Posted on 05/20/2018 4:29:14 PM PDT by otness_e
Transcript:
GEORGE LUCAS: In school, I was of the, I don't know, angry young man...
JAMES CAMERON: Sure, you were a rebel.
GEORGE LUCAS: I come out of anthropology.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: So, my focus is social systems.
JAMES CAMERON: Right.
GEORGE LUCAS: And in science fiction, you've got two branches: One is science...
JAMES CAMERON: Yep.
GEORGE LUCAS: ...And the other is social.
JAMES CAMERON: Right.
GEORGE LUCAS: I'm much more of the 1984 kind of guy.
JAMES CAMERON: Sure.
GEORGE LUCAS: I am...
JAMES CAMERON: THX-1138
GEORGE LUCAS: ...the spaceship guy.
JAMES CAMERON: Yep.
GEORGE LUCAS: The spaceship... I got into spaceships out of cars.
JAMES CAMERON: Yep.
GEORGE LUCAS: I loved cars, I loved going fast.
JAMES CAMERON: [Numbshot?]
GEORGE LUCAS: I liked spaceships.
JAMES CAMERON: Yep.
GEORGE LUCAS: But... it isn't the science, aliens, and all that kind of stuff that I get focused on, it's the... it's how the people react to all those things.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: How they accommodate them.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: So that's the part that really fascinates me and I'm interested in.
JAMES CAMERON: You did something very interesting with Star Wars. If you think about it, the good guys are rebels, they're using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire. I think we call those guys terrorists today. We call them mujahideen. We call them al Qaeda.
GEORGE LUCAS: When I did it, they were Viet Cong.
JAMES CAMERON: Exactly. So, were you thinking of that at the time?
GEORGE LUCAS: Yep.
JAMES CAMERON: So it was a very anti-authoritarian, very kind of sixties, "against the man" kind of thing that's deep inside of fantasy...
GEORGE LUCAS: Or... or a colonial, you know, we're fighting the largest empire in the world.
JAMES CAMERON: Right.
GEORGE LUCAS: And we're just a bunch of hayseeds in coonskin hats who don't know nothing.
JAMES CAMERON: Yes. That's right.
GEORGE LUCAS: And it was the same thing with the Vietnamese.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: The irony of that one is, in both of those, the little... the little guys won.
JAMES CAMERON: Right.
GEORGE LUCAS: And the big, highly technical empire...
JAMES CAMERON: English Empire.
GEORGE LUCAS: English Empire, the American Empire... lost!
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: That was the whole point.
JAMES CAMERON: But that was a classic "us not profiting from the lesson of history" because if you look at the inception of this country, and its very... its a very noble fight of the underdog against the massive empire. You look at the situation now, where America's so proud of being the biggest economy and the most powerful military force on the planet. Its become the Empire. From the per... from the perspective of a lot of people around the world.
GEORGE LUCAS: Well, there was the Empire during the Vietnam War. And we never learned, you know, from England or Rome or, you know, a dozen other empires.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah, empires.
GEORGE LUCAS: That went on for hundreds for years, or sometimes thousands of years. We never got it. We never said "woah, wait-wait-wait-wait! This isn't the right thing to do." And we're still struggling with it.
JAMES CAMERON: And they fall because of a failure of leadership or, or government often.
GEORGE LUCAS: Yep.
JAMES CAMERON: And you, you have a great line which is "So this is how liberty dies..."
GEORGE LUCAS: We're in the middle of it.
JAMES CAMERON: "...With thunderous applause." Exactly. It's the pi... there was the condemnation of the nation of populism in a science fiction context.
GEORGE LUCAS: It's a theme that runs through all the way through Star Wars.
JAMES CAMERON: I think that science fiction is so good at these kind of social themes.
GEORGE LUCAS: Yeah. Great thing about Star Wars is I had kind of a thing... I mean a... a... a vessel that I could throw anything into.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: But one of the biggest problems you have in science fiction with movies - you don't have that in books or anything like that, but in movies - you have to create a real world.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: And its a real world that doesn't exist.
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: And you have to do what, like what Kurosawa used to say is "it has to have immaculate reality."
JAMES CAMERON: Yeah.
GEORGE LUCAS: Even though it's not real.
JAMES CAMERON: [Turn?], yeah.
And quite frankly, Lucas' comment about social structures and coming out of anthropology and trying to use science fiction as a vehicle to push this is one other reason why education really needs to be thoroughly cleaned up, especially at the college level (let alone K-12).
Just an FYI, this is part of a series of AMC interviews where James Cameron interviews several people involved with Science Fiction, including Steven Spielberg and Guillerno del Toro called "James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction", and in fact, the Lucas bit was from the second episode of the series. It premiered this year.
Tried to transcribe it as best as I could with my ears, but some parts were hard to make out.
Unfortunately, some EU stuff DID have the Rebels targeting civilians. There was a member of Rogue Squadron named Elscol Loro who deliberately targeted civilians during her time in the unit, and she actually got promoted for it in one of the Rogue Squadron books. She even paraphrased Louie de Saint Just when justifying her actions.
Also, Children of the Jedi has a passage that has Leia recalling the day that they liberated Coruscant, and her description read like something from the September Massacres by the French Revolutionaries or the October Surprise by the Bolsheviks (Specifically: “”Silent in the narrow alleyway, Leia recalled the day the Rebels had taken Coruscant. The Emperor’s palace - that endless, gorgeous maze of crystal roofs, hanging gardens, pyramids of green and blue marble shining with gold... summer quarters, winter quarters, treasuries, pavilions, music rooms, prisons, halls... grace-and-favor residences for concubines, ministers, and trained assassins—had been shelled hard and partially looted already, Rebel partisans having killed whichever members of the Court they could catch. These had included, if Leia remembered correctly, not only the President of the Bureau of Punishments and the head of the Emperor’s School of Torturers, but the court clothing designer and any number of minor and completely innocent servants of all ages, species, and sexes whose names had never even been reported.”)
Heck, even in the Disney canon, we had instances of the Rebels doing stuff that did attack civilians deliberately (case in point: The pilot episode for Star Wars: Rebels “the Call” had the Ghost Crew slaughtering what was explicitly a civilian mining guild to steal their fuel). And don’t get me started on Saw Gerrera (whom the Rebels were ultimately tied to by association, as Leia implied in the book “Bloodlines”).
But I do agree with you, you shouldn’t be called a terrorist unless you deliberately target civilians (or if you do stuff far beyond the pale even if the people present aren’t technically civilians). Besides, technically, when we were fighting the British, “terrorism” didn’t even exist as a term, as that was coined with the French Revolution (not that the American Minutemen would have ever qualified even if it DID exist during that time, since they deliberately avoided trying to slaughter civilians or even any British people in non-combat situations. John Adams even did a fair trial for any British soldiers despite personally hating them.).
Eff those two draft dodgers.
Were the rebels in Star Wars the same as al Qaeda, as Cameron says? The rebels in Star Wars generally used guerilla tactics against the Empire’s military. The difference is recognizing the exception from the rule. Al Qaeda, as a rule, exclusively targets civilians because they’re easy. They’ll target military if they can, but that’s the exception in their case.
Oh, yeah. It’s all about the asymmetrical blah-blah.
The Rebellion/Resistance is every bit the tired, ossified establishment that the Empire/First Order is.
A resistance, however small and under equipped, with enough time and tenacity will defeat a superior force.
It comes down to passion and perseverance. Having a real cause, not just being thousands of miles from home as a conquering or occupying force.
It has been the case with America, Vietnam, Afghanistan, many other situations.
And recent SW has done a pretty good job of showing moral ambiguity in resistance. Saw Guerra especially.
NO you dirty rotten treasonous SOB, Cameron. The Star Wars rebels were like the Colonial patriots who used guerilla warfare against the conventional tactics of the Redcoats. Only a commie POS like Cameron would equate the good guys in Star Wars to terrorists when it is clear they were like the Minutemen who adopted Indian fighting tactics to harrass the Redcoats and beat them in a war of attrition in small engagements and ruin their morale, right down to the shocking tactic of shooting officers, which the Redcoats were completely unused to seeing in Continental European wars. Die a painful death you commie traitor, Cameron.
White skin = terrorist
Brown skin = freedom fighter
This is typical leftist projection. Hollywood and their favored authors all do it, since they are all communists at heart.
Harry Potter. Hunger Games. Star Wars. The villain is always the leftist distortion of what a conservative is.
Unfortunately, Lucas, as he stated in the interview, actually DID have the Vietcong in mind for the Rebels, who were in fact terrorists (and unlike his claim that Vader was always Luke’s father or that Greedo always shot first, this can actually be backed up by his development notes, as you can see here: https://otnesse.tumblr.com/post/162081709399/this-is-from-george-lucas-1973-notes-for-star).
But I agree, someone like Lucas and Cameron deserves a traitor’s death, especially for their remarks. In fact, isn’t Cameron Canadian or something? Why on earth would he live here in America if he hates it that much?
We didn’t really lose Vietnam. We actually beat the Vietcong, broke their backs during the Tet Offensive, with the NVA being forced to just send its own forces in. You wouldn’t know that from the CBS Evening News though, thanks to that traitor Walter Cronkite. And besides, by the time we left Vietnam, we not only were the ones who headed the peace talks in 1972, we even had a plan right in place during the peace accords to provide the South Vietnamese for replacements for anything they lost in battle (bullets, choppers, you name it). Unfortunately, after Watergate and Nixon being forced to resign, Congressional Democrats, many of whom either had a massive axe to grind against Nixon for his testimony against Alger Hiss or otherwise being full-in with the anti-War movement, proceeded to stab our South Vietnamese allies in the back. In other words, we never lost Vietnam, the victory was stolen from us. You can learn more about the latter here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk
The UN certainly didn’t do us any favors, or LBJ (though to be fair, it’s not like we didn’t have justification for that belief, considering what happened when Red China pushed onward when MacArthur tried to invade North Korea and China, which he really should have been allowed to do).
Fully agreed. Too bad those “leftists” write the story and thus have full control over it. Though at least with Harry Potter, JK Rowling had the sense to base the main villain on the likes of Hitler and Stalin (and the latter’s a full-on leftist by even liberal historians.), unlike the others (Lucas primarily based Palpatine on Richard Nixon, and President Snow was stated to be based on a mixture of reality TV and President Bush. I can sort of understand how reality TV’s trash, but Bush, while not really one of our better presidents, doesn’t really deserve that kind of condemnation).
I agree regarding America, and I have no comment regarding Afghanistan, but you’re dead wrong regarding Vietnam. The Viet Cong never actually beat us in battle. That was a falsehood made due to Walter Cronkite deliberately misreporting the news during the Tet Offensive. By all accounts, we had in fact WON Vietnam (too bad Congressional Democrats stole our victory in the wake of the Watergate proceedings).
And to be fair, the old EU also has shown a bit of that as well (case in point: Children of the Jedi has a passage that... well, let’s just say that the Rebels in Leia’s flashback come across as acting more like the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks to the Imperials).
Well, the Vietcong certainly didn’t have any qualms targeting innocent civilians, I can tell you that much:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html
http://vnafmamn.com/VNWar_atrocities.html
Whether it makes the Rebels the same as al Qaeda is up for debate (though I will say that there are a few old and new EU stories and even at least one movie, Rogue One, that did have them, if not out and out deliberately targeting civilians exclusively, then certainly skirting the line there at the very least), but it certainly makes the Vietcong the same as al Qaeda at least.
Well, to be fair to George Lucas, he was deferred from serving due to diabetes, and that came as a really nasty shock to him. And James Cameron had been a Canadian citizen until 1971 when he and his family moved to California, and by that point, the draft was removed, so he had zero reason to do the draft anyway.
Of course, that doesn’t make their statements in that video any less contemptible or disgusting (actually, if anything, that makes them sound even WORSE, especially considering that they never even needed to dodge the draft, or even serve, yet they STILL condemned the war. At least with draft dodgers, they’re being consistent and honest, and I don’t like draft dodgers either).
Cameron especially has written some pretty insulting rants about all military members. He usually depicts them as homicidal maniacs and warmongers. He especially can kma.
I enjoyed the Harry Potter books and didn’t detect overt leftism in them. Unfortunately, Rowling has since revealed herself as such a screeching, leftwing lunatic that I will never be able to enjoy them again.
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