forth between the two.
As the Plantagenets conquered and reconquered Wales and Scotland, they wiped out the hereditary rulers in those places.

Prince John (Claude Rains) holds his very large scepter in 1939’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. There‘s no evidence that Robin Hood was a real person, but Richard the Lion-Hearted, and his brother John, were real Plantagenets.

The Magna Carta was a 1215 peace treaty between King John I (1166-1216) and his ruling class.
Its’ purpose was to protect the freedoms of Englishmen.
This document had a big influence on the thirteen colonies, and the American belief that rulers shouldn’t be autocrats.
Its’ main principal was that an English ruler was not above the law.
It also guaranteed due process of law, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, and trial by a jury of ones’ peers.
Of course, the Magna Carta was designed mainly for the upper crust, and it wasn’t honored by British rulers for many generations.
However, it was a start.

Doctors attempt to treat Cardinal D’Ambroise (Christopher Lee) suffering from bubonic plague in 2011’s Season of the Witch.

Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets covers the Black Death, the bubonic plague pandemic that killed the rich and the poor, and threw England’s economy into a tailspin.
Hundreds of thousands of workers died, and wages overall threatened to rise.
Therefore, King Edward III instituted the 1351 Statute of Laborers.
This law kept wages artificially low, and protected the political class, and the King (England’s biggest landowner), from suffering financial losses due to the plague.
One sentence from the law reads:

“If any man take more [than the prescribed wage], he shall be committed to the nearest jail.” (page 413 in The Plantagenets.)

This 1351 Statute which set wages for “saddlers, skinners, white-tawers, cordwainers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, tilers, shipwrights, carters, and all other artisans and laborers” reminds me of how COVID-19 was actually used to widen the inequality gap, making fortunes for the wealthy, and driving middle-class (and lower class) workers into poverty. 

In any rational world, the COVID-19 pandemic should have made wages go up, especially for workers engaged in health care and education.
However, while wages increased slightly in many industries after the pandemic, they increased at a much lower rate in health care and education, and haven’t kept up with inflation!
Most salary increases went to people in executive positions, and not to the average worker.

Getting back to the Plantagenets, the next ruler after Edward III (Richard II), faced the Peasants’ Revolt.
At the young age of 14, Richard actually held a face-to-face negotiation with the rebel leader Wat Tyler (1341-1381).
Tyler demanded that all hierarchy be abolished (except for the king’s own lordship), that the goods of the Catholic Church not remain in the hands of the clergy, and that serfdom be abolished.
Richard appeared to concede to his subjects, but soon after the conversation occurred, Wat Tyler was beheaded, and the rest of his rebel band was hunted down and killed. 

King Arthur (Graham Chapman) assaults a peasant (Michael Palin) in 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
“Help, help, I’m being repressed.”

A British film about a peasant during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, is currently in preproduction.
The proposed title is The Hood, and it’s to be directed by Paul Greengrass (the director of the Jason Bourne movies).
Benedict Cumberbatch has been mentioned as the possible lead.

By the time Richard II was 20 years old, he resolved to not be as conciliatory to rebels.
He reversed Edward III’s 1351 Treason Act, which had mainly limited treason to attacks on the King, the Queen, their children, and senior officials.
Richard broadened the law, in order to expand his executive power.
He decreed that all those who constrained the King, ignored a royal command, or basically annoyed him in any way, were now traitors to the crown!
This, and other actions, led to a civil war.
As Dan Jones put it:

“He had built himself up as an antagonistic private lord, rather than fulfill his higher duty to be a source of public authority. He had believed that kingship was about prestige and magnificence instead of leadership. And he had ended up with nothing.” (Page 494, The Plantagenets.)

Jack, 14th Earl of Gurney (Peter O’Toole) is quite, quite mad in 1972’s The Ruling Class, a black comedy about the British class system.

I began to realize, after reading The Plantagenets, that the English have been attempting to limit their rulers to just leading their subjects—and not terrorizing them—since the early 1100’s.
In doing so, Englishmen were way ahead of the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians, and the French.
No wonder, the men of the thirteen colonies rose up against George III in 1776!

It’s interesting that a person like Trump still believes that a U.S. President should expect absolute loyalty, and that leadership is mainly about prestige and magnificence.
He’s obviously never heard about the Magna Carta.
It’s also interesting that the U.S. Supreme Court would rule, in 2024, that Presidents are immune from criminal liability for committing fraudulent acts.
To many, that sounds like being above the law.

*In The Plantagenets, Dan Jones notes that, in 1269, Henry III forced the Jews of England to wear a felt yellow badge of shame (page 271). I also learned that Frederick II (Holy Roman Empire) made Sicilian Jews wear a blue T-shaped badge, and Philip II ordered French Jews to wear a wheel-shaped badge (page 272). Note: all page references in this memorandum are from the American 2014 paperback edition.