My favorite example of this.
Hint: George Lucas has stated in the most plain-English unambiguous terms that the empire does in fact represent US imperialism in A New Hope. It’s in a director chat interview thing with with James Cameron if you feel like searching it up.
Oh boy now I can add this to my “Americans being so far gone that they don’t realize a movie about US imperialism is a movie about US imperialism”. Almost like MAGA thinking Homelander is a celebration of Trump for 3 whole seasons before realizing it may actually he the opposite.
For people that say “don’t make x media political” I think that almost all media is inherently political, your making a statement about something that has real world connotations and people are going to form an opinion from it.
I was just thinking of the ex-gf who didn’t believe Star Wars was about Vietnam. I should add that to the list of reasons for the break up.
Never date a centrist. If they’re not a militant leftist, don’t bother kids. 😂
Not good thoughts, not good thoughts by the way. Thinking about the writing group I dropped because “that’s always been my thing”.
disagreed. my wife, when we met, was right wing. but also very smart. also very empathetic. not very politically aware.
we were friends for a decade. dated for a bit. got married. talked politics for a few years. i asked a few pointed questions over the years. in 2015, agent krasnov’s response to the attacks in Paris in November of that year were enough for her to leave the republican party, without any of my prompting. dear gods i love that woman. i remember, the responses were all about him being right about some bullshit and nothing about calming and unifying people. nothing what a politician is supposed to do.
nowadays, yeah, never date anyone more right than Rick Allen.
The story goes that George Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, but the studio didn’t like that he was gonna make it a 35mm black and white documentary instead of a blockbuster movie, so he said he’d make his own Vietnam war movie…with spaceships, and lasers!
I’ll direct my own movie! With blackjack and hookers!
And eventually he really did.
he just did space chess and, uh, what are those women in cages called. gogo dancers?
I thought that was lady gaga on the far right
I don’t think that’s a George Lucas work.
And unlike the original Star Wars film, which made the parallels to the Vietnam War paint the US in a bad light, the latest Star Wars film riffs off the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now!, but instead of presenting napalming the shit out of people as a bad thing, presents it as a good thing.
Which film?
TMAG
I had to look that up, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is the name of the film for anyone else curious. I guess they learned all the wrong lessons from the success of The Mandalorian.
Not the Delorean and Groggy!
does lil grogs at least eat eat everyone he spacenapalms?
I love this meme with stormtroopers, because instead of the guy in front being about to die he’s in the safest possible place.
There was a bit of fan-lore I read a while back that the stormtroopers intentionally missed because Vader didn’t want them to kill his kids… really its because it would make for bad cinema if the NPCs killed the main characters 30 seconds into their first scenes…
It wasn’t because of his kids, but as later explained (in expanded material) the Millenium Falcon had a tracking device installed soon after it was detained.
Otherwise, consider that the Death Star could’ve blown the freighter out of the sky the moment it exited the hanger with its thousands of Point Defenses.
It was pretty awesome when that Suicide Squad movie did it.
Glad to see a new spin on this meme format.
Too bad the stormtrooper on the right still missed.
LITERALLY
Watching Star Wars as a kid is LITERALLY one of many reasons I give a fuck as an adult.
I paid attention to the fucking story.
also: george lucas said as much
And what exactly is the difference between Western imperialism and other kinds of imperialism?
I know your question is rhetorical, because you always, always cape for the imperial core, but: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
“Western” is inaccurate. The fascist Japanese empire was a monopoly-stage capitalist empire much like the others, and Japan is still a junior partner today’s neocolonialism, but it’s never been “Western.”
This isn’t about cultures or genetics or location on the map, but about ownership of the means of production, international power dynamics, and sovereignty. It’s about imperialism vs anti-imperialism.
One is an actual problem for the world and the other exists as a hypothetical?
So Chinese military presence in Africa is not imperialism?
Is that what imperialism means to you? Can you show me this Chinese military presence? Because it doesn’t fill me with confidence that you can’t get any more specific than the name of the continent.
Nope.
You might want to actually educate yourself on what words mean instead of going with vibes and memes
what do you think etcetera at lemmy dot ml might think about the subject?
Why would you think .ml users would be uncritical to China? We just like our western imperialism balanced by eastern imperialism, thank you.
Perfectly balanced. As all things should be. To much to one side… or the other…
I remember the time before I learned much 20th century history, I was saying dumb shit like this all the time
Like how, unironically? Wow :D
Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.
There really isn’t anything comparable to western imperialism, and western imperialism is the single largest barrier to human progress around the world. What is it with whataboutism?
“And what exactly” makes you sound offended.
Euro-imperial chauvinist brainworms.
Excuse my anger at the genocides conducted by the disgusting whites
No. It’s literally just space Nazi’s.
Guys… There are STORMTROOPERS in the Empire. It’s not subtle lol.
george lucas has stated very plainly it was about US imperialism in vietnam
The comparisons to Nazi Germany were deliberate, as the Nazis were inspired by the US Empire. Lucas himself said it was a metaphor for the Vietnam war.
george lucas literally said it in an interview that the empire is the us empire…
NO! THEY are the space nazis!
Space nazis of the US empire.
Just like Starship troopers are space nazis of the US empire to it’s filmmaker.Now excuse me while I cut off your hand.
Sorry, it’s pretty clearly stated in this interview by Lucas.
And the Nazis were also based on the USA 😶
Removed by mod
Hot take:
The Galactic Empire is portrayed as bad mainly due to it’s execution of power. The Empire’s ideals of order and stability don’t actually seem so bad in theory. Even the Mandolorian spin-off show supports this perspective.
Such ‘order and stability’ that they have a full-blown galaxy-wide rebellion organised against them (without involvement of the CIA or any other of NATO’s parts).
Whose order, stability for who? Order and stability are features of a system, not ideological beliefs. Pretty much everyone wants order and stability in the abstract, the problem is when the order is an extractive fascist police state that devastates planets and wipes out cultures so that the people perpetuating it can enjoy stability at everyone else’s expense.
That’s so true.
