Ah...the joy of rediscovering old TNG episodes on TNN...
Worf's stuck in the prison camp of the Klingons who were captured at Khitomer. He's talking with the head Romulan who's trying to explain why he did what he did.
At one point he makes a comment that Klingons and Romulans have ALWAYS hated each other and that there has never been peace between the two.
Does this line disprove the Alliance Theory of explaining how the Romulans got Klingon designs?
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
they could have had a political and military alliance without liking each other, or really having peace. it's possible that they looked at each other, saw that the federation was bigger threat than either of them and a romulan said "hey, our ships suck. if you give us d-7's and their design, we'll give you cloaking devices". the klingons of course say "hell yeah, motherfucker". they never stopped fighting or hating each other, but they relized that it was better to help each other a little than be smashed by starfleet. after all, if you are killed by the federation than you can't enjoy killing your racial enemy the klingons/romulans (depending on whther you are a romulan or klingon, respectively).
--jacob
[ December 02, 2001: Message edited by: EdipisReks ]
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
"The enemy of my enemy, is my friend. At least, for now."
Posted by The Red Admiral (Member # 602) on :
As well as racial hatred I think distrust is the key factor between the two powers. In later years the incident of the Khitomer Massacre being a key event, as well as skirmishes like Narendra III, and the fact that the Romulans saw the Klingons join forces with the Federation, their bitterest rivals.
If there ever was a treaty or an 'Alliance' between the Romulans and the Klingons it was in the very early days, long ago. But on the other hand who's to say designs and technology weren't stolen, rather than shared due to a treaty?
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
I don't believe there was ever a Romulo-Klingon alliance, anyway. IIRC from "The Enterprise Incident", it was just a Federation report that claimed such. It's entirely possible that that was just something the Feds were guessing, in order to explain the fact that the Romulans seemed to have Klingon ships.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Though I'm not willing to go quite that far, as I recall Spock doesn't make any speculation about the origin of the Klingon ships in Romulan hands anyway. Just "Intelligence reports Romulans now using Klingon design." As I recall.
[ December 03, 2001: Message edited by: Sol System ]
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
The question is not about the nature of the Alliance. I'm sure that if there was an Alliance, it was not a very buddy buddy thing by any stretch of the imagination. But I think Toketh's line about there never having been peace between the two would include any alliance, no matter how brief and rascist.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
The "never peace" line could also be propaganda specifically designed to make the achievements of the prisoners look all the more impressive. Perhaps the older people had a reason to teach this to the youngsters.
Also, an alliance between one Romulan faction and one Klingon faction would not disqualify such a statement - we saw such an alliance during the Klingon civil war, and hints of it all across the preceding TNG episodes, although officially "the Romulans" still hated "the Klingons" and vice versa. Perhaps such factional alliances are actually common in the history of the races, and since they have never stopped the overall fighting, they are dismissed in history writing.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
Well, nationalist propoganda always promotes a lot of inaccurate statements. I'm sure people have strong things to say about Iraq, despite the fact they used to be very much on our better side.
And an uneasy alliance doesnt really equal peace. The USSR and the US both fought Germany in WWII, out of necessity. Once that conflict was put aside, we began a long cold war.. and most people would say the US never had peace with the Communist USSR.. even though we shared that agenda back in the day