Honest, The Guardian Newspaper Isn’t Obsessed With Racism… Much!

Another day in everyone’s favourite liberal socialist castle-in-the-air The Guardian (let’s not mention the redundancies at the start of the year when they chose to shut down their printing facilities and use Trinity Mirror’s instead), where the ground remains covered in snowflakes all year round.

‘He shook up Star Wars as it’s first black stormtrooper.’

Wait? What?

Okay Simon Hattenstone, in your own time, explain to the readers why you know for a fact this was the first black stormtrooper?

There’s perhaps a little problem in your claim. The picture above will help you realise what that is.

A film franchise which employed thousands of extras to be Star Wars stormtrooper cannon fodder shitter at shooting than the Canadian Olympic ice hockey squad.

Finn removing his helmet in The Force Awakens is a great moment in cinema. The persona of Imperial (and now Third Reich Order) Stormtroopers as blank emotionless functionaries of a merciless totalitarian organisation has been an immutable part of world culture.

Other nasty nazi clone baddies have thrown in the ‘good’ one as a tired plot twist (Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who, Harry Potter, every single movie with Nazis or Soviet Russians in it, etc), and the Star Wars universe decision to go down that road could easily have proved another disappointment to match the prequals.

What made it so good, so devastating, was it showed not the callous grunt audiences have been honed to expect, nor even the cliched grim faced, tight lipped introspective look of ‘am I doing the right thing?’ so popular with Hollywood, but a stormtrooper completely distraught with what he has witnessed and been a part of – not because he was black!

When he is immediately told off for removing his helmet without permission while on duty, it begs the question at once whether the part-purpose of the helmet is to hide signs of non-verbal emotion between stormtroopers which could cause discipline to break down when they are expected to carry out atrocities on civilian populations or prisoners.

That’s what makes it such a clever moment – amongst the many clever moments of a fantastic movie beating every other Star Wars movie or spin off ever made hands down.

Nothing to do with race – no matter how much you want it to be, oh great temple of white middle class virtue signallers.