Star Wars Syndrome and the Psychology of Leftism

Why "the Rebellion" won't be ending any time soon.

Here’s another iFungus classic that did not survive the automod, now regurgitated from memory like 5 years later. Here’s hoping it doesn’t cost me my Chudstack account!

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Have you ever wondered why American culture always paints the rebels as good guys? No, it’s not really because of our Revolution— that sentiment was bleachscoped for eternity by the Civil War. Seriously, think about it. Our love of rebellions and underdogs extends beyond media, but popular mediaslop serves as a great launching point:

Note: this image comes from iFunny. Lol

Why are the Rebels always the good guys?

World War II

There are many, many people who want WWII to never end. It’s largely regarded as the high water mark for America, unfortunately, so we have collectively morphed into the “ overweight 30 year old ex high school quarterback reliving the glory days” stereotype :

“And then we defeated HITLER by landing on Omaha Beach!!” 80 years after the war ended

Outside stomping on the Middle East, what has the military accomplished since then? Nothing, which is why WWII is ingrained into our identity at the microscopic level. We never wanted it to end because it was a “clash of civilizations” (rare for intra-European conflicts) where our values triumphed in a gory proof-of-concept in the ultimate affirmation of the “American way”. Of course, this American way has now been maliciously redefined into an affirmation of ethnic diversity over homogenous societies, endless immigration, GDP-worship, etc. Many people leaving public schools have this idea that all of the people that fled the Holobunga arrived in the US and used their talents to stop the baddies: oceans of Jewish, Gay, atheist, and disabled people flooding into laboratories, military command, political leadership, and industry. They also unironically think that the US fought to preserve diversity.

Moreover, there were clearcut enemies wearing easily identifiable jerseys, easy-to-understand battle lines and strategies and armies, and America was never really in harm’s way. This allowed us to cheer on the war from afar with the same zeal Americans consume sports entertainment with (Sports are a good thing btw). Like, very few people thought, even at the peak of the Axis, that New York City was going to get bombed with a V2 rocket or something. We were safe, we had reason to fight, nobody that mattered was telling us we were wrong, and our opponents were easily identifiable both in ideology and practice. It was the closest thing to being a spectator at the 50 yard line of the Super Bowl that America ever got.

The American consciousness has also retroactively painted the US as a group of scrappy rebels, clawing their way to victory with some ingenuity and grit. Our rendition of the Germans is a complete contradiction, both bumbling idiots that were easily outfoxed, and capable villains powerful enough to go blow-for-blow with the Allies long enough for our victory to be dignified and eternally glorious. Here’s a thread where a Redditor tries to reconcile obvious impossibility in a way that’s really funny.

Contrast that with the nightmare that was counterinsurgency and the “informal warfare” of Vietnam and the Global War on Terror. The bad guys didn’t wear jerseys that said MORALLY IRREDEEMABLE BADDY, ITS OK TO KILL ME in the way that the Germans did. We didn’t have clear objectives outside of picking off the raghead of the month that ran these organizations. How do you win an occupation? By occupying harder? Briefly, our keaders attempted to drop so many bombs that Iraq and Afghanistan had no choice but to become democracies. Perhaps they thought of Japan, a nation we really did nuke into being a democracy (lmao).

This image and others like it depict Iraqi women with purple fingers dipped in ink for “voting” in their “democratic election”. This was as foreign to them as election through trial-by-combat is to us. You have to imagine these women were later identified and savagely beaten for acting out of turn. Their votes never mattered btw.

The new wars are scary, inconvenient, and not pre-determined. We never had a “1943 moment” where the enemy is clearly stalling out and the momentum is irreversibly shifting so we get a 2 year victory lap. Instead they attacked us on our turf, somewhat unprovoked, incinerating thousands of random office workers on live television. New Yorkers could really watch their co-workers and friends’ skin dripping off their bones as they suicidally hurdled out of the towers to make the agony stop. For as gruesome as WWII was, there were no people leaping out of burning American skyscrapers for the masses to watch on live television. In fact, it was still taboo to take photos of dead GIs. This is one of the first widely consumed, publicly available photos of dead American soldiers:

Even the way these guys look in death is preferable to their successors. Who wants to see the fried, twitching limbs of IED victims in shitty digital camo?

In WWII, the Axis had a clear ideology and the product of their ideology visible to the world (by the second act, at least): concentration camps, blowing London to smithereens, bizarre medical experiments, offensive campaigns, cruelty to prisoners, mass executions in occupied countries, cracking down on dissidents, etc. Tell me, what is the Al-Qaeda equivalent of Auschwitz?

There’s lots of other things that made them our preferred enemies, like that they held still long enough for us to punch them. We knew what 10 mile radius Hitler and the German brass worked and lived in the entire time, it was just a matter of getting close enough to hit it with bombs. Where was the equivalent for Osama Bin Laden? For ISIS?

WWII is also just forever enshrined in our national memory in a unique way that will never be replicated or competed with. Even when we found another enemy that held still long enough to be beaten to a pulp in the Iraqi Army, nobody cared. People just forget that the Gulf Wars were one of the most lopsided victories in human history, where America flossed its asscrack with the Iraqi army that was, on paper, ranked somewhere around #3 in the world. Yes, people really thought we would be repelled by the conventional Iraqi army. They thought we were fat and lazy (in the 1990s, lmao), unwilling to pay the price of dislodging a well-established defense conducted by a determined, well trained and equipped, homogenous, and cornered professional army on the other side of the world. This is where the “rude awakening” myth (that America is in for a “rude awakening” when it fights someone that can fight back) first really appeared post-Soviet rivalry. Of course, this is still a complete fantasy. When the bullets started flying, we obliterated the Iraqis so definitively that we had to try our own officers for war crimes afterwards. We filled in the trenches they were hiding in with bulldozers while they were inside lmfao. Within 100 hours, “World War 3” was over. This was unfathomable beforehand, people expected years of trench warfare with the Iraqis. They thought we’d have to do WW1-styled creeping barrages while Iraqi ATGMs picked off our soon-to-be-exposed Abrams fleets. Instead, they retreated so quickly that their entire military and civilian industry quickly devolved into a fleeing scramble. They dropped everything and ran along a specific highway, which we then firebombed so hard it was termed the “Highway of Death”:

And nobody cared about this victory.

Nobody is rebooting the Gulf War uniforms the way we rebooted the WWII uniforms for the Army:

These uniforms are fantastic btw

Because we have our WWII founding myth and we would rather keep retelling its stories (many of which are worth retelling) instead of adding the Gulf Wars to our lexicon. They’re on their way to surpassing the Spanish-American war (or perhaps the Barbary Pirate war) for most forgotten American war ever.

Lastly, the Nazis are also just an interesting opponent in a way that captivates our interest (more on that below). They had great uniforms, they had a different means of doing business in government, politics, and war. In a way, they were the ultimate throwback to the pre-WWII world: horse-drawn artillery, bolt action rifles, stalhelms, stormtrooper trench raider tactics, treating ethnic replacement as a legitimate method of providing stability, etc. The top brass of the German regime were these really ghoulish characters that did sinister things (the holobunga happened btw) that are now effectively movie-bait, they had the insane engineering developments and narrowly lost the Nuclear weapons race to the Americans after some industrial sabotage. They have no meaningful political backing, demographic, or presence in the US, meaning they have the ultimate green light to be mocked endlessly in Hollywood as cardboard cutout villains.

Often by people who do not understand what they stood for or why they did what they did.

Star Wars

So, America has its villain. I don’t really like the Nazis (I have some major issues with key ideological planks and the way they prosecuted the war, to include extermination camps), but I am fair to them. I don’t think it’s fair to paint the Nazis as some huge empire that the scrappy Americans only barely defeated with the help of female B29 Pilots of color.

They were the underdog for most of WWII and basically got ratio’d by a globe-spanning coalition to include the greatest logistics machine in human history. The Germans weren’t defeated by battlefield tactics as much as they were defeated by the American industrial capacity to grind them off the face of the planet with more, better armed soldiers. I mean, we were driving humvees and planes produced during WWII into the ocean because we didn’t have room for them for 50 years. There were strokes of genius on both sides (whenever the German brass could babysit Hitler long enough to let his brilliant Prussian elites actually run the military), but the Germans never really had a chance because of this enormous industrial mismatch.

All of that to say, I think the Galactic Empire in Star Wars is a pretty fair depiction of them. If you didn’t know, George Lucas based much of the aesthetics, ideology, main villains, and tactics of the Empire on the Nazis.

Stiff and grey uniforms, rigid hierarchy, total war tactics, superiority complex, willingness to feed the meatgrinder with your own conscripts if necessary, a constellation of strange characters in the upper brass, the comparisons are basically endless

Back in the 1970s, this was apparently a very novel idea. It was also a lot more recent, akin to a novel interpretation of the Global War on Terror that comes out today. Lucas also combined some ancient and pre-modern story archetypes such as the Hero’s Journey to create a fun, exciting, and groundbreaking tale that challenged the way people saw the war and warfare in general. WWII was still fresh in the collective conscious, and in a way, Star Wars helped to solidify how Americans wanted to remember the war by letting us process it in a fictional format. Reconsider Episode IV from this perspective: a scrappy midwestern farmer uses some American grit and ingenuity, along with a collection of allies from across the galaxy, to narrowly defeat an evil, aggressive, anti-democratic empire through daring trench raids. In the 1970s, this was epic. Nobody had seen this retelling of WWII before. Moreover, there was this uncomfortable truth that people were seeing the Empire make some good points.. The dialogue over who was really the bad guy in Star Wars rages today.

Lets fast forward 50 years from the Episode Four and check in on the current state of Star Wars

Aaand it’s almost a complete 1:1 of the actual Nazis complete with a shot-for-shot recreation of the Nuremberg Rallies. No subtlety, no nuance, nothing interesting going on, just a straight up decree on how the audience should feel:

This was already sort of a problem in the original Star Wars movies, people literally had morally color-coded lightsabers, but Reddit has taken this quirk of the originals and absolutely ground it into dust. You’re not being offered an interesting villian, you’re being informed of what Hollywood believes is bad. This also includes vaguely anti-equality actions like raising your voice, being angry, behaving aggressively, taking initiative, hierarchy, obeying orders, and other impulses that anger the Longhouse. Notice that the Rebels in these movies always behave as if their 7th grade English teacher is just off-screen, ready to pounce if anyone speaks without raising their hand. And they win decisively because of it!

The message of these propaganda pieces is clear: We will never stop fighting the Nazis.

This story will never be over. We will always be scrappy, upstart rebels taking on an increasingly hard to identify evil empire.

Only now, it’s been revised to include a pantheon of racially diverse, culturally sanitized characters as commentary on history. We really want to imagine those fighting for diversity were diverse themselves, and not a sea of Anglo-Saxon farmers.

Star Wars provides the perfect outlet for this:

A fantasy where women meaningfully contribute in combat and the teams are color-coded with racial jerseys (non-whites and women on one side, crakkas on the other) so the audience is aware of which side to take.

For those of you who haven’t seen The Last Jedi, it is truly one of the worst films ever made. It is actually mind boggling, looking back, how terrible this movie was. The production quality was great, of course, but the plot itself was easily the worst in major AAA movie history. But none of that matters, they were in victory formation from the start because the movie put diversity before quality. Just like WWII!

And so, every story will be told this way because we never want to stop reliving WWII and Star Wars. Every conflict is between a scrappy, upstart rebellion fighting a monolithic, white Empire. Nuggets of historical vignettes, like the Underground Railroad, anchor this in the brains of Jews and liberals as some sort of archetypical story that deserves to be told on repeat until the end of time.

In fact, Star Wars is so dominant in the American psyche that inverting this power dynamic is now novel for normies. For laughs, I went and saw The American Society of Magical Negroes. Yes, that is a real movie:

Even the melanin golems this movie was produced for have tired of seeing the same movie over and over. After all, Star Wars VII was quite literally and intentionally just Star Wars IV almost shot-for-shot but with some diversity this time. Because it’s familiar, and comfortable. We can scroll our phones peacefully knowing that the movie playing in the background will ensure the good guys are never really in harm’s way. In every piece of media. Forever.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is a riff on this, removing the battle and just postulating that blacks already won from the beginning of time. They really portray this secret world where black people are telekinetic and can fly, and are sent to babysit white people. It’s about monitoring Karens and Kyles using melanin-magic, pacifying them so they don’t hurt any more black people. Seriously. Go pirate it.

This is their alternative to the “scrappy rebels” archetype: our victory is without question but we rule in the name of diversity, sassy comebacks, equity, obesity, low-IQ, and anti-white hatred.

The Eternal Present

I wrote about this in my last (major) article about the phrase at this time. It’s definitely applicable here. We live in the Marxist-inspired eternal present. We are stuck in this cryostasis of sorts, living and reliving WWII until the heat death of the universe. Every single piece of information is processed through this lens, further codified by media like Star Wars. You can watch stupid people really cling to this as the fundamental reality of their life, especially when they get on Twitter to yap:

This is probably the 87th best example of this from AOC, it’s just the first one I found on Google images that fit the bill.

In AOC’s head, she is fighting the rebellion. She is “rebelling” against the evil, homogenous empire of…

Disenfranchised and placated whites?

She’s on the side of billionaires, almost every politician, every industry, compromised academia, popular culture, etc. Even members of the controlled opposition are frequently disloyal because they understand the cost of being loyal to masters that aren’t AOC’s:

This scrappy, eager resister managed to get his opinion on the cover of one of the most widely-read publications in human history. So brave!

I know you know this, but AOC’s example drives the point home. AOC might really be too stupid to understand that her side is the one with all the power, and all the guns. She is the brown, mediocre, unqualified commissar that was once the face of the Empire.

But she doesn’t know that. In fact, she believes the exact opposite. She thinks the best way to upset the Empire is by organizing and protesting at the local level. She is trying to form her own “scrappy resistance” because that is what every piece of media she’s ever consoymed told her that good guys do. Somewhere in that tiny, smooth brain she thinks there is a Rush Limbaugh-phenotype fat cat Republican smoking a cigar after lighting it with a Benjamin that is going to cower in fear in his skyscraper CEO office because a bunch of fat black women have materialized on the horizon holding signs and yelling.

She has no idea, apparently, that her party routinely uses its secret police to intimidate, arrest, or just straight up kill political opponents Soviet style.

She has been presented with evidence of this, such as when she served on the J6 committee that falsely and incorrectly asserted that the FBI played no role in the event. Btw, it’s not even up for discussion, they were even caught trying to plant an explosive underneath a park bench- presumably to fry unsuspecting American citizens. But, she will never make the logical leap to realize that she is on the side of the Empire because she has to be the brave resistance fighter with her back against the wall.

She could achieve everything she ever wanted, an abortion clinic staffed by transgender illegals on every street corner and mass graves for every white, and still be searching for that next hit. Getting high off being a member of the resistance is an essential component of being an American leftist. This is also part of why they always have a hill to climb, and why they need a new cause to champion. They’ve matured into fighting aristocrats as discussed in my article that references Ted K’s writings. Their entire purpose for being alive is to crush American society, undemocratically, into the next social battle.

Sanitization instead of Suppression

Another interesting feature of Star Wars Syndrome is that it doesn’t seek to completely block access to taboo ideas like one might expect. Instead, it leverages pre-established notions about how the world works to beat other narratives to the punch. An easy example here is American antebellum slavery. I’ve written an entire article deboonking some of the most outrageous lies about American slavery:

But it doesn’t matter. The people that need to read this article will, barring an act of God, never ever break the mental image of slaves toiling in a field while Doug Dimmadome cracks a whip on their backs. This is, of course, accompanied by daydreams of the Underground Railroad and… a resistance against White agrarian society.

I don’t believe that dissenters have no agency in the US. Like, I don’t believe election outcomes are predetermined. The 2020 election was a good example of this, because they were pretty blatant about exerting effort to ensure the rigging was successful, it’s not as simple as just installing Biden or whatever.

That being said, there are a lot of smart people that are also evil. They understand the value of first impressions and the biases that come with it. If they can teach a lie, any lie, and make it the first exposure to a topic that a critical mass (75%) of Americans will have, then that becomes truth.

Part of the ongoing Star Wars Syndrome psychosis is beating the opposition to the punch on everything. They control the narrative and ensure that exposure to topics is highly controlled, manicured, and only disseminated by authorized entities. Thus, the opinions of normies merely becomes an amalgamation of authorized opinions reheated and re-served according to their innate rhetorical powers:

It is really, really hard to dislodge a consensus opinion narrative from someone’s mind, especially if they’re not used to critical thinking and aren’t a free thinker.

The concept of the Overton window is quite relevant here:

There is a range of authorized opinions that have steadily marched left since the end of WWII- by design. Some small percentage, perhaps 25%, of the population is capable of even entertaining an idea outside this window. Pushing a normie too hard does not result in some revelation where they suddenly disregard their prior worldview and immediately become some Far Right dissident. Instead, they sperg out and call you racist or something. When you see Karens (and their black counterparts, Idk Le’quieshas or something) pull out their phone and record someone for stating an unauthorized fact, they’re not engaging their rational faculties. They’re enforcing their authorized opinion and neutralizing threats that can disrupt the benefits conforming gives them: convenience, placation, endless Reddit karma, and a sense of belonging. How many of us can truly resist the temptation for those comforts? You can’t just force someone into adopting solitary, frustrating, views that fundamentally challenge how they saw the world before their exposure to the truth. It takes time to pull the Overton window one direction or another, in both individuals and society. Which is why the Communists that invaded American academia in the 1960s had to incubate for 10 years prior.

The undoing of this process has to be gradual, gently knocking down assumptions and First Principles. Consider the Allegory of the Cave here: if the sun is too bright, normies will just go back inside the cave and put their shackles back on.

Yet, it is still important to challenge the sanitized version of history that normies have been authorized. Sometimes empires are good, hierarchy is good, equality is a false god, etc. Just go line-by-line and undo the damage that Star Wars Syndrome has caused.

It’s your responsibility, as a sentient person who has some exposure to the truth, to do this in a loving and respectful way.

Conclusion paragraphs are retarded and I feel quite vindicated in not restating what I just said again down here.