‘Star Wars’ Made Us Unprepared For Fascism
Photo by Tommy van Kessel 🤙 on Unsplash
At the core of the decades-spanning space opera Star Wars, sits a cosmic battle between the Light and the Dark Side of the force, the latter of which is led by the evil Sith who have terrorized the galaxy in their pursuit of total conquest.
Sith like Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and Kylo Ren have captivated the popular imagination as ciphers for absolute evil. We have watched in cruel fascination as these men have demonstrated what being the worst truly means, staging master plans laid out months, if not decades in advance, only for them to be undone at the last possible moment.
However, these examples have had the unfortunate effect of setting the bar far too high for our conception of evil, and conversely, too low for good’s triumph against it. While some people undoubtedly fit inside the Sithian mold quite comfortably (i.e., that of a sociopathic murderer who outlines every second of their master plan years beforehand), evil often is done by incompetent showmen inflicting untold harm as they go. They lie, cheat, and steal without any cackling monologues or Chessmaster finesse — all with unearned privilege, bravado, and a smile.
Emperor Palpatine has been a fixture of evil for over four decades. He was first popularly introduced as a hologram in the movie The Empire Strikes Back (1980) as he directs his subordinate Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) to stop Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) from becoming a Jedi, killing him if necessary. He is the picture of ultimate evil, someone so malicious that even Vader eventually turns on him by the end of the original trilogy. He is a fascist of the highest order — someone who has created an entire Empire devoted to serving his will alone.
The picture we have of Palpatine is that of the perfect manipulator. He rose to power by creating a series of galactic incidents (e.g., an armed trade dispute over the planet of Naboo, an intergalactic Civil War, etc.) that he secretly orchestrated behind the scenes while serving in the Galactic Senate. He somehow managed to mobilize hundreds of systems into open rebellion without anyone ever being the wiser about his involvement. He then sidelined these former allies at the first available opportunity to declare martial law within the Galactic Republic and become Emperor.
He accomplishes all of these evil machinations while serving in one of the galaxy's most powerful and scrutinized institutions, and again, very few people walk away with a thorough understanding of what happens until years after the fact. All his enemies are either coopted (e.g., Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader), exiled (see Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi), or killed by the time the prequel trilogy comes to a close. His power so cemented that the Galatic Senate dissolves at the start of the original movie, A New Hope (1977).
In pop culture, there is a name for this trope: “The Chessmaster.” The designation is in reference to how chess is often used as a visual shorthand in film and television to convey the cunning and manipulativeness of a character. It’s quite common to see scenes where two characters play chess and for that interaction to represent a battle occurring between them metaphorically. Sometimes this metaphor can be quite literal such as when Hades (James Woods) in Disney’s Hercules (1997) places monsters on his board to represent the hero’s twelve labors or when the spy Control (John Hurt) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) tapes pictures of suspects onto chess pieces. These Chessmasters move characters about on a board to symbolize plots occurring in the real world.
Mostly, though, this trope is less about the game of chess and more about how the characters are portrayed as cold and calculating figures able to stay multiple steps ahead of everyone else in the story. We see Chessmasters a lot in fiction because, unlike in reality, an author has the power to decide that a single person really can organize a series of events singlehandedly. The Emperor conquers the galaxy because George Lucas wills it so. It’s easier as a writer to pin all of your narrative choices on a single entity than the series of inter-connected causes that affect real-life events.
We tend to retrospectively do this with real-world people as well. It’s typical for people to argue that historical figures, even terrible ones such as Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, grew to prominence because of their political genius. Part of this has to do with the intense propaganda machines they led during the height of their power. Stalin and Hitler were both built up into almost Superman-like figures by their people, yet that narrative found itself even in outlets beyond their control. As professor Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote of the former Soviet leader in their 1953 New York Times article What It Takes to Be a Stalin:
“Stalin’s role as political intrigue and boss is well known. He was able to crush opposition both in high party circles and among the masses because he was a brilliant and ruthless totalitarian politician. This means that he knew how at any given time to command the loyalty of the party and state bureaucracy and to avoid pushing the masses so far that the morale and cohesion of the ruling apparatus might be seriously affected.”
To this day, we still see people praise the genius of dictators such as Stalin or Hitler, even as they decry the horrors they committed. When, for example, the blog Leadershipgeeks.com penned an article on what could be learned from Hitler’s leadership style, they focused on the “positive lessons” you could emulate from him, saying:
“…Hitler was a captivating public speaker. He would enrapture crowds with his vision and sense of purpose of the nation. His words moved a country, even the church to believe that they were killing in the name of God. That was the extent of his charisma.”
This frames his charisma almost as an otherworldly force that acted upon the German people. It portrays his will as something so strong that it overpowered God-fearing people's senses to the point of making them murderers. It also coincidentally absolves the German people of all responsibility by placing the source of that evil in one bad person's hands.
In truth, real fascism does not work like the Galactic Empire. It cannot come about because of the manipulations of a single individual, or even a group of individuals, but rather because an in-group has been given the social permission to enact beliefs they already have.
Fascism is a group sport.
When we look at men like Hitler, the trauma they helped cause was so terrible that it understandably left a scar on the public imagination. Hitler’s name, and really Nazism in general, has become a sort of boogie man used to personify the worst kinds of evil.
In pop culture, Hitler often shows up to bolster some of the worst causes throughout history: his regime is what gives rise to the fringe science organization HYDRA in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); he’s seen shaking hands with the devil in horror, B-movie Faust: Love of the Damned (2000); and cloning and replicating his upbringing is the primary plot point of the book and film The Boys From Brazil (1976/1978).
From this lens, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that fascist leaders were real people unable to foresee all the events that brought them fully to power. They may have made plans intended to last decades only for them to fall apart spectacularly in real life. Hitler’s first major grab for power, for example, was a failure. When the Nazi Party attempted a coup in 1923 in the German province of Bavaria, it was ultimately foiled by the region’s military forces. He would eventually gain power through political means (and force), but that didn’t mean his regime was flawless. He had an almost childish demeanor with an overly inflated sense of self. He did not respond to feedback well, which caused him to make strategically poor decisions — most infamously, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Trump also fell into this category, especially during the earlier parts of his first term when many people tried to paint him as a master manipulator. It was common for detractors to warn us not to “get distracted” by his antics and instead be on the lookout for what he really intended. Debates were waged in columns across America on whether he was figurative or literal with his words. It took months, and in some cases years, for people to realize there was no higher point to his rhetoric — there was only ever what he wanted at the moment.
The rebranding of fascists leaders as brilliant Chessmasters ignores the fact that some authoritarians lack political finesse. It also ignores how their hold on power relies initially on support from the larger populace. Authoritarians certainly use violence to grab and maintain power, but they also try to convince their followers that all problems can be solved by worshipping a single authoritarian figure. They can only achieve their nonsensical aims when the greater population passively accepts it.
In his essay Ur-Fascism, commentator Umberto Eco, who grew up during the fascism of Benito Mussolini, listed fourteen qualities defining fascism. Many of these involved a fascist gaining buy-in from their own people, such as by fostering a fear of difference, creating a culture of hero-worship, and appealing to a frustrated middle class. To that last point, he wrote in this essay that people have a habit of scapegoating disenfranchised political groups, writing: “In our time, when the old [working class] are becoming [richer] (and the [dispossessed] are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”
In essence, it’s not the downtrodden who fuel that rise to fascism, but the people just above them. While the exact number of people susceptible to authoritarianism is widely disputed, the simple truth is that, if presented with the right set of arguments, a percentage of any population at any time is amenable to that style of leadership. It’s something many people are primed to believe already, and they don’t need an evil mastermind to make that happen.
This reality fails to show up in a lot of pop culture, especially in the Galaxy Far Far Away, where the opinions of regular people are largely omitted for narrative convenience.
Star Wars is a brand where fascism is a core facet of its mythos (e.g., the Sith, the Empire, the First Order, etc.), but somehow it has villains so far removed from our empathic understanding that its possible as an audience member to walk away not really understanding how fascism works.
While the Expanded Universe (now Star Wars Legends) has some works that examine the propaganda and anti-alien xenophobia that helped give rise to the Empire (see the Thrawn trilogy and the video game Knights of the Old Republic), most of the films are a simplistic battle between good and evil. Emperor Palpatine's cruelty can be witnessed within a vacuum, never challenging viewers to seriously comprehend how they might fall within the equation.
This failure to truly contextualize fascism affects how a lot of fans perceive the work itself. A quick search online reveals dozens of articles and videos of fans claiming that the Empire was actually right all along because it provided stability to the galaxy. YouTuber Allen Xie (Generation Tech) talks extensively about this issue on their channel. In his video Imperials Are People Too, he highlights all the times the Rebel Alliance killed members of the Empire military. He remarks of character Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) decision to blow up the planet-destroying Death Star as the following:
“…any other situation, we would question the morality of a man who has killed over a million people, but what did the rebellion do? Give him a medal. History is written by the victors, and the Empire had its flaws. But the next time you go to celebrate the destruction of an Imperial ship or victory of a Rebel hero remember that there are living breathing people behind those blast doors and plastic helmets. “
This is obviously a bad take. The Death Star destroyed nearly 2 billion people when it blew up the planet of Alderaan in A New Hope. Maybe the author is not genuine. The Internet is filled with so much irony and meta-humor that it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is serious (see Jim Huss’s parody video series). Still, there are so many videos on this subject it speaks to the failure of the text itself. The franchise failed to delineate between what is and what is not fascism so much that an entire subgenre of videos has sprung up arguing that the text validates the very thing it appears to be disproving — that fascism is bad.
Star Wars is not the only franchise that has this issue. The MCU stumbled into the same problem with intergalactic Space Tyrant Thanos (Josh Brolin). As with Emperor Palpatine, Thanos is also portrayed as a manipulative Chessmaster hellbent on dominating the galaxy. In this case, he works behind-the-scenes of all the movies to gather magical infinity stones with the power to rewrite reality. His ultimate plan is to randomly wipe out half of all sentient life in the galaxy.
This plan comes to fruition at the end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), but not in the way we would expect a fascist to achieve their ends. While he does have a small band of committed followers fighting to cull the galaxy, Thanos’ goals are achieved through space magic. He snaps his fingers, and half of everyone we know flutters out of existence.
Unlike with real fascism, the galaxy is a spectator in his horrors, not a participant.
As with Star Wars, this refusal to take a hard stance ultimately made Thanos’ brand of meritocratic Malthusianism sympathetic to many viewers. His simplistic, authoritarian solution was not called out in a way that would challenge viewers' assumptions. #Thanoswasright flooded Twitter and other social media shortly after the film’s release. Soon we had a bunch of bad hot takes espousing the very ideology that a responsible movie would have taken the time to disprove. As JV Chamary wrote in Forbes in his article The Science Of ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Proves Thanos Did Nothing Wrong:
“The Avengers are guilty of putting the grief of survivors above the health of our world. From the planet’s point of view, it’s the superheroes who are the bad guys. Reversing Thanos’ actions is a selfish endeavor…”
Overpopulation’s contribution to climate change is a contentious idea that has been hotly debated elsewhere. Climate change is believed to be exacerbated by other issues, such as overconsumption and wealth inequality. These would not be fixed by removing half of all people at random.
The movie never bothers to have this debate, though. When the second part of the Thanos saga, Avengers: Endgame, aired in April of 2019, the film attempted to disprove the tyrant’s plan by demonstrating the tragedy of all the lives lost, not by tearing apart the fascist ideology Thanos represented. As with Alderaan's destruction, the snap became divorced from its totalitarian ideology to represent a “bad” viewers could consume without getting uncomfortable.
Some works do put viewers in that place of unease, but they are usually Oscar-bait and Indie films, not pop culture hits. The last major time Star Wars attempted to be pointed in its commentary was The Last Jedi (2017), which was arguably a meta-commentary on the Star Wars fandom's toxic masculinity. This film was not idly consumed but instead was widely polarizing among viewers. It became a topic of intense debate precisely because you knew it was trying to say something.
Conversely, Emperor Palpatine’s ideology is too vague and amorphous to be rejected. We don’t understand what the Emperor really wants other than power itself, and because that power has not seriously been scrutinized by the text (merely the person holding it), the viewer doesn’t have to question their political beliefs.
Much of our media has made people think they understand fascism when really they are more familiar with a caricature of fascism: that of an all-knowing, evil Chessmaster who manipulates people into doing things they don’t really want to do from behind the scenes. This type of story-telling does not seek to challenge the viewer's complicity in that evil, which is why so many people can comfortably wrap themselves in Storm Trooper or Thanos paraphernalia without ever feeling awkward.
It’s not bad for a film to talk about fascism. Art reflects life, so artists would inevitably want to talk about an issue so pressing to human culture. This ideology is worth talking about, but a lot of media is employing an overly-simplistic understanding of it — one where the viewer is always blameless.
In real life, people are not tricked into following fascist leaders such as Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump. They follow those monsters willing, and while we can debate the reasons surrounding those decisions, we must not compartmentalize that evil into something only evil masterminds can accomplish. It is sadly not hard to get people to abandon everything in pursuit of hatred.
If we want to prepare people for how to avoid the next fascist regime, then we need media that explores how everyday people can fall to the Dark Side too. Responsible media is not afraid to make its viewers defensive over their capacity to inflict harm, especially when discussing one of the darkest ideologies in human history. It brings them into the text and does not let them look away.