• squirrel
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    98
    ·
    9 months ago

    George Lucas introduced evil guys wearing SS uniforms who conduct genocide before the viewers’ eyes and somehow people still pretend that Star Wars is apolitical.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      59
      ·
      9 months ago

      The best political statement from Star Wars is that the raging liberal that is George Lucas created a galactic society with a robotic slave labor race and apparently unlimited resources but could not imagine a world where the good guys did anything but fight to restore the status quo of poor people being not quite so oppressed.

      That said, Star Wars 10 should be the Droid Revolution.

      Do it, you Disney pansies. You won’t.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        34
        ·
        9 months ago

        Solo tried to go there, but only droids oppressed by the Empire are truly oppressed for some reason.

      • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        9 months ago

        To be fair to Star Wars, the entire premise of the overall universe is that the Galaxy is stuck on cycle between fascism and neo-liberalism because the latter will always pave the way to the former.

        • Gabu@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          Also because the only beings who could break the cycle (the Jedi/Sith) are more interested in wiping the opposite faction than fixing the galaxy. Pre-Disney, Anakin/Luke begin the important transition from the cyclic system into a state of perfect balance.

        • sundray@lemmus.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          9 months ago

          Man, using droids for forced labor is immoral. Let’s forcibly remove their sentience, that’ll fix it!

          • Gabu@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            9 months ago

            It unironically does… Otherwise, why stop at droids - using a hammer to drive a nail would also be slavery. We’d have countless slaves working for humanity right now, in the form of industrial robots.

            That’s precisely why the default protocol in Star Wars (that nobody remotely related to the main cast seems to follow) is to periodically wipe droids, to prevent them from developing sentience and personality.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Are you seriously criticizing the use of droids in a galaxy where slavery and clone armies are a thing? Also, in-universe, the use of droids isn’t quite as bad as it seems - we get confirmation from multiple sources that Droids do not develop a personality and sense of self unless they’re left on for too long. That’s why I’d consider C3PO, R2-D2 and most B1 battle droids to be sentient individuals, but most Droidekas to be no more than tools/weapons.

    • Snot Flickerman
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      9 months ago

      Oh wait until you meet the Starship Troopers / Helldivers communities…

        • Nightwatch Admin@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          9 months ago

          The beauty of the book is that you’re basically reading a future soldier’s diary. Heinlein is letting the story speak for itself, the reader has to decide what to think of such a life, such a future without being nudged into any direction whatsoever. I love it.

          • HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            9 months ago

            I think Heinlein did that a lot. I think stranger and a strange land is him looking at the hippie culture and taking it to a sci-fi extreme. I don’t think he was trying to advocate for anything. In particular, a lot of his books was about trying to protect the future and see how that would affect people.

          • frezik@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            9 months ago

            Then you read the next book, and it’s about space being a Libertarian utopia. And then the next one is about a free love cult.

            He might not be writing satire, but if he wasn’t, then I don’t know how to make anything coherent out of his writing. The only commonality is a very obvious self insert mouthpiece character.

            • sundray@lemmus.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              9 months ago

              There’s a line of criticism on Heinlein’s work that tries to defang the unsavory themes in his stories by pretty much declaring them all satire. Fascist themes in Starship Troopers? Satire. Racist themes in Farnham’s Freehold? Fourth-dimensional chess level satire, you can see it if you look real carefully. Incest in To Sail Beyond the Sunset? A big joke!

              And maybe it’s true? He definitely became more libertarian over time – but he was a professional writer, so his output is bound to be a combination of what he believed and what he thought would sell. Personally, I have no idea what the mix is. Would be nice if the people who enjoyed his stories didn’t also feel obligated to puff up his moral bone fides though. So much bending over backwards isn’t really good for a person.

              • Jojo@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                9 months ago

                I’m a big proponent of the “death of the author”. Even if the author is still around to give their reasons for writing something the way they did, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is what the audience sees in the work.

                Every interpretation is equally valid as long as they’re sincere. The drapes were blue. The drapes represent depression. The drapes represent Democrats. The only invalid deconstruction is one delivered in bad faith.

                Edit: typo

                • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  ·
                  9 months ago

                  I hate death of the author because it destroys art as a form of communication. You end up with Orwellian art: Whoever controls the present narative, controls the past.

                  I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.

                  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    6
                    ·
                    9 months ago

                    Death of the Author enables the most absolute shittakes to be valid. John Carpenter felt the need to make a public statement decrying the neo-nazis who were promoting the idea that They Live was a critic of Jews.

                  • Jojo@lemm.ee
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    3
                    ·
                    9 months ago

                    I don’t think it destroys art as a form of communication any more than the possibility of being misunderstood over texting or even in person destroys those media.

                    The chance for miscommunication exists in every form of communication, it’s the consequence of letting an idea out of your own head and into the world. And art is inherently less clear a method for communication than something more straightforward would be.

                    If you create a work that nazis can see a bit of their worldview in, congratulations! They see their worldview in the world, so you’ve created a decently accurate facsimile of reality. Shitty people seeing their own shitty ideas in your art doesn’t say anything about you, y says something about them. The same “death of the author” that lets them have that take insulated the author from that take.

                    But the reason I like it is that it also allows decent people to come to decent conclusions about art made by shitty people. Even if I didn’t like it, I know it exists. Art can speak to someone about experiences the author didn’t imagine, and that can be powerful and significant and beautiful, even if it can also be shitty.

                  • Jojo@lemm.ee
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    9 months ago

                    I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.

                    And even more importantly is that people are gonna “teach” the making of art how they teach it regardless, but the teacher experiencing it one way doesn’t make any of the other readings invalid.

        • TheControlled@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          Not mad at you but I literally cannot fucking abide with critics’ read of Starship Troopers that it’s somehow pro-fascist. Not only have I read some of his other books that are about peaceful, optimistic space exploration, but the book itself is so clearly a satire it astounds me. I could really write a whole wall of text right now.

          Anyway, it’s concept is “what if facism was normal to everyone and it was centuries of that normalization and they decided to conquer the galaxy because… Fascism” And then it goes into the mind of a literal average soldier who starts to think too much and is really horny because he’s barely ever laid eyes on a girl." It’s anti fascist, but in a clever way. That’s what makes it so good.

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          I personally think the book is an exploration of what a militaristic society would look like if faced by a external threat, and that it should be taken at face value, but there are plenty of critics who have read more books than I have with much less favourable interpretations.

          tl;dr - Heinlein ain’t that smart

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      9 months ago

      Episode 1 was about a trade dispute on the surface and a plot to take over the Republic and turn it into a dictatorship just below the surface (where “the surface” is about what the characters in the movie see, the audience sees it all if they’ve watched the OT before). Episode 2 is about expanding that into a war, episode 3 is about creating a moment to perform a coup.

      The action is secondary to the politics with the exception of the death of Darth Maul, the escape of Obi Wan and Yoda, Obi Wan defeating Anakin, the destruction of the first Death Star, the Ewoks joining the battle of Endor, and Anakin turning on Sideous. Everything else was part of Sideous’ plan to take political power.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        There are also strong messages about trauma and how being cloistered can lead people to become the very evil their isolation was intended to prevent. Luke is a walking billboard saying “even evil people can realise the gravity of their mistakes”, as well.