I was wondering when this aspect of Star Wars would start getting batted around in the main stream. It's very interesting watching America square the never ending war on terror against our rich cultural history of glorifying rebels, particularly in light of our nation's birth. There's a reason that the Iraqi rebels were branded as "insurgents" during that war. I'd venture a guess that referring to them as rebels or any form of the word would be enough to get a Fox news employee fired. Orwell would have a field day with our modern linguistic contortions to allow ourselves to remain the scrappy beacon of individualism and personal liberty in our minds.
To be fair most founding myths are about a "hero" revolting against the current status quo : Zeus, Odin, Prometheus, Gilgamesh, etc. So I don't think this is only an "American" things, or related to individualism.
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
Mostly becuause the insurgents in Iraq killed Iraqis and Kurds more than they killed American soldiers.
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 cannot understand why you were downvoted. Your comment made excellent sense. I think the benefits of the empire are overlooked when compared to the romantic fantasy of rebellion. Then, in a galaxy far, far away, as now, I must wonder what alternatives may have been avoided by imperialism, such as secretarian civil wars or intragalactic economic warfare, such as the blockade of Naboo.
Or control by organized crime like the Huts. We were shown first hand what their brand of justice looked like. brutal dismemberment at the hands of animals for entertainment's sake.
The question is whether that was outlawed in Imperial space, or if it was tacitly given a pass for the sake of the larger order, like the CIA overthrow of Guatemala's elected government at the behest of the United Fruit Corporation.
Gaddafi enabled state-sponsored terrorism. The West has wanted him gone for ages. In their eyes, it was better for him to be gone and have their own people safe than to have a stable Libya that could participate in terrorist activity. It doesn't justify what they did, but it is worth knowing the overthrow was not primarily done for the sake of your everyday Libyan.
Saudi Arabia's money was effectively behind Bin Laden and most of the attackers of 9/11 were Saudis. They also supported ISIS until it was clear that ISIS would rule over
them too.
"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?
Your thinking is too America-centric. Gaddafi's aims have always been more focused on Europe and Israel. His regime has been connected with countless bombings in Europe - including the infamous Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988 - and aid to terrorist groups such as the IRA since the 70s.
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.
That's why I'm asking. Since 1988 a lot of things happened, including the rise of first al-Qaeda and now ISIS, and he was against al-Qaeda and significantly improved the relation with the West since 1988. Anything newer? It just has no sense removing a guy who supported a terrorist act in 1988 by supporting the guys who did 9/11 and plan to do more. And now we even have the guys who are "too extreme" even for those of 9/11.
Once a state-sponsor of terrorism, always a state-sponsor of terrorism.
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?
So al-Qaeda and ISIS are less evil? And the 1988 attack is more worrying than the 2001 one and everything that happened since? I don't understand your reasoning, especially looking at it as an European. (The only "annoying" thing Europe remembers Gaddafi for, from the times before the war, is his son getting drunk somewhere in Switzerland or something like that.)
There is no either-or. There are no sides, only players. I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department. They saw an opportunity to knock out an old adversary with a lot of oil money that they couldn't trust and it didn't quite work out the way they hoped. Who's to say that if he stayed in power he wouldn't swing back towards terrorism if it proved advantageous? An autocrat will do what they must to stay in power, and if it meant placating the terrorist groups, he may have very well done that. It doesn't make him any more or less evil than any killer of innocents.
I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department.
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.
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 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).
Sorry for edging over into what may be partisanship, but I don't see why this doesn't get more ink.
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?
I could write a book to adequately respond to your question. In the interests of HN I will try to be brief.
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.
A big difference, in fact, the critical difference, between a 'rebellion/revolution' and 'terrorism', at least between a just rebellion and an un-just rebellion, is that a rebellion attacks (or intends to attack) military targets. Terrorists attack unarmed civilians.
Can you name a rebellion or revolution that didn't target civilians? There aren't any, and I think that distinction ultimately reduces to "terrorism is what's done by bad guys, revolution/rebellion by heroes!"
The American Revolution was primary a fight between the Continental Army (a military) and the British infantry in the colonies. This is not to say that all of the English that were killed were military, and I'm sure you'll come back of examples of terrorism committed by the Contintental Army or associates, but the strategy of the Contintental Army was to push the British army out of the Americas. And it worked.
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.
----------------
EDIT: 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".
Sadly, no. My grandmother never published it, because it was nothing special – most people from that time had similar stories. And, as she died in 2000, the possibility to publish anything is long over, too.
You can surely find many similar statements from old people from the war, though.
If true, those soldiers were criminals and terrorists and they were acting against orders, at least the orders of the high command.
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
We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made Napalm and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and vastly-civilian casualties in both cases. And these are just easy cases where direct responsibility can be tracked all way up to the commander-in-chief, so please no BS about no official strategy.
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.
> We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made Napalm and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and vastly-civilian casualties in both cases.
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)
Which has still issues today – every few weeks whole districts in German cities are evacuated, because they found another WWII bomb with chemical timer that hasn’t exploded yet.
Yep, and in more recent years, we've lead the way in nuclear disarmament. We haven't firebombed entire cities in decades . In the past 8 years we've (to my great relief) de-escalated our military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Our military leaders take pains to make sure drone attacks and military incursions are as precise as possible. We've done this because we've recognized, unlike terrorists, that civilian deaths are extremely unhelpful to our foreign policy.
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.
> In the past 8 years we've (to my great relief) de-escalated our military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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.
It is a big mess, but I'm relieved that our foreign policy has been reset and that if there will be further action in the Middle East it will be one undertaken and lead by an true international coalition (not the fake international coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 for reasons un-related to terrorism). We won't keep pretending (at least not for the time-being) that it's even possible for the US alone to make sure that no terrorist attacks happen anywhere. Terrorism is not US's problem alone, it is a multinational problem with a multinational - and probably not even a military - solution. I'm glad the US's foreign policy has changed to reflect that reality.
I certainly hope so. But what about the next rich old white guy who panders to the ignorant masses in the next election cycle (or the one after, or the one after that).
Predicting that the US will remain in the hands of some what sensible leaders seems rather naive to me.
> I am extremely extremely skeptical that Donald Trump will win the nomination of a major political party.
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.
The comment you're responding was edited to couch the argument in "now at least".
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.
The US politics and military had often redeclared civilian targets as the military targets and then caused enough "collateral damage." Even politicians alone do that (before military strikes) with the systems of sanctions. It was claimed in the media that some 500 thousand Iraqi children died as the effects of the sanctions to Iraq even before the last Iraq war. Then the politicians are surprised that their army isn't welcomed.
It's easy to be self righteous when you hold all the cards though....
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.
> That's why they order soldiers not to and why it is officially against the law of the United States
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.
So the young Luke should ignore the actual situation on the ground, and take the Empire's publicly-stated policy as moral truth?
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.
> they were acting against orders, at least the orders of the high command.
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).
'Do you have any evidence of this or are you just asserting to because it sounds nice?'
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.
First, that was Britain's directive, not the US, though the US definitely indiscriminately bombed cities in both the European and Pacific theatres as well. Second, Germans were conducting a campaign of area bombing against London in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, as well [1]:
'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.
> 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".
>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?
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.
It is not surprising to me. If you read over this entire thread you'll see that I acknowledge that the US has blood on its hands but I also argue that we have made considerable progress in foreign policy particularly with regard to how we treat civilian casualties. This, and the critical difference of 'intent,' is something conveniently ignored by those who want to hand-wave away the difference between the foreign policy of Western countries and the actions of extremists who indiscriminately murder un-armed civilians routinely and without warning. It is a false equivalence.
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'm not an ideologue at all, although there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just annoyed by people who pontificate at length about historical matters of which they are ignorant.
> I don't have evidence that what the parent said happened actually happened.
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.
The firebombing of Dresden in WW2 (which killed 25,000 civilians) was according to at least one RAF memo due to the fact that it was primarily a civilian city with undamaged housing:
“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.
Thank you.
Sorry, I don't have similar stories (although my grandmother saw two women being shot by the local Belgian police at the end of the war because the two were somehow walking around when the village was supposed to be in lock-down).
> when she walked to school, very often US fighters shot at the children walking there.
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?
Shooting at people in fields is irresponsible, but as the train and one of the houses blew up with terrific explosions I would hesitate to deem them "civilian targets".
I think they knew exactly what they were doing. Shooting the civilian population behind the front line creates problems for the enemy who will now have to divert resources to hospitalize the wounded, deal with a lower agricultural production, a weaker public transportation, a drop in morale, etc.
Under this classification what makes the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima different from any other terrorist attack? I mean, who is to decide under which circumstances unarmed civilians are a legitimate military target?
What's interesting is that there are louder voices about the US's need to be "more ruthless" towards ISIS. Obviously they don't mean "killing ISIS less nicely" or anything like that. What they mean is the US shouldn't care if it kills say 10 civilians for every known ISIS member. If that's what brings them the win (maybe) then they should do it.
Technically, there was a military target for both of those. The firebombing of Dresden was designed to deprive the German army of materiel by bombing strategically important industrial factories. With Hiroshima, there was several Army headquarters and key logistic facilities. (Hiroshima probably fails to be justified on the grounds of proportionality; the military objectives there probably could've been achieved with conventional bombings.)
The Wikipedia article you cite there mentions that Essen, which is on the other side of the country from Dresden, was the primary target of that campaign, and that it ended in 1943, when the firebombing of Dresden didn't begin until 1945.
Well, that is annoying. The German article mentions a larger timespan. I had hoped the english one would be equivalent, but it seems that’s rarely the case anymore :/
I just finished a biography of Harry Truman. If I recall that part correctly, he actually vetoed one city (maybe Yokohama, iirc) because it wasn't clearly enough a military target.
That's not really true, there's plenty of recorded instances of terror attacks on military targets (the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, for example).
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.
At the time the Millennium Falcon was captured by the Death Star, it was a civilian transport. The use of enemy uniforms was to facilitate escape from captivity, note that they sabotaged the tractor beam preventing them from escaping, not any other part of the Death Star.
> 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!". :-)
And Vader correctly identified Leia as a Rebel spy and traitor -- she was carrying information while continuing her duties as a member of the Senate. But she doesn't carry out any violent actions using her consular ship.
The do (ineffectively, pointlessly) return fire, if that counts.
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.
Cloud City, per Lando's admission, wasn't part of the Empire when the Falcon landed there.
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.)
> 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.
I think this is a really weak distinction. One of the key transformations in the thought of wars that occurred through the 19th and 20th century (at least in western thought) is that nearly all wars have an element of 'total war'.
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.
That's a manufactured narrative. In actual war, the US attacked civilians all the time. If nothing else, we constantly bombed entire cities and strafed civilian populations during World War 2.
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.
It is also a manufactured narrative to argue US foreign policy has not evolved considerably. We no longer firebomb entire cities. We have not dropped an A-Bomb since 1945. In fact the US has lead the way in nuclear disarmament. In drone strikes, we take great care to identify targets with armed combatants as opposed to civilians in them. In the last 8 years we have de-escalated military operations in the Middle East. You don't see US soldiers wandering into a random concert hall and machine gunning hundreds of unarmed innocents and then blowing themselves up - especially not on orders from the high command.
This is only because we and our allies don't face an existential threat from our adversaries. It'd likely be much more effective to, say, ruthlessly hunt down and murder the extended families and friend networks of known terrorists or insurgents to discourage terrorism and uprisings, but the diplomatic cost of such actions in what amount to wars of choice is too high, and it would do too much damage to our narrative of "good guys versus bad guys". We're bad at fighting these types of groups because we choose to be bad at it, because the narrative matters more than winning—the cost of losing, or at least of a perpetual draw, isn't nearly as high as the cost of winning using effective but brutal strategies. In a "real" war, that likely wouldn't be true.
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)
I think we can all agree that WWII was a pretty terrible war for everybody, and every side saw the darkest corners of the human heart.
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.
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.
I have a slight hope that may be, just may be, this will result with people stop using labels and actually digging deeper to the substance of each issue.
Especially if they try to pass moral judgement and assign such labels as "good" and "bad" go very complex situations.
> There's a reason that the Iraqi rebels were branded as "insurgents" during that war
"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,)
Insurgency is a specific word with specific meaning -- it's an attack against a recognized authority (in the modern context, recognized typically means recognized by the United Nations) by a party not recognized (again, in the modern parlance, by the UN) as a belligerent. In Iraq, the insurgency didn't hold territory, for instance, or have any of the other trappings of a state actor in a military conflict. Counter-insurgency tactics are very different than a straight-up fight in a civil war. It's not Orwellian to use words to describe the things the words are intended to describe.
This loses meaning when we realize that the US is a huge force behind defining who is "recognized" or not anyway. Also this doesnt change the fact that during the American Revolution, the British were much more "recognized" in the international space than America -- so why were we rebels and not insurgents?
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."
Recognized is a binary; you either are or you aren't. The colonies behaved like a nation-state during the Revolutionary War -- they had ambassadors to multiple European nations during the conflict, for instance. The American revolutionaries also raised an army, for instance. They wore uniforms, etc. Similarly, during the Civil War, the Confederacy was not an insurgency and we didn't treat it as such.
>Recognized is a binary; you either are or you aren't.
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.
>Orwell would have a field day with our modern linguistic contortions
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.
> 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.
Irrespective of what you have ever or never heard, the pattern commonly flown -- and the pattern over which there was controversy -- is the pattern of a battle flag[0].
The national flags of the Confederacy were different, though some of them incorporated that pattern.
That is literally what it is- the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It is most technically accurate (and will slow down angry calls from readers who trying to correct you) to call it a battle flag, regardless of common usage.
I think that author took this all just a little bit too seriously. It's all obviously fairly tongue-in-cheek. I mean, his title is "Neoconservative Post-Hoc Rationalization of Genocide". He must be a blast at parties.
Pro-Jedis never discuss the countless of lives lost during the Mandalorian wars because the Jedis ineptitude in fighting a brutal enemy while the Galatic Republic waste time with bickering.
I watched the cartoon series "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" with my young son a few years ago and came away with an uncomfortable sense that the Jedi were morally bankrupt having created clones who they mostly treated like nameless slaves and used as cannon fodder. I haven't read the books so I don't know if the treatment is better but the Republic probably had the resources to develop and deploy drones too but they didn't, instead they chose to burn through human beings.
I've been watching the movies with my kid now that he's a little older and we're discussing the moral ambiguity.
I remember having the same feeling after watching the movie. Ok, so the Trade Federation turned itself into a dangerous military power by mass-producing droids, but fighting them with cloned, throw-away sentient beings? Seriously, Republic, what the hell is wrong with you? Yoda's approval for this plan is what broke my belief in Jedi being the good guys.
"The Empire’s accidental harming of Luke’s Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen can be directly compared to the casualties of President Obama’s drone campaign, whose body count terrorists capitalize upon for recruitment."
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.
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.
I'm not sure it's fair to argue that it would scale in such a way. Sure numerically it's an insignificant portion of the population but the Death Star still literally destroyed and entire planet and every living being on it.
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.
> I'm not sure it's fair to argue that it would scale in such a way. Sure numerically it's an insignificant portion of the population but the Death Star still literally destroyed and entire planet and every living being on it.
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.
You can try this in court one day. "Well, there were only 100 million people in Roman times, and there are like 6 billion people now, so on a relative scale, so me brutally murdering someone is an order of magnitude less serious. That's like killing 1/60th of a human, like a field mouse or a small puppy or something?"
I don't think this article was meant to be more than thought provoking.
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?
I am incredibly conflicted about what happened at Hiroshima, and I am coming around to the belief that what the US did there wasn't justified. (When I was serving in the Marine Corps in Japan, I visited the bridge that was the bomb target -- chosen because it could be easily seen from a plane -- and talked to a survivor, and it was really harrowing.)
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.
It's kind of funny, but my first introduction to the Star Wars franchise was the TIE Fighter game. I really thought Empire was the good guys that fight terrorists. Even today, after learning the truth, I still prefer Empire and "peace and order throughout the galaxy".
Don't stop with Star Wars. Just about every morality play can be analyzed this way. It's a trope that goes all the way back to antiquity. It's one of the first things I think about when I watch such a movie. Is this political order really something that needs to be destroyed? My answer winds up almost always being 'no'.
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.
Saw someone bat around the idea of Ursula being the good side in The Little Mermaid. Strong independent female fighting against the two patriarchal monarchies, etc etc.
Radical light-siders believe that killing should be done in a calm and focused state of mind. Remember, anger is part of the flesh, and they believe they are non corporal luminous beings temporarily trapped in flesh ... possibly by xenu.
It's 10-12 hours of pulp-grade movie. You can project a lot onto it, because in the end, there isn't much there to either draw conclusions from, or contradict your interpretation.
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.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but, in a way, the fact that this sort of analysis isn't about the movies, but the people doing it, is sort of my point.
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.
> 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.
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.
That interpretation would make more sense if the messianic figure did anything messianic, but our "savior" stories don't generally involve the savior first killing everybody he was supposed to save.
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.
There's a lot of quaint cherry-picking of evidence going on in these arguments which is really cheesing me off, but I want to highlight the importance of what I think is the fundamental issue, what is always the fundamental issue: what we're fighting for.
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.
Let's remember what's being fought for: a democracy versus an autocracy based on raw power...replaced a democratic government that responded to its constituents with the rule of one man.
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'm not arguing for "democracy", I'm arguing for democracy - the extension of popular power, which, I agree, must be preserved through constant action against ossification and entrenchment of power (viz. the current American "democracy"). I'm also not arguing for the replacement of autocracy with nothing. Caesar was the product of years of devolution of the Roman Republic, the corruption and decay of its democratic institutions in the face of military power, wealth, and slavery. His removal could not produce democracy merely by its absence.
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.
Unlike the real world, the force actually exists and has practical applications within the Star Wars universe. Who wouldn't want to master that power? Same cannot be said for some "other thing" in the real world which people believe in...
The problem with this is that "the Force" really does have supernatural powers (in the context of the movie at least), whereas religions only claim them but can't prove it.
From the perspective of ISIS, they fight for the final peace of the whole world under the only real God, and if they live they win slaves, if they die in fight they win the heaven and 72 virgins each (no matter what they did before, that would push them to hell, like forgetting to pray often enough or drinking beer).
And they have the book that has the "actual words of God" to support them (the whole book instead of pithy 10 commandments), and the bunch of the books describing how their role model ("a messenger of God") did what they do now (including beheadings).
And the highest values of their faith aren't "freedom" (and especially not "democracy"). The name of their religion means "submission" (to the God) and the meaning of the name of the followers is "the submitted." The important part of the religion is showing the submission often enough, even before and after visiting the toilet.
And even more convenient, the book confirms that their enemies, directly and explicitly named as unbelievers, Christians and Jews will surely burn in hell and that God hates them. And it does that repeatedly, so much that removing the pages with such content would reduce the book to a few pages.
How can that be countered, apart from pointing that the religious founder cleverly invented all that for his own gains, as even documented by their own books, and just mentioned by one novelist who was to be assassinated in 1989 and lived in hiding for decades. If you try to do that you'd be with a high probability now considered as somebody spreading religious hatred (insulting "everyone" who are of that religion). Because "all this has nothing to do with the religion that can't be named."
The reality starts to be weirder than fiction.
On another side, the "empire" really did a lot of nasty things in these areas.
If you have a genuine problem with Islam, my suggestion would be to not "accuse" it of stuff that Christianity does or did. It's just rhetorically weak. Even if you yourself are athiest or Hindu or whatever, its just plain odd to single out a religion for having a concept of hell to which unbelievers are sent, for being aimed explicitly at a "chosen people" or for praying, which the western leaders who wage war in the middle east from the crusades up till now talk about quite a lot.
In context of the article it would be like a Sith accusing the Jedis of believing in the force, and it would be rank hypocrisy.
And yet you seem surprised that this way of talking about Islam might be viewed negatively. That everyone is protecting Islam due to some politically-correct conspiracy rather than a basic sense of treating people with respect and equality.
I just see someone being totally disingenuous, so I'm not sure it's worth engaging with this.
To pick just one example (since I've already given several in the post you replied to which you seem to have ignored):
Does Christianity have as its "highest values" either "freedom" or "democracy"? Historically they've often been on the wrong side of both. Does any religion meet this test? If not then why did you feel the need to state this particular fact about this particular religion? As I said, it's rhetorically weak and open to entirely fair accusations of hypocrisy, even if you yourself are not a Christian.
> Does Christianity have as its "highest values" either "freedom" or "democracy"?
Have I mentioned Christianity anywhere? My subject was the religion whose name is translated as "submission."
> why did you feel the need to state this particular fact about this particular religion?
My topic was "what's being fought for from the perspective of ISIS."
I believe I kept my text focused to the topic. You are welcome to point any incorrectness in my elaboration of the topic, up to now I haven't seen that anybody recognized anything incorrect.
The percentage of the followers of the given religion in the US is something like 1% of the population. The religion fundamentalism based on the religion of just 1% of the population produced 50% of "Deaths From Extremist Attacks in the U.S." and that even not counting 9/11. Imagine how the chart would look with only one year more (2977 deaths more).
Please the most relevant link or links from the results of the search.
When I put "Muslim victims" I get something like
"a United Nations report from September 2014 found that “at least 24,015” Iraqi civilians — the vast majority of whom were Muslim — had been killed or injured by Daesh in the first eight months of 2014"
And can you specify the religious ideology based on which 4 million Muslims were apparently killed (since 1990)? And the quotes from the religious books that those who did these acts followed, like ISIS does for its acts and I can quote?
From my link with 4 million:
"US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11 in the form of covert military, logistical and financial aid to the Taliban from around 1992 onward. This US assistance propelled the Taliban’s violent conquest of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory."
The article is of course inaccurate, the U.S. supported the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan since mid-1979 even before Russia entered there.
So the deaths in Afghanistan resulted from raise of Taliban, for which the U.S. is partly responsible. In Iraq, the war between different Muslim entities was the "undesired" result of the U.S. actions (they expected "democracy").
I don't see Christian agenda in supporting the Taliban (!) or the Shia politicians in Iraq (because "democracy" -- Shia are majority there!). I think you can agree it's not the Christian religious values that motivate all that.
Although your other comments are fine and often excellent, all of this religious flamewar stuff is off topic here. Yes, this is a loose use of 'flamewar' but justified by how inflammatory the material is. Please don't bring it into HN threads.
Wherever and whenever the politics or faith is discussed among those not having the same views the discussion can be considered a flamewar as most of the time just the beliefs of one of other side are rephrased. I try not making such kind of contributions by stating and quoting the established facts. I can give more sources for any statement of the post above. I don't understand why stating the facts is something negative, except that the facts aren't widely known. But that's exactly why it's worth mentioning them. If anybody questions any of the facts, the support for them can be cited etc.
My "inflammatory" reply is by the way the reply to the post having, among other sentences:
"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."
My claim is, it's not that OBL fought against "oppressors" in general, he had very specific faith-based highly intolerant ideology which is in the widest strokes described in my post. Not to mention that his definition of "oppression" was "having the military bases of infidels on our holy lands." And I'm very sure that every sentence of my post is true.
Your comments are excellent; I think dang is just hinting at the fact that such religious discussions are not welcome on HN, which is a private domain he gatekeeps.
This article and others like it ignore the context of the films. Palpatine disbanded the imperial senate. The rebels were fighting to restore the galactic republic that had stood for 1000 years.
The point I'm making is the empire was a totalitarian regime that had to be eliminated. Look at it in terms of today's world. Imagine if a president disbanded the congress and held power by threat of force.
I think you're confused; "the empire was a totalitarian regime that had to be eliminated" is the thesis you're trying to prove. So, what is your argument? Your original comment contained to points for this argument: (1) Republic is old, (2) the Senate was dissolved. (1) relies on the assumption that "old = good" and (2) assumes that elimination of Senate — about which we don't know pretty much anything at the moment — is bad. Does it really look convincing to you?
Oh, and Galactic Republic is/was too different from US political system for your comparison to be relevant in any way.
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.
> 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.
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.
From this cherrypicking article to various other online forums critical of them, it's pretty hilarious how recently, every single crevice of the Star Wars movies is thrown into the town square naked, and then being loudly decried for it being an inconsistency/plot hole/any other logical deficiency. All the while forgetting that in the 70s, a business man with an acumen for world-building conceived these space operas. Space operas whose largest overarching theme is a simple struggle of good vs. evil. I'm partially convinced Disney is to blame for this, most likely stoking the fire behind-the-scenes.
I guess that between Luke Skywalker's lifelike radicalization, and Palpatine's seizing dictatorship through an emergency-powers clause, _Star Wars_ is the story of how al-Qaida fought the Nazis...
("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.")
As with most articles, this one says more about the writer than it really does the subject. The stories are ambiguous enough that you can literally find any message you want to out of them. Scrappy little startup vs Oracle. The plight of the middle east vs the UN (or just the USA). A SF story told from another time.
So, what do you take from it? What does that tell you about yourself?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadBut 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
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.
As far as I understand, before it was at least peace in the land, now it's a second home of ISIS.
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?
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
EDIT: 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".
You can surely find many similar statements from old people from the war, though.
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.
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?
Predicting that the US will remain in the hands of some what sensible leaders seems rather naive to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
“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...
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.
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:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
Especially if they try to pass moral judgement and assign such labels as "good" and "bad" go very complex situations.
"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,)
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...
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...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...
http://sean-mcbeth.tumblr.com/post/134608041510/neoconservat...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
From the perspective of ISIS, they fight for the final peace of the whole world under the only real God, and if they live they win slaves, if they die in fight they win the heaven and 72 virgins each (no matter what they did before, that would push them to hell, like forgetting to pray often enough or drinking beer).
And they have the book that has the "actual words of God" to support them (the whole book instead of pithy 10 commandments), and the bunch of the books describing how their role model ("a messenger of God") did what they do now (including beheadings).
And the highest values of their faith aren't "freedom" (and especially not "democracy"). The name of their religion means "submission" (to the God) and the meaning of the name of the followers is "the submitted." The important part of the religion is showing the submission often enough, even before and after visiting the toilet.
And even more convenient, the book confirms that their enemies, directly and explicitly named as unbelievers, Christians and Jews will surely burn in hell and that God hates them. And it does that repeatedly, so much that removing the pages with such content would reduce the book to a few pages.
How can that be countered, apart from pointing that the religious founder cleverly invented all that for his own gains, as even documented by their own books, and just mentioned by one novelist who was to be assassinated in 1989 and lived in hiding for decades. If you try to do that you'd be with a high probability now considered as somebody spreading religious hatred (insulting "everyone" who are of that religion). Because "all this has nothing to do with the religion that can't be named."
The reality starts to be weirder than fiction.
On another side, the "empire" really did a lot of nasty things in these areas.
In context of the article it would be like a Sith accusing the Jedis of believing in the force, and it would be rank hypocrisy.
And yet you seem surprised that this way of talking about Islam might be viewed negatively. That everyone is protecting Islam due to some politically-correct conspiracy rather than a basic sense of treating people with respect and equality.
What is that "stuff that Christianity does or did" that I write about above? What do you consider an accusation? I see just a set of facts.
Which part of my text do you dispute?
I just see someone being totally disingenuous, so I'm not sure it's worth engaging with this.
To pick just one example (since I've already given several in the post you replied to which you seem to have ignored):
Does Christianity have as its "highest values" either "freedom" or "democracy"? Historically they've often been on the wrong side of both. Does any religion meet this test? If not then why did you feel the need to state this particular fact about this particular religion? As I said, it's rhetorically weak and open to entirely fair accusations of hypocrisy, even if you yourself are not a Christian.
Have I mentioned Christianity anywhere? My subject was the religion whose name is translated as "submission."
> why did you feel the need to state this particular fact about this particular religion?
My topic was "what's being fought for from the perspective of ISIS."
I believe I kept my text focused to the topic. You are welcome to point any incorrectness in my elaboration of the topic, up to now I haven't seen that anybody recognized anything incorrect.
Additionally, ponder the chart shown here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/us/california-...
The percentage of the followers of the given religion in the US is something like 1% of the population. The religion fundamentalism based on the religion of just 1% of the population produced 50% of "Deaths From Extremist Attacks in the U.S." and that even not counting 9/11. Imagine how the chart would look with only one year more (2977 deaths more).
That's a big number.
When I put "Muslim victims" I get something like
"a United Nations report from September 2014 found that “at least 24,015” Iraqi civilians — the vast majority of whom were Muslim — had been killed or injured by Daesh in the first eight months of 2014"
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/IQ/UNAMI_OHCHR_POC_...
(Edit: OK I've found one link: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/unworthy-victims-wester... )
And can you specify the religious ideology based on which 4 million Muslims were apparently killed (since 1990)? And the quotes from the religious books that those who did these acts followed, like ISIS does for its acts and I can quote?
From my link with 4 million:
"US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11 in the form of covert military, logistical and financial aid to the Taliban from around 1992 onward. This US assistance propelled the Taliban’s violent conquest of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory."
The article is of course inaccurate, the U.S. supported the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan since mid-1979 even before Russia entered there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
So the deaths in Afghanistan resulted from raise of Taliban, for which the U.S. is partly responsible. In Iraq, the war between different Muslim entities was the "undesired" result of the U.S. actions (they expected "democracy").
I don't see Christian agenda in supporting the Taliban (!) or the Shia politicians in Iraq (because "democracy" -- Shia are majority there!). I think you can agree it's not the Christian religious values that motivate all that.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731716 and marked it off-topic.
My "inflammatory" reply is by the way the reply to the post having, among other sentences:
"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."
My claim is, it's not that OBL fought against "oppressors" in general, he had very specific faith-based highly intolerant ideology which is in the widest strokes described in my post. Not to mention that his definition of "oppression" was "having the military bases of infidels on our holy lands." And I'm very sure that every sentence of my post is true.
Bad for business, you see :-)
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiM5zEEI_Jo
Not at the time the Empire was formed, though.
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.
("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.")
So, what do you take from it? What does that tell you about yourself?