Would you betray mankind?

Watching television can create weird ideas. One of those is the deep rooting of tribalism in humans and what it will mean for the future of mankind. It also poses the question at which point you would actually decide to stand with your tribe instead of with your principles.

In the mediocre Star Trek Discovery, there's a "Terran Empire", a military dictatorship with an emperor in which other interstellar races are either enslaved or exterminated. In Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, there's a general who is considered a war criminal for using high powered weapons in a fight for life and death. He had already lost 500.000 soldiers and was about to lose the battle and with it probably the war, so he used his high powered weapons that wiped out a stone age hippie species on the planet below the battlefield as a collateral damage.

Would you actually sacrifice your soldiers in their millions and lose a war because you want to save a weird species of sentient stone age creatures you don't even have contact with? (I perfectly understand the irony of a German writing about a fictional story in which 6 Million people are killed...)

Would you betray humankind if it is a brutal dictatorship and side with other species for moral principles, even if you are the only human among them and the rest of your species stands against them? When the result might turn out to be an extermination of humans by the other species or their enslavement as a retribution?

The implications are obvious and very much unprogressive. While some of us might side with the non human species against a terran empire and others would rather sacrifice their soldiers and their nation to safe the stone age hippie aliens, many would probably rather stand with their species. But those same persons would very likely not support a new Nazi-Dictatorship for the simple reason that it was established in their home country. They'd rather leave their home and maybe even join new Allies to fight said Nazi-regime. Which, of course, is good and right.

So where do we draw the line? Because most of us would draw one at some point. Would you betray your own species for some weird aliens you might not even be able to reproduce with if that wiped out your species that has turned fascist?

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