Thirty Years Ago, “Star Wars” Warned Against Empire. We Didn’t Listen.
By Richard B. Simon
When it first hit screens on May 25, 1977, few perceived “Star Wars” as a political statement. But like all great science fiction, George Lucas’ six-film cycle is extremely political. As “Star Wars” celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, it’s more relevant than ever – and it bears a chilling message for America.
Ultimately, “Star Wars” is the story of Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader – and Anakin’s story parallels our own. It’s a warning that democracies which pursue imperialism end up in totalitarianism, and good people who trade their core values for “security” end up enslaved to fear.
Lucas’ understanding of history, imperialism, and power, echoes that of an earlier sci-fi visionary, George Orwell.
Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is about how governments of all ideologies maintain control over the governed. It takes place in a totalitarian, socialist Britain, turned by the United States into “Airstrip One,” a launching pad for resource wars against rival imperial superpowers, Eurasia (Soviet Europe) and Eastasia (China-Japan). It’s eerily prescient. Permanent war and fear are means of social control, allowing Big Brother to control every aspect of life.
Thirty years later, in the wake of Vietnam and Nixon’s “Imperial Presidency,” Lucas reintroduced “Empire” as synonymous with evil. The scrappy Rebellion was a bicentennial echo of the ragtag Minutemen, the stormtroopers an easy reference to the Nazis. Who would have complained in 1977 that “Star Wars”’ blatant anti-imperialism was unpatriotic or un-American?
But after “Revenge of the Sith” (2005), in which Anakin echoes George W. Bush’s false dilemma “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists,” conservative pundits attacked Lucas for “Bush-bashing.”
It’s a bit more complex than that.
Lucas told Wired he had always intended “Star Wars” to examine how a democracy becomes a dictatorship. And by exploring how dictators rise to power, Lucas predicts the Bush Administration’s machinations – and Congress’ utter failure to keep them in check.
FROM TERROR, AN EMPIRE
We meet Anakin Skywalker in “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” (1999), when two Jedi Knights, Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi, recognize the boy slave’s unusual power and purchase his freedom to train him. Anakin leaves his home planet vowing to return and free all the slaves, including his mother.
Meanwhile, the well-mannered Senator Palpatine – secretly a Dark Lord of the Sith – is orchestrating his own rise to power. He will use fear and war to become Emperor – and his rise will be Anakin’s fall.
Released eight months after the September 11 attacks, “Episode II: Attack of the Clones” begins with an exploding plane – a “separatist” attack. The parallel is clear. But Palpatine controls the “separatists.” The attack, and the ensuing war, are a ruse to consolidate his power as Emperor.
It’s as close as popular fiction gets to “conspiracy theories” that neoconservatives, who called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in a 2000 policy paper, planned 9/11, or allowed it to happen, to transform U.S. military power into an instrument of global hegemony.
The document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses", is non-fiction; signatories include Cheney aides Stephen Cambone and Scooter Libby, and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz. The think tank’s members include John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Bill Kristol, and Dick Cheney himself. Their goal? Consolidate American Empire and rule the 21st Century as an unchallengeable hyperpower. Hence the name, Project for a New American Century.
Within days of the 9/11 attacks, a terrified Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act and the Authorization of the Use of Military Force with little debate or dissent. Most members never even read the bills, which authorized the War on Terror, allowed the invasion of Iraq, and enabled an expansion of executive power (including secret prisons, wiretapping, and torture) that continues to this day. The 2006 Military Commissions Act removes habeas corpus for anyone designated an “enemy combatant” by the President. The 2006 Patriot Act reauthorization empowers the Secret Service to arrest dissidents, and the White House to replace U.S. Attorneys with “loyal Bushies” – loyal not to the rule of law, but to Bush – without Senate confirmation.
If anything, in “Clones,” the donkeyish Jar Jar Binks is a caricature of Congressional Democrats. Palpatine moves to expand his own power (temporarily, of course, to fight the “separatists.”) He cons Jar Jar, now a Senator, into sponsoring his “Military Creation Act.” The Senate adopts it immediately, clearing the way for Palpatine to become omnipotent.
Palpatine’s secret clone army appears; they are the Stormtroopers who will plague Luke Skywalker and friends. They file into troop transports to familiar, ominous music: “The Imperial March.”
That’s not Lucas’ only warning about our response to 9/11.
Anakin, now a teenage Jedi apprentice, is tormented by dreams of his mother. He finds her, just in time to watch her die. She has been brutalized by burqa-wearing “Sand People.” Full of hatred, Anakin slaughters them, women and children included. Darth Vader’s theme music plays.
It’s just as Yoda warned back in 1999: “Fear is the path of the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
ELIMINATING THE OPPOSITION
By “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” (2005), Palpatine has used flattery, misinformation, and fear to make Anakin a loyal Palpie. He installs him on the Jedi Council, the high chamber of law and order.
Now Anakin has nightmares about the death of his pregnant wife, Padmé. Palpatine tells him there is a chance to save her, but only through the dark side. Just as the Jedi are racing to remove the Sith Lord from power, Anakin betrays them. Terrified of losing his wife and unborn child, he abandons his own moral code. He becomes Darth Vader, and helps Palpatine execute his checkmate move – the destruction of the Jedi.
As he murders Jedi leader Mace Windu, who has come to his office to arrest him, Palpatine revels in “U-u-unlimited! Power-r-r!” With the Jedi out of the way, nothing can stop him.
It presages what’s happened at the Justice Department.
A year after “Sith”’s release, U.S. Attorney Carol Lam indicted GOP Congressman Duke Cunningham and CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo. When she told the Justice Department she was investigating a wider plot, the White House forced her to resign, along with other prosecutors pursuing Republicans.
A similar purge took place at CIA immediately after Bush’s re-election. At the time, conservative pundits excoriated CIA operatives (and journalists, and filmmakers, and everyone else) who opposed Bush’s policies as traitors.
Palpatine vilifies the Jedi as traitors, too – they’re such a threat, he declares himself Emperor.
“In order to ensure our security and continuing stability,” he glibly tells the Senate, “the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society, which, I assure you, will last for ten thousand years.”
The senators cheer. “So this is how liberty dies,” Padmé muses. “With thunderous applause.”
The new Emperor dispatches Anakin to murder the “separatist” leaders. The war is over. The dictatorship is in place. And Anakin’s fall is imminent.
RED LIGHTSABER, BLUE LIGHTSABER
That controversial line? Here it is in context: Padmé flies to meet Anakin, but Obi Wan has stowed away aboard her ship. He confronts his pupil.
Lucas isn’t bashing Bush. He’s describing a battle for America’s soul – a cataclysmic duel on the hellacious lava planet Mustafar, named for a village in Iraq.
Heartbroken, Obi Wan de-limbs Anakin and leaves him for dead, literally blistering with hatred as his skin catches fire. The Emperor rescues him and rebuilds him – new limbs, a suit of black armor to protect his scorched flesh, a breathing apparatus that yields his signature hhh-khhh ... and, finally, the mask.
In his anti-imperialist 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell writes, “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys ... For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
(Think Cheney, arguing that we must stay in Iraq, lest Osama bin Laden think we’re cowards.)
Because Anakin abandons his core moral principles, he not only fails to save his family, he destroys it. Blind with rage, he fatally injures Padmé. She dies giving birth. And Anakin is enslaved again, bowing to the Emperor and calling him “Master,” forever.
The next time we meet Vader, in the 1977 film – now called “Episode IV: A New Hope” – he is still fighting the insurgent rebels who oppose the totalitarian Empire. The Emperor has dissolved the Senate. Democracy is dead.
Vader is so lost, he tortures Princess Leia – his daughter – for information (she never submits). When he tortures Han Solo (in 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back”), he doesn’t even ask any questions. It’s torture for torture’s sake. Just like Abu Ghraib. He’s a monster.
He exists only to serve the Emperor.
Later, as they duel – red lightsaber versus blue lightsaber – Vader beseeches his farmboy son, Luke Skywalker, to join him in that service. In “Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,” the Emperor wants Luke to kill the ravaged Vader and take his place. Better still, says Vader, kill the Emperor and rule as father and son.
But Obi Wan has trained Luke for this moment. He won’t kill Vader. He won’t even kill the Emperor. That would mean surrender to the dark side. Instead, Luke allows the Emperor to nearly kill him – and Vader kills the Emperor, to save his son.
Because Luke refuses the dark side, Anakin is redeemed; the tyranny of the Empire is crushed; and freedom is restored. Luke removes his father’s mask.
THE DARK SIDE OF FORCE
Five days after the September 11 attacks, newsman Tim Russert asked Vice President Cheney what kind of tactics the U.S. would use in pursuing the perpetrators.
Cheney responded that America will “have to work ... sort of the dark side, if you will ... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
Cheney knew enough to make the reference, but sadly not enough to understand it.
We hated the men who hit us on September 11, and we lashed out with that hatred. We’ve sought to restore order by imposing our will on others, the antithesis of democracy. We voted in fear, and we got a Presidential Administration that sees itself as an all-powerful “unitary executive,” accountable to no one – a war time dictatorship, in a war so permanent, they say we may not even know it when it ends.
Six years into that endless war, Americans look in the mirror and find the iron mask staring back. We’ve become a pariah, seen no longer as a beacon of light, but as a threat to the very global stability we sought to ensure.
Lucas’ message is clear. Once you submit to the dark side, even just a little, the war is lost.
Though it seems the most expedient way to survive in frightening times, America pursues an imperial destiny at the peril of its own freedom. We’re already well down the road to totalitarianism. The groundwork has been lain.
Perhaps the 2006 election was our “New Hope,” with Nancy Pelosi – who represents Lucasfilm’s district – as Rebel Commander Mon Mothma. It remains to be seen whether Congress or a new president will restore democracy and repair America’s place in the world.
First, we must reject the dark side.
By Richard B. Simon
When it first hit screens on May 25, 1977, few perceived “Star Wars” as a political statement. But like all great science fiction, George Lucas’ six-film cycle is extremely political. As “Star Wars” celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, it’s more relevant than ever – and it bears a chilling message for America.
Ultimately, “Star Wars” is the story of Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader – and Anakin’s story parallels our own. It’s a warning that democracies which pursue imperialism end up in totalitarianism, and good people who trade their core values for “security” end up enslaved to fear.
Lucas’ understanding of history, imperialism, and power, echoes that of an earlier sci-fi visionary, George Orwell.
Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is about how governments of all ideologies maintain control over the governed. It takes place in a totalitarian, socialist Britain, turned by the United States into “Airstrip One,” a launching pad for resource wars against rival imperial superpowers, Eurasia (Soviet Europe) and Eastasia (China-Japan). It’s eerily prescient. Permanent war and fear are means of social control, allowing Big Brother to control every aspect of life.
Thirty years later, in the wake of Vietnam and Nixon’s “Imperial Presidency,” Lucas reintroduced “Empire” as synonymous with evil. The scrappy Rebellion was a bicentennial echo of the ragtag Minutemen, the stormtroopers an easy reference to the Nazis. Who would have complained in 1977 that “Star Wars”’ blatant anti-imperialism was unpatriotic or un-American?
But after “Revenge of the Sith” (2005), in which Anakin echoes George W. Bush’s false dilemma “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists,” conservative pundits attacked Lucas for “Bush-bashing.”
It’s a bit more complex than that.
Lucas told Wired he had always intended “Star Wars” to examine how a democracy becomes a dictatorship. And by exploring how dictators rise to power, Lucas predicts the Bush Administration’s machinations – and Congress’ utter failure to keep them in check.
FROM TERROR, AN EMPIRE
We meet Anakin Skywalker in “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” (1999), when two Jedi Knights, Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi, recognize the boy slave’s unusual power and purchase his freedom to train him. Anakin leaves his home planet vowing to return and free all the slaves, including his mother.
Meanwhile, the well-mannered Senator Palpatine – secretly a Dark Lord of the Sith – is orchestrating his own rise to power. He will use fear and war to become Emperor – and his rise will be Anakin’s fall.
Released eight months after the September 11 attacks, “Episode II: Attack of the Clones” begins with an exploding plane – a “separatist” attack. The parallel is clear. But Palpatine controls the “separatists.” The attack, and the ensuing war, are a ruse to consolidate his power as Emperor.
It’s as close as popular fiction gets to “conspiracy theories” that neoconservatives, who called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in a 2000 policy paper, planned 9/11, or allowed it to happen, to transform U.S. military power into an instrument of global hegemony.
The document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses", is non-fiction; signatories include Cheney aides Stephen Cambone and Scooter Libby, and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz. The think tank’s members include John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Bill Kristol, and Dick Cheney himself. Their goal? Consolidate American Empire and rule the 21st Century as an unchallengeable hyperpower. Hence the name, Project for a New American Century.
Within days of the 9/11 attacks, a terrified Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act and the Authorization of the Use of Military Force with little debate or dissent. Most members never even read the bills, which authorized the War on Terror, allowed the invasion of Iraq, and enabled an expansion of executive power (including secret prisons, wiretapping, and torture) that continues to this day. The 2006 Military Commissions Act removes habeas corpus for anyone designated an “enemy combatant” by the President. The 2006 Patriot Act reauthorization empowers the Secret Service to arrest dissidents, and the White House to replace U.S. Attorneys with “loyal Bushies” – loyal not to the rule of law, but to Bush – without Senate confirmation.
If anything, in “Clones,” the donkeyish Jar Jar Binks is a caricature of Congressional Democrats. Palpatine moves to expand his own power (temporarily, of course, to fight the “separatists.”) He cons Jar Jar, now a Senator, into sponsoring his “Military Creation Act.” The Senate adopts it immediately, clearing the way for Palpatine to become omnipotent.
Palpatine’s secret clone army appears; they are the Stormtroopers who will plague Luke Skywalker and friends. They file into troop transports to familiar, ominous music: “The Imperial March.”
That’s not Lucas’ only warning about our response to 9/11.
Anakin, now a teenage Jedi apprentice, is tormented by dreams of his mother. He finds her, just in time to watch her die. She has been brutalized by burqa-wearing “Sand People.” Full of hatred, Anakin slaughters them, women and children included. Darth Vader’s theme music plays.
It’s just as Yoda warned back in 1999: “Fear is the path of the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
ELIMINATING THE OPPOSITION
By “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” (2005), Palpatine has used flattery, misinformation, and fear to make Anakin a loyal Palpie. He installs him on the Jedi Council, the high chamber of law and order.
Now Anakin has nightmares about the death of his pregnant wife, Padmé. Palpatine tells him there is a chance to save her, but only through the dark side. Just as the Jedi are racing to remove the Sith Lord from power, Anakin betrays them. Terrified of losing his wife and unborn child, he abandons his own moral code. He becomes Darth Vader, and helps Palpatine execute his checkmate move – the destruction of the Jedi.
As he murders Jedi leader Mace Windu, who has come to his office to arrest him, Palpatine revels in “U-u-unlimited! Power-r-r!” With the Jedi out of the way, nothing can stop him.
It presages what’s happened at the Justice Department.
A year after “Sith”’s release, U.S. Attorney Carol Lam indicted GOP Congressman Duke Cunningham and CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo. When she told the Justice Department she was investigating a wider plot, the White House forced her to resign, along with other prosecutors pursuing Republicans.
A similar purge took place at CIA immediately after Bush’s re-election. At the time, conservative pundits excoriated CIA operatives (and journalists, and filmmakers, and everyone else) who opposed Bush’s policies as traitors.
Palpatine vilifies the Jedi as traitors, too – they’re such a threat, he declares himself Emperor.
“In order to ensure our security and continuing stability,” he glibly tells the Senate, “the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society, which, I assure you, will last for ten thousand years.”
The senators cheer. “So this is how liberty dies,” Padmé muses. “With thunderous applause.”
The new Emperor dispatches Anakin to murder the “separatist” leaders. The war is over. The dictatorship is in place. And Anakin’s fall is imminent.
RED LIGHTSABER, BLUE LIGHTSABER
That controversial line? Here it is in context: Padmé flies to meet Anakin, but Obi Wan has stowed away aboard her ship. He confronts his pupil.
Obi-Wan: You have allowed this Dark Lord to twist your mind ... you have become the very thing you swore to destroy.
Anakin: Don't lecture me, Obi-Wan. I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, justice, freedom, and security to my new Empire.
Obi-Wan: Your new Empire?
Anakin: Don't make me kill you.
Obi-Wan: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic. To democracy!
Anakin: If you're not with me, you're my enemy.
Obi-Wan: Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.
Lucas isn’t bashing Bush. He’s describing a battle for America’s soul – a cataclysmic duel on the hellacious lava planet Mustafar, named for a village in Iraq.
Heartbroken, Obi Wan de-limbs Anakin and leaves him for dead, literally blistering with hatred as his skin catches fire. The Emperor rescues him and rebuilds him – new limbs, a suit of black armor to protect his scorched flesh, a breathing apparatus that yields his signature hhh-khhh ... and, finally, the mask.
In his anti-imperialist 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell writes, “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys ... For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
(Think Cheney, arguing that we must stay in Iraq, lest Osama bin Laden think we’re cowards.)
Because Anakin abandons his core moral principles, he not only fails to save his family, he destroys it. Blind with rage, he fatally injures Padmé. She dies giving birth. And Anakin is enslaved again, bowing to the Emperor and calling him “Master,” forever.
The next time we meet Vader, in the 1977 film – now called “Episode IV: A New Hope” – he is still fighting the insurgent rebels who oppose the totalitarian Empire. The Emperor has dissolved the Senate. Democracy is dead.
Vader is so lost, he tortures Princess Leia – his daughter – for information (she never submits). When he tortures Han Solo (in 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back”), he doesn’t even ask any questions. It’s torture for torture’s sake. Just like Abu Ghraib. He’s a monster.
He exists only to serve the Emperor.
Later, as they duel – red lightsaber versus blue lightsaber – Vader beseeches his farmboy son, Luke Skywalker, to join him in that service. In “Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,” the Emperor wants Luke to kill the ravaged Vader and take his place. Better still, says Vader, kill the Emperor and rule as father and son.
But Obi Wan has trained Luke for this moment. He won’t kill Vader. He won’t even kill the Emperor. That would mean surrender to the dark side. Instead, Luke allows the Emperor to nearly kill him – and Vader kills the Emperor, to save his son.
Because Luke refuses the dark side, Anakin is redeemed; the tyranny of the Empire is crushed; and freedom is restored. Luke removes his father’s mask.
THE DARK SIDE OF FORCE
Five days after the September 11 attacks, newsman Tim Russert asked Vice President Cheney what kind of tactics the U.S. would use in pursuing the perpetrators.
Cheney responded that America will “have to work ... sort of the dark side, if you will ... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
Cheney knew enough to make the reference, but sadly not enough to understand it.
We hated the men who hit us on September 11, and we lashed out with that hatred. We’ve sought to restore order by imposing our will on others, the antithesis of democracy. We voted in fear, and we got a Presidential Administration that sees itself as an all-powerful “unitary executive,” accountable to no one – a war time dictatorship, in a war so permanent, they say we may not even know it when it ends.
Six years into that endless war, Americans look in the mirror and find the iron mask staring back. We’ve become a pariah, seen no longer as a beacon of light, but as a threat to the very global stability we sought to ensure.
Lucas’ message is clear. Once you submit to the dark side, even just a little, the war is lost.
Though it seems the most expedient way to survive in frightening times, America pursues an imperial destiny at the peril of its own freedom. We’re already well down the road to totalitarianism. The groundwork has been lain.
Perhaps the 2006 election was our “New Hope,” with Nancy Pelosi – who represents Lucasfilm’s district – as Rebel Commander Mon Mothma. It remains to be seen whether Congress or a new president will restore democracy and repair America’s place in the world.
First, we must reject the dark side.
