The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad
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One of the most striking stories my grandmother always told about WWII (she was born in '34) was how, when she walked to school, very often US fighters shot at the children walking there. There was no way this was a mistake – they were still children, the road only led to the school, no one else was walking there at the time. And still, every few days fighters shot at them, and they had to jump in a drainage canal, or similar to hide.
Seeing your friends from school being shot by fighters in front of your eyes can hurt a child a lot.
Many old people here still hold a grudge towards the allies, despite all the amazing things they did after the war to rebuild.
But if attacking civilians is the measure, then the US is a terrorist state. And has been for decades.
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There is a side that gasses jews, and a side that nukes civilians. There is a side that bombs hospitals, and a side that blows themselves up at a concert in Paris. There’s a side that massacres disabled people, and a side that shoots children.
We can’t compare, or even weigh up the sides against each other, and doing so would miss the point. But we can’t say "only terrorists kill civilians".
The US has accidentally killed plenty of civilians, of course. In the past (in World War II, for instance) they've also killed civilians deliberately. I'm not arguing that the US's hands are clean. But the US also recognizes (now, at least) that it is extremely counter-productive to kill civilians. That's why they order soldiers not to and why it is officially against the law of the United States as well as international law, and a war crime, to target civilians. It is not part of the official US strategy to target civilians - in fact it is part of the official US strategy to not target civilians. On the other hand, it is part of the official, stated strategy of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organizations, to intentionally murder civilians in the most visible way possible.
*Edited to acknowledge current reality vs our past
And then of course, the military chain of command is exceedingly good at diluting responsibility -- generals will demand results implying but not writing down how far commanders can go; soldiers and commanders will cross many lines which no colleagues will report() and no immediate superiors will punish; the press will be strictly managed to not see anything that "national security" doesn't need us to see so our own civilian population will be morally appeased that we're being righteous, everyone is happy.
() A few will do, and then they're jailed for life as traitors.
The Drone Papers asserts ~90% of people killed by drone strikes weren't the intended target (with a wide mix of civilians, combatants, and unknown). https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ Other sources, eg the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...), provide more granular data over time. Precision is somewhat lacking in estimates due to the inherent secrecy.
While the number of actions, targets, deaths, and total casualties varies by nation (Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia...), a high rate of collateral damage is clearly an accepted part of the current strategy.
Don't forget the extensive firebombings of numerous cities including Dresden or Tokyo (casualties estimates for the latter are in the same 100000~200000 range as the two nuclear strikes combined)
Again I'm not saying the US's hands are clean. I wholly disagree with many of the foreign military actions we've taken - especially between 2000 and 2008. What am I saying is that our policy - along with international law - have evolved considerably in the past 60 years. And I also sincerely believe that most of our armed forces in present day are doing their very best to avoid killing civilians.
I also think a lot of this is hand-waving away of the critical differences between terrorists who think it is acceptable to walk into a concert hall and gun down hundreds of people, and the militaries who are fighting those terrorists.
Nothing is simple, but there are meaningful moral differences here.
You're relieved about what's going on in Iraq? Seems like a big mess to me.
As bad as whatever the U.S. has done in the Middle East, it hasn't beheaded civilians to make political statements or committed genocide against religious and cultural minorities.
We can certainly discuss if the U.S. should pull out anyway, but I don't feel "relief" in making the least awful choice.
Have you heard of a guy called Donald Trump?
There's some very good structural reasons to expect that, even if gets the most votes in the primaries, he may not win the Republican nomination.
OTOH, major parties have collapsed entirely before in US politics, and not having a candidate finish at least second in the Presidential general election would be a pretty big sign of collapse -- and pretty much every three-way head-to-head poll conducted with any has an independent Trump taking the #2 spot by a wide margin over the Republican.
Trump may well define the major party that replaces the Republicans.
Predicting that the US will remain in the hands of some what sensible leaders seems rather naive to me.
“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also far the largest unbombed built-up the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.” [1]
In other words, it was specifically targeted because the civilians were conflated with "the enemy" broadly, to deny resources to refugees, to demoralize the German public, and to warn the potential Soviet enemies of Allied military prowess. Definitely a lot worse things happened in WW2, but neither British nor American hands are exactly clean when it comes to war.
[1] Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/the-bombi...
Do you have any evidence of this or are you just asserting to because it sounds nice? Intentional disregard for civilian casualties was rampant on all sides of WWII. There were about as many civilian fatalities (not including disease and famine) as there were military fatalities. The firebombing attacks during WWII were brutal.
> It is not part of the official US strategy to target civilians - in fact it is part of the official US strategy to not target civilians. On the other hand, it is part of the official, stated strategy of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shebab, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organizations, to intentionally murder civilians in the most visible way possible.
Saying "we don't target civilians" doesn't get you any points. You have to actually not target civilians (or say, red cross hospitals).
I don't have evidence that what the parent said happened actually happened. I'm not saying it didn't happen but I don't have any evidence that it did. Do you?
"Saying "we don't target civilians" doesn't get you any points"
Not targeting civilians gets you a lot of points. 'Intent' vs 'non-intent' (along with 'consent' vs 'non-consent') is in my view the central concept of all ethical / moral discussions.
As for whether or not US soldiers, either disobeying orders, obeying direct orders, or obeying the orders from high up in the chain of command, actually kill civilians, yes, that is a critical part of this conversation as well. But it is much easier to stop killing civilians when it is not a stated part of our foreign policy, our military strategy, or our laws to deliberately do so. And I can't say the same thing about ISIS or Al Shabaab or terrorists in general.
You heard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive before? The aim of your foreign policy was literally to hurt civilian morale by de-housing them and killing their friends, family, etc.
I am only glad that, after the war, you decided it would be best to help by rebuilding all that.
'The Luftwaffe, which Hitler had prohibited from bombing civilian areas in the UK, was now ordered to bomb British cities.'
So this attitude of 'total war' was not one-sided and was precipitated by Germany's "accidental" bombing of British civilian areas, followed by their expressly deliberate bombing of civilian areas.
None of this makes this right, but World War II was not the finest hour for anyone in the conflict, and people were generally responding in kind to defend themselves. This was before many of the international norms that are in place today existed.
Third, I have already said repeatedly that the US has blood on its hands, but I have also argued that our military policy has evolved considerably since 1945.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
> I’m not saying the US is bad, or good, I’m trying to say there is no "good" side in a war. No one in a war is innocent.
> There is a side that gasses jews, and a side that nukes civilians. There is a side that bombs hospitals, and a side that blows themselves up at a concert in Paris. There’s a side that massacres disabled people, and a side that shoots children.
> We can’t compare, or even weigh up the sides against each other, and doing so would miss the point. But we can’t say "only terrorists kill civilians".
The parent provided evidence via hearsay from his grandmother. Him providing a source for his assertion lets us make our own judgements about it's veracity.
You made a definitive statement:
> they were acting against orders, at least the orders of the high command
I assumed you had some reason, possibly just hearsay regarding similar incidents, leading you to make that assertion. If you don't have any actual reason for believing it, then you are just saying it because it sounds nice. That makes you propagandist/liar.
Chuck Yeager admitted to participating in missions over Europe that involved strafing civilians, and more generally committing atrocities (his word) in his first autobiography. It's so baffling that this would come as a shock to you, in light of the more heavily publicized and more terrible bombing in the Pacific theatre.
One of the things that eludes the mindset of the ideologue is that you can have civil disagreements. In other words, you can disagree with someone without being a fucking dick about it.
I mean, can you imagine a small group of terrorists being able to effectively target the US military? Of course not. So these people do what they can in an attempt to achieve their objectives. If the rich nations of the world were truly pushed against the wall (rather than mildly annoyed) they would likely resume killing civilians in a heartbeat.
Never mind the effects of the military campaigns themselves kill plenty of civilians even if these are not directly targeted.
It is not part of the official US strategy to target civilians
Official or not, the US's actual conduct kills a LOT of civilians - by some reckonings, our drone war has killed more civilians than it has actual enemy combatants.
I think it's fair for our hypothetical middle eastern Skywalker to look at his actual experience, rather than accepting propaganda at face value.
Every time we have collateral damage in a drone strike, every time someone's child is killed by a missile or bomb dropped by an American aircraft, that child's father is going to go to war with whomever dropped that bomb, fired that missile, sent that drone.
If instead of burning corpses, Luke had found Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru at home waiting to ground him for a month, he would have never gone with Obi-Wan.
The Empire's heavy handedness lead to its downfall.
Really? I would have blamed the Empire's downfall on not being bus proof and falling apart on the Emperor's death. Sounds like poor planning to me.
That's what's so beautiful about language. We can simply redefine anyone in a war zone as an enemy combatant. Want to bomb a school or hospital? Say they were aiding insurgents. Ta da, moral high ground maintained.
You can surely find many similar statements from old people from the war, though.
She died in December 2000 due to an untreated infection of her lungs.
If you have a similar story, though, go on and share!
Here's a documentary shot in 1944 that proudly and joyfully tells the story of an air squadron based in Corsica that was bombing civilian targets in northern Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt!
They bombed and shot at houses, farms, trains, people in the fields, etc. The narrator is having fun around the 26:00 mark - "Somebody in that field. Wonder who they are... No friends of mine!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0erLVkqvPb0
This would not fall under terrorism, but under war crimes. But war crimes only matter if you lose the war, right?
Fantastic link.
What distinguishes the Rebellion from terrorism or insurgency is not just the choice of military targets, but its goals and methods. The definition of terrorism is the use of violence or intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. Terror attacks against military targets are designed to sow fear. The Rebel Alliance attacked the Death Star to deny the Empire the use of their planet-killing weapon, it's not so much that it was a military target as it was a military OBJECTIVE.
Also, if you look at the Rebels -- they're a military organization. They wear uniforms. They have bases. They aren't hiding among the civilian population. They're fighting the Empire in straight-up space battles, they aren't loading civilian ships down with explosives and blowing up Imperial bases with them.
"This is a consular ship! We're on a... diplomatic mission!". :-)
They do manage to bring the Imperial hammer down on Cloud City. They also propagandize the poor Ewoks into joining their war, which has got to be somewhere around using dolphins in warfare, ethically speaking.
As for the Ewoks -- it seems pretty clear that the Ewoks were already engaged in combat with the Empire before the Rebels arrived -- Warrick kills a stormtrooper when rescuing Leia, and Han and Luke are caught in a trap that seems like it would've been set for imperial forces. (I think one could argue that the Ewoks before the arrival of the Rebellion were operating an insurgency against the Imperial forces.)
Now that I think about it, judging from what the Ewoks do when they catch Our Heroes, they may have been hunting stormtroopers for food. There's a creepy angle on the whole thing that I'd never considered.
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Attacking civilian populations during war is meant to place pressure on the government to surrender. It serves the exact same purpose that a "terrorist" is seeking to achieve by attacking civilian populations.
It's ridiculous that the only way Americans can justify their violence is through caricatures of their own behavior and through propaganda about their enemies. It should be really, really easy to justify attacking Al Qaeda or ISIS without the linguistic gymnastics, but America is so culturally bankrupt that they can't make a simple argument for an obvious good without manipulating the public.
As to America being "so culturally bankrupt that they can't make a simple argument for an obvious good without manipulating the public," I would have to counter that without effective propaganda mechanisms, a simple argument for an obvious good may not be palatable or worth the time of the average citizen. In other words, if the choice is between a "simple argument" that may work, and a concerted propaganda effort that will work, propaganda will win every time.
This is what I get for reading Edward Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion" between bug fixes.
Give us an actual threat and we'll go right back to flattening cities and firebombing civilians in no time.
(note: I'm not advocating these tactics, I just think our relative restraint is a consequence of our position in current geopolitics, not of some ethical enlightenment on our part)
The concept was "morale bombing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive
It has stuff like "the monthly bombing rate in 1944 was 90'000 tons", etc.
In general, the German article focuses more on the concept in general than about the specific directive.
Read more on the actual article that I wanted to link, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsm%C3%BCdigkeit
I've got that reading Grove's "Now it can be told." Grove's biggest fear, as he writes, was for a war to end before he can detonate a few bombs.
I haven't read the full article here, but it seems it agrees:
First I found with a quick google: "France foils terror attack on Toulon naval base"
http://www.france24.com/en/20151110-france-foils-terrorism-a...
Sherman burnt down Atlanta. We bombed Dresden. We bombed Tokyo. We pretake in psyops, we nominally follow 'hearts and minds'.
Strict civilian vs military distinction was a fiction invented and maintained by European powers leading into the modern era. It's a fiction that disintegrated once defeating field armies was no longer sufficient to ensure victory.
For one legitimate countries and their state agents also attacked unarmed civilians all the time.
And of course traditionally rebels have also attacked non-military targets.
The main difference between rebellion/revolution and terrorism is, besides intent (e.g. getting freedom for an occupied country) who gets to do the naming.
But obviously Daesh is using that same proto-myth to appeal to potential recruits : be a hero fighting to overthrow an evil empire, and establish a new golden age
But let's not over glorify the terrorists either. I think Naomi Klein said it well that if you had to choose on a deadly multiple choice questionnaire between American imperialism and fundamentalist terror, the correct answer is "none of the above."
Diplomacy is much more nuanced. While you might or might not be recognized in the official sense, there's a broad spectrum or relationships and attitudes that imply recognition.
E.g. there are players that are not official, but nethertheless have relationships with state players, and are thus recognized for discussions, negotiations, etc.
As much as I like NPR, they're consistently guilty of this. I have never heard the Confederate flag called a "battle flag" before the whole fracas around getting it banned.
This is just a coincidence. I've heard the confederate flag referred to as the battle flag for years and almost exclusively by those who support (or are at least sympathetic to) flying that flag.
With that stated, I agree that NPR is guilty of "linguistic contortions" but I can't think of a single news source that isn't guilty of it. If you can think of some exceptions, I'd be genuinely interested in a recommendation.
The national flags of the Confederacy were different, though some of them incorporated that pattern.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...
As far as I understand, before it was at least peace in the land, now it's a second home of ISIS.
It seems that the Left is fond of trumpeting how the 2nd Iraq War was a mistake, leading to the genesis of ISIS. But why do they stop the narrative there? If you're going to tell the story, don't you need to continue on the US strikes on Libya, Syria, etc., which created the regionally widespread power vacuum in which ISIS could take root and grow?
Gaddafi was a historic enemy of the West in a turbulent region. His course of action was unpredictable and had a history of sponsoring terrorism. There is no way to debate a counter factual, such as whether this historic enemy would resume terrorist activities.
In my mind, the mistake was not to use force, but to leave a power vacuum. The Kennedy CIA would be ashamed.
Why not Saudi Arabia? And also,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi
"In 2001, Gaddafi condemned the September 11 attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda, expressing sympathy with the victims and calling for Libyan involvement in the War on Terror against militant Islamism."
Why Gaddafi in 2011 then? The "rebels" against Gaddafi were al-Qaeda, and the US was supporting the "rebels" and "the rebellion."
And when were the last terrorist attacks connected with Gaddafi? Anybody remembers them?
http://www.cfr.org/libya/libya-got-off-list/p10855
In Back to the Future, there is a reason the designated terrorist figures were Libyan. At that time Gaddafi was actively seeking nuclear weapons material.
He simply could not be trusted. Just because he allegedly stopped sponsoring terrorism and aligned himself against al-Qaeda doesn't mean he wouldn't ever cause trouble in the future.
Vladimir Putin is also against ISIS. How much do you trust him?
Plenty of people were predicting that an invasion of Iraq would lead to an explosion of radical, anti-Western, violent totalitarian Islam in that area as far back as discussion of the Iraq invasion which occurred in 2003 occurred, and predicting that the Iraqi Sunni population would be its breeding ground and Islamist groups kept it check by Hussein's regime would be its nucleus.
No one predicted that the exact group (which already existed) which became "al-Qaeda in Iraq" when it decided to affiliate with al-Qaeda for its anti-US brand currency during the occupation (and later became the "Islamic State in Iraq" after it decided that al-Qaeda's constraints were holding it back rather than the brand being useful, then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" when the splinter group it sent to fight in the Syrian Civil War merged back, and later just "the Islamic State" when it decided geographic constraints in its name were overly constraining) was going to be the particular one that would become the big concern, but the basic outline was predicted well in advance.
I did, and I'm no foreign policy expert. Plenty of pundits did the same. "Nature abhors a vacuum" applies just as much to politics as it does to physics, and it was pretty obvious that by removing the stabilizing force we were throwing the dice, making a hail-mary bet that whatever sprouted up in the rubble wouldn't be any worse. Anybody who wasn't thinking that far ahead shouldn't be making these kinds of decisions.
EDIT: at the time I argued about it back then, my primary point was that our attacks were clearly illegal, the president usurping Congressional authority. The outcome really underscores the reason that we have these checks and balances. If we'd had some real deliberation, rather than one "Nobel Peace Prize" winner with any itchy trigger finger, much of this might have been avoided.
I would like to know too. All those movements in the area are far to be clear now to us, humble people without access to Top Secret documents.
I suppose we will know in 15 or 20 years. One thing is for sure, it was not motivated by a interest in the welfare of the Libyan people (or people in general).
Now for Star Wars.. is Jediism a religion? The 7th most popular faith in the UK according to this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9737886/Jedi-religi...
"Insurgent" means about the same thing as "rebel" and has no more negative connotation in modern American English usage (which is why the name is frequently applied to, and embraced by, perceived underdog political campaigns,)
Especially if they try to pass moral judgement and assign such labels as "good" and "bad" go very complex situations.
Calling them rebels because some pampered ideological college twat wants to relive the anti-Vietnam hysteria they read so much about is a disservice not only to American soldiers but also Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers and civilians who got to live amidst radical jihadis who take sex slaves and commit public executions of non veiled women branded as adulterers.
I feel genuine curiosity because that was not my impression at the time.
This gets squared (or exponentiated) if you, like some people have done, decide that the films may themselves be unreliable narration. Which I think is not a useful decision, because you pretty quickly run smack up into the fact that these are just fiction anyhow in this case; the films were not written to stand up to that interpretation.
I think it's particularly difficult to draw any sweeping conclusions because it's not clear to me that the movie universe is written carefully enough to justify them. For every Jedi epigram, you can find a Jedi violating it, or for some epigrams, it's hard to find anyone actually doing the thing. Jedi, for instance, repeatedly act in a way that can be described as "fearful"; is the Jedi proscription against fear simply referring to the brute emotion, or anything that can be described as fearful? Honestly, the best answer is probably that it was not written to be able to answer that. Are the Jedi "hypocrites", or is the writing just too clumsy? Especially after the prequel trilogy, I can't help but think it's the latter. (And I do not mean that as a fashionably-snotty thing to say; I really don't think they were well-written. But they don't necessarily deserve the opprobrium heaped on them; they were not especially bad by Hollywood standards. I'd call them pretty average on that front. Most Hollywood movies are philosophically and ethically really quite mushy.)
One must also bear in mind that from a "hard science fiction" point of view, the concrete and scientifically-proved existence of "The Force" may change things. In our real world, I think almost everything that Yoda says is gibbering nonsense, but in his world it may be entirely true that fear inexorably and directly leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. There's a mechanism for it to do so that doesn't exist in our universe, and we should expect that if "The Force" is real that it means that there are things that are perfectly true in Star Wars that aren't true here, making it even harder to draw sweeping conclusions.
The conclusion I come to is that this is a fun movie series that, in the end, simply doesn't stand up to this level of analysis, as evidenced by the fact the analyses always seem to simply be the analysis' author writing about exactly what they already believe, dressed in Star Wars trappings.
As I read it, the Jedi are supposed to be hypocrites, particularly in the prequel trilogy. Its a pretty standard "the supposed guardians of good have become overly comfortable, arrogant, and neglectful of the higher virtues, creating the environment in which evil will flourish from within and nearly destroy them, until a messianic figure restores virtue and reestablishes the institutions that are supposed to guard the good."
There's plenty of clumsy writing, too, but the basic outline is pretty clear.
We'll see how the next three movies play out, but so far it's virtually impossible to square the messianic "bringing balance to the force" and anything we've seen in the first six movies. "Jedi were too dominant, so all the Sith and all but one Jedi will be killed" isn't exactly balance by any philosophy I know, Eastern or Western. If the series is striving for a Eastern-style "balance is important", it's not doing a very good job. (Especially since such things usually run the light/dark axis at at least an angle to what we'd normally call good/bad; the Sith are usually written as stupid evil, which doesn't fit into a "balance" story very well.) If that's not it, what is it?
I think the fact that there's no clarity whatsoever about what "balance" is, or why it's desirable, or why somebody would prophesy about it, or... anything really.... is the problem. (Ambiguity is one thing; if there were multiple interpretations by multiple characters within the story that'd be one thing, but there's just no "there" there that I can find.)
Again, the story just doesn't stand up to this level of analysis, and it's not clever ambiguity, it's just... no "there" there. The story doesn't go back this far; it's a story about good and evil and space magic and space princesses and lasers going pew pew pew. And it's at least decent at that.
I think the key consideration should be the context in which the movies were created. Movies are made to make money and the more time a movie-maker spends on ironing out small inconsistencies, the more money they lose.
That movie was made to be relatable by a wide audience so it's no surprise that many people can have differing interpretations of the deeper meaning. This is simply one of them.
Uh-huh. And I suppose Alderaan was like Hiroshima, they were just forcing the rebels to surrender without risking stormtrooper lives with a ground invasion. Or something like that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...
The Empire had a population of >100 quadrilion, Alderaan killed about 2 billion people. That's a difference of 8 orders of magnitude (50 million), that's equivalent to killing ~140 earth humans. In relative scale, it doesn't come close to Hiroshima, it's closer to having bombed a large wedding.
Rather than comparing it to bombing a wedding, I think it's more accurate to compare it to destroying every trace of some micro-nation and then cleansing any plant and animal life native to that nation.
Between core worlds, protectorates, governorships and colonies, the empire is estimated to cover close to 70 million inhabited worlds, and billions of uninhabitable planets.
> Rather than comparing it to bombing a wedding, I think it's more accurate to compare it to destroying every trace of some micro-nation
More like a small town taken over by entrenched terrorists.
> then cleansing any plant and animal life native to that nation.
A firebombing would do that, and that's an unfortunate side-effect more than the purpose of the act.
It ignores the history of the Jedi as a peace keeping force of a "good" republic, who are dispersed from that service after a cruel dictator rises to take control over that republic with his supreme powers over the military and no political method to prevent or restrict that control.
As a comparison to the US, it's better to think about this as a concern about what happens as Congress continues to push more power into the hands of the President because they don't want to deal, or are incapable of compromising, due to political issues derived from radicalized voting bases formed from gerrymandered political districts.
In all this tongue in cheek stuff, there is a real possibility that some crazy radical religious fundamentalist ends up in power and abuses that... Oh George W Bush happened, did we survive?
But... the US and Japan were at war at the time. Alderaan was a part of the Empire! There were declared hostilities with the Rebellion, but the Rebellion wasn't ON Alderaan. Leia grew up there, but that was about the extent of it. The Empire wasn't at war with Alderaan. It's as if during the Civil War we murdered everyone in Cleveland because one of the key members of the Confederacy had an uncle who lived in Cleveland. There's no ambiguity here, the destruction of Alderaan is clearly beyond the pale.
"How to Talk About Star Wars at Thanksgiving With Your Ignorant, Rebellion-Backing Uncle"
http://freebeacon.com/blog/pilgrims-were-the-original-rebels...
My favorite is this treatment of The Dark Knight:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/3insgr/joker_i...
I enjoyed the otherwise-awful movie The Seventh Son because of the playfulness they take with world-building. The heroes and their quests all wind up being a part of the broader political structures of the world rather than those structures being the stakes. I like it when the very plot doesn't take itself seriously.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...
Jedi scum!
I've been watching the movies with my kid now that he's a little older and we're discussing the moral ambiguity.
He's the head honcho, he feels uneasy about taking in Anakin, but he does it anyway? What happened to due diligence?
He then gets the kid on Dagobah, and does nothing when he goes off and nearly gets killed.
Like another David Brent, a little guy with big quotes and no skill.
Sidious even mentions Yoda's arrogance. I agree with the dark lord.
("You're all a bunch of damn Yankees," as the hillbilly said of the Yale versus Harvard football game, "and I hope you both lose.")
I think some of these parallels are correct: we can compare Luke Skywalker to a terrorist and the Galactic Empire to (presumably) the US. Why does this comparison work? Because the US IS a fucking evil empire, and there IS genuine outrage and injustice to be fought. The drone campaign is not mere "justification" for terrorists to use to fight their battles, it is an actual injustice, as was the invasion of Iraq, its starvation before that, the ongoing bombing of Yemen, the support of autocrats who oppress ordinary people for decades, etc., etc.
This is not mere "recruiting material", this is stuff worth fighting over. The reason people revere Osama bin Laden as a hero is because he is fighting the dark power that has oppressed them - literally, with bombs and guns - for a generation.
No doubt people will find this comparison uncomfortable, while the inverse tee-heeing over the Empire is amusing.
Let's remember what's being fought for: a democracy versus an autocracy based on raw power. The Empire, after all, rules through fear, mediated by an army of storm troopers, and replaced a democratic government that responded to its constituents with the rule of one man.
This is closely modeled on the actual events in Rome, where a thousand(ish) years of Republic, with genuine democratic struggle for the rights of ordinary people an ongoing feature for most of its history (Brutus deposing the kings, the Gracchi becoming the first tribunes) devolved into an Empire ruled by pure thuggery, men like Caesar and Crassus who used their enormous wealth and influence to amass enough personal power to simply take control of the state.
There WAS a rebel who fought against the advent of this Empire to preserve a Republic, who died hunted down and killed by the army of the first emperor - Brutus. We might also call him a terrorist for his attempted assassination of Caesar. But in the balance we must judge these men - all men - who exercise brutality on what they are fighting for. What is the order they are seeking to preserve or rebuild? What are its principles? This is the distinction that matters.
Except that is an unbelievably naive way of looking at the world. Popular power is always limited, even in a "democracy", thanks to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Most people are too busy living their own lives to understand how the levers of power actually operate, or to understand the complicated ways in which they are getting screwed. And even when they do participate in politics, people are usually whipped into a frenzy based on envy, fear, and bigotry. Correspondingly, autocracy does not automatically mean "bad". Many powerful leaders actually did bring order to their realms, and allow people to live decent lives, free from internal strife. See Augustus, or the four good emperors of Rome. And often removing a strong ruler simply brings the realm into chaos. See the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the aftermath in Iraq and Libya. Or look at what happened after Brutus killed Caesar -- there were twenty more years of civil war until once again someone could win definitively.
I wrote much more in depth on this topic here: http://devinhelton.com/2015/08/dictatorship-and-democracy
What I find most interesting in this Star Wars argument is this lack of faith in democratic power and the seeming resignation to autocracy that seems to be generally present. These are all things that are happening now, to our own democracy. I find this lack of faith disturbing.
So, what do you take from it? What does that tell you about yourself?
http://nypost.com/2014/09/21/how-star-wars-was-secretly-geor...
Oh, and Galactic Republic is/was too different from US political system for your comparison to be relevant in any way.
Please argue this. I don't see how I could disagree with this, but here's your chance to convince me.
Have you seen Episodes 1-3? Palpatine has real support of the public.
(Look, dude, of course he's evil as hell, I don't deny that. It's just that arguments that you choose to prove that are not working.)
They showed many planets at the end of RotJ [1] where massive celebrations occurred, including Coruscant. I think these celebrations speak to the rebellion's support.
>It's just that arguments that you choose to prove that are not working.
There's nothing to prove. The belief that a people have the right to topple their dictators is subjective. I can only prove something if we share the same axioms.
How do you define who's a dictator and who's not?
If Winston Churchill have acquired more executional powers during WWII to get through mind-boggling beurocracy, would you call him dictator, for example?
You're trying to prove a statement that is true, but your proof is abysmal.
Not at the time the Empire was formed, though.