Anno: "I don't hate Star Trek, but I'm not impressed by it. You can see the arrogance of America in it. It's a story of influencing or enlightening native peoples of destination planets, that features romance with their most admirable woman in a front-line way. I feel like this is American imperialism itself.
It's like Marxists are portrayed as being primitives. I can't get used to that kind of American worldview. I think the Enterprise is cool, but that's all."
庵野: 『スタートレック』は嫌いじゃないですけど、そんなにはまってはいないんです。なんかアメリカ人の傲慢さが見えててね。行く先の星々の原住民を感化していくというか啓蒙していく話や、最前線の基地では、そこの一番偉い女性とロマンスがある。もう、アメリカの帝国主義そのものという気がしてね。なんかこうマルクス主義の人たちが、原始的なものとして描かれてますよね。ああいうアメリカ的な世界観というのには、どうもなじめなくて。エンタープライズ号は、カッコいいと思うんですけどね。」
Tbh I'm not really convinced by all these influencing other societies = imperialism takes. Shows a very superficial and liberal understanding of imperialism, totally deprived of its economic basis.
In a way it's affirming one of the central myths of colonialism: that's it's done for the sake of the colonized. Like, that's not actually why the AmeriKKKans went around exterminating indigenous people. Like, we weren't going around murdering people and stealing their land to enlighten them.
Also seems to imply the "bumbling empire" trope. I've seen it invoked a few times with comparisons between both The Culture and the Federation and the Iraq War, the idea being that the Iraq War is what you get when you try to intervene in other cultures' affairs, as if it was so awful because it was "interference" and not because it was literally just fucking invading and looting a country for profit.
Like, if you run across a genocidal fascist space empire (like in The Culture and Star Trek), obviously you kick the shit out of them. That's not imperialism in any remotely Marxist sense.
The point about Noon having a really similar approach to utopian space communist intervention is a good one, I think; it shows that the desire to influence other societies in a sci-fi setting isn't necessarily rooted in colonial attitudes.
I don't actually think that Star Trek, Culture or Noon people are imperialist. I just find it interesting that in some of the most influential utopian sci-fi settings the utopian good guys are by far the biggest dogs on the block and mostly deal with people much less powerful than them. Maybe I'm reading too much into it...
No, that makes sense. I guess it might have something to do with what kinds of conflicts you can have in utopias, since they kind of have to be externally driven since everything's so great inside, but at the same time it's interesting that the stories tend to be about powerful utopias deciding what to do with their power. Might reflect the countries the authors came from, being hegemonic in different ways.
Anyway, I wasn't really responding to you directly, more the general idea that I think is annoying, which your post reminded me of, and I tend to get ranty when I'm caffeinated.
That was my first thought as well.