Recently someone brought up an interesting point about clones, which happens to be something thought of the clone issue since they were introduced in Episode II.

I remember this argument spontaneously appeared: clone troopers were somehow "non-humans". It was a knee-jerk reaction to be sure, and the product of one of those cleverly placed philosophical riddles the George likes to embed in his space opera. It was designed to make us ask, from the very beginning, a few things:

"What is Human?"

and

"When does a human cease to be human?"

and

"To whom do human rights apply?"

I remember these questions so well because I will admit this myself - my first reaction to genetically altered clones with engineered obedience was likewise that they were somehow quite possibly just shy of human status. They were certainly treated this way in the context. They were designed. They were grown. They were hidden. They were bought and sold. They were delivered. These men were shuffled about like so much inventory, albeit expensive inventory, and were designed to counter the threats of mechanical counterparts. And so, like many others, the first conclusion I leapt to was that they were less than men.

And certainly this was enforced by plenty of imagery, not only in Episode II, but throughout the saga. Even when we didn't know Stormtroopers were clones, I remember vividly the various theories that they weren't men at all, that they were in fact robots. Why? Because we never saw their faces. They never once appeared as other humans did in these films. We never saw pain or fear or joy in their eyes.

And really even for those of us that knew better about Stormies being human, we never really cared much about their humanity. We can easily recount when various human characters died in the saga, but scene by scene, I would imagine few of us have an accurate body count for downed Stormtroopers. They were blaster fodder, and that's all. Even when we thought of them as human, we didn't think of them as deserving of the attention we give other humans. They had no names, they had no faces, and so whether we stopped to consider it or not, we relegated them to inferiority.

Then Episode II came along and turned everything upside-down. All of a sudden it mattered what and who these guys were. Aside from the initial denial many experienced (or endured, depending on your point of view) that these soldiers of the Republic would eventually become the foundation of the ranks of Stormtroopers we knew in the Original Trilogy, there was another issue - just what were these guys, exactly?

It started to become evident in the vernacular of the debate. People started referring to "human recruits" vs. clones, and how later many believe the Empire would opt to replace "non-humans" with a "fully human" army.

This of course proved to be only partially true. The cloned army would endure as the heart of the Stormtroopers, and regular recruits only supplemented their forces later. That issue being solved, there remained the troublesome verbiage - that clones were somehow not human.

This is exactly the sort of sneaky moral conundrum Lucas excels at. He did this throughout the Prequels. He would take an issue that we had never questioned, and turned it on its ear. We never questioned that Darth Vader was somehow always evil, and then we saw him as the victim. We never questioned that Boba was heartless, and then we saw him cradle his father's helmet. We never questioned that the Jedi were peaceful, until we saw them go to war. And we never questioned that these white clad anonymous warriors were people, until we saw them as the Jedi saw them.

George Lucas could have easily continued with the more palatable and marketable theme that Stormtroopers were just baddies, deserving of every laser bolt and arrow thrown at them. Instead, he gave us the story of Jango, and his son, and the many other genetic copies of him. Each of these soldiers would undergo accelerated learning, growth, aging, and were ultimately designed to be nearly perfect soldiers, obedient perhaps to a fault. But as they may have been different in design and purpose, they have always been human by nature.

This is why we see Obi-Wan befriending Commander Cody throughout the Clone Wars, and even up until the very end when Order 66 was carried out. They were brothers in arms, comrades, peers, equals. Obi-Wan respected Cody as a human being, and Cody returned this respect.

This is also why these soldiers developed names, at first derivatives of their ID numbers, but later more personal, meaningful names. Names like Jangotat and Darman and Atin. These are human beings, seeking their own birthright to have an identity.

All of this was designed for us to view the clones in the same distressing light the Jedi must have. To Jedi, all life is sacred, and all sentient beings have a right to follow their own path. It was an affront to all these Jedi stood for to place them in command of sentient beings who never had a choice in their lives to be anything but what they were. One by one, the Jedi commanders secretly fostered individuality in their reports, because they knew instinctually these men were real people, and people have choices.

This makes Order 66 all the more poignant, you see. While the Jedi seek to enlighten their cloned allies, the clones are given an order to extinguish their Jedi mentors. This sort of irony is not accidental, folks. Make no mistake that Mr. Lucas is making a statement about the nature of good and evil. Good nurtures an open heart, Evil seeks to exploit it. The Evil forces at work in the Galaxy were conspiring to rob the clones of the nature the Jedi sought to encourage. By the clones becoming victorious, they lost so much more.

For anyone left that believes these clones were somehow "non-humans" or even "sub-human", please note this example, which I gave as a response to another poster's entry.
The primary argument I've seen about clones not being humans is that they were genetically designed to be different in many important ways, namely:
Accelerated growth,
Accelerated aging,
Artificial conception,
And an altered mental state.

In the real world there are natural and artificial counterparts to each of those conditions mentioned:
Accelerated growth: Gigantism
Accelerated aging: Progeria
Artificial conception: Test Tube Babies
Altered mental state: Autism, Retardation, Dissociative Disorders, Sociopathic Disorders...

So you have to ask yourself these questions, by that logic:

If a person has one, two, or all of these conditions, are they less human?

If there were some accident that caused all of these traits, are the victims sub-human?

If there were some sinister agenda by the government to do this to people on purpose, are they not due any rights?

And what if said government doesn't do this to adults, but does this to children, or the unborn - humans no more?

You can design something to behave in certain ways, but that doesn't mean you've changed its basic nature. I may change a car into a truck, or into a tank, but it is still a metal box in its purest form. Humanity reaches further down into our roots than just what we do, or what we've been tinkered with to do.

Otherwise, we are all in danger of some day crossing some nebulous boundary that could deny us our very nature. We could be struck with genetic ailments and/or mutations that render us "non-human" or "sub-human". We could all experience some event that alters our cognitive abilities that would strip us of our status and our rights.

But this is simply not true, is it? In our world there are so many examples that tell us that what makes a human is more than a narrow definition, and at the same time, we can rely on very basic guidelines. Otherwise, Terry Schiavo would have been just so many pounds of flesh, and there would have been no controversy in ending her life. Humanity is more complex than this.

There are certainly broad categories used to describe the different kinds of humans: Mongoloid (originating from the Asian continent), Negroid (from the African continent), Caucasoid (from the European continent), etc etc. Beyond that, it's a very dangerous endeavor to catalog the exact nature of Humanity as we see it, because intrinsic to this process are "standards". And who would sets these standards? And what happens when someone changes these standards? And what happens when someone changes these standards in a fashion that benefits some, and excludes others?

This would seem innocent enough. They would go something like this:

A human thinks a certain way. Not processing information in the manner of the accepted norm is non-human, or sub-human.

A human looks a certain way. Deviation from the standard form is non-human, or sub-human.

A human performs a certain way. Any person that is deficient, or is overly proficient in various human activities is non-human, or sub-human.

A human is never altered. Only naturally evolving humans can be considered human. Anything arrived at artificially is non-human, or sub-human.

A human is born in to a standard family unit. A human without standard parentage is non-human, or sub-human.

...but such standards have been twisted before and are therefore insidious. Where in our history have these narrow definitions been applied? I think you know the answer to that, and I won't bore you with talk of Reichs and eugenics.

But I will point out another conflict in human history that centered on this very question - the nature of humanity. From 1861 to 1865 my country tore itself asunder in the fight to assert who had the right to own another human. Not only a constitutional struggle over states rights, this was more importantly a struggle for individual human rights. The Civil War of the United States brought our nation to the brink of dissolution if for no other reason that the idea that this question is not always so easy to answer, and because of this difficulty in quantification it was determined that the nature of humanity runs deeper than mere definitions.

Part of the Confederacy's argument went something like this:

"These people, while certainly appearing human, are in fact sub-human. As a greater society, the South has taken these poor souls in, given them a home and a purpose, and to release them would be inhumane. Proof?

They do not think like us.

They do not look like us.

There can't perform like us.

They have been bred for hundreds of years to be slaves, to have strong backs, to have empty minds, to be subservient to us.

They have never had parents, or a family.

Their only purpose is to serve us. They were designed to be property. They have been bought and sold.

Therefore, they are not human, and human rights do not apply."

What was wrong with those points - the standards, the agenda, or something deeper? Was it that humanity was being defined by Caucasoids that excluded all others? The problem with these standards is that someone will always be there to twist them. But more importantly, they simply do not address the reality of the human condition.

I'm not suggesting that Moglop who lives as a sentient crystaline structure at the bottom of a sea of liquid hydrogen 827 light years from here is Human, nor could the case be made that he (she, it) is.

What I am suggesting, however, is it takes a great deal more than simple genetic tweaking to strip us of our humanity. And let's be clear here - one day we will cross that line. We will "manufacture" humans with genetic enhancements, try as we might to stem the tide. It will be unfortunate that we feel the need to usurp the power of nature, but these moral questions have never stopped us before.

This is why its important to view humanity past the simple realm of standards, because this could even happen in our lifetime.

I find it ironic, however, that if we were discussing Cows, there wouldn't be as many questions. If scientists made some alterations to a Cow's color, or altered its mental capabilities, or even managed to clone that cow in a laboratory without parents, is there any doubt that it would still be referred to as a cow, perceived as a cow? You can imagine the headlines in scientific journals. They would say "Scientists Continue Genetic Research on Cow", not "Scientists Study Sub-Cow" or "Scientists grapple with what to name non-Cow species."

And what makes Cows different than Humans? Simple - the question of status. The question of human rights. The question of deserving the same things that "real" humans get without a second thought. As far as Cows go, you can change one, and you have not changed the nature of the world around it. As far as humans go, if you change a group of humans into something other than this, genetically arrived at or otherwise, you have likewise changed the rules that surround them. A Cow will always be treated like a Cow, but a "semi-human" will be treated very differently indeed. Perhaps more like the Cow in the long run.

Making genetic alterations is not the domain of scientists only. Nature does it all the time. Ten's of thousands of years ago, when there was still a land bridge that connected Siberia and North America, ancient Asians migrated from colder, barren lands to the fertile promise of America's primordial forests and open plains. These Asians, in genetic terms "Mongoloid" humans, settled across the new continent and made a life. In time, subtle changes made themselves evident in successive generations, manifesting in different ways, in different areas. To the far north, Eskimos became a distinctive people and culture. Further south, Native Americans flourished in a variety of great nations. Each looked slightly different; each had changed subtly in form and function. They were no longer Asian, although perhaps still classified as Mongoloid.

But since they had been tweaked by nature with subtle permutations, were they then no longer Human? Would the peoples of Korea, China, and Japan look at them as "sub-human" or "non-human"? I doubt that in nearly every case. But there is one people that did jump to this conclusion, again with amazing regularity - the Caucasoids. The European peoples that later flooded the Americas often crushed the Native American societies under foot because they were seen as "savages". Soon after the war to establish human rights for African slaves was fought, a campaign was undertaken to exterminate these indignious peoples to make way for "Manifest Destiny", the doctrine that said the US should spread from Sea to shining Sea.

Once again, standards were applied. They went something like this:

"These people stand in the way of our great society. They attack our settlers who rightfully claim this land. They do not deserve this great country, nor any rights due to an upstanding human being. Why?

They do not think like us.

They do not look like us.

There can't perform like us.

They live like savages.

They do not have our kind of family or morals.

More importantly, they are in the way. Their lands have been bought and sold. They may not be property, but where they live is.

Therefore, they are not human, and human rights do not apply."

Funny how this keeps happening. In one case, you've got people viewed as property, because they benefit the society they live in. In another case, you've got people viewed as animals that have to be culled, because they are in the way, something that would be repeated 80 years later in Europe. History has a nasty habit of showing us patterns of disturbing regularity.

But let's take a look at this logic, then. If humans are to be held to a certain standard, a "genetically unaltered" standard, a "pure" standard, then who were the first humans? Wouldn't we return then to the source? Would this be the "Master Race" then, the template for all humanity? And if so, what do we do with the knowledge that archeology and paleontology is finding converging evidence that Africa was the cradle of humanity?

Are non-Africans, then, by virtue of their genetic alterations throughout time, non-human? Sub-human?

Before you try to answer that, let me be the first to alleviate the pressure of such a monstrous question. The answer is simple. We're all human.

Well...ok you are. I'm a moose

Anyway, if you think differently, you're still human. If you look differently, you're still human. If you perform differently, you're still human. If you were born differently, you're still human. And therefore, you are afforded those same lofty Jeffersonian gifts of humanity, those "inalienable rights" of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And THAT, ladies and gents, is the very point I'd like to return to now. That is why Mr. Lucas had us go through this mental exercise. Let's forget the fact that George Lucas viewed these clones as human. Let's forget that he has licensed authors and artists to present the very human qualities of these clones. Let's forget that they were inserted into the storyline for this very reason. Let's forget that we're even talking about fictional creations, because the question itself is more important that those considerations.

Let's simply answer this question: Are these clones human? Yes. What else would they be?

DM out