Fox News: Star Wars Saga Reflects Political Ideals

[norml]

Star Wars Saga Reflects Political Ideals
Saturday, May 21, 2005
By Thomas A. Firey
ARCHIVE
•Star Wars Saga Reflects Political Ideals

In the lead up to the last Star Wars movie, Weekly Standard online editor Jonathan Last took his magazine over to the dark side.

The Empire may be a dictatorship, Last wrote, but it's "a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime...The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen."

Last went on to explain that imperial ruler Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine "is a dictator — but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet." Last's column was written tongue-in-cheek — I think. But, in post-Patriot Act America, I hope his ideas stay far, far away from Capitol Hill.

No cultural icon can exist without someone trying to stuff it into a political ideology. The Star Wars saga, the greatest pop culture icon of the last three decades, is no exception. Fan Web sites have buzzed for years over whether Sith patsies Nute Gunray and Lott Dodd symbolize Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. Palpatine's dissolution of the Senate in favor of imperial rule has been compared to Julius Caesar's marginalization of the Roman Senate, Hitler's power-grab as chancellor, and FDR's court-packing scheme and creation of the imperial presidency.




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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,157229,00.html

[MadAsHellNewYorker]

1. "a dictatorship people can do business with."

"a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime...The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen."

:wtf: does THAT mean? Its alright to be oppressed and controlled as long as it is not too apparent to the average citizen?

Trying to make excuses much?

[Demeter]

5. Not The Average Citizen, the average Corporation

They could not care less about the average citizen.

[yurbud]

2. Righty in LA Times wrote a piece praising monarchy

For some reason, I find this more pathetic and creepy than threatening.

Most notable is he compares the give and take and debate in a democracy to "goofing around" compared to the stability of an autocrat who serves for life.

If this was their goal, they should have done it sooner after 9/11. No amount of terrorism is going to let them get away with this now; people are getting to tired of fake threats and fear-mongering.

May 20, 2005
Long Live the Queen: She Still Matters
Britain's flexible democracy rests on the throne.

DAVID GELERNTER

EXCERPT:

...This extraordinary flexibility works well because of the queen. She is the ballast that helps keep the ship of state from capsizing no matter how much goofing around takes place on deck. (No need for ballast to be brilliant or exciting.) It's a law of organization that VPs come and go, but the top dog's disappearance makes the organization stagger.

That decapitated feeling is no good for a nation's mood or currency or economy. But with the soothingly familiar queen always on duty, Britons generally feel stable. And the feeling of great stability permits the reality of great flexibility. That is the monarchy's invaluable contribution...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gelernter20may20,0,7338095.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

[thebigidea]

3. yeah, FDR was JUST like Caesar, Hitler, and a fictional Emporer

fucking Fox...

[bpilgrim]

6. they HATE Caesar and FDR because they actually helped the people

against the wishes of the senate elite.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar

A People's History of Ancient Rome

Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility. They regard Roman commoners as a parasitic mob, a rabble interested only in bread and circuses. They cast Caesar, who took up the popular cause, as a despot and demagogue, and treat his murder as the outcome of a personal feud or constitutional struggle, devoid of social content. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, the distinguished author Michael Parenti subjects these assertions of "gentlemen historians" to a bracing critique, and presents us with a compelling story of popular resistance against entrenched power and wealth. Parenti shows that Caesar was only the last in a line of reformers, dating back across the better part of a century, who were murdered by opulent conservatives. Caesar's assassination set in motion a protracted civil war, the demise of a five-hundred-year Republic, and the emergence of an absolutist rule that would prevail over Western Europe for centuries to come.

Parenti reconstructs the social and political context of Caesar's murder, offering fascinating details about Roman society. In these pages we encounter money-driven elections, the struggle for economic democracy, the use of religion as an instrument of social control, the sexual abuse of slaves, and the political use of homophobic attacks. Here is a story of empire and corruption, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, slumlords and urban rioters, death squads and political witchhunts.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a compelling new perspective on an ancient era, one that contains many intriguing parallels to our own times.

source...
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html

well worth the read

peace

[Gatchaman]

4. unbelievable

"a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime...The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen."

Isn't this basically what the said about Mussolini when he came to power? That he'll get the trains running on time?

[Elidor]

7. Darth Vader isn't so bad

He's a good disciplinarian, and he knows how to lead. Empire is good.

Can you believe these people?

[Lisa]

10. yes, and none of that pesky decision-making

Life is so much easier when you don't have to make choices or negotiate, isn't it.

[Shadowen]

8. The problem with the Empire being the bad guys...

...is that aside from a few actions that can be attributed to a very few individuals, they aren't really bad guys in the movies--at least, they aren't in the same way that, for example, hapless Nazi infantrymen aren't. They were, for the most part, just following orders, though some of those orders reveal some of the soldiers to be terrified of their superiors at best and amoral or outright evil at worst.

You need to go to the Expanded Universe--the novels and video games--to understand the Empire's speciesist, sexist, genocidal tendencies. Humans referring to aliens as "subhuman", women being part of the armed forces but neither prevalent nor powerful, the dispassionate way that scientists experiment on sentient beings so long as they don't look human. Plus the slavery. Can't forget the slavery.

And of course, there's the "a corrupt democracy is better than any kidn of dictatorship" school of thought. Because no matter how you slice it, things were certainly better for a large segment of the population Republic than they were under the Empire.

I'm really sick of Imperial apologists--that is, Star Wars fans who think that the Empire is largely good, but that the people on top were corrupt, resulting in a "trickle down" of evil. Especially in this day and age, where some of them have begun referring to the Rebels as "insurgents" (or even "terrorists"), which is just tasteless, IMHO.

/Star Wars geek and unabashed liberal

[aldian159]

9. just the person I needed to find

I need a time line of the books, all of them, I'm looking to buy all the major post-Jedi novels, but I don't know what chronological order they're in. Can you help?

Thanks

/Star Wars geek and unabashed liberal as well