George Lucas raised some ire with a poor choice of metaphors recently, in an interview with Charlie Rose, referring to his movies as his children and then confessing and I sold them to the white slavers. The big hubbub right now is that he referred to Disney as white slavers. He metaphorically did, but he also technically referred to himself as a white slaver, considering that slavers are people who sell slaves, id est, sell people into slavery.

My pause comes from his metaphor referring to Disney / himself as white slavers. White slavery historically refers to the trade of Europeans by the Ottoman Empire, in an age when slavery wasn’t too far removed from ordinary feudal contracts between vassals and liege lords. Slaves were commonly captured in war and had no rights (though considering a noble could dead a serf any time he wanted, that wasn’t…