Posted on 12/28/2017 2:06:32 PM PST by otness_e
Viet Cong probably had several recipes for Ewok.
>And it’s not just Lucas who claimed this, even Walter Murch, his associate at American Zoetrope, made it VERY clear Lucas was trying to push pro-Vietcong propaganda in his book The Conversations.
Sure, and he failed. No one connected it as propaganda because the content is so divorced from the reality of the Vietnam war. Every time Lucas has tried his own muddled version of propaganda he’s failed to support the causes he cares about.
>As far as your points about American values in the original trilogy, you’d be pretty surprised on how the Communists have cynically used love of family as a means to push Communist propaganda despite their personally loathing the family unit.
So? In star wars there was no hook included telling people that communism is good thus failing at any attempt at making good propaganda.
The only effective leftist propaganda in star wars was the kickass girl character, but it was done without the typical men are idiots and need women to direct them which is so common today.
We love a bold handful of misfits going up against an evil empire -- British, Nazi, Communist, whatever. That doesn't make us pro-Viet Cong.
The roots of Star Wars were in the old serials of the interwar period -- Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon.
But don't take my word for it. Here's an overstimulated, somewhat unbalanced film geek to give you his analysis.
Ewoks = Montagnards.
Maybe America as a whole wasn’t pro-Vietcong so much as loving the underdog, but George Lucas and his associates most certainly WERE pro-Vietcong.
>Sure, and he failed. No one connected it as propaganda because the content is so divorced from the reality of the Vietnam war. Every time Lucas has tried his own muddled version of propaganda he’s failed to support the causes he cares about.
You sure about that? I’ve seen people actually FALL for propaganda that actually WAS subtle. Don’t believe me? Look at all the people who used the Matrix Defense after watching the Matrix and proceeding to commit their crimes, and several people, even people who are otherwise conservative such as Father Barron, thought it was a pro-Christianity tale when it in reality was taken directly from Nietzsche’s diseased mind, not to mention the diseased minds of Jean Baudrillard and Cornel West (and the latter actually had a cameo in the film).
And let’s not forget about Goebbels, who actually DID use subtle methods to promote anti-Semitism, such as Jud Suss (in fact, the one time the Nazis tried to make a film that was OVERTLY anti-Semitic, even by Nazi standards, which was The Eternal Jew, people were so shocked at the crudity of the messages that they actually fainted.
>So? In star wars there was no hook included telling people that communism is good thus failing at any attempt at making good propaganda.
Yeah, actually, there was, unfortunately, as this guy actually points out: http://www.newsweek.com/does-star-wars-endorse-political-republican-democrat-498365
>The only effective leftist propaganda in star wars was the kickass girl character, but it was done without the typical men are idiots and need women to direct them which is so common today.
Nope, that wasn’t the only effective propaganda. The most effective propaganda is the type that manipulates people into thinking they’re rooting for one thing when they’re instead rooting for someone else. Like how the Vietcong manipulated the anti-war movement into thinking they were truly like us Americans when in reality they were Communists answering to Moscow, or at least Beijing. That’s also why the Soviets usually relied on disinformation campaigns instead of outright TELLING us their plans to screw us over.
OK, I stand corrected. It’s ‘ART’, just relax and enjoy it.
Yeah, and people also thought “Jud Suss” was art as well. Doesn’t change the fact that it was blatant propaganda. People also thought that they shouldn’t step in on Voltaire and his ilk when they peddled garbage, the minister of justice even warning everyone like an idiot about the impending seizure, and look what happened, we got the French Revolution and Reign of Terror because their “art” convinced everyone to just slaughter everyone to remake the world in those guys images.
Nope... That may have been Lucas intent but you have to be an super duper psycho-babbler person to get any of that from watching a sci-fi movie. It wasn’t overt or clearly displayed. Sorry but it was just a movie. No one at that time seeing it were bemoaning the Vietnam connotations
I think this is just how Lucas sold it so he could make his movie. Hollywood liberals had killed off patriotic war movies and real westerns by the 1970’s. Lucas brought those genres back, setting his movies in space so the PC crowd wouldn’t have anything to be offended about.
Barely anyone bemoaned the anti-Semitic messaging of Jud Suss or the nihilistic messaging of the Matrix movies, either. Didn’t change that they were that, or that people were clearly influenced by their messages.
That Asian gal reminded me of that one nurse from the old MASH episodes - face AND voice.
Is it Rey that was the young gal Jedi? My daughters were wishing the SHE would go over to the Dark Side. “I mean - you can make a much more interesting evil character than one that is always doing the right thing.”
>You sure about that? I’ve seen people actually FALL for propaganda that actually WAS subtle. Don’t believe me? Look at all the people who used the Matrix Defense after watching the Matrix and proceeding to commit their crimes, and several people, even people who are otherwise conservative such as Father Barron, thought it was a pro-Christianity tale when it in reality was taken directly from Nietzsche’s diseased mind, not to mention the diseased minds of Jean Baudrillard and Cornel West (and the latter actually had a cameo in the film).
I thought we were talking about star wars, not the matrix.
>And let’s not forget about Goebbels, who actually DID use subtle methods to promote anti-Semitism, such as Jud Suss (in fact, the one time the Nazis tried to make a film that was OVERTLY anti-Semitic, even by Nazi standards, which was The Eternal Jew, people were so shocked at the crudity of the messages that they actually fainted.
The best propaganda is always subtle. Lucas, however, failed in his propaganda efforts in his works. I think you misunderstood my point that Lucas failed to create effective propaganda and is something other than what it’s creator intended.
>Yeah, actually, there was, unfortunately, as this guy actually points out: http://www.newsweek.com/does-star-wars-endorse-political-republican-democrat-498365
Entirely unpersuasive. You’re caught too much in people rather than the actual movie.
>Like how the Vietcong manipulated the anti-war movement into thinking they were truly like us Americans when in reality they were Communists answering to Moscow, or at least Beijing.
The entire anti-war movement was directly funded by Moscow. Everyone involved knew exactly what they were about. Also, the movement was tiny and greatly amplified by the leftist media. Treating the people involved as anything other than communist infiltrators just goes to show that you’re the victim of the same sort propaganda you’ve been railing against.
I doubt it. Otherwise, why not come out now and admit he was trying to push conservative values onto the audience? It’s not like he has anything left to lose anyways. Disney’s got his franchises, he has nothing, and he’s already out of a job anyways.
Not to mention, that doesn’t explain why he told Walter Murch, his associate, this, or why he desired an Apocalypse Now-style documentary and in fact largely based Star Wars on that film, or why, even after ALL of the info released about the aftermath of Vietnam, including the boat people, the reeducation camps, and the Khmer Rouge, he STILL insisted that it was Vietcong propaganda, or why he actually stated in writing with his draft that the heroes and villains were based on the NVA and America, respectively. Or heck, afterwards, how he stated he was of the 99% or how he used the Prequel Trilogy to bash capitalism and even used ROTS to basically bash Bush, or how he even implied that Soviet filmmaking under Stalin was better and “more liberating” than American filmmaking.
And there were still a few patriotic films being made in Hollywood, like The Green Berets or We Were Soldiers.
Also, might as well show this passage from the book Children of the Jedi:
“Silent in the narrow alleyway, Leia recalled the day the Rebels had taken Coruscant. The Emperor’s palace - comt 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.”
Now, does that in any way sound American to you regarding the Rebels? Not to me. If anything, that sounds more like Bolshevik or French behavior.
>What makes you think that he failed? Just because people thought they represented Americans? If anything, that indicated it was a success precisely BECAUSE the masses were tricked.
Ok Pondexter, which propaganda values from Starwars did we absorb?
> My film professor, for example, was a radical anti-war protestor in his youth, radical enough that I butted heads with him explaining that the Communists DID invade Southeast Asia just as the Domino Theory predicted, and he claimed we invaded to steal tin, and he also denied his friends in the protests were communists when I accused him of such.
Wars for profit is a standard Marxist line as is denying that a Marxist is really a Marxist. Your professor lied to you. He wasn’t fooled, he was just another communist fellow traveler.
> However, it’s clear a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that, and I’ve even had to witness this brainwashing first hand.
Is it? When dealing with a Communists the first you thing you learn is they lie about being communists. Muslims call it Taqiyya and the leftists call it entryism, but it amounts to the same of pretending to be something other than they are.
One last thing. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the 1960s made it very clear that there were some anti-War protestors who did have a genuine, if naïve, desire for peace and WEREN’T affiliated with the Communists, and that there were others who only protested because they didn’t want the draft, and they listed the ones who actually WANTED the communists to win as separate from the two.
Vietnam was probably the furthest thing from my mind when I saw the first Star Wars movie. The war was over by the time the movie came out, so it wasn't going to change anyone's mind.
Contrast Lucas with Robert Redford. Redford always has a political point and he pushes it hard. With Lucas, you'd really have had to be on the same wavelength that he is to begin with or you wouldn't have gotten any anti-Vietnam War message out of it. Also, the Nazi imagery was so overwhelming that any anti-Nixon message was obscured for most people.
When the second series of films came around, the people opining about the movie here saw it as an allegory of our own (1861-1865) Civil War, not of anything to do with Bush. Go here, for example.
Does that mean Lucas is a bad propagandist? I guess so. But to be a very good propagandist is a pretty low aspiration for a film maker. Lucas doesn't seem to have made films as politically pointed as some of Spielberg's.
I think George Lucas misjudged where his talents lie. And that may not be a bad thing, since if he'd made the movies he thought he was making, nobody would have watched them.
Saw it at Christmas and came seat with the complete opposite impression. The men were strong, decisive, and willing to take risks. The battle between Luke and Kai lo was masterful. The destruction of the carrier was brilliantly done. If anything, I was pissed at the female commander for waiting so long to do her kamakazi move.
Loved it.
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