The Games Brew

The famous "Picard facepalm" meme is from the Star Trek episode "The Drumhead," aired in 1991, in which the crew becomes ensnared in a vicious spiral of national security paranoia, xenophobia, irrational suspicion and runaway confirmation bias and begins to carry out an ever-widening witch hunt against innocent crewmembers, baselessly and opportunistically accusing them of being "Romulan agents," stripping them of their rights and requiring them to prove their innocence. Picard, having opposed it all along, is eventually hauled before the inquisition himself, provoking the famous "facepalm" gesture. He then refuses to defend himself, instead making a general plea for the entire system of rights that is under attack. "With the first link the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." His opponent, the inquisitor, enraged by this, loses control and exposes herself as an authoritarian, and her spell is broken. The episode was originally an allegory for McCarthyism in United States history. It should be required viewing for European establishments today, now a decade deep into a reenactment of the very same pathology, extending a culture of national security suspicion over everything, converting every domain of civilian life into a source of "threats," stigmatising differences of political opinion as "disinformation," thuggishly smearing opponents as being "pro-Russian" and eroding the framework of fundamental rights that gives our societies any claim to being democracies in the first place. Those of us who know the importance of those rights will have lost count of how many times over recent years, listening to European political leaders lurch further into this psychosis, we have felt like putting our head in our hands in the universal gesture of dismay. RIP Patrick Stewart