Character description
Early presidency
Clark became president when EarthForce One, carrying President Luis Santiago, was destroyed in 2258. He was complicit with the assassination, in order to take office. He believed Earth to be in danger of being overrun by extraterrestrial races, and so the Nightwatch, a fascist, paramilitary organization, was formed to find out people suspected to be alien infiltrators or sympathizers.
A paramilitary is a semi-militarized force whose organizational structure, tactics, training, subculture, and (often) function are similar to those of a professional military, but is not formally part of a country's armed forces.
EarthForce's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General William Hague, suspected that Clark was involved in the assassination, and began a low-level counter-conspiracy that included Captain John Sheridan. In 2260, John Sheridan and General Hague found evidence that Clark had arranged the assassination of Santiago. Hague managed to get the evidence introduced in the Senate, which caused an uproar.
John J. Sheridan is a lead character in the fictional universe of the science-fiction television series Babylon 5, played by Bruce Boxleitner. For most of the series, he is the commander of the Babylon 5 station; during the series' final season he is the President of the Interstellar Alliance.
At about the same time, it was revealed that Clark's forces had found a Shadow vessel buried on Ganymede. Clark was having the ship studied in order to learn its secrets. John Sheridan took the White Star back to Ganymede, and destroyed the vessel. Clark soon issued a decree of martial law using the Ganymede incident as a pretext.
The Shadows are a fictional alien species in the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Their homeworld is Z'ha'dum, although whether it is the world they originated from is uncertain, and they were the second race among the First Ones to be discovered and nurtured by Lorien, the "First One". In contrast to the Vorlons, whose philosophy is represented by the question "Who are you?", that of the Shadows is represented by the question "What do you want?", centering towards desire rather than identity. J. Michael Straczynski, the show's creator, once explained that he chose the name "Shadows" because of its meaning in Analytical psychology.
Ganymede, a satellite of Jupiter, is the largest and most massive of the Solar System's moons. The ninth largest object in the Solar System, it is the largest without a substantial atmosphere. It has a diameter of 5,268 km (3,273 mi) and is 8% larger than the planet Mercury, although only 45% as massive. Possessing a metallic core, it has the lowest moment of inertia factor of any solid body in the Solar System and is the only moon known to have a magnetic field. Outward from Jupiter, it is the seventh satellite and the third of the Galilean moons, the first group of objects discovered orbiting another planet. Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively.
Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civilian functions by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency such as invasion or major disaster, or in an occupied territory.
Civil war
When martial law was declared, Hague began armed resistance against Clark's government. Hague was soon killed in a firefight between his ship, EAS Alexander and the heavy cruiser EAS Clarkstown. Meanwhile, Mars rejected martial law, and Clark responded by bombing Mars.
In the Babylon 5 science fiction universe, the EAS Alexander was an Earth Alliance Omega class destroyer. It may have been named after Alexander the Great. It played a key role in the Earth Alliance Civil War of 2260 - 2261.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after Mercury. In English, Mars carries a name of the Roman god of war and is often referred to as the 'Red Planet'. The latter refers to the effect of the iron oxide prevalent on Mars' surface, which gives it a reddish appearance distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth.
Clark dissolved the Senate, and nationalized the media outlets. In response, Proxima III and Orion VII broke away from the Earth Alliance, setting themselves up as independent states. Babylon 5 soon followed these two colonies by breaking away ("Severed Dreams"), after Clark attempted and failed to seize the station and put it under command of the Nightwatch. Clark quickly turned the Earth Alliance into a dictatorship, making ISN into a propaganda machine. Considering Sheridan to be a threat, Clark targeted Babylon 5 and Sheridan specifically with a blockade and a propaganda war ("The Illusion of Truth").
The Earth Alliance is the name of a fictional alliance of the nations of Earth and off-world colonies in the television series Babylon 5. The transition of Earth government from a democratic, elected government to an authoritarian, militaristic one and back to a democracy again is a major theme of the series. It is considered one of the five major galactic diplomatic/military powers in the Babylon 5 pilot episode movie "The Gathering". They have separate seats at the head of the council chambers on the Babylon 5 station. The League of Non-Aligned Worlds sit in the general assembly section.
Babylon 5 is a fictional space station and the primary setting in the television series Babylon 5. Its design is a variation of an O'Neill cylinder.
"Severed Dreams" is an episode from the third season of the science fiction television series Babylon 5. It won the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
In the fall of 2261, Clark put a policy in place of killing refugees trying to leave the colonies that he was taking military action against. When Sheridan learned that in one case 10,000 innocent civilians were killed by an Earth Alliance vessel, he realized that the time had come to remove Clark. After the Shadow War, Sheridan had built a powerful alliance of races and held command of the White Star Fleet, giving him the military muscle to fight Earth directly. Sheridan's forces began a systematic campaign against Clark's forces, including a televised message of their own dubbed the "Voice of the Resistance". Large numbers of Earth Force personnel defected, and Sheridan scored his first major victory against Clark by defeating his forces blockading Proxima III. Sheridan himself was eventually captured by his former chief of security Michael Garibaldi (who had been brainwashed by Alfred Bester) and tortured, but was rescued and returned to the fleet soon afterward, which by this time had grown to include a large number of Earth Force ships fighting alongside him.
Clark decided to trap Sheridan's forces with advanced model destroyers which had been fitted with Shadow technology. When Sheridan's second in command, Commander Susan Ivanova, learned of this, she engaged the destroyers with White Star ships, leaving the rest of the EarthForce vessels behind. Captain James of EAS Agamemnon opposed Ivanova's decision, but soon realized that Clark would have his destroyers target the Earth ships rather than the White Stars. While Ivanova managed to destroy all the vessels, her White Star was severely damaged by a collision with debris from one of the destroyed vessels and she was injured and left in a near-death state.
Suicide and aftermath
Eventually, Sheridan took the fleet directly to Earth, and sent a message saying that they had come home to fight against Clark's tyranny. Realizing that he would soon be captured, Clark committed suicide with a PPG. In one last vindictive act, he turned the planetary defense grid back on the Earth under a "scorched earth" policy – the parallels with Adolf Hitler's end and final policies at the end of World War II are notable. Sheridan and his forces, however, were able to destroy the defense platforms before they fired; Sheridan was prepared to ram the final platform (targeting North America's eastern seaboard) with his badly damaged ship, but EAS Apollo (previously fighting against Sheridan) appeared, then destroyed the platform and saved Sheridan's life ("Endgame").
During his entire presidency, Clark accused others of being traitors to the Earth Alliance and humanity – even though he personally arranged the assassination of his predecessor President Santiago so he could assume office and turn Earth into a fascist police state. Further, he pursued a massive Orwellian propaganda smear campaign to present any who opposed him personally as traitors to humanity as a whole. Ultimately, he tried to kill everyone on Earth rather than let it fall to opposition forces. After Clark's suicide, footage of his body was shown on an ISN broadcast to confirm his death: someone had unceremoniously hung a taunting handwritten note around his corpse's neck, which read "Traitor to Earth" – ultimately, Clark had done more to undermine and destroy the Earth Alliance than the fictitious "alien conspiracy" he scapegoated to seize power.
After Clark's suicide, Senator Susanna Luchenko of the Russian Consortium was named president. President Luchenko announced that the Justice Department would prosecute those who had committed crimes during Clark's reign of terror and offered amnesty to those who had followed Sheridan. Sheridan would resign in the aftermath of the civil war, but to the chagrin of his former superiors who considered him politically inconvenient, he was immediately appointed President of the Interstellar Alliance.
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