Star Wars IS Fascist—Ha!
So many of you already know that I’m the only child raised in the 1980s who didn’t see Star Wars. Any of them. And you know that the reason I didn’t see Star Wars was that my parents thought it was New Age-y and anti-communist. (Not that they forbade me from seeing it or anything—they just made it sound uninteresting. Which it is.) I cannot count the number of people who have informed me that Lucas did not intend the “Evil Empire” to refer to the USSR, but rather to Nazi Germany or even the imperialist US (I buy that argument for Revenge of the Sith, but not necessarily for the early ones). Blah blah.
But here’s Adam Roberts of The Valve (yes, that’s right—he of the “Taking the Hobbits to Isengard” analysis) agreeing with my instinct that the Jedi are not only annoying but also fascist! Hurrah! I am vindicated! Adam Roberts is fast becoming one of my favorite people. (You do have to scroll down to the paragraph after the extended Suzy Rice quote to get to the most interesting bit–the rest is about the font choice for the logo.)
Of course, the difficulty is that you could critique many world religions-as-practiced for being fascist in the same sense that the Jedi are. Extra emphasis on the as practiced, though. Ideally, Christianity not only participates in the messiness of incarnate life but also does not seek to control others through state means (if you’re up for a dense and difficult read, check out John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, which elaborates on this latter principle—it’s brilliant and inspiring, if you’re willing to wade through all the references to various German theologians). Ideally. However, the messiness of incarnate human life also means that people, being people, mess things up.
7 comments June 22nd, 2006