Symbol and Civilization in Star Wars: The Last Jedi
The island of Ahch-To, where Luke Skywalker voluntarily marooned himself, surprised me. It evoked some surprisingly strong feelings in me and somehow turned my thoughts to the future of Western Civilization. Of course, in our galaxy, the island the Achc-To scenes were filmed on is known as Skellig Michael, a former refuge for Irish monks and a symbol for the preservation of Western Civilization.
I hadn’t thought of Skellig Michael in over twenty-some years. I didn’t recognize it in the end of The Force Awakens but, when I saw the stone bee hive huts, memories started to flood back. Skellig Michael first captured my imagination when I watched the episode “By the Skin of our Teeth” in Kenneth Clarke’s documentary. Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization and other reads on Colm Cille (Columcille, Saint Columba) and ancient Celtic Christianity added additional layers of fascination. Being part Scots-Irish probably helped me vividly imagine this time when Irish monks retreated to islands like this to preserve both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman writings. While the vast majority of people in western Europe were illiterate, these monks were preserving western civilization and dodging Viking raiders. Later some of these monks would play a crucial role in the re-educating of western Europe. Would the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment periods have happened at all without them? It is hard to say. But it does seem fair to say that circumstances in western Europe would have been profoundly different without them.
By its self, seeing Skellig Michael was just a pleasant, stirring surprise! But seeing it in the story line of Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi, having retreated to it, much as the Irish monks had in the 13th century had retreated to it, made the parallel more palpable. The Jedi, mystical warrior monks that they are, could have a basic resemblance to the Celtic Church monks—who were not warriors but might have had a mystical streak. Both Luke and the Celtic monks were retreating from the dangerous world to avoid conflict and escape various evils of the day. When it became clear that Luke was the guardian of several holy books of the Jedi religion canon, like the Celtic monks were the guardians of the gospels and other texts, the parallelism seemed to be confirmed and my fascination began.
As this review is almost entirely about Western Civilization, I should be quick to offer that I am not one who worships Western Civilization. In fact, I confess to being rather hostile towards the idea of it in my teens and twenties. The history of Western Civilization was just too ugly and nasty for me. And I found myself very sympathetic to some of the Anabaptist and Neo-Marxist critiques of the West. But I have been changing. Here in my forties, after rethinking the Marxist challenges to Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilization for more than twenty years, I find myself becoming more protective of it. It’s not that I think the type and level of civilization that Western Europe and its North American offshoots produced were blameless and awesome. I don’t. It’s more that as I look to the alternatives to Western Civilization, the more concerned I am that maybe Western Civilization should be preserved and improved—rather than destroyed and recreated with something radically different.
Marxism (which goes by many names and takes many forms) is the chief competitor of Christianity, I believe. And while it sounds marvelous in the theoretical world of the ivory tower, it seems to produce the absolute worst form of anti-civilization when its devotees attempt to implement it in the real world. A hundred years of Marxist misery on every continent (except Antarctica) has convinced me of that.
Based chiefly on the simple math of birthrates, and secondarily on the Marxist penchant towards open borders and weaponized immigration, Islamic Civilization is perhaps the second greatest competitor to Western “Christian” Civilization. There may have been some times and places in the past where I would have preferred to live in part of the Islamic Empire than in Dark Age Western Europe. There was, for example, a span of almost 100 years where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in relative harmony, in Cordova, Spain, under Moorish rule, and studied at the same schools. That might have been one of the better, more tolerant, more enlightened places to be in the world at the time. But the peace didn’t last very long. As I write (2017), there are protests going on in Iran. Regardless of whether these are sponsored by the CIA, by the MI6, by George Soros’s Marxist organizations, or whether it’s a grass-roots movement, I’m sure there are several things worth complaining about. There are a few things that may be healthier in modern manifestations of Islamic civilization (realizing that there are only two genders, for example, and actually having children rather than avoiding or aborting them like we do in the West) than in Western countries, but ultimately there is no appeal for me in Islamic civilization. The fact that the Leftists/Marxists seems to be embracing Islam and using it as a weapon against traditional Western Civilization (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) makes it seem more like something to be resisted and avoided. The forced importation of Muslims from many countries (not just from Syria and Iraq where ISIS has been killing Christians and creating a genocidal humanitarian crisis) to Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the US has already produced all manner of sour fruit—fruit that does not get much publicity in the Left-dominated media. The clash of cultures is not likely to create assimilation, harmony, and mutual enrichment. The Muslims, would like to replace the laws of their host countries with Sharia law and would like to replace the post-Christian (mostly secular humanistic) culture with Islamic culture. The Leftists who are pushing the open borders agenda, and forcing the agenda act like they’re doing this because they are caring people who care for the disenfranchised and underprivileged and seek equality all over the globe. What they really seek is the destruction of Western Civilization and, in particular, anything that has any trace of Christianity. They are using the Clive and Piven strategy of socialism overload to burden and bankrupt the countries to which migrants are fleeing (to take advantage of the socialist theft from the prosperous) and to foster civil wars. Although they almost never admit it publicly, that is what they ultimately want. They want the existing order, imperfect as it is, to crash and burn. And because of the mythology they believe, they expect a utopian order of perfect equality and harmony to magically arise, Phoenix like, from the ashes.
Perhaps the main thing that Last Jedi has forced me to think about is whether (or to what degree rather) it is an introduction—a very entertaining introduction—to both classical Marxist and reformed Neo-Marxist philosophies. A case can be made that the film seems favorable to both and, therefore, that it serves as social conditioning, programming, propaganda, indoctrination for them. As someone who watched the Warsaw Pact countries cause all manner of problems for every continent during the “Cold War” era, Marxism is the philosophy of the big, bad Empire. By making this review, I imagine myself a little guerilla rebel striking a little blow against it. Perhaps the keyboard is mightier than the light-sabre.
The idea that I am the rebel and Marxism is the evil Empire may seem counter-intuitive to the many college professors and college students who know that Marxist/Neo-Marxist philosophies are all revolutionary by nature. The universities are the main incubator of Marx’s eggs. The Left-leaning professors outnumber the right-leaning professors some 12 to 1, I believe I heard recently. These Leftists may tend to think of Marxism as the main force working in the world for justice and equality in an unjust and unequal world. To them, Fascism is the big, bad Empire and somehow the USA inherited that mantle from Hitler after WWII. Now of course, just as everythingisaremix.com said, the imagery in the 1970s for the Empire and again recently for the First Order is predicated upon Nazi Germany. And I have no problem thinking of National Socialism as a great prototype of the big, bad Empire. So I am anti-Fascist as well, but have no shred of respect for the modern AntiFa terrorist-wanna-be network. As Dinesh Disousa’s book The Big Lie shows, National Socialism (NAZI) isn’t all that different from the Marxist-Leninist Communism of the Soviet Union. They were just competing forms of authoritarian, totalitarian socialism. They’re not that different to me and the Empire symbolizes them both, as far as I am concerned.
Preferring the world of imagination, they refuse to live in the real world. They refuse to connect all the many millions of humans murdered, enslaved, imprisoned, and made miserable all over the real world in the last 100 years by implementations of Marxist philosophies. Safe in their ivory towers, they don’t feel the terror and pain of the bombs that are going off every day in the Neo-Marxist country of Sweden, the desperation of modern Marxist Venezuela, or the rapes and murders of Marxist South Africa. The academics and intellectuals can always say, “Well, that’s not really true Marxism,” and then go on to propagate the same Marxist misery all over the world. Or maybe they delight in the chaos and conflict and say, as one of my old Marxist friends used to say, “You cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!” This was a phrase that he and his Marxist professors and fellow students (of course he became a Marxist in college) used in favor of “the end justifies the means.” What my old friend meant was that the end goal of global equality among all people groups justifies the means of using terror and genocide against various people groups. The Marxist Empire did not die in 1990 when the Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist countries failed to implement pure socialism, much less pure communism. I’d argue that it just shifted away from an empire of overt communism to an empire of a more subtle socialism and neo-marxism. It seems to me that the Marxist/Neo-Marxist Empire seems to control the immigration policies of the European Union, the taxation policies of most nations in the world (as a matter of degree), the narrative on climate change, the vast majority of professors in the educational systems of Europe and North America, and the majority of the entertainment industries—movies, television, cable shows, etc. When your ideology permeates the schools and the entertainment world, and movies like Last Jedi, that seems like an Empire to me. Here I am attempting to resist that ideology in a non-bloody, peaceful, reasonable, and intellectual way.
Last Jedi seems to give a strong nod to Marx (classic, economic Marxism) with its disdain for the wealthy people who visit Canto Bight, the casino planet, and the glorification of the disenfranchised, oppressed, abused, slave-like child-workers who will surely join the resistance. At the end of the movie, when the resistance had been crushed and set to flight, Leia Organa, the leader of the beleaguered rebel guerillas, reassuringly said, “We have all we need!” What she meant was that even though the military forces of the Empire destroyed what seemed like 95% of the military might of the Rebel force, the injustice and inequality inherent in the way the Canto Bight system worked (what they would call “Capitalism” in our galaxy), had already incubated the next crop of insurgents, as subsequent mediate camera shots showed. The children—the exploited child slaves—of Canto Bight had awakened to the fact that their wealthy, capitalistic masters were very evil (mistreating children and even animals), deserve to be fought violently, and, as the rebel forces proved, could be fought by a guerilla force. These children would grow up and become the next wave of rebels. This nod to class warfare was, in my judgment, a pretty obvious nod to classic Marxism. This raises several concerns.
First, while it is true that there are injustices and inequalities on our planet that we should work to peacefully fix, Marxism has never worked in the real world and cannot work in the real world. Every attempt to implement a Marxist revolution makes the level of injustice and misery far, far greater than the system it strangled. I’ve argued this elsewhere and don’t want to rehash it here. If you’re not convinced, go to a former communist country and listen to the old people who lived there between 1950 and 1990.
Second, it is deceptive to paint a picture of our world that only has one evil empire and one heroic band of rebels fighting for the old republic. The so-called capitalistic empire of today is guilty of many evils but it is not purely capitalistic. Although it is impossible to calculate, I’d say that maybe it is 60% capitalist and 40% Marxist-Socialist. The old Warsaw Pact Empire, by contrast, was perhaps more like 70% Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Stalinist and 30% capitalist. Between 1950 and 1990, the more-Marxist of the two Empires was far keener on conquering the world than the less-Marxist Empire. And it spilled more blood and caused more terror. Now it does seem true that the United States of America does seem like it has attempted to extend its Empire since 1990. And it is far from blameless. Its role in Libya, Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen, for example, in recent years, is highly dubious, in my opinion. And while I’m not saying that we, the people, should not try to “speak truth to power” and try to lead our leaders away from unjust wars, preemptive wars, unjust aggression over natural resources like natural gas, oil, and minerals, and away from trying to start the next World War, I will say that two wrongs never add up to one right. Seeking purely peaceful, non-violent, non-bloody, constructive reform of “the Empire” is admirable. Seeking destruction of the Empire in the hope that a utopian People’s Republic of Equity and Justice will somehow rise out of the ashes is misguided. Saying “they’re so bad that they only way to deal with them is to be even worse to them,” will only make things worse.
Third, it irks me that the Marxists are aiming for the minds and hearts of the children. I appreciate how Last Jedi is honest about this. But it boils down to brainwashing. Children are impressionable, gullible, trainable. Going back to Marx, Rousseau, and back to Plato, the traditional family unit—one husband, one wife, a few children—needs to be abolished and the State needs to take its place. The totalitarian, authoritarian State needs to control who does and doesn’t breed. The State needs to control how the children are educated and raised—not the parents. And of course the reason there are so many Marxist/Neo-Marxist people today is the infection of Marxist ideas into the educational systems and entertainment systems. Marxists are raising our children and controlling the narrative that they are hearing. Last Jedi is one example of this fact.
Fourth, the idea that some of the wealthy gamblers on Canto Bite were guilty of selling arms to both the First Order / Empire and to the Rebels as well is deceptive, depending on what that wealthy gambler is a symbol of. I agree with the movie in saying that arms dealers are scum. (Perhaps more on this later.)
The Disney team ruined the character of Luke Skywalker. Luke Skywalker was one of my earliest childhood heroes. I could identify with this innocent, heartland farm-boy who was forced by the evils of empire to grow up too quickly. Brave, decent, special, and a little impetuous, he was the character I was mostly rooting for back in the 1970s and 1980s. I wanted to grow up to be an honorable Jedi like him. So it was a little disappointing to see him in The Last Jedi acting like an old curmudgeon who had given up and gone into hiding. Tired of seeing his pupils seduced by the Dark-Force, Master Luke marooned himself on a hard-to-find island on a hard-to-find planet. He had totally given up the fight against the evils of the Empire, had disconnected himself from “the Force,” had given up on training prospective Jedi paduans, and ultimately, at the end of the movie, he gave up the ghost so to speak; he voluntarily retired from the material universe for the parallel spiritual universe of ghosts. True, he did one last psyop remotely (astral projection) to help the rebel remnant retreat away from the base they had retreated to. While he scores some points for cleverness and uniqueness of power there, his intervention doesn’t really impress me. Perhaps Yoda convinced him that it was okay to really retire since Rey, who was more powerful than Luke, can take his place as the last Jedi. The last Jedi is not Luke—it is Rey. Or perhaps Luke was operating under Obi Wan’s myth that he could be a greater asset to his galaxy by crossing over and becoming one with the Force. In our galaxy, however, we call that suicide. Luke gave up the fight and committed suicide. And there is nothing good to say about this. This Luke is no hero. Understandably, actor Mark Hamil was not pleased with the way his character was developed.
So what does this have to do with (Neo)Marxism? Possibly nothing. Possibly everything. Marxism is about conflicts between groups of people. It assumes conflict and encourages conflict. Between which groups? All of them. It encourages cooperation among the less powerful groups against the more powerful groups. These days Marxism is no longer about the factory workers against the aristocracy, like it was back in the 1800s. Nor is it about the illiterate, poor farmer serf peasants against the land owners and early 1900s. Today it is about getting the students to rebel against the old traditions (except of course for the old traditions of Marxism), pitting women against men, pitting minority ethnic groups against majority ethnic groups, and of waging war against all traces of Greco-Roman, traditional European, traditional British, traditional American, and Christian civilization. Can we see signs of this in Last Jedi? I’ve seen Last Jedi only once and have had four days to think about this. While I think there is some room for debate (indeed I am still debating it in my own mind), I think ultimately the answer is yes.
We all know that the “Caucasians” or “Whites” of European nations carried on the Roman tradition of pretty much conquering the world did colonize the Americas, most of Africa, and much of Asia. The people groups that had superior technology had the ability to take power over other people groups. Those in the Greco-Roman tradition had the impetus to “civilize” the rest of the world. Hopefully most of us can agree that the conquests and colonization usually involved an unspeakable amount of human suffering and injustice. I certainly won’t hesitate to admit that and don’t want to pretend that never happened. My own genetic heritage comes from various Germanic and Celtic tribes. The ancient Romans (of the Roman Empire era more than the Roman Republic era) did the same thing to my barbarian tribes that my tribes later did to other people groups. The fact that Marxism capitalized on this fact and found favor among many of the oppressed peoples against their oppressors is all very understandable to me. I’m not saying that the “scientific laws” of economics and social class dynamics that Karl Marx imagined are vindicated; the opposite is the case. I’m just saying that it is fairly natural for the oppressed to rise up against those who they believe are oppressing them. That’s an old story that goes way back in time before Marx and even Plato.
The world is changing. The peoples of European genotypes have of course tended to enjoy more wealth and luxury than the peoples they plundered. Europeans and North Americans have since the 1960s so focused on enjoying lives of wealth, vacations, and ease that they stopped having babies. The white people-groups of the world voluntarily chose to go extinct by preferring lives of birth control, abortions, and very small families. Their populations have been dwindling and I suppose it is very natural for other people groups—groups more interested in having children and building new civilizations—to eventually overtake them. This in and of itself does not bother me. If the Caucasians volunteered for extinction, they get what they wanted and get what they deserve.
The Marxist push to speed the process of extinction up using open borders policies, forced immigration policies, forced diversity policies, and campaigns to recondition Caucasian peoples to wallow in “white guilt” and hasten the destruction of ethnic and national identities. Sweden is leading the way on being destroyed and recreated as something that is no longer Swedish. France, Germany, and the UK are also fairly far along the road of voluntary reconstructions as lands that are no longer French, German, British, Irish, or Scottish, etc. Meanwhile the Hungary, Poland, and some of the other former Marxist nations of Eastern Europe are resisting the European Union’s (Empire) pushes of Islamic immigrants (who can’t or won’t assimilate) into their nations. They still remember what it felt like to be run over with the Marxist steamroller and they are not eager to be run over with the Marxist/Neo-Marxist steamroller. Canada and the United States of America are not too far behind Europe. There is reason to be concerned. Western Civilization is being replaced bit by bit—and especially the Christian bits—with secular humanist, occultic, and pagan civilization and global governance. The clash of Sunni Islam and Shi’ia Islam against one another, and of Islam against Western (Post-Christian, Semi-Christian) culture seems to be calculated to lead not ultimately towards worldwide Islamic hegemony but the secular-occultic hegemony.
If I’m right about the way things are going, it’s time for people who care about the Bible and about the Christian faith to join the ideological war of ideas that is fought not with light sabers and blasters but with (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). You will be seeing more and more immigrants of all kinds are being lured to your towns and cities with promises of benefits that your taxes are paying for. This will create friction. As always, I advocate peace whenever possible and even advocate loving our neighbors and even our “enemies.” I am not recommending an armed and violent counter-revolution. To begin with, I advocate instead a peaceful but vigorous opposition to the open borders agenda and for healthy and intelligent immigration policies. Immigration of foreigners DOES enrich the nations and peoples they migrate to. But nations should not import large numbers of foreigners who are gang members, criminals, potential terrorists, and nonproductive drains on the culture and the economy. Nations should attract foreigners who are productive members of society, who are there to raise their families, contribute to the society, and not seek its demise. I also would warn you—you who can read English—that you and I are losing our sovereignty. Our votes are counting for less and less. And we’re letting it happen. We’re letting the world educate our children with Marxist/Leftist and anti-Christian ideas and we’re going to end up with a Marxist and Anti-Christian world. If you still can, you might want to try to strengthen your grip on the steering wheel of your nation, state, and county.
And while I’m not in favor of the voluntary clashing of civilizations (bad idea), and certainly not in favor of stealing from citizens in order to bankrupt their respective nations (bad idea), there may still be a silver lining to this unwelcome revolution that we are living through today. Since the church has not been good about going into all the world and being Jesus’s witnesses to all 7,000 or so of the world’s people groups over the last 2,000 years, perhaps it is good for the 7,000 or so people groups of the world to be brought to those who can be witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection. Also, in so far as the ideal pattern (ideal for the powerful leaders in the world and not ideal for the 99% of the rest of the world’s population) for all nations seems to be the authoritarianism and totalitarianism model of modern communist China (which ironically has adopted a capitalistic economy), consider the fact that there may today be more Christians in China than there are in North America and Europe combined. Think about that! Marxism/Communism hates Christianity (and is a counterfeit of it) most of all, persecutes it relentlessly when it cannot co-opt it, and yet somehow its attempts to stop the spread of Christianity have totally backfired and somehow caused the spread of the Christian faith. Persecution of Christians is never fun for the Christians, but it is seems to purify the faithful, weed out the faithless, and, as always, the blood of the martyrs becomes seed for the faith of others. It is time to prepare for a future where Christians are persecuted everywhere in the world (not just in communist and muslim dominated countries). Read some Richard Wurmbrand books to see what it can be like. It’s also time to prepare for a world where the government(s) control almost everything you do. If you don’t like it, do something about it now. And expect to have to get used to it more and more in the future. Keep the silver lining in mind as those dark clouds of a new dark age begins.
Further resources:
My views of Marxism can be read at http://normangeisler.com/Marxism-2
Also check out https://patternsofevidence.com/2019/03/30/lost-monastery-linked-christianity to get another glimpse of how Skellig Michael and the alphabet helped save western civilization from the dark ages.
Copyright © 2017 Christopher Travis Haun – All Rights Reserved
Author: C.T. Haun
Written: December 30, 2017
Last updated: March 18, 2019
