I came across Colony on Netflix, and I decided to watch a couple of episodes because of this thread.

Unfortunately, it is a blatant attempt to reflect the US occupation of Iraq: the walls, the “green zone”, the drones, the MRAPs, the references to “IEDs”, the checkpoints and even the shape of the helmets as well as the weapons.

Yet its creators clearly have no idea about living under foreign occupation, insurgency or terrorism. Their very notion of the occupation of Iraq has been gleaned by watching CNN rather than visiting Baghdad at the height of the killing. Nor have I come across an occupied people as clueless as those in Colony.

When the Germans swept across Europe, even the lowliest peasant knew why they were there and what they wanted. When the German tide ebbed and the Soviet one surged across Central Europe, no one was surprised. What do these aliens want that is worth the resources expended on securing human cities? Why keep the humans alive? For the Germans, people were kept alive temporarily to be of use as slave labor or to produce food or defer their death by helping the Germans kill others. The Soviets wanted people contributing to the Stalinist system, working in its factories and mines, and protecting the Soviet Union from invasion from the West.

Terrorism and insurgency are interesting things, and are hardly ever two-sided:

  • From the Irish War of Independence to the end of the Troubles, the Irish conflicts were overwhelmingly ones of Irishmen killing fellow Irishmen, not the British
  • During the Algerian War of Independence and after, the brunt of the slaughter was born by the Algerians, who continued to slaughter one another after the French left
  • The same is true of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq


If Colony expects to be accurate, then various human factions should be slaughtering one another with the alien occupation being a rallying point, but with the aliens less involved in the violence than the humans.

Americans care about their role in occupation, when Americans are doing the killing and dying. When the Americans are not present and the locals kill and die in the same numbers or even higher, Americans barely care at all.