
The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad - kushti
http://decider.com/2015/12/11/the-radicalization-of-luke-skywalker-a-jedis-path-to-jihad/
======
wmeredith
I was wondering when this aspect of Star Wars would start getting batted
around in the main stream. It's very interesting watching America square the
never ending war on terror against our rich cultural history of glorifying
rebels, particularly in light of our nation's birth. There's a reason that the
Iraqi rebels were branded as "insurgents" during that war. I'd venture a guess
that referring to them as rebels or any form of the word would be enough to
get a Fox news employee fired. Orwell would have a field day with our modern
linguistic contortions to allow ourselves to remain the scrappy beacon of
individualism and personal liberty in our minds.

~~~
Aqueous
A big difference, in fact, the critical difference, between a
'rebellion/revolution' and 'terrorism', at least between a just rebellion and
an un-just rebellion, is that a rebellion attacks (or intends to attack)
military targets. Terrorists attack unarmed civilians.

~~~
kuschku
> Terrorists attack unarmed civilians.

One of the most striking stories my grandmother always told about WWII (she
was born in '34) was how, when she walked to school, very often US fighters
shot at the children walking there. There was no way this was a mistake – they
were still children, the road only led to the school, no one else was walking
there at the time. And still, every few days fighters shot at them, and they
had to jump in a drainage canal, or similar to hide.

Seeing your friends from school being shot by fighters in front of your eyes
can hurt a child a lot.

Many old people here still hold a grudge towards the allies, despite all the
amazing things they did after the war to rebuild.

But if attacking civilians is the measure, then the US is a terrorist state.
And has been for decades.

    
    
        ----------------
    

EDIT: I’m not saying the US is bad, or good, I’m trying to say there is no
"good" side in a war. No one in a war is innocent.

There is a side that gasses jews, and a side that nukes civilians. There is a
side that bombs hospitals, and a side that blows themselves up at a concert in
Paris. There’s a side that massacres disabled people, and a side that shoots
children.

We can’t compare, or even weigh up the sides against each other, and doing so
would miss the point. But we can’t say "only terrorists kill civilians".

~~~
Aqueous
If true, those soldiers were criminals and terrorists and they were acting
against orders, at least the orders of the high command.

The US has accidentally killed plenty of civilians, of course. In the past (in
World War II, for instance) they've also killed civilians deliberately. I'm
not arguing that the US's hands are clean. But the US also recognizes (now, at
least) that it is extremely counter-productive to kill civilians. That's why
they _order soldiers not to_ and why it is officially against the law of the
United States as well as international law, and a war crime, to target
civilians. It is not part of the official US strategy to target civilians - in
fact it is part of the official US strategy to _not target civilians_. On the
other hand, it is part of the official, stated strategy of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al
Shabaab, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organizations, to intentionally
murder civilians in the most visible way possible.

*Edited to acknowledge current reality vs our past

~~~
opinali
We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made Napalm
and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and vastly-
civilian casualties in both cases. And these are just easy cases where direct
responsibility can be tracked all way up to the commander-in-chief, so please
no BS about no official strategy.

And then of course, the military chain of command is exceedingly good at
diluting responsibility -- generals will demand results implying but not
writing down how far commanders can go; soldiers and commanders will cross
many lines which no colleagues will report( _) and no immediate superiors will
punish; the press will be strictly managed to not see anything that "national
security" doesn't need us to see so our own civilian population will be
morally appeased that we're being righteous, everyone is happy.

(_) A few will do, and then they're jailed for life as traitors.

~~~
masklinn
> We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made
> Napalm and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and
> vastly-civilian casualties in both cases.

Don't forget the extensive firebombings of numerous cities including Dresden
or Tokyo (casualties estimates for the latter are in the same 100000~200000
range as the two nuclear strikes combined)

~~~
kuschku
Which has still issues today – every few weeks whole districts in German
cities are evacuated, because they found another WWII bomb with chemical timer
that hasn’t exploded yet.

------
jerf
It's 10-12 hours of pulp-grade movie. You can project a lot onto it, because
in the end, there isn't much there to either draw conclusions from, or
contradict your interpretation.

This gets squared (or exponentiated) if you, like some people have done,
decide that the films may themselves be unreliable narration. Which I think is
not a useful decision, because you pretty quickly run smack up into the fact
that these are just fiction anyhow in this case; the films were not written to
stand up to that interpretation.

I think it's particularly difficult to draw _any_ sweeping conclusions because
it's not clear to me that the movie universe is written carefully enough to
justify them. For every Jedi epigram, you can find a Jedi violating it, or for
some epigrams, it's hard to find anyone actually doing the thing. Jedi, for
instance, repeatedly act in a way that can be described as "fearful"; is the
Jedi proscription against fear simply referring to the brute emotion, or
_anything_ that can be described as fearful? Honestly, the best answer is
probably that it was not written to be able to answer that. Are the Jedi
"hypocrites", or is the writing just too clumsy? Especially after the prequel
trilogy, I can't help but think it's the latter. (And I do not mean that as a
fashionably-snotty thing to say; I really don't think they were well-written.
But they don't necessarily deserve the opprobrium heaped on them; they were
not _especially_ bad by Hollywood standards. I'd call them pretty average on
that front. Most Hollywood movies are philosophically and ethically really
quite mushy.)

One must also bear in mind that from a "hard science fiction" point of view,
the concrete and scientifically-proved existence of "The Force" may change
things. In our real world, I think almost everything that Yoda says is
gibbering nonsense, but in his world it may be entirely true that fear
inexorably and directly leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to
suffering. There's a mechanism for it to do so that doesn't exist in our
universe, and we should _expect_ that if "The Force" is real that it means
that there are things that are perfectly true in Star Wars that aren't true
here, making it even harder to draw sweeping conclusions.

The conclusion I come to is that this is a fun movie series that, in the end,
simply doesn't stand up to this level of analysis, as evidenced by the fact
the analyses always seem to simply be the analysis' author writing about
exactly what they already believe, dressed in Star Wars trappings.

~~~
leereeves
This isn't really about the movies.

~~~
Vaskivo
Then why talk about them? Framing it around Star Wars is pure clickbait. And
it's dishonest.

~~~
leereeves
It's a little bit clickbait, but it might also have some value if it gives
someone a different perspective on terrorism.

------
gd1
"The Empire’s accidental harming of Luke’s Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen can be
directly compared to the casualties of President Obama’s drone campaign, whose
body count terrorists capitalize upon for recruitment."

Uh-huh. And I suppose Alderaan was like Hiroshima, they were just forcing the
rebels to surrender without risking stormtrooper lives with a ground invasion.
Or something like that.

~~~
jameskilton
Actually, yes. That's exactly right.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-
four/wp/2015/10/29/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-
four/wp/2015/10/29/the-destruction-of-alderaan-was-completely-justified/)

~~~
masklinn
Not even that.

The Empire had a population of >100 quadrilion, Alderaan killed about 2
billion people. That's a difference of _8_ orders of magnitude (50 million),
that's equivalent to killing ~140 earth humans. In relative scale, it doesn't
come close to Hiroshima, it's closer to having bombed a large wedding.

~~~
tehstone8
I'm not sure it's fair to argue that it would scale in such a way. Sure
numerically it's an insignificant portion of the population but the Death Star
still literally destroyed and entire planet and every living being on it.

Rather than comparing it to bombing a wedding, I think it's more accurate to
compare it to destroying every trace of some micro-nation and then cleansing
any plant and animal life native to that nation.

~~~
masklinn
> I'm not sure it's fair to argue that it would scale in such a way. Sure
> numerically it's an insignificant portion of the population but the Death
> Star still literally destroyed and entire planet and every living being on
> it.

Between core worlds, protectorates, governorships and colonies, the empire is
estimated to cover close to 70 million inhabited worlds, and billions of
uninhabitable planets.

> Rather than comparing it to bombing a wedding, I think it's more accurate to
> compare it to destroying every trace of some micro-nation

More like a small town taken over by entrenched terrorists.

> then cleansing any plant and animal life native to that nation.

A firebombing would do that, and that's an unfortunate side-effect more than
the purpose of the act.

------
strictnein
All of this "Empire as the good guy" stuff started out as amusing, but I'm
starting to agree with it. One of my favorite takes:

"How to Talk About Star Wars at Thanksgiving With Your Ignorant, Rebellion-
Backing Uncle"

[http://freebeacon.com/blog/pilgrims-were-the-original-
rebels...](http://freebeacon.com/blog/pilgrims-were-the-original-rebels-that-
is-to-say-racist-religious-freaks/)

~~~
vinceguidry
Don't stop with Star Wars. Just about every morality play can be analyzed this
way. It's a trope that goes all the way back to antiquity. It's one of the
first things I think about when I watch such a movie. Is this political order
really something that needs to be destroyed? My answer winds up almost always
being 'no'.

My favorite is this treatment of _The Dark Knight_ :

[https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/3insgr/joker_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/3insgr/joker_is_the_hero_in_the_dark_knight)

I enjoyed the otherwise-awful movie _The Seventh Son_ because of the
playfulness they take with world-building. The heroes and their quests all
wind up being a part of the broader political structures of the world rather
than those structures being the stakes. I like it when the very plot doesn't
take itself seriously.

~~~
strictnein
Saw someone bat around the idea of Ursula being the good side in The Little
Mermaid. Strong independent female fighting against the two patriarchal
monarchies, etc etc.

------
aikah
Unlike the real world, the force actually exists and has practical
applications within the Star Wars universe. Who wouldn't want to master that
power? Same cannot be said for some "other thing" in the real world which
people believe in...

~~~
EXDIR
Hello. I am the Director of NEPTA. Will you please reach out to
Maverickheroes/Mindblowideas. The MRF APP needs to be completed. Thank you
Kindly.

------
leereeves
Pro-Imperial writers so often ignore the bombing of Alderaan.

~~~
strictnein
Completely justified.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-
four/wp/2015/10/29/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-
four/wp/2015/10/29/the-destruction-of-alderaan-was-completely-justified/)

~~~
moron4hire
Completely not

[http://sean-mcbeth.tumblr.com/post/134608041510/neoconservat...](http://sean-
mcbeth.tumblr.com/post/134608041510/neoconservative-post-hoc-rationalization-
of)

~~~
strictnein
I think that author took this all just a little bit too seriously. It's all
obviously fairly tongue-in-cheek. I mean, his title is "Neoconservative Post-
Hoc Rationalization of Genocide". He must be a blast at parties.

~~~
moron4hire
Actually, I am a blast at parties.

------
chappi42
Luke wouldn't blow himself up in the middle of a market. Neither do to
Yazidis.. you know it. Bad article, [x] check

------
clock_tower
I guess that between Luke Skywalker's lifelike radicalization, and Palpatine's
seizing dictatorship through an emergency-powers clause, _Star Wars_ is the
story of how al-Qaida fought the Nazis...

("You're all a bunch of damn Yankees," as the hillbilly said of the Yale
versus Harvard football game, "and I hope you both lose.")

------
Dirlewanger
From this cherrypicking article to various other online forums critical of
them, it's pretty hilarious how recently, every single crevice of the Star
Wars movies is thrown into the town square naked, and then being loudly
decried for it being an inconsistency/plot hole/any other logical deficiency.
All the while forgetting that in the 70s, a business man with an acumen for
world-building conceived these space operas. Space operas whose largest
overarching theme is a simple struggle of good vs. evil. I'm partially
convinced Disney is to blame for this, most likely stoking the fire behind-
the-scenes.

------
astazangasta
There's a lot of quaint cherry-picking of evidence going on in these arguments
which is really cheesing me off, but I want to highlight the importance of
what I think is the fundamental issue, what is _always_ the fundamental issue:
what we're fighting for.

I think some of these parallels are correct: we can compare Luke Skywalker to
a terrorist and the Galactic Empire to (presumably) the US. Why does this
comparison work? Because the US IS a fucking evil empire, and there IS genuine
outrage and injustice to be fought. The drone campaign is not mere
"justification" for terrorists to use to fight their battles, it is an actual
injustice, as was the invasion of Iraq, its starvation before that, the
ongoing bombing of Yemen, the support of autocrats who oppress ordinary people
for decades, etc., etc.

This is not mere "recruiting material", this is stuff worth fighting over. The
reason people revere Osama bin Laden as a hero is because he is fighting the
dark power that has oppressed them - literally, with bombs and guns - for a
generation.

No doubt people will find this comparison uncomfortable, while the inverse
tee-heeing over the Empire is amusing.

Let's remember what's being fought for: a democracy versus an autocracy based
on raw power. The Empire, after all, rules through fear, mediated by an army
of storm troopers, and replaced a democratic government that responded to its
constituents with the rule of one man.

This is closely modeled on the actual events in Rome, where a thousand(ish)
years of Republic, with genuine democratic struggle for the rights of ordinary
people an ongoing feature for most of its history (Brutus deposing the kings,
the Gracchi becoming the first tribunes) devolved into an Empire ruled by pure
thuggery, men like Caesar and Crassus who used their enormous wealth and
influence to amass enough personal power to simply take control of the state.

There WAS a rebel who fought against the advent of this Empire to preserve a
Republic, who died hunted down and killed by the army of the first emperor -
Brutus. We might also call him a terrorist for his attempted assassination of
Caesar. But in the balance we must judge these men - all men - who exercise
brutality on _what they are fighting for_. What is the order they are seeking
to preserve or rebuild? What are its principles? This is the distinction that
matters.

~~~
devinhelton
_Let 's remember what's being fought for: a democracy versus an autocracy
based on raw power...replaced a democratic government that responded to its
constituents with the rule of one man._

Except that is an unbelievably naive way of looking at the world. Popular
power is always limited, even in a "democracy", thanks to the Iron Law of
Oligarchy. Most people are too busy living their own lives to understand how
the levers of power actually operate, or to understand the complicated ways in
which they are getting screwed. And even when they do participate in politics,
people are usually whipped into a frenzy based on envy, fear, and bigotry.
Correspondingly, autocracy does not automatically mean "bad". Many powerful
leaders actually did bring order to their realms, and allow people to live
decent lives, free from internal strife. See Augustus, or the four good
emperors of Rome. And often removing a strong ruler simply brings the realm
into chaos. See the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the aftermath in Iraq and
Libya. Or look at what happened after Brutus killed Caesar -- there were
twenty more years of civil war until once again someone could win
definitively.

I wrote much more in depth on this topic here:
[http://devinhelton.com/2015/08/dictatorship-and-
democracy](http://devinhelton.com/2015/08/dictatorship-and-democracy)

~~~
astazangasta
I'm not arguing for "democracy", I'm arguing for democracy - the extension of
popular power, which, I agree, must be preserved through constant action
against ossification and entrenchment of power (viz. the current American
"democracy"). I'm also not arguing for the replacement of autocracy with
nothing. Caesar was the product of years of devolution of the Roman Republic,
the corruption and decay of its democratic institutions in the face of
military power, wealth, and slavery. His removal could not produce democracy
merely by its absence.

What I find most interesting in this Star Wars argument is this lack of faith
in democratic power and the seeming resignation to autocracy that seems to be
generally present. These are all things that are happening now, to our own
democracy. I find this lack of faith disturbing.

------
falcolas
As with most articles, this one says more about the writer than it really does
the subject. The stories are ambiguous enough that you can literally find any
message you want to out of them. Scrappy little startup vs Oracle. The plight
of the middle east vs the UN (or just the USA). A SF story told from another
time.

So, what do you take from it? What does that tell you about yourself?

------
ttflee
It was that George Lucas tried to protest against Vietnam war.

[http://nypost.com/2014/09/21/how-star-wars-was-secretly-
geor...](http://nypost.com/2014/09/21/how-star-wars-was-secretly-george-lucas-
protest-of-vietnam/)

------
tehwebguy
Great, I clicked on this from an airport lounge and it was blocked. Hope I am
allowed on the plane!

------
wildengineer
This article and others like it ignore the context of the films. Palpatine
disbanded the imperial senate. The rebels were fighting to restore the
galactic republic that had stood for 1000 years.

~~~
golergka
The point you're making is that it's good because it's tradition?

~~~
wildengineer
The point I'm making is the empire was a totalitarian regime that had to be
eliminated. Look at it in terms of today's world. Imagine if a president
disbanded the congress and held power by threat of force.

~~~
golergka
I think you're confused; "the empire was a totalitarian regime that had to be
eliminated" is the thesis you're trying to prove. So, what is your argument?
Your original comment contained to points for this argument: (1) Republic is
old, (2) the Senate was dissolved. (1) relies on the assumption that "old =
good" and (2) assumes that elimination of Senate — about which we don't know
pretty much anything at the moment — is bad. Does it really look convincing to
you?

Oh, and Galactic Republic is/was too different from US political system for
your comparison to be relevant in any way.

~~~
wildengineer
Any representative government being overthrown by a militaristic dictator is
justification for war.

Please argue this. I don't see how I could disagree with this, but here's your
chance to convince me.

~~~
golergka
> overthrown

Have you seen Episodes 1-3? Palpatine has real support of the public.

(Look, dude, of course he's evil as hell, I don't deny that. It's just that
arguments that you choose to prove that are not working.)

~~~
wildengineer
> Palpatine has real support of the public.

They showed many planets at the end of RotJ [1] where massive celebrations
occurred, including Coruscant. I think these celebrations speak to the
rebellion's support.

>It's just that arguments that you choose to prove that are not working.

There's nothing to prove. The belief that a people have the right to topple
their dictators is subjective. I can only prove something if we share the same
axioms.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiM5zEEI_Jo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiM5zEEI_Jo)

~~~
golergka
> their dictators

How do you define who's a dictator and who's not?

If Winston Churchill have acquired more executional powers during WWII to get
through mind-boggling beurocracy, would you call him dictator, for example?

You're trying to prove a statement that is true, but your proof is abysmal.

------
xmlblog
The pro-Empire articles referenced in the piece above require the reader to
turn on their irony detectors. First-rate trolling.

------
peter303
Its also creepy to watch either of the two Dune movies. Herbert borrowed a lot
form Islam Jihad.

------
rwmj
The problem with this is that "the Force" really does have supernatural powers
(in the context of the movie at least), whereas religions only claim them but
can't prove it.

