Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Disrupting meaning
- 2 Deconstructing the second American 9/11
- 3 The decisive intervention
- 4 The institutionalisation and stabilisation of the policy programme
- 5 Acts of resistance to the ‘war to terror’
- 6 The discourse strikes back
- 7 Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - The discourse strikes back
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Disrupting meaning
- 2 Deconstructing the second American 9/11
- 3 The decisive intervention
- 4 The institutionalisation and stabilisation of the policy programme
- 5 Acts of resistance to the ‘war to terror’
- 6 The discourse strikes back
- 7 Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In the late spring of 2005, George Lucas released the third of the second trilogy of Star Wars films. The Revenge of the Sith dealt with a conflict between superbeings in a different galaxy and achieved great popularity at the box office. It also, however, echoed the debates of contemporary America. As Daniel Kutzman noted:
‘You're either with me, or you're my enemy,’ Anakin Skywalker tells Obi-Wan Kenobi before he turns into Darth Vader, in a none-too-subtle echo of President Bush's infamous ‘you're either with us or against us’ mantra. At another point in the film, as the galactic Senate cheers dictator-in-waiting Palpatine, Padme Amidala says, ‘This is how liberty dies – to thunderous applause.’
The message – that abandoning rights in favour of a bigger struggle, in which the stakes are raised to the highest, leads to the total abandonment of the values supposedly being protected – is epitomised by Anakin's descent into becoming Darth Vader. And picking up on the theme, cartoonists enjoyed representing George Bush as Vader. George Lucas had himself made a connection between the film and the Iraq War, even though he had written the original storyline some thirty-five years earlier: ‘In terms of evil, one of the original concepts was how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship … The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.’ The Revenge of the Sith as a popular critique of the ‘war on terror’ discourse?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror , pp. 214 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006