‘The Last Jedi’ gets fascist order wrong

THE Star Wars franchise’s latest evil government, the First Order, seems carefully crafted to send a shiver down contemporary spines. Based on an alpinelooking ice planet, run by crisp functionaries in sharply tailored uniforms and armed with worlddestroying weaponry, the First Order harks back to fascist regimes of the 20th century.

But the most frightening thing about the First

Order, as far as real-world audiences ought to be concerned, is the radical inequality festering in the society it aims to rule.

In the world depicted in The Last Jedi, the relationship between mass politics and the First Order is never made entirely clear; the regime seems to have manifested out of some dark energy conjured by its diabolical alien leader, and, this being a mass-market sci-fi flick, we can’t fault it too much for that. But the film does linger on the shape of its characters’ economy: upside-down, one gathers. Wealthy arms dealers and other rich characters decked in haute couture throw money down and drinks back in glittering casinos while dirty-faced children muck out stalls for alien beasts roughly akin to terrestrial racehorses.

This inequality is adduced as a source of strength for the Resistance. At the film’s conclusion, a child labourer is seen using the Force to summon a broom for his chores, glancing at a Resistance emblem and gazing up hopefully toward the stars. Things simply can’t go on this way, we’re meant to conclude; the oppression of the many by the few will eventually be righted via popular uprising. Resistance, to borrow a trope from another star franchise, is not futile. In reality, the economic conditions sketched in The Last Jedi are perfectly primed to give rise to the very sort of fascist regimes the film seems to think they’re naturally antithetical to.

Filmic fascism may arise from the shadowy machinations of evil mystics but, in life, fascists neither arrive on the political scene ex nihilo nor present themselves as straightforwardly evil. On the contrary, fascists frequently lean into concerns about class struggles, rhetorically throwing in their lot with the downtrodden.

Germany’s Nazi Party was putatively socialist, though its commitment to addressing the interests of workers was never much more than empty verbiage.

Hitler found the word “socialism” both useful and troublesome: it allowed him to tap into the frustration of dispossessed workers, but also obligated him and his party to pursue solutions they didn’t favour and had no real intention of accomplishing.

If resistance-minded folk want to prevent the rise of a less imaginary First Order, eliminating inequality, not just reconceptualising it as an engine of popular opposition, should be a top priority. – The Washington Post