[Despondent]

You guys don't consider that at least one former employee "brought it up?"

[Just your average movie goer]

Ah yes... in fact, the exchange between them went something like this.

[Jordan]

Thanks for the LInk JYAMG! Those slides are hilarious!

[Hannibal]

Well, all that, except they shouldn't need to live as hermits. That was just a lifestyle Yoda chose, because as a force master he liked to be ina place thick with life. And a choice Ben took, because being an idiot he figured he should hide out in the desert and not bother to change his name.

I fugure the average Jedi lived like the travelling warriors of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON. Lots of people knew them, and they helped folks out from time to time, even assisting in wars where needed. But yeah, not in a city and certainly not having some central authority. That's dumb.

This is how I saw the Jedi as well. Now they are the CIA--or worse the Freemasons or Knights Templar working for the government in some high capacity as spies, diplomatic agents and religious/mystical seers, prophets, counselers to the government and intelligence gatherers. Religion and politics don't mix, this is why we all cringe when we hear about the Templars in the old Catholic Church and their Holy Wars, we are terrified of the thought of secret societies behind political affairs, secret societies based on mystical--or religious beliefs, and here comes George Lucas suggesting that (like Heinrich Himmler) a golden age of mystical knights properly attended to guard the world from evil from within the government. Perhaps Lucas is suggesting in it all was a bad idea, the Sith and the Jedi were both meddling, but one was socially accepted and the other was not, and thus the battle of secret societies brought the universe to an apocalypse.
Religion and politics do not mix, and all our original ideas about the Jedi, being wandering mendicant miracle workers who know a bit of Chi Gung and gung Fu and happen to carry these little wands of energy they whip out and defend themselves with is all gone now.

It seems now from the Prequels, the Jedi are the Masonic Agents of the Intelligence Community of the Republic, nothing less than Heinrich Himmler's proposition that he was creating a New Knights Templar from the SS, which would be the guardians of peace and justice in the Reich, learning from an early age the secrets and mystical concepts which would allow them to perform great miracles and be almost worshipped by the people. These mystical knights of Himmler's were to be the true master race, properly selected and trained from youth and initiated into the mystical world of the SS/Templar/Nazi philosophy. The Midichlorian racial theory does not make be breath any easier.


Even the Jedi Temple and Library and the whole Jedi Academy thing is straight out of Himmler's visions. Don't believe me, get ready to be scared to death:
http://www.nsm88.com...%20camelot.html
Nothing could make you more disgusted, and even if Lucas is attempting to dispel these Jedi myths(he's doing a bad job--many of us grew up wanting to be jedis), he's making a lot of money selling toys of the Jedi as the "good guys."

Here's some frightening backstory on Heinrich Himmler's "Jedi" Order:

http://www.whitedrag...les/himmler.htm

"The SS was modeled on the Teutonic Knights, an offshoot of the Knights Templar who were thought to have custody of the Holy Grail (as well as the ancient Indian warrior caste of the Kshatriya). Therefore SS teams were sent in search of the Grail, as well as the Ark of the Covenant. At first it would seem a little strange that a man who had renounced Christianity and oversaw the systematic murder of millions of Jews should be interested in such relics but the theory was that Jesus was Aryan and his father a Roman.

It has been claimed (most speculatively) that Albrecht Haushofer (son of Karl, the geopolitician) who Hess knew from university had been a student of Gurdijeff and had set up the Vril Society (a lodge claiming contact with Shambhala, the Tibetan otherworld) and that Hitler and Himmler were members.

Himmler did know Haushofer (who knowingly or not seems to have been one of Himmler's spies in the resistance[Padfield]) but I seriously doubt that the Vril Society really existed. That said, Himmler did send SS research teams to Tibet, and Russian troops entering Berlin in 1945 found Tibetans who had committed ritual suicide wearing SS uniforms. [Dyson, Carroll] What it all adds up to is anyone's guess.

Many amongst the Nazi leadership found Himmler rather a figure of fun and would often take the mickey out of him and his mystification of the SS (only behind this very dangerous man's back, though!). Architect, construction supremo, and armaments minister Albert Speer reports Hitler as saying of Himmler:

"What nonsense! Here we have a last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church ... To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! I would turn over in my grave..."[Speer]

Himmler's intense interest in Germanic paganism is illustrated well by a letter that he wrote to the head of the Ahnernebe (a historical and cultural research unit that Himmler had incorporated into the SS). He believed the ancient Germans enacted legal ordinances and marriages upon ancient stones at burial places of the clan (Sippe), and had come across the following custom that he claimed had survived.

His own views about immortality owe something to Hinduism as well as Germanic beliefs in rebirth in the Sippe via the transmission of the bloodline - not at all incongruous since both beliefs are linked via the spread of Indo-European, or "Aryan", culture (the word comes from the Sanskrit Aryas - meaning "noble" or "freeman" - and Swastika is Sanskrit also). [Berresford Ellis] Speaking, in 1937, of the idea of rebirth in the Sippe, Himmler said:

"A Volk that has this belief in rebirth and that honours its ancestors, and in so doing honours itself, always has children, and this Volk has eternal life." [Padfield]

He even ordered 20,000 copies of Karl Eckhart's Earthly Immortality: German belief in reincarnation in the Sippe for the SS.

This belief, as well as that of the SS being the noble warrior caste of the Third Reich, is reflected in his instructions for a great triptych for the entrance hall of Wewelsberg Castle - the symbolic seat of SS power. Of the first painting he wanted a depiction of "the attack of an SS troop in war, in which I envisage the representation of a dead or mortally wounded SS man, who is married, to show that from death itself and despite it new life springs". The next panel would show SS men tilling the newly won land, and the final panel would show a new village full of families with many children. [Padfield]

This idea is also reflected in the rather macabre "death's head" insignia adopted by SS killing squads - death and killing were necessary and noble as they kept the folk community pure and vibrant. Himmler could use this same idea to purge whole families such as the von Stauffenbergs (the family of the July 20th 1944 bomber). Witness a speech Himmler made to district leaders:

"You only need to look up the Germanic Sagas. If they proscribed a family and outlawed them, or if there was a blood feud in the family, then they were drastically thorough ... they said, 'This man is a traitor, the blood is bad, there is bad blood in them, that will be eradicated'. And in the case of a blood feud it was eradicated down to the last member of the whole Sippe. The family of Graf Stauffenberg will be extinguished to the last member..." [Padfield]

He then mercilessly hunted down the family, even to distant relatives and had them executed or shipped to concentration camps. Similarly, the disabled or mentally ill were killed or sterilised so as not to pass on their "bad blood", and Germans who had intercourse with slave workers, Jews or other "inferiors" were harshly punished.


Archaeology in the SS was mainly carried out by the Ahnernebe, whose "cultural research" also included devilish experiments on the inmates of the concentration camps. The idea of landscape alignments linking supposed sacred sites of the ancient Germanic people - that were being dubbed "leys" in Britain - appealed to Himmler, and many of the pioneers in this area were soon working for the Ahnernebe. "They looked for evidence of ancient landscape surveys in order to substantiate Germany's claims as the home of civilisation, and where proof of the primaeval skills of the race was lacking, it could be fabricated." [Harte]

Indeed, so sparse and unimpressive were the finds from some of the pivotal sites in these grand landscape schemes that the evidence had to be manipulated or just plain invented. Hitler was rather embarrassed by Himmler's obsession with the past:

"Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these relegations." [Speer]

The Ahnernebe, following the theories of Wilhelm Teudt, found ancient Germanic "star temples" where sightlines supposedly radiated out towards important positions of sun, moon, and stars. These calendrical centres tended to turn up near SS colleges, and were often just natural rock formations, medieval remains, and in one case an old farm refuse tip![Magin]

The most famous Nazi sacred centre was the Externsteine near Detmold, north-east of Dortmund. Here stand four spectacular columns of rock, one of which has a small chapel cut into it. The window of the chapel admits the rising sun at midsummer.

According to Teudt this was where the sacred pillar of the Saxons, Irminsul, stood until toppled by Charlemagne (it almost certainly didn't), and a carving of a "weeping Irminsul" is supposed to be on one of the pillars of rock. [Schmidt] The Externsteine was at the centre of alignments (never statistically tested by the Nazis) and was supposed to have been a sacred centre before Stonehenge. [Magin] Excavations in the 1930's found only pottery from the seventh century CE, and the majority from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries.[Schmidt] The chapel is actually Christian, not pagan, and probably medieval.[Devereux]

Still, none of this mattered too much in a totalitarian state with "Spin Doctors" better than Tony Blair's, and the Externsteine became a major Nazi cult centre. Even today thousands of pagans come to this Christian site for the summer solstice, and neo-Nazis still gather here on November the first. The two groups are not entirely separate.[Schmidt]

The Castle of Wewelsberg

Fascinated by tales of King Arthur and his knights, Himmler's "Camelot" for his own knightly Order was the castle of Wewelsberg near Paderborn in Westphalia. Having acquired it in 1934, Himmler had massive reconstruction work done (paid for by his company "The Society for the Protection and Maintenance of German Cultural Monuments") - the labour came, of course, from the concentration camps.

The focal point of the castle was a huge round oak table with seating for his twelve of his senior Gruppenführers:

"They sat in high-backed chairs made out of pigskin, on each of which was a silver disk on which the selected 'knight' had his name engraved. Here the chiefs of the SS were compelled to sit in the company of their Grand Master [Himmler] for hours of contemplation and meditation ... Each 'knight' had his own quarters in the castle..."[Graber]

[Hannibal]

http://www.geocities...s/starwars.html

PFS Film Review
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace



Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, the first of three prequels to the "Star Wars" series is not a film for mature adults; it is for children who read comic books and be counted upon to attend the film multiple times. The tagline of the film is "Every generation has a legend. Every journey has a first step. Every saga has a beginning." Nevertheless, strange adult ideas permeate the script, albeit vaguely. Early in the story we learn that our galaxy is for free trade, but a rival galaxy insists on collecting tariffs in the manner of the robber barons of the Rhine River who retarded Germany’s rise by a few centuries. Our hero Qui-Gon Jinn (played by Liam Neeson) is an invincible Jedi warrior out to serve a noble cause, namely, negotiating tariff reduction. However, he is secretly sent by advisers to weak Queen Amidala (played by Natalie Portman) because the Federation’s parliament is in gridlock, unable to make up its mind what to do about the conflict. In short, democracy is too slow, so covert action is preferable. George Lucas, the film’s director and scriptwriter, continues to provide medieval garb and undemocratic conceptions of politics to young filmviewers in which decisive, executive power is preferable to the slow, consultative processes of representative government. Thus, filmviewers get action instead of reason, the hallmark of fascism. "May the force be with you" is still the highest ambition of the few. The original Star Wars film of 1977 tantalized youth to the glory of warfare in the post-Vietnam era, though with Cold War discourse. Indeed, in due course President Ronald Reagan justified extraordinary deficit military spending for an unattainable "star wars" shield to defend against the "evil Russian empire" a few years after the "evil Galactic empire" was first identified in Star Wars. Now, Episode I retrospectively justifies the political process that gave us Iran-Contra, the Grenada invasion, and countless covert actions. We even find that fatherless but precocious child Anakin Skywalker (played by Jake Lloyd) can be taken away from his mother (played by Pernilla August) in order to fulfill his Lucasesque destiny as a star warrior and future father of Luke Skywalker. With no sentimentality about leaving his mother, it is no wonder that Anakin is later transformed into Darth Vader. With a weak queen as the ruler of the Federation, destined to marry Anakin, there is no positive role for women in Lucas’s preferred undemocratic world. Lucas appeals to fatherless children to abandon their mothers without tears in order to join a violent gang, as if they needed any inducement to do so in the inner cities. Moreover, Jinn’s valet, a bumbling Stepin Fetchit, can only annoy African Americans, one of whom (Ahmed Best) plays the part. Nevertheless, the political implications of Episode I will probably sail over the heads of the audience and the politicians, and Lucas’s candidate for president, whoever that may be, is not yet on the political horizon. Why the prequel? Lucas, director of American Graffiti (1973), knows the box office power of nostalgia. But just think: the third of the prequels will come in the year 2005, when the original cherubic Star Wars fans will be in their thirties, and a new generation of fascistic racist sexists can be cultivated all over again to hate their parents. MH

[J m HofMarN]

Ummm dude... If George Lucas is planning to take over America thant I'm president Kennedy.

They replaced my brains with sand. That's why this post is so short. I'm thinking with sand here!







Also, they dyed me black.

[Hannibal]

"Ummm dude... If George Lucas is planning to take over America thant I'm president Kennedy. "

Well, Mr.President...just kidding...no, i don't think Lucas wants to take over America, I just think the idiot has no idea of what he is in fact saying. He's not a member of the Nazi party, he's just a fool who doesn't realize that in his movies is an undercurrent of unconscious fascism that may have rubbed off on the American public over the last 20 years or so. If Lucas was a fan of Himmler, then perhaps we are all in serious trouble. The reality is all we have to do is separate the insanity from the rest, realize it, acknowledge that there is something slithery about the whole Jedi thing. Many people from many points of view have pointed out that this whole new Jedi concept from episode I is somewhat disturbing. We wonder where the hell he got it from. As i sit here typing some kid is out there still wishing there was a real Jedi, wanting to be one...just like it was in the old days when a certain failed businessman who couldn't even raise chickens was obsessed with the Wagner Ring Cycle, reading about King Arthur and the Holy Grail and dreaming of forming a circle of mystical knights to protect and enlighten the country...until one day a man named Adolf came around...

[jariten]

i'd like to give serious consideration to your argument if only i could find some sense of practical application in it. if i wanted to, i could apply any system or theory to practically anything i wanted. which might work in some film or english course, but which doesnt actually apply to the real world.

[ernesttomlinson]

"if i wanted to, i could apply any system or theory to practically anything i wanted."

That, in essence, is what deconstructionism is. Look at this: http://www.info.ucl..../PVR/decon.html Silly, silly stuff--or would be if it weren't taken so seriously.

[J m HofMarN]

Hannibal- I really don't think there's any underlying fascist message in the PT. Lucas isn't copying Himmler, he's copying Arturian legend, the same thing Himmler was copying. I don't even think Himmler's name should have ever been brought up in the SW forums. And even if it was some sort of accidental Nazi brainwashing, who takes a serious message from a movie where a six year old shouts "yippie" and blows up a space ship?

[Just your average movie goer]

I've decided to dig this up because it's relevant to Ernest's new post and saves me repeating myself.

I had to dig past a lot of crap to find it though. Honestly, there are far too many threads in this forum.

[CowboyCurtis]

Great stuff! How did I ever miss this thread?

[J m HofMarN]

This really was a great thread once. It's a shame it got turned to the Hannibal side near the end, but now it's returned, woot! I really love how you made up a perfectly solid plot just by listening to what is said in the OT.

[Mnesymone]

That's all you need to do...

I've done some similar things - using the stuff out of the prequels and I had thought of diiferent/better prequel scripts - not entirely hammered out and ordered but a lot of individual scenes...

Predominantly for Episode I "The As Yet Unnamed Rememberer's Take" and climactic scenes for Episode II "The Still Unnamed Rememberer's Take" and Episode III "The Once More Unnamed Remeberer's Take"

I might begin refining them and seeing if I can do them either in flat written form or in a Column Comic a la Starry Nights in the screening room.

[snaithbert]

it's too bad yoda says EVERYTHING backwards in the PT's...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Little Jerry, GOOD POINT.

That really drives me nuts about the "new" Yoda.

A little of that backwards talking goes a long way and they used it sparingly in the OT.

But Lucas is totally overdoing in the PT, most likely because has has no concept of subtlety or simplicity, etc.

"If people liked a little backwards talk in the OT, they'll LOVE a LOT of backwards talk in the PT!!!!!!!!!"

But oh no we do not.

The result is that new yoda trips all over his words and his sentences don't make much sense. Lucas tries to so hard to play up this character, because he knows that no matter how bad the PT is, we'll always love Yoda, etc. Except the problem is that Lucas is really really bad at writing dialogue (among other things) and the end result is that even our beloved Yoda seems unrecognizable and unpleasant. I find it VERY difficult to imagine how the stick up his butt, scowling, finger wagging Yoda of the PT will ever become the relaxed, insightful, wise Yoda of the OT.

And actually that speaks to a larger problem of the PT, which is that it tries too hard overall and the end result feels stale and forced. It's not just the backgrounds and certain characters of the PT that are phony- it's the sentiment and the emotions as well. There's no heart, no humor (except bad humor) and contains none of the humanity that made the OT special.

I think it comes down to this: Whereas the films of the OT feel like they were lovingly created by a skilled master craftsman, the films of the PT feel like they were put together on an assembly line by mindless robots. The PT is quantity, not quality. Just churn the product out, never mind if it works or not. Lucas knows the fans will always buy his product no matter what- so why bother trying.