How the Force Can Fix the World by Stephen Kent

Author:Stephen Kent [KENT, STEPHEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

BALANCING HOPE AND ANGER

There’s a vocal contingent within the Star Wars fan community that pushes the idea that the franchise is exclusively a story about standing up to fascistic regimes. Those people aren’t entirely wrong. Star Wars is definitely about the virtue of recognizing and facing down evil, and fascism is evil. But this debate tends to obscure at least two things. The first is the specific political orientation of the Empire and whether or not its specific brand of authoritarianism is purely fascism and not a hybrid that includes elements of communism and corporatism (among other things). The second is what we’ve been exploring in this chapter about what it takes to win against oppressive regimes of any variety.

In any historical scenario you’ll always be able to find real-life characters who fit the mold of either radical or realist, revolutionary or incrementalist. Star Wars and its clever inclusion of Saw Gerrera in the story of the Rebellion is no exception. And the timing was just right. In our own world, Rogue One had come just after the Bernie Sanders insurgency against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Now, we aren’t talking about some sort of armed insurgency, of course, but a legitimately radical (and I don’t mean that as a slur) alternative to the establishment figure and centrist that is Clinton. The timing didn’t feel like a coincidence. The rise of Bernie Sanders and a more militant-Left politics came right on the heels of Barack Obama’s tenure, a presidency many thought would be more progressive than it turned out to be. Obama spoke the language of the establishment, with an idealism about what America is and could be. He had his moments to the contrary. But at the end of the day, he was a guy whose 2006 book was entitled The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. It wasn’t titled Irredeemable: Why the American Dream Never Really Existed.

For all his flaws, Obama might have fit in at the table with Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and the Rebel Alliance, fighting for a belief in what the Republic once stood for and could be again. On the other hand, it’s hard to see the historical revisionists behind journalistic ambitions like the New York Times’ 1619 Project, writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, for example, standing with anyone other than Saw Gerrera. To these kinds of thinkers, righteous anger is the primary currency of their politics. Anger can be enough to get people animated about change, but it tends to be a powder keg of emotion more prone to flaring up and burning out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.