All but a few nerds and serial contrarians agree that the “Star Wars” prequels, a trilogy of motion pictures released between 1999 and 2005, were amongst the worst contributions to cinema of all time. There are many reasons why they are so terrible – but I will focus today on only one crucial element as to why they are so memorably awful and what that all has to do with liberals.
The films trace the fall of both Anakin Skywalker and the Jedi. At the beginning of the first movie we are explicitly told that there are 25,000 Jedi in the galaxy. At the end of the final film, there are only a handful still alive. Given they are basically ninjas who can for all intents and purposes fly, not to mention be able to see into the future, you’d think that on some level the Jedi must have contributed to their own downfall, particularly as all it takes to topple them is one corrupt Senator, a bunch of identikit Kiwis and Hayden Christensen.
But no – Lucas couldn’t bring himself to admit the guardians of truth and justice he’d created had cocked up. It was all the fault of the right-wing establishment! In doing this, he made his trilogy of terrible movies make no sense.
Liberals are a bit like that these days. We’re faced with a real crisis of liberalism at present, as far left and far right political forces become more ascendant by the day. Yet there is a tendency to see this as a purely external thing; something liberals have to suffer through, this trend having arrived as if from Mars out of the blue.
But it was a failure of liberalism that allowed this opening up for darker forces. We convinced the world that once the Berlin Wall fell a future of unencumbered growth and prosperity was assured. Boom and bust was history – so was history itself, apparently. So when 9/11 came along we had no answer, other than it was a glitch – some dodgy Saudis just got lucky. The 2008 crash couldn’t be shaken off quite so easily, yet liberals still didn’t have any good answers, apart from let’s just try and pick and up the pieces and pretend it never happened.
It was liberals not getting stuck in enough that contributed heavily to the Leave vote as well. Instead of explaining what had happening in 2004 with mass immigration, we shrugged it off and refused to listen to people’s concerns. This made it much easier for people like Nigel Farage to advance his theories on it all.
Much like the Jedi saw Anakin growing more and more petulant by the day, and instead of nipping that problem in the bud let the whole issue destroy them, liberals throughout the West have been and still are much too complacent. The enemies of liberalism mean business – it’s time liberals figured out how to fight fire with fire themselves. Or at least, admit that there’s a problem here, once and for all. And some of it – if not most of it – is our fault.
Lisa Gooch-Knowles says
I’d forgotten about the liberals.
Two things I know about the liberals
Paddy Ashdown, or as the Sun newspaper immortalized him as “Paddy Pantsdown”
Simon Hughes M.P for Bermondsey and old Southwark until 2015, still miss him,wrote to him a few time,always replied.
It’s not in the nature of a liberal to fight, as they always see both side of the argument.
They are to nice
Nick says
By liberal, I meant small “l” liberal, not Lib Dems.
Lisa Gooch-Knowles says
Haha, thought it was odd, I had you down as a Tory “