34 minutes ago, Dayham said:

All this aside, on the question of the Japanese and Galactic Empires, I think the Empire took some inspiration mainly from Nazi Germany, the British Empire, Cold War/Vietnam Era America, and Imperial Japan. It was based more on the idea of fascism and authoritarianism than any one concrete source, but they followed similar trends, and thus were bound to have them as references  .

I think the political backstory of Star Wars is one of its most interesting story elements, it's often ignored though people find it boring. I especially find it interesting is the Republic Senate is so horribly corrupt yet the Jedi serve it faithfully, while the CIS Senate is full of idealists, and patriots but their military are run by mustache twirling villains. The CIS has a droid army core, and the Republican as a core military of factory grown slave soldiers.

2 hours ago, Eoen said:

I think the political backstory of Star Wars is one of its most interesting story elements, it's often ignored though people find it boring. I especially find it interesting is the Republic Senate is so horribly corrupt yet the Jedi serve it faithfully, while the CIS Senate is full of idealists, and patriots but their military are run by mustache twirling villains. The CIS has a droid army core, and the Republican as a core military of factory grown slave soldiers.

It also cribs liberally from history. Often turning the events up a notch or 2

For example the melavence smacks of both axis monitor ships. And like the monitors died to aircraft

On ‎4‎/‎29‎/‎2019 at 2:37 PM, Tramp Graphics said:

I see where you're coming from, but still there really isn't much of a comparison there. The factors of "Cause" and motivation are different. regardless of how "cruel" we might see the actions of certain Japanese "militarists", the one thing that they all had, that that the Empire and the Nazi's lacked, was the Japanese sense of honor; the Samurai code of Bushido . The reasons why they treated prisoners of war cruelly is because, by their sense of honor, anyone who would surrender has lost all honor , and was thus unworthy of decency or good treatment. A Japanese soldier, much less an officer, would sooner take his own life through Seppeku than surrender, and they expected the same of their foes. Also, they weren't so much interested in world domination, so much as in need of resources that Japan lacked. Hitler, and Emperor Palpatine were both out for total domination and conquest for the sake of conquest and domination. For Japan conquest was a means to an end. For the Nazis and for the Galactic Empire, conquest and domination was an end unto itself.

This is hogwash. The Japanese wanted all of China, Korea and all of the Pacific, and had plans for western USA also. I guess this isn't considered world domination.

15 minutes ago, Rogo727 said:

This is hogwash. The Japanese wanted all of China, Korea and all of the Pacific, and had plans for western USA also. I guess this isn't considered world domination.

I think you are mistaking the Japanese excuses for truth.

2 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

I think you are mistaking the Japanese excuses for truth.

How So? Please enlighten me. This should be good.

Just now, Rogo727 said:

How So? Please enlighten me. This should be good.

So the Japanese say they did these things for the reasons stated by Tramp Graphics. Just because they made excuses does not mean they weren't monsters or going for world domination.

Frankly, the Japanese also aren't "unapologetic". In fact, when they talk about ww2, they tend to be very apologetic. Furthermore, even though the U.S. has asked for them to recreate their armed forces to take some of the burden off of us, they have been reluctant to do so because much of their populace is afraid it would hail a return to a more aggressive militaristic society. There was even an uproar over some games and anime (like Kantai collection and Arpeggio of Bluesteel) because many Japanese felt that they glorify world war 2. At the request of President Obama, Prime minister of Japan Shinzoe Abe went to Pearl Harbor where he offered condolences for the men we lost that day. He said "We must never repeat the horrors of war again. This is the solemn vow the people of Japan have taken."

I want to accept the Condolences and apologies of Japan. While I do not believe one should forget the mistakes of the past, I also do not believe we should dwell on them. I also believe that Japan is sincere in it's regrets and it's desire to make amends.

But we should not forget, nor should we accept lies in the place of truth. I can only assume that this accusation of the U.S. "maneuvering" Japan into attacking is based on the fact that we put an oil embargo on Japan. We shouldn't forget that the oil embargo was a response to the warlike actions of Japan. Japan attacked Manchuria. Japan left the League of Nations. Japan signed an anti-Russia treaty with Germany. Japan stopped us from trading with China. All of that was before we stopped selling to Japan. Then Japan signed a "defense pact" with Germany and Italy, both of whom were busy invading other countries. It was a defense pact designed to stop other nations from interfering with the land-grab. We didn't choose war. We didn't even choose the timing of war.. when we were attacked, we were still gearing up.. had we chosen the timing of pearl harbor, the IJN planes wouldn't have had enough gas to reach Hawaii and we would have had another 12 Battleships and about 9 more carriers there ready to meet them. As we proved during the war, our production capacity was monstrous compared to other nations. If we wanted to fight, it seems like we would have used that production capacity to actually prepare our defenses, instead of nearly being without a navy for 2 months. No, the fact that we didn't have a far superior military to everybody else when we entered the war can only be explained by the fact that we had no desire for war, and therefor didn't prepare.

I also wanted to comment about Star Wars being a mirror, or commentary, on Vietnam. As I understood it, Vietnam was responsible for the creation of Star Wars, but Star Wars was not any sort of commentary on Vietnam. Star Wars came about because Lucas felt that the nation was becoming depressed and was losing it's idealism. This is why he wanted a story with absolute good v. absolute evil. This is also why Star Wars seems to mirror WW2 so much.. because, even today, we all pretty much accept that the allies were good guys and the axis were bad guys (In the 1970's it was even more the case).