A galactic contradiction simmers beneath the surface of the recent Star Wars franchise.
The franchise is in the midst of being extended with a further trilogy. The first of this new trilogy was Star Wars: The Force Awakens released a couple of years ago and now there is, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Central to the plot of all Star Wars franchises are group of people i.e. the so-called Resistance, who are pursued by the “dark side” as originally manifested by the Galactic Empire.
Remnants of the Empire survived military extinction in the final episode of the original trilogy are now referred to, in this new trilogy, as the ‘First Order’ and once again looking to establish Imperial supremacy.
In the current trilogy, a central character in the so-called “Resistance” is Rey played by the English actor, Ms Daisey Ridley. When one digs into the schooling of the privately educated Ms Ridley there is a realisation that her casting maybe at the very least misplaced, possibly problematic, if not, an insult to actual history.
Ms Ridley was not only privately educated at an imperialist institution, Tring Park School, which charges somewhere in the region of £30,000 per child but the school is very closely associated with the British Empire.
Tring Park, as opposed to Tring Manor which also stands on the grounds, was built by a Sir William Gore who was one of the founding Directors of the Bank of England. And as should be known this Bank owed its early success to the African slave trade as even a BBC report acknowledged back in 2011. The Bank,
“underpinned the whole system of commercial credit [to slavers], and its wealthy City members, from the governor down, were often men whose fortunes had been made wholly or partly in the slave trade.”
From Gore, Tring Park was sold in the late eighteenth century to another banker, a certain Drummond Smith. I would humbly eat my shoe if this bankster wasn’t also involved in this most evil trade. In the nineteenth century the ever endearing Rothschild banking family got hold of it and remained in their hands until the end of the Second World War after which it mysteriously glided into the ownership of an organisation called the “Arts Education School”.
For most of its history, Tring Park was sustained by an actual Empire which looted and laid genocidal waste to continents. In order to do this the Empire needed to actually kill off all real resistance, whether it be in Ireland, India, Africa, Australia or Palestine.
Furthermore, Ms Daisey’s great-grandfather, William Fawkner-Corbett served the Empire as a colonel in World War One but at the time of writing it is not known whether he continued army service slaughtering and looting the indigenous populations of the British Empire.
But an argument has been put forward that the latest Star Wars franchise is a nod to feminism. However, this certainly doesn’t apply to those that benefited from British imperialism. A reading of Bill Schwarz’s “The White Man’s World (Memoirs of Empire)” or Gerald Horne’s “Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire” clearly show that white women of a particular socio-economic standing were at the forefront of defending, preserving and revelling in the racial hierarchies of the British Empire.
In conclusion, Star Wars is considered to be great cinema because it is pure fantasy and no one should take it seriously because Hollywood and specifically, Walt Disney, the corporate makers of the film, would never cast a grandchild of someone who benefited from the African slave trade or Jim Crow as an anti-racist hero…or would they?
Colonial Karma 