PT Defending Anakin and the Tusken

That's his opinion and his opinion is tainted by grief and anger.

 

He's the only source we have, besides the Tuskens' actions which already
speak for themselves.

 

Ok maybe but does it speak for the Tusken Younglings.

 

And how would you judge the actions of Tarkin in ANH? The destruction of Alderaan and the murder of billions?
Would you be ok with his actions be taken as a sign that ALL humans are monsters and ALL humans, even children, should get wiped out?

The Tusken that kidnapped Shmi were cruel and vicious and what they did was horrible. That doesn't make ALL Tusken, down to the smallest child, equally guilty. Nor does it make it ok for Anakin to murder them all, even those that had nothing to do with Shmi's death.
Guilt by association is not a concept I like nor do I think small scale genocide is ever a good thing.

I think one of the messages of SW is that good and evil are not so black and white. Even the very evil Darth Vader had some good inside him And Luke was not ready to give up on him and he was proven right.

Bye for now.
The Guarding Dark

 

We really need to see what the Tuskens are actually like as a species. Many people seem to see them as basically 'bandaged humans' when in actual fact we've never even seen any Tusken's real face to the best of my knowledge, much less had any kind of insight into how they think or act.
To a Tusken it could well be that anyone who goes out defenceless and weaponless like Shmi did deserves to be punished for that weakness/stupidity in the way she was. Perhaps to a Tusken, there is no such thing as a noncombatant, males and females are both fighters and hunters equally and they simply assume humans to be the same. It could even be that for whatever reason the mushrooms Shmi picked hold some sort of religious significance to the Tusken or are valued much higher than simply something you add to a recipe and picking them was some kind of Tusken taboo. We have absolutely no idea, neither do the farmers of Tatooine. They simply know the Tusken are not like them, they don't care why and they don't want to know - they just want to kill them all.
Shmi's husband lost his leg in an ambush and the hunters were massacred by Tusken - having set out to wipe out the Tusken.... which seems to have slipped Lars' memory, conveniently enough. It's broadly similar to calling Sitting Bull a savage for wiping out Custer's men at the battle of Little Big Horn. Even if you do actually believe the Tusken are literally animals as Lars seems to, this is a little bit like a hunter taking personal offence when he goes after a bear or a boar and it kills members of the party trying to kill it.

 

This is what a lot of people seem to misunderstand. Anakin didn't commit genocide. He didn't hunt down and destroy every Tusken tribe on Tatooine, and he never claimed to want to. He's a Tatooine native, and he very well knows there are countless more all over the planet, like the ones who tried to MURDER him and other pod racers on Mos Espa. Did he want to murder their tribe? Nope. More than the (fanfic) notion that there is "definitely" some racist war instigated by the humans against Tuskens (we don't even know which species first inhabited Tatooine), it is safe to assume that when Anakin moved from hut to hut killing the Tuskens, he found other abused, tortured, murdered women in the same position as Shmi. It is probable Cliegg's previous wife was killed by Tuskens, too. Plus, if the Lars family was some crazy racist bunch of red necks, the Jedi wouldn't have given Luke to them. Anakin calls them good people. Yoda also knows what happens, and instead of being horrified at Anakin's vigilante justice to a bunch of monster aliens (not Indians or Arabs, this is fiction), he is horrified at the loss of Shmi and Anakin's suffering.

And about Tarkin, his actions aren't a sign of every human being a similar monster, but only reflective of the Empire and specifically the Death Star, which we can think of as the tribe in this case, as a parallel to the Tuskens.

 

The word "genocide" is technically as applicable to the destruction of a single tribe, as it is to the destruction of an entire species.

 

It is the wrong term to use, since it depends completely on the situation and Anakin's intentions. In this case, the whole tribe was responsible, at least in his state of mind at the time. He wasn't some raging racist who wanted them offed just because they were different.

 

He wanted to wipe them all out because they were all Tusken, and one or more Tusken had been responsible for his mother's death. He didn't know which, he didn't care which, old, young, male, female, guilty or innocent he drew no distinctions and unilaterally decided to exterminate the entire tribe based on the actions of a few. If that's not genocidal then it must come pretty close. Had there been more Tusken nearby then he would have gone after them too, he stopped only because there were literally none left to kill. I don't know if racist is exactly the correct term but deciding that every member of a species should die for the actions of a minority is pretty damn troubling.

 

Full Definition of GENOCIDE

: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
The term does partly fit as Anakin killed every single Tusken in that camp or that particular group.
And he killed them because they were Tusken.
Had there been other Tuskens nearby it is likely that he would have killed them as well.
Some Tuskens killed his mother and in rage and full of hate, Anakin killed every last Tusken he could find. He didn't care it they were involved or not. His choice of words later seem to indicate that he was aware that not all he killed had anything to do with Shmi's death.
But that didn't stop him, he was drowning in hate and was after blood. Guilty or innocent, he didn't care.
What he did was vengeance, mass murder and maybe even small scale genocide.
You invent a lot, like there being other women there. Source for this?
Yoda knew what he did? Where is that established? Yoda sensed that he was in pain but that he committed mass murder filled with hate? I really doubt Yoda knew about that.
Palpatine knew as did Padme. But Anakin didn't tell the Jedi, at least as far as I know.

Why? What he did was many times worse. He killed billions as nothing more than an object lesson.
You are willing to condemn every Tusken to death because the actions of some but aren't willing to do that with humans.

Lastly, the whole tribe was responsible?
That is a massive guilt by association and this type of arguments have been used many times in our worlds history to justify the killings of a variety of ethnic groups.
This is not an type of argument that I will ever be comfortable with.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

What

No it does not because no matter his intentions he is still killing people and Children

Thats Genocide.

 

I invent a lot. Definitely. Like this hypothetical scenario of racism towards Tuskens. Or are they Indians or Arabs now? What a sad mess of a thread.

 

I think it is more to do with how the ideas used to defend Anakin in this scenario are in themselves dangerous...but also, that the movie itself isn't intended to act as a defence of Anakin's actions - that in the movies it is intended to be seen as wrong, not something that is defensible.

 

Yeah, Anakin never tried to say 'But they deserved to die!', he never pretended he'd done the right thing in killing them, he was well aware he'd done the wrong thing. The problem is it does kind of get a bit ignored after this point. He presumably has some sort of lingering guilt long after the event or perhaps he deliberately represses the memory somehow, we have no idea. He kills the Tusken, angsts a bit then it's off to Geonosis for some cool action sequences and no-one ever mentions it again until Palps suddenly brings it up towards the end of the next movie. The only comment we kind of get on it is Padme blathering about 'getting angry is human' which a) doesn't mean an awful lot and b) is just as ignored as the rest of it as they get married a few days later anyway, hurray.

 

No there just Tuskens and there still an Ethnic group so...

 

Anakin doesn't forget about it. The anger is still there when he's on Geonosis, which intensifies because of the threat to Padme and the numerous Jedi who fell in battle. Hence his attempt to attack Dooku on his own. Later, he tells Palpatine about it and he keeps quiet about it, and uses it and the first fight with Dooku to start Anakin's turn. When Anakin finally manages to off Dooku, Palpatine uses it as a comparison of similar situations where Anakin was justified in killing someone out of a desire for revenge. Palpatine uses it to blur the lines between right and wrong and says that what you feel is right, is right when others would claim it is wrong.

As to Padme's response, she is telling him that there was nothing wrong with his getting angry. It means that despite what he thinks, his being angry wasn't the worst thing in the world, even though the Jedi know that to not be true.

 

No, they aren't an ethnic group. They are a fictional species of aliens called Tuskens. Comparing them and their portrayal to a specific race of people is borderline racist. It's like people saying Watto is Jewish or the Neimoidians are Chinese. Nope, you're just looking for something that isn't there.

 

Same principles apply. Wiping out a single tribe of Tuskens (as opposed to all the Tuskens on the planet) works the same way as wiping out a tribe of humans, for the purposes of "was it genocide or not".

 

Tusken are fictional, yes, but guess what? So's Anakin. No-one is actually saying that Anakin is actually racist against a real life ethnic group of any kind, that would be preposterous. But IN-UNIVERSE, he committed what is basically a genocidal act. An entire group of people were eradicated for the sin of being the same species as those who committed a terrible crime. The Tuskens are a species portrayed as sharing a culture, beliefs, certain physical characteristics, that makes them a race in the world of Star Wars. Anakin committed a race crime by deciding that all members of that race should be killed for what a minority of them actually did. Trying to paint it as political correctness just shows how weak the argument that they deserved it actually was in the first place.

 

There an ethnic group in star wars does that make it better for you.

 

Tuskens are animals. They do not have morality or conscience - if a tiger kills a man, it doesn't mean that that tiger is "evil". Yes, the Tuskens tortured Shmi in a completely inhumane and terrible way, but one cannot describe a creature which doesn't have a conscience as good or evil. And again, killing every living thing in a camp, including infants and women, is probably just as horrific as torturing Shmi.

 

Well they do have a Conscience so...

 

Tuskens are animals? I'm sorry, where was this proven? Because they tortured a person? By that rationale, I guess when people in real life torture others, then they're animals as well. Like when the CIA did water boarding at Guantanamo? And how do you know that the Tuskens don't have a conscience? What about when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with the first nuclear weapon? Were the pilots inhuman for doing so?