Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Released in 2005 in the midst of the George W. era, Revenge of the Sith was perhaps the most overtly political of the entire saga. Nixon was no longer the emperor. As Lucas explained, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” Supreme Chancellor Palpatine manipulates fear to turn the Republic into the Empire. With eerie prescience, Lucas told the Chicago Tribune, “Democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”
As a strongman , T’Challa bears some resemblance to Kwame Nkrumah, the leftist president of Ghana who was overthrown by a coup allegedly aided by the CIA in 1966. There’s little about T’Challa that would suggest he’s a leftist, save for the fact that he rules over a country untouched by colonialism. If anything, he leans right. His beneficence does not extend beyond Wakanda’s borders, sealed against as they are against the povertystricken tribes on all sides by a ring of mountains. T’Challa believes that only by refusing to share its wealth and technology can his country protect its unique way of life. His Wakanda First isolationism flies in the face of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, and even has a whiff of you-know-who about it. In fact, in this important way, he is more like Donald Trump than he is like Nkrumah.
An index of the pessimism that pervades these shows is that the dystopias they picture are not sited in the indeterminate future, but only a few years off. In 2017’ s Blade Runner 2049, a crisis occurred in 2022, the year after my driver’s license expires.