The Star Wars franchise does more than nod to history; it asks audiences to learn from it. For example, the saga poses the question of how a Hitler (or a Napoleon, or a Caesar) comes to power—and thus how the next one might be stopped. In the prequel trilogy of films, Palpatine rises from senator to chancellor to emperor in a series of moves that parallel Hitler’s own ascendance. As scholar Tony Keen notes in “I, Sidious: Historical Dictators and Senator Palpatine’s Rise to Power” (an essay from the larger collection Star Wars and History), both Hitler and Darth Sidious built military forces to bring them to and keep them in power; both employed similar rhetorical techniques (Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich” became Palpatine’s promise that the Empire “will last for 10 thousand years”); both became dictators by election; and both dispensed with their state’s parliamentary bodies after claiming supreme authority. From a certain point of view (as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say) both Germany and the Empire got the government they deserved.
Not exactly a fan of republics or democracies, Lucas pointedly reminds viewers that gullible people and their easily manipulated representatives not only enabled the rise of Nazism, but also helped transform the earlier Roman Republic into one of the Nazis’ chief inspirations, the Roman Empire. (Martin M. Winkler’s “Star Wars and the Roman Empire” from the book Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema is one of several academic works to discuss how Star Wars employs and echoes the classical past.) The takeaway? Citizens in these cases did not so much lose their freedom as willingly give it away. As Amidala observes Palpatine’s political victory in the Senate in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, she utters prophetic words well worth remembering: “This is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.”
The saga suggests that history teaches other lessons as well. For example, over-powerful states or leaders may come to view robust, independent institutions within their borders as threats. Just as the Shaolin Temple in China suffered multiple attacks and the Knights Templar in France fell by the order of Philip IV, so the Star Wars Jedi became “all but extinct” thanks to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s Order 66, which triggered their executions by members of the clone army. And just as American and Viet Cong revolutionaries proved that knowledge of local terrain, unanticipated guerrilla tactics, and ideological investment in a fight could trump the superior firepower and training of the most powerful military force in the world, so too the Ewoks of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi remind us that determined underdogs can prevail against vastly grander forces.
What happens if audiences ignore instructive examples from history? According to the logic of the saga, we’re already guilty of doing just that. Star Wars, after all, takes place long ago in a galaxy far away; any similarities between its narrative and our earthbound experience reflect our failure to learn from the past. That said, we can stop the cycle here. Before it’s too late.
If we don’t step up to do what’s right, who will?
Amy Sturgis, “Star Wars, Remixed.” (via lyrafay)