The Evil of the Jedi

The Evil of the Jedi

Or

The Prideful Arrogance of the Late Jedi Order 

(and other Religious Fundamentalists, Clerical Fascists and Tyrants)

"Sensibly, Grace chose to hope for the best rather than fear the worst, and planned to spend the day calmly washing her clothes and herself, which for some reason or another she was sure none of the characters from Tom's fictitious township would dream of doing...."

"I have been arrogant. And I apologise."

Jedi Councilor Anakin Skywalker

(NOT a Jedi Master...)

"So what are we gonna do?

If you want to change things, the first thing you have to change is yourself.

Because if you don’t change yourself, you will take on the world as if it is yourself – and fuck up. 

You will really fuck up, because you don’t understand your own dark side. 

If you don’t understand your own weird, shitty side.. if you don’t understand the fact that there’s someone in there who will kill your mother, if need be – if you can’t take that on; if you can’t take that on board and realise that Charles Manson and me and you are not much different; that John Wayne Gacy and me and you are not much different – except that he did it. 

Y’know, there’s those days when I’m gonna kill that motherfucker over there – but we don’t do it.

But it’s in us, and it’s there. 

And so much of this is denial. That we have no dark side. 

You know: the hippies, and those lovely people in the rave era who were all on ecstasy – they tried to pretend we have no dark side. 

And what happened was they got fucked up by their own dark side. 

As will ALWAYS happen.

So let’s kiss our Dark Sides; let’s f**k our Dark Sides. 

GET BEHIND ME, SATAN !!


Get him down there where he belongs. 

And he can tell us stuff. Y’know, that thing’s useful.

But above all: let’s become plex-creatures. 

Complex, superplex – be able to take on new personality traits; able to take on new ideas; able to adapt; able to extend our boundaries into what was previously the ‘enemy territory’ – until the point where we become what was once our enemy, and they are us, and there is no distinction."

Mitt Romney and the White Supremecist Implications of Producerism

Calls to rally the virtuous "producing classes" against evil "parasites" at both the top and bottom of society is a tendency called producerism. It is a conspiracist na rrative used by repressive right wing populism. Today we see examples of it in the Tea Party and Republican Party rhetoric, some sectors of the Christian Right, in the Patriot movements and armed militias, and in the White Supremacist Right.

The Jacksonians were the first major U.S. movement to rely on producerism. Their vision of the producing classes included White farmers, laborers, artisans, slave-owning planters, and “productive” entrepreneurs; it excluded bankers, speculators, monopolists—and people of color. In this way, producerism bolstered White supremacy, blurred actual class divisions, and embraced some elite groups while scapegoating others.

After the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade in the late nineteenth century. Kazin points out that as it developed in the nineteenth century:


...the romance of producerism had a cultural blind spot; it left unchallenged strong prejudices toward not just African-Americans but also toward recent immigrants who had not learned or would not employ the language and rituals of this variant of the civic religion. . . . Even those native-born activists who reached out to immigrant laborers assumed that men of Anglo-American origins had invented political democracy, prideful work habits, and well-governed communities of the middling classes.

In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews. Producerism, with its baggage of prejudice, remains today the most common populist narrative on the right, and it facilitates the use of demonization and scapegoating as political tools.