Media Star Wars: the racial-civilisational subtext

[NEETzschean]

Many criticise modern films such as Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars sequels for their overt "leftist" political messaging, claiming that Hollywood has been "infiltrated" by “woke” ideologues (who were in fact there from its inception). And there is no doubt that the Disney Star Wars films are thinly-veiled political allegory, regardless of what Bob Iger says:

“Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization.” - Chris Weitz

“…Opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women.” - Gary Whitta

But from a pro-European perspective, the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983) was replete with ethno-suicidal themes; the symbolism was always much the same. This should not be surprising: George Lucas is one of Hollywood's most successful directors, he's been a "leftist" since his student days at the latest and has since married an African woman, with whom he had his first biological child.

The key collective conflict in Star Wars is between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.

The Empire: totalitarian, inhuman (faceless "Stormtroopers", most iconic figure is a cyborg), homogeneous/uniform, cold/austere, dictatorial, ultra-technological, genocidal (destroys the planet which looks most similar to Earth, Alderaan), exclusively patriarchal (women are never seen among its ranks) and Northern European at core, a hybrid of Nazi Germany and the British Empire (the nation which opposed Nazism the longest, making the Empire a stand-in for the traditional Western order generally)

The Rebels: multiracial (Lando Calrissian), multispecies (Chewbacca), droid-inclusive (C-3P0, R2-D2), gender egalitarian (founded and led by a woman Mon Mothma and Leia is one of the three biggest heroes, implied to have Jedi potential similar to Luke's: "There is another" - Yoda), third worldist-coded coalition, the Empire’s symbolic inversion and antithesis

The primary philosophical battle is between the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi are a monastic order led by Yoda; a humanoid midget alien and Asian-coded sage, whereas the Sith are led by a grotesque and seemingly decrepit British-accented Emperor.

Jedi: Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism

Sith: Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, Machiavellianism, Sadism

The former is a universalist metaphysical syncretism broadly aligned with liberalism while the latter is strongly aligned with anti-Christian European philosophy and Nazism.

On a more personal level, the conflict is between Aryan protagonist Luke Skywalker and his father Darth (a portmanteau of dark and death) Vader (an abbreviation of “invader”; a nod to Western colonialism). Jedi master and surrogate father figure Obi Wan deceived Luke, telling him that Vader “betrayed and murdered your father" (to add insult to injury we find out much later that Obi Wan mutilated and crippled Vader), manipulating “white saviour/white ally” Luke into fighting to destroy his father’s Empire. Ultimately, the corrupted chalk-white patriarch Vader finds redemption in death by destroying the Empire he built with Palpatine (a transparent allegory for Hitler/Satan) and killing his former master, resulting in Vader's ascension to immortality along with his former masters Obi Wan and Yoda.

While viewers (particularly in America) may feel that the Rebel Alliance solely represents America (the accents of the three primary heroes followed by the narrative are distinctly American, "The Empire" as Britain exclusively in their mind) based on a superficial reading which omits key facts (Lucas's claim that the primitive forest-dwelling Ewoks represent the Viet Cong, the heavy British-coded involvement in the Rebel Alliance), Star Wars trains the Western audience to see itself from the perspective of the third world, conditioned to feel exhilaration at their symbolic overthrowal and desiring to emulate Luke's example.

Had the Rebel Alliance been exclusively composed of European men, The Empire been a multicultural cesspool and the villain been a hooked-nosed Emperor with a Middle-Eastern accent, there would be no obscurantism about the political allegory.​

 

[RNT]

He's back

 

[n9wiff]

Jedi: Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism

Sith: Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, Machiavellianism, Sadism

no its just pedophiles controlling everything and all these things you listed. they make everyone fight each other while they take. its pretty simple but people are to afraid to look into it so denounce it from it being a possibility

@Original is part of the cabal so he can attest to it

 

[Deleted member 3241]

I don't think I've ever even watched a Star Wars movie, or a Marvel movie, or a DC movie in my entire life. My autistic ass got a DVD of Titanic for Christmas once as a kid. Never understood why people liked that shit, it's too silly to self-insert into or learn anything from (beyond the most basic elementary moral lessons).
Good post though, OP. No wonder Reddit eats that shit up.

 

[Gamercat_]

So apparently on youtube you cannot tag someone unless you properly hit the 'reply' button. And for some users, under some videos, certain replies simply will not appear while logged in. That is the case under your reply to me, NEETzschean.

I am the enemy of the youtuber known as "Wyatt Stagg", here to carry on my crusade against bad art criticism and poor hermeneutics. I tried to get your attention on youtube, probably in vain simply due to technical difficulties. Not much we can do about that. Youtube is owned by Google, and Google is becoming a primarily Indian company. The future of the internet is not bright.

But Star Wars, that's why we're here. Here's what I tried to send you on youtube.

@smoothcritical1 I am attempting to reply to you here, not sure if it will work. Youtube won't let me see (and so reply to) your comment while signed in. This site is a disaster.

I found your "essay" by googling your excerpt. I may chase you down on your home forums if you still check them, but will also answer here. I am also from forums. Ones far more influential and respected than those you dwell in. I appreciate that you place yourself in a more vulnerable position than "Wyatt", you are much easier to dismantle in detail in text. Especially on a forum where you can be broken down piece by piece. This is of course why forums have been so fecund in producing influential ideas and memorable characters and intellects, while youtube is an open sewer that gives us "wyatt".

I'll give you the short answer here in case this comment reaches you. George Lucas I consider a man of great integrity. And like other great men of his generation he superficially appeared to be left-aligned, but I would argue that this alignment was merely incidental. He has always gone to what he believed was the side of what is good in humanity, and I believe that if you look at his work seriously you will find that his values are good and sound, and that he is willing to modify and adjust his conclusions as he grows more worldly and takes more time to observe history taking its course. The original trilogy is a bit naive and frivolous, taken on its own. But it's not alone. Lucas' work on the Prequel trilogy is a stunning feat of self-awareness and perspective from a Boomer. I would say it's the greatest achievement in political awareness from this cohort of artists. The recontextualisation provided by the prequels elevates everything in the OT beyond worldly disputes of the day into a truly perennial exploration of human nature. The Emperor, The Empire, The Senate, The Republic, The Jedi, The Sith, all things are connected, subject to the same *FORCES*, and will pass and come again.

No symbol is dominated by one side, there is no clean answer to the human condition. The Emperor is not the west. His throne is situated before a window of concentric circles, placing him in the middle of a thangka. And his worldview is arguably ultimately as Buddhist as that of the Jedi, if not moreso. If one truly believes that our destiny and fate are bound up inextricably with that of the universe, why not act with explosive force against all around you? One can at least make that case. And if you think nobody has you ought to learn what those quaint little Tibetan men have written in their old books. I suspect George eventually found out. Like how he found out actually Democracy is kind of frivolous and idiotic and wars that wars tend to be murky and chaotic.

If you want to engage more seriously I recommend we try on your neets forum. Youtube's absurdly broken systems will quite likely lose this.

I read your entire post here, not just the part you sent to youtube. But I didn't reply in detail there since it would be a pain to tab back and forth, grab quotes, etc. And youtube would probably lose the comment anyway. So I gave you the general overview. Of how I see Lucas, and how I believe Lucas sees the world and his own work.

If you're very into your Star Wars discourse you might recognise that I'm largely taking cues from the youtuber 'Rick Worley', one of the few men on the site I would say deserves to be called a real critic. Or at the very least someone admirably serious about what he's dealing with actually making genuine intellectual progress in the relevant discourse of the subject matter.

Worley emphasises first Lucas' particular character as an artist and an auteur, the man is making something very deliberate. And it is absolutely his. He is devoted to both proving the extent of authorial intention throughout Star Wars, and clarifying the nature of that intent.

Worley seeks to teach people what Star Wars is, and Star Wars is George Lucas. Then he seeks to teach you who Lucas is. If you want to hear the man himself, this alone might be enough to make you consider your OP, here's probably the most Lucas and his expressive intentions oriented video Worley made. The others are largely production-oriented and lectures on auteur theory and the necessity of appreciating creative intentions to make coherent criticism.



What this video is great for is demonstrating what the spiritual vision of Star Wars was all along. Nothing ever changed. And from there, if you think out a bit further you might see where I'm going with what I wrote on youtube. Lucas was a somewhat alienated and unhappy spiritual seeker, dreamer, and man of unique integrity and force of personality. Or put more simply, he was better than most people. Would a Nietzschean disagree?

Put yourself in his shoes, you don't have the internet, you grew up in post-war America. Who are the people who are a drag, enemies of the human spirit and your great potential, and where does it look like freedom might be? What shape might that take? Lucas has explicitly said that there is an element of the 'Vietcong' in the Rebels, but this doesn't upset me as a Star Wars fan for the same reason Hideo Kojima's admiration for Che Guevara doesn't upset me as a Metal Gear fan. Because it's the idea that Lucas head of the VC in the 70s, and the vision that Kojima has of Che as a Japanese man to whom latin American history is exotic and poorly understood. In their minds I understand that these figures and forces stand for things which are good.

It is possible to, at certain points in time and space, find yourself holding ideas and positions which are wrong despite being driven by the right forces. Lucas thought the VC were running a noble and heroic enterprise. Nationalism, resisting foreign oppression and imposition of alien ways of life. If I get abstract enough I can make them sound like the Nazi analogs in their own struggle (or the American Confederates, as Gustav Hasford does in his novels).

What is Lucas actually celebrating with Luke and the Rebellion? Blonde hair, freedom loving and life-seeking outlooks, fast cars, clean airs, self-mastery and self-assertion. Awesome. I love it. What is the empire? Rules? You know who loves rules? Trannies. They're the ones who banned me from 3/4 of the front-facing internet. Shift your perspective. Who's a rebel now?

You probably won't appreciate this but I enjoy sharing this anecdote, another great rebel artist, Pat Mills, I have talked to a little bit on twitter. Anti-authoritarian mostly known for his 80s work. He created the British comic '2000AD' and characters like 'Judge Dredd'. This woke boomer agreed with me that while the authoritarian personalities of his age might have been Catholic clergy, now those personalities are "the woke".

Not all of these guys are hopeless. Get a drink or two into Lucas and who knows what he might agree with me on. I write textwalls about art and artists all day, I know how to reach these people (which is why trannies are constantly purging me from the internet, they know they're fucked if I get enough exposure).

So where was I going, the tendencies which we're meant to see as Bad in The Empire. Are those inherently English, or American, or white, or merely things which we have embodied in certain individuals in certain times and places? And the traits and tendencies which are admirable in the rebels, do they belong to anybody? Or are they merely traits, tendencies, and latent possibilities and potential in all of us?

If you are following me, I think you are ready to get Star Wars as George Lucas sees it.

And I can see the Wyattism glitching your brain at the end of your post as you grasp for a conclusion after all this time spent applying a junk hermeneutic of weakness, of trying to read this film for negative associations.

Star Wars trains the Western audience to see itself from the perspective of the third world, conditioned to feel exhilaration at their symbolic overthrowal and desiring to emulate Luke's example.

Trains the audience. Think about that. Really? Is there a great danger here? Can you point to specific damage done? I'll make the best case I can for this perspective. Star Wars and more importantly Harry Potter have had some visible presence as examples and inspiring (allegedly) visions for what it means to be a dissident, to fight power for justice, and so on.

But look what happened in each case. Harry Potter was stricken from the woke canon when the British woman born in 1965 turned out to have the worldview of a British woman born in 1965, and nobody emulates or takes cues from the work divorced from these revelations either. Which begs the question, was it ever teaching them anything?

And Star Wars. Do you believe Star Wars trained any anti-fascists? I would say arguably it helped set the junk-assumption that rebellion, individuality, and integrity are left-coded traits. But I believe those are universally forced memes in our culture, and this is an idea which simply does not survive contact with reality. When I see people with politics informed by Star Wars it's actually always far more obviously running in the opposite direction. George Lucas so faithfully and honestly captured the upsides and virtues of the forces opposing his protagonists that they ultimately win more people over. If I see a guy drawing politics from Star Wars irl, he is always a closet crypto-nazi because he fell in love with the grandeur, order, and vision of The Empire. I'm not some obnoxious cretin saying Lucas failed or anything, I'm saying he succeeded and demonstrated extraordinary integrity in doing this. He can recognise virtue in what he ultimately believes is wrong, and even in the first film was expressing a vision of balance and distributed quality through the universe. Free Mos Eisley is an ugly unsafe shithole. The despotic Empire is clean and orderly.

Now if you use twitter you might have seen a new movement of ostensibly "star wars" informed anti-fascists who believe that their space-magic fantasy is teaching them to resist Blumpf's hatefascism. But they aren't watching Lucas' movies. If anything they consider those an embarrassment. They're watching 'Andor'. What does that tell us? That tells us that the ideology, biases, preferences, and vision of an anti-fascist do not recognise the work of George Lucas as an expression, vindication, or discourse on their beliefs. They believed that the Star Wars brand would be nice to have. To be able to say "Star Wars is anti-fascist!". But they couldn't. They fundamentally did not see themselves vindicated in the work of George Lucas.

So these people, being what they are, took George Lucas' brand and work, and injected themselves into it with a new production wearing the name he made so weighty and prestigious. Because that's all they can do. You may have already mentally noted that this is what they do with the the history of the USA, and all other institutions. They aren't builders, in the generative roots of anything with genuine power to impress or gratify the human soul you will simply not find libtardism. To put it simply, if George Lucas were a libtard, the movies would have sucked.

Now I consider this a start to addressing this issue. I could reply to particular points you wrote in detail but I feel like this larger general post should cover everything. And I would be greatly pleased if you had further questions or challenges.

Do you still think Wyatt Stagg has my number?

And by the way, I'm internet famous enough that this forum used to have a thread about me and my work. It was so ridden with basic factual errors and written in such a strange, feeble, struggling manner that I assume the author was struggling to think through a medicated haze. And it was eventually deleted. But that's some lore for you.

 

[Zangano1]

Ive never watched star wars

 

[Deleted member 3347]

Many criticise modern films such as Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars sequels for their overt "leftist" political messaging, claiming that Hollywood has been "infiltrated" by “woke” ideologues (who were in fact there from its inception). And there is no doubt that the Disney Star Wars films are thinly-veiled political allegory, regardless of what Bob Iger says:

“Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization.” - Chris Weitz

“…Opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women.” - Gary Whitta

But from a pro-European perspective, the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983) was replete with ethno-suicidal themes; the symbolism was always much the same. This should not be surprising: George Lucas is one of Hollywood's most successful directors, he's been a "leftist" since his student days at the latest and has since married an African woman, with whom he had his first biological child.

The key collective conflict in Star Wars is between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.

The Empire: totalitarian, inhuman (faceless "Stormtroopers", most iconic figure is a cyborg), homogeneous/uniform, cold/austere, dictatorial, ultra-technological, genocidal (destroys the planet which looks most similar to Earth, Alderaan), exclusively patriarchal (women are never seen among its ranks) and Northern European at core, a hybrid of Nazi Germany and the British Empire (the nation which opposed Nazism the longest, making the Empire a stand-in for the traditional Western order generally)

The Rebels: multiracial (Lando Calrissian), multispecies (Chewbacca), droid-inclusive (C-3P0, R2-D2), gender egalitarian (founded and led by a woman Mon Mothma and Leia is one of the three biggest heroes, implied to have Jedi potential similar to Luke's: "There is another" - Yoda), third worldist-coded coalition, the Empire’s symbolic inversion and antithesis

The primary philosophical battle is between the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi are a monastic order led by Yoda; a humanoid midget alien and Asian-coded sage, whereas the Sith are led by a grotesque and seemingly decrepit British-accented Emperor.

Jedi: Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism

Sith: Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, Machiavellianism, Sadism

The former is a universalist metaphysical syncretism broadly aligned with liberalism while the latter is strongly aligned with anti-Christian European philosophy and Nazism.

On a more personal level, the conflict is between Aryan protagonist Luke Skywalker and his father Darth (a portmanteau of dark and death) Vader (an abbreviation of “invader”; a nod to Western colonialism). Jedi master and surrogate father figure Obi Wan deceived Luke, telling him that Vader “betrayed and murdered your father" (to add insult to injury we find out much later that Obi Wan mutilated and crippled Vader), manipulating “white saviour/white ally” Luke into fighting to destroy his father’s Empire. Ultimately, the corrupted chalk-white patriarch Vader finds redemption in death by destroying the Empire he built with Palpatine (a transparent allegory for Hitler/Satan) and killing his former master, resulting in Vader's ascension to immortality along with his former masters Obi Wan and Yoda.

While viewers (particularly in America) may feel that the Rebel Alliance solely represents America (the accents of the three primary heroes followed by the narrative are distinctly American, "The Empire" as Britain exclusively in their mind) based on a superficial reading which omits key facts (Lucas's claim that the primitive forest-dwelling Ewoks represent the Viet Cong, the heavy British-coded involvement in the Rebel Alliance), Star Wars trains the Western audience to see itself from the perspective of the third world, conditioned to feel exhilaration at their symbolic overthrowal and desiring to emulate Luke's example.

Had the Rebel Alliance been exclusively composed of European men, The Empire been a multicultural cesspool and the villain been a hooked-nosed Emperor with a Middle-Eastern accent, there would be no obscurantism about the political allegory.​

I’ll read later