The "Evil Empire" is US according to Lucas.. - Page 2  

I smell a thread closure so I wont waste a lot of time with this response. I think it is helpful when art reflects what some people in a society perceive their society looks like to others. Take for instance the original star trek showing the bigotry between the people whose right half was black versus those whose left half was black. Sometimes pointing out the obvious to the oblivious is a useful practice. Certainly surveys show that the majority of countries, including well established allies of the US consider some of the actions of the US as simply self-serving under the guise of geo-political stability. As for the UN, you might think of them as the Jedi, striving to be the pure and balanced but still flawed and arrogant. The US as the empire controls the UN to serve its purposes and yet fears the UN much as the emperor used and also feared the Jedi.

Sure this all a bit of a stretch but stretching your mind and imagination is rarely a wasteful exercise.

My dad. :rolleyes:

Well obviously theres similarities AND differences, why are you so adamamant that we ignore the similarites, and focus on the differences?

I could list 100 differences and 100 similarities, if I had the time :)

Don't mind me. I just didn't want another episode of "someone complained so I'm going to treat you adults like children" happen before I could post and be a part of it. Carry on.

Too much work to see the original quote to which I objected?


Just how amazingly similar are they pray tell? I suppose if another 50,000 US servicemen and women die in Iraq then they will become more similar. It would take a great amount of rewriting history to ever make them even remotely similar much less amazingly similar!

Just keep letting patriotic fervor steer our course and in time the two will seem quite similar.

I stand by that, even if Archie was portrayed racist, and he was portrayed as such intentionally, then. But I see through all that, and the character, with all of his failings, in today’s context, is missed.

Missed my meaning? Yes, for some… but not all. <smile>

Meathead and Gloria were not portrayed as buffoons… Archie was, and so was Edith. But from a writer’s perspective, Archie and Edith needed to have some certain likeable qualities back then. The backfire is that Archie’s quality was portrayed as an over-the-top patriot (flag waving in-your-face defender of Uncle Sam no matter what), and Edith, an over-the-top devoted wife (in those days an idiot), both to be ridiculed. Though “likeableâ€, the “idiots†were supposed to give way to the new politic of anti-Americanism as portrayed by Meathead and Gloria and of course their Canadian draft-dogging buddies.

New context. Backfire.

If Lucas truly did use America as inspiration for Dark Side, then I will have been truly offended. But I will rest assure it will not be interpreted that way, now, or in the future.

It's amazing that 30 years after Vietnam, a war we had no business waging (even the master architect of that war, Robert McNamara, now believes that), there is still a group out there that thinks anyone who rightly protested our involvement was somehow "anti-American". Now, we're involved in another war we have no business waging, and patriotic Americans who are objecting not only to the war but to the way the American people were conned into initially supporting it are tarred with the same tired, old brush. Anyone who feels that way is a little confused as to what it means to be an American. We don't like being lied to by our democratically elected leaders.

Oh, and fleeing to Canada to avoid military service was so lower class. More sophisticated and priviledged dodgers just enlisted in the Guard and fled to Alabama. :rolleyes:

And the first real step to closing this thread begans :p

Edit to add: A lefty in Charlotte, NC? Oh my :eek:

Or is that just my Blue state yankee bias showing ?

Well put! Especially for a guy named "arci" :)

Oh, I think it started a few pages back actually. And yes, it's a lonely life for those few of us interested in truth and justice here in NC but, and I'm proud to add, Charlotte is an island of blue rationality in a sea of red conformity. There are more of us here than one might suspect, keeping our heads down and our powder dry. :D

Consider this an official complaint, Mr. Moderator/Administrator.

I didn't come to living in America to have George Lucas or anyone else in Hollywood
talk about politics, sex or religion. America is too diverse for this. Please keep these issues out of life and delete Hollywood.

Huh? He clearly states what? He indicates that Vietnam was an influence, but NOT Iraq. And when the interviewers try to draw the parallel to Iraq, Lucas insists thats not intentional, its purely coincidiental.

Mainly I see that Anti-war website making all the associations...

I wonder, was the line, "If you are not with us, you are our enemy" in the original screenplay, or was that added in the last year? Does anyone know?

The problem with a thread like this is dangit you have to keep checking back so often.
If you don't, then once you check back and discover the thread has joined Jimmy Hoffa, you'll never know what juicy posts came in since the last checkin.
Someone needs to volunteer and monitor threads like this continuously. And copy and paste all the posts into a file as they come in. Then we can all see them all. Who knows, that one post might have been made which would have caused me to change my whole worldview. Okay, so I don't have no worldview. But you get the point.

Why is it that so many people on the right cannot tell the difference between standing up and saying that something is wrong in X and being against X? This has always baffled me. History it littered with civilizations that went down the tubes because pointing out problems became synonymous with treason, therefore no one ever spoke truth to power and power ran rampant. It's the same thing that's wrong in the middle east as well, because in theocracy it is blasphemy to speak out against the govt. Blind patriotism (or blind submission to theocracy) is a dangerous cancer that will eventually destroy every civilization in infects. It's a pattern towards maximum orthodoxy and suppression of innovation and new thinking that is so common that it's boring.

Our loyalty should be to the truth. It shouldn't be 'my country right or wrong', it should be 'the truth, whoever speaks it'.

You've got my vote...

Probably the same reason so many people on the left can't tell the difference.


Agreed in principle. I'd suspect the problem arises when trying to determine what the truth is.

But the left doesn't do that by-and-large. It's a right-wing thing as we've seen so clearly during the last two election cycles; the left has other issues.

That's always true, but I was comparing it against 'my country, right or wrong'. If you take that position, one would assume you take a stance against the right and the true even if you know it to be the case. I think that's even more dangerous than being unable to recognize the truth, since the latter is at least amenable to education and exposure to the wider world and it's complexities.

And it's the backing of one's own govt., no matter what, that always has and still does allow govts to gain unfettered power and to suppress honest dissent, and to do it without even having to give the appearance of dictatorship, because they can goad the 'my country' types into doing it for them, through social and economic pressures.

So, I take it that you perceive something wrong with the right, but you aren't actually against the right? :D

For my part, I'm certainly not against the right. I've spoken for balance in many of these discussions. Without a balance, the system will very quickly run off into the weeds in one direction or another. But I am against those aspects of either side that prevent balance, and the attitude that is prevalent on the right, and very much so on the far right, that speaking out against the govt when you think it is wrong is tantamount to conspiracy or anti-Americanism, that is a very dangerous mechanism that prevents balancing.

It always happens that a country founded on dissent by radicals will become a country that suppresses dissent by orthodoxy, because those radicals are inevitably replaced by the same people that caused the original radicals to break away, by people who suppress dissent because dissent threatens their power.

Actually, it's not even balance I think we need, it's Darwinian genetic variation that we need. You never know what's coming down the pike and in any time, one or another set of skills and outlooks will work best. Many answers will not remain the right answers over time, and since people almost never change fundamentally and therefore cannot react well to significant environmental change, we need that diversity of views and ideas so that the outcasts can take over when the current answer for whatever ceases to be the right answer.

Taking a position against what one knows to be right and true is indefensible.

I guess my point is that there is always a risk in taking any stance that one's position might later found to be false, or at least, not entirely justifiable. So it's a fine line between risking commitment or being indecisive to the point of impotency.

I think that some of these themes of the interplay of right and wrong, action and inaction, are present in ROTS. It seems to me that very few of the characters come out at the end as being beyond reproach.

Yeah, kinda'. Like Mr. Roddy, I believe in balance (and the system is way out of balance right now). The problem I have is with those who cling so tenatiously to dogma, even when that dogma is clearly shown to be wrong. You don't find lefties defending their government when it's clearly in the wrong; that's almost exclusively representative of the right. Lefties, on the other hand, are perfectly willing to abandon even their most cherished views and most beloved politicians in a heartbeat when new information comes to light. "Flip-flopping" is what their opponents call it, I believe. ;)

Don't kid yourself, archi. I can understand your frustration, but neither side has the monopoly on politicians who lie, cheat, and misrepresent themselves. In other words, the Dems are just as guilty.

I guess you've never lived in a liberal area. Well, I do, and some of the things the government comes up with here is downright ridiculous. Here in SF we pay bums to be, well, bums, for instance. Is this a good idea? Well, plenty of lefties here defend this concept, even though it clearly isn't. I could go on, but I think you get the point. Again, the left is just as guilty.

Perhaps I am mistaken but I seem to remember at least one or two lefties defending Clinton. How much more wrong can you get?

As long as the attitude is limited to opinion rather than being codified, I think we're still OK. After all, trying supress it would be equally bad, or even worse.

In the case of X being equal to the U.S.A. (or more generally, the establishment), you are likely correct that the right is more vocal in their denouncements. But then, that specific value for X targets the innate philosophy of the right. Using other values for X will get similar results with the left, or with any other "sides".


Good point about human nature tending to be resistant to change. It would be interesting to see what happened if human nature readily embraced change. Would it indeed be better, or might we find that chaos would ensue.
Even with Darwinian genetics there is a natural built-in resistance to change. Maybe everything is actually in pretty good balance after all. Unlike the force. Although I still haven't heard a satisfactory explanation of why it was out of balance to begin with.

I'd like to think that most reasonable people believe that balance is a good thing. But it also seems that most people can't agree on what needs to be done to achieve balance, or even what constitutes a good balance.

Depending on exactly how you mean that the system is way out of balance, I'd either strongly agree or strongly disagree.
I'd agree that our political process in general is out of balance. This being due to the people not being represented well by any of the political parties. Individual politicians vary in their desire and ability to be good representatives.
I'd disagree that the system is way out of balance along conservative/liberal lines. This is a pendulum that continually swings back and forth and, while it is currently swinging towards more conservatism, it is nowhere close to where it once was conservatively in the middle of the last century, and it is nowhere nearly as extreme conservatively as it once was liberally.
The fact that the extremes of both liberalism and conservatism continue to cry that the sky is falling is good evidence that we are more balanced than we might think by listening to either side alone.

Awe, Jeeezz, Archi…

My point, which still stands, was that a piece of work can be interpreted differently, and validly, by changing times regardless of the creator’s intent.

This reference to the Empire being molded after an “evil†America, is simply stupid at best. Only on some Internet website are some people going to get all serious and all worked up over a ridiculous comparison like that, and drag serious political views into he conversation as well.

What I said was true. You are going to find people out there who, like myself, used to watch All In The Family live, each week, and who agreed with the humor of the times, but who now watch the same show, realize Archie had more than a few good points (as compared to today)! And my point regarding Star Wars is also correct, as you are going to find more people identifying with Lucas’ Empire as some sort of twisted Soviet Union on steroids… not the United States of America (for goodness sake).

Uh, LOTS! I think the folks who were defending Clinton were making the argument that in the vast scheme of things, what someone does in their private life is nobody's business but their own (and their families, I suppose). There was also the hypocrisy evident in that many of his most ardent and vocal detractors in other branches of government were guilty of similar offenses, but didn't have a dedicated prosecutor rummaging through their garbage at taxpayer expense. Now, compare that with the malfesience witnessed during the last 5 years and it's easy to see "how much more wrong you can get". I'm just sayin'. ;)