Never Forget (Squirrel War Version)
As I go ever further down the hole of turning this blog into "Stormtrooper's Lament", I feel it important to remind my dear readers - and myself - where the term Stormtrooper first came from. The NAZI's. As with so many evil modern inventions. So, alas, while dressing up as a Star Wars Stormtrooper is mostly for laughs, the foundational undercurrent is disturbing - Lucas did not choose the name or look to be cute, but rather as a very direct reference to the NAZI's. That these same characters are now glorified in pop-culture should tell us that we've been crossing some lines over the past 30 years, and our entire cultural mindset has shifted - towards the Authoritarian, the Imperial, the faceless soldier doing the bidding of Evil.
Just as, I realized, with what is occurring with the plethora of incredibly realistic war video games on the market - Call of Duty, Counterstrike, etc. While fun and engaging, they are also literally training millions of people in combat tactics and in pure (simulated) violence. There's only so much conditioning required before it becomes the norm. Couple this with the parallel developments in real warfare (robotics), and you see how easy the transition will be from "guy killing fake people on his X-Box" to "same guy, soldier, killing real people via his remotely controlled drone". And maybe he'll get to wear a cool mask while doing so. Black, of course.
The trends are grim.
3 comments:
uh your a moron
As long as I'm not a moran, it's cool.
Storm troopers were originally the specialist soldiers used by the German army during the first world war to conduct small coordinated assaults on enemy positions. The terms only connection to Nazism is that it was reused during the second world war to describe the political militia. It has also been reused many more times since for many purposes, including its use in Star Wars.
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