by Nancy Reagin
In Star Wars and in the two historical analogs (the American Revolutionary and Vietnam wars) considered in this chapter, we witness the triumph of People’s War against seemingly long, if not impossible, odds.14 One can almost hear the voice of Yoda intoning, “Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.” A small, seemingly “insignificant,” rebellion can grow to remarkable strength when the proper strategy is followed, the right recruits are marshaled, and a compelling belief provides a luminous, force-multiplying vision.
Yoda lifting Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamp on Dagobah. (The Empire Strikes Back)
After Yoda lifts Luke’s X-wing fighter out of the swamp in The Empire Strikes Back, a chastened Luke gasps and then says, “I don’t believe it.” “That is why you fail,” the wizened Jedi Master replies. Princess Leia believes in the Rebel cause of freedom; Luke Skywalker comes to believe; so, too, in the end does Darth Vader; and that is why they do not fail.
Why Empires Lose: A Trilogy of Reasons
Well, it is a little exaggerated. We’re applying an $18,000,000-solution to a $2-problem. But, still, one of the little mothers was firing at us.
—U.S. pilot in Vietnam15
History, whether in a purely fictional-cinematic form as in Star Wars or in the very real dramas of the American Revolution and Vietnam, is fascinating precisely because one can imagine alternative events and endings.16 By imagining how the Empire could have prevailed in Star Wars, how the British could have put down the American rebellion, and how the United States could have achieved its objectives in Vietnam, one can draw some suggestive lessons and have some fun. Yet in all of these cases, three critical flaws hampered imperial attempts to maintain their grip. In order of importance, these were overconfidence that led to underestimation of the enemy, indiscriminate reprisals that led to renewed rebel opposition, and an overreliance on technology and firepower that led to civil and nonmaterial factors being undervalued to victory.
People’s War, however, is no fail-safe strategy to victory; it is difficult but not impossible for empires to counter. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the United States defeated a serious insurrection in the Philippines, and after World War II, Great Britain put down a communist insurgency in Malaya.17 Rebels, in other words, do not always win. Yet key to any lasting imperial triumph is never to underestimate the rebel enemy. As Luke Skywalker says to the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, “Your overconfidence is your weakness.” The Emperor’s riposte “Your faith in your friends is yours” proves untrue, but only with help from a most unexpected quarter (more on the Ewoks in a moment).18
Consider the U.S. war in Vietnam. Until 1968, Americans were nothing but confident that they would ultimately prevail in defeating the communist insurgency, thereby preserving a (somewhat) independent South Vietnam. Indeed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, such as the decisive North Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, U.S. military officers agreed with President Lyndon Johnson that North Vietnam was basically a “raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country,” which had no hope of prevailing against the world’s foremost superpower.19 That events soon proved otherwise was due in large part to American overconfidence. Similarly, the British believed in 1776 that a sufficient show of force would cow the American rabble into dour acceptance of the established order, but ill-managed efforts to split New England from the rest of the colonies succeeded only in driving more colonists from a wider area into the ranks of the rebels.
When it comes to resisting rebel insurgencies, overconfidence often emerges as a cardinal, even fatal, flaw of empires. As overconfident empires stumble, dashed hopes for quick and easy victories often lead to internecine fighting and savage reprisals that only exacerbate previous setbacks at rebel hands. In classic People’s War, both sides vie for the hearts and minds of the people, who are much more than passive spectators. In a classic metaphor used by Mao Zedong, the people are the “sea” in which the rebel “fish” swim. If an empire can make the sea do its bidding, the fish cannot thrive and have nowhere to hide. Yet if the rebels can wrest control of the sea from the empire, the latter will wither and eventually die.
In the American Revolutionary War, as well as in Vietnam, enough of the people turned against the empires involved to allow the rebels space in which to swim and thrive. The people did so often because of heavy-handed, even murderously violent, repression and reprisals by these empires that generated resentment, recruitment, and rebel resurgence. Such a dynamic is captured in the Star Wars trilogy. As mentioned earlier, Luke joins the Rebellion only after the Empire murders his innocent aunt and uncle. Though left unsaid in the original Star Wars, it is logical to assume that the Empire’s apocalyptic destruction of the planet Alderaan generated as much sympathy for Leia and the rebellion as it terrified wavering star systems into toeing the Imperial line. And in The Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian sells Han Solo to Vader, only to join the Rebel cause when Vader ups the ante, insisting as well on the surrender of Leia and Chewbacca, a demand he backs up with a threat of a permanent military occupation of Lando’s profitable but less-than-entirely-legal gas mine.
Because unprincipled empires believe only in themselves and their own prerogatives of power, they have a habit of acting imperiously, even viciously, when they are frustrated in their (overconfident) designs—a flaw that opportunistic rebel troops exploit to their benefit. When not intimidating or torturing or killing them, empires may also be oblivious to the “little people” within them, another weakness that a crafty rebel force can readily exploit. Consider events on the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi. Its indigenous civilization of Ewoks is literally beneath the Empire’s notice. The Ewoks themselves are not so much persecuted as they are shoved aside or flattened under the feet of Imperial Walkers. In the eyes of the Empire, a subject society such as the Ewoks that relies on spears, rocks, booby traps, and similar “primitive” weapons and techniques is a nonfactor.
It is not so much what the Empire does to the Ewoks as what it fails to do that proves decisive to the Rebellion. On first encounter, the Rebels themselves are not immune to dismissing the Ewoks as feckless “primitives” and therefore of little use. Finding themselves snared in a booby trap, Luke and Han confront a band of Ewok hunters whose small stature and cute furry faces initially amuse more than they impress. Amusement turns to concern as Luke and Han are trussed up and marched off. It quickly becomes apparent they are to become the main course at a feast in honor of C-3PO, the translator-droid whose golden sheen makes him something of a minor deity among the Ewoks.
Ewoks in action against Imperial stormtroopers, using rocks to disrupt their mission. (Return of the Jedi)
Yet it is not the Force that Luke employs to levitate C-3PO that wins the Ewoks over to the Rebel cause. Rather, it is the respect the Rebels come to show for the Ewoks, as they share with them their collective struggle against the Empire. In a light-hearted and seemingly inconsequential moment, Ewok tribal elders proudly proclaim that Luke, Han, Leia, and the rest of the Rebel team are now members of the tribe, an event that has profound implications for the victory to come.
George Lucas has said that he had the Viet Cong (VC) in mind when he created the Ewoks, and one can see why.20 Like the VC in the Vietnam War, the Ewoks are smaller in stature than their enemy and possess little in the way of advanced weaponry (whereas the VC dug pits and employed bamboo Punji sticks as weapons, the Ewoks have a hankering for logs, swinging, and rolling, as well as nets). Like the VC, what the Ewoks do possess is superior knowledge of the local terrain and an ability to blend into that terrain. Their eventual revolt demonstrates that clever tactics aided by the element of surprise can prove effective even against an enemy that possesses superior technology and devastating firepower.
The torturous terrain of Vietnam was alien to U.S. soldiers, but not to members of the Viet Cong, like this man.
Despite their stature and l
ow-tech weaponry, there are just enough Ewoks to confuse an elite Imperial force at a crucial moment, a diversion that enables the Rebel Alliance to disable the new Death Star’s protective energy field. Without this brave (and costly) diversionary assault by the humble Ewoks, the crucial offensive would have failed, even if Luke had somehow still prevailed in his personal duel with the Emperor.
The Millennium Falcon and other Rebel ships confront the Imperial fleet at the Battle of Endor. (Return of the Jedi)
Indeed, the Battle of Endor sequence in Return of the Jedi illustrates the Rebel Alliance’s growing sophistication as they combine all three phases of People’s War to disrupt the Empire’s entire system of command and control simultaneously. Whereas the Empire is straitjacketed by its dependence on the Emperor’s personal attention and control, the Rebels rely on decentralized execution and improvisation within a general strategic framework. At Endor, the Rebels launch a combined arms assault by collected forces (the Rebel fleet and the Ewoks) against the full span of Imperial conventional forces, while selected elites of committed Rebel units (Rogue Squadron and Lando Calrissian against the new Death Star; Han, Leia, and the commandos against the Imperial Legion on Endor; even Luke against the Emperor and Vader) engage, disrupt, and ultimately destroy crucial command nodes. With the Emperor fully engaged in personal combat with Luke, Imperial forces are bereft of timely and authoritative instruction to supplement the orders already in place. Thus, they fail to develop a coherent and appropriate response that would allow them to bring their superior strength to bear.21
However transitory it proved, the Ewoks’ success on Endor highlights another key weakness of many materially driven empires: an overreliance on technology and firepower as being decisive. Consider the U.S. military in Vietnam. It employed every advanced (and terrifyingly destructive) technology it could think of (short of nuclear weapons) to defeat the VC insurgency. B-52 strategic bombers on “Arc Light” raids (incredibly, the U.S. military dropped 6.7 million tons of bombs on Southeast Asia, the equivalent of more than four hundred Hiroshimas in explosive power), defoliants such as Agent Orange, napalm and cluster munitions, tanks and artillery, helicopter gunships, even electrified fences and sensors.22 Virtually every high-tech weapon in the U.S. inventory was tested in the Vietnam laboratory, and all came up wanting.
Even worse from an American perspective: the widespread devastation wrought by these weapons convinced many Vietnamese to join the rebellion, even as it persuaded many Americans of the immorality of their own military and senior civilian leaders. An undeniable lesson emerged (that many Americans still seek to deny): The U.S. military did not lose the war because the American people lost patience on the home front or because antiwar protesters stabbed the military in the back. Rather, military excesses and overly optimistic assessments (“We see the light [of victory] at the end of the tunnel,” General William Westmoreland, the U.S. commanding general in Vietnam, was saying in 1967), driven by overconfidence, led a “silent majority” of Americans to lose faith in their military and its leaders, so much so that a minority of Americans turned against their own government to sympathize with the plight (and even the goals) of the Vietnamese rebels.23 Thus, the U.S. military lost the Vietnam War not because it was betrayed by the people but because its leaders betrayed the ideals of the people.24 One of the key betrayers here was President Richard M. Nixon, Lucas’s model for the Emperor (Palpatine/Darth Sidious), as discussed further on.
The same is true of the Empire in Star Wars. Its approach to Rebel dissent is to build ever-bigger and more powerful weapons to annihilate the dissenters. Rule by fear, by shock and awe, is the method to its growing madness. As Grand Moff Tarkin says to Leia in Star Wars, once the Empire demonstrates the power of its Death Star vengeance weapon, dissent will be quashed forever.25 Only Vader sees more clearly. In reply to Admiral Motti’s boast that “This station is now the ultimate power in the universe,” Vader tells him not to be “too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”
Putting a less mystical spin on Vader’s dissenting insight, a clear lesson of Vietnam is that destructive space-age technology is not enough to compel assent to imperial demands, especially when rebel resistance is supported and sustained by a powerful ideology. By highlighting the spiritual and nonmaterial factors that sustain successful rebellions, Star Wars provides an invaluable reminder to military theorists of all stripes.
Because of this trilogy of critical flaws—the Emperor’s overconfidence, his belief in violent reprisals and rule by terror, and the Empire’s faith in “Death Star” technology—the Emperor and his minions hardly bother with political suasion and mobilizing popular support, a key tenet of counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. A less cocky, less power-mad Emperor would recognize that the iron fist of murderous reprisals needs to be balanced by the velvet glove of conciliatory rhetoric. Subject peoples can tolerate considerable oppression if it is softened by reassurances of safety and security. Put differently, victory in COIN is derived not so much from military action per se as it is from military action that creates time and space for civil means (to include police action) that seek both to marginalize the rebels and preserve the people’s support.26 Empires can do this by focusing on the pro-establishment minority, rallying them to the cause of neutralizing the rebels, while at the same time encouraging compliance (often in the name of security and order) among the rest of the people.
Yet the Sith Emperor will have none of it. Instead of seeking inclusion and a broader base of support, his actions are exclusive and narrow his base of support. Indeed, his “base” rests on the jackbooted excesses of stormtroopers, the intimidating power of Star Destroyers, and the sorcerer ways of the Sith. When the former are neutralized and the latter (Darth Vader) is turned to the Rebel cause, the Emperor is lost.
Evil Incarnate?: The Emperor, Vader, and the Rebel Cause
At first glance, the Star Wars universe appears incredibly simple, a Manichean realm in which the Rebels are the forces of good, and the Empire and especially its leaders are the forces of evil. Certainly, the Emperor and Vader recall real-life totalitarian analogs such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler (the head of the notorious SS, or Schutzstaffel) in Nazi Germany or Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria (the head of the NKVD, or secret police) in the Soviet Union. Yet interestingly, in portraying the ascent of Senator Palpatine, who becomes the evil Sith Emperor, Darth Sidious, Lucas says he had Richard Nixon in mind as a parallel, as well as other historical dictators who subverted democracies.
Surely, this is less than fair to Nixon, who, despite all of his faults, had positive qualities to go along with his paranoia, his abuse of power, and his betrayal of the U.S. Constitution.27 Yet Lucas is making a more subtle point here, one in which we can view Nixon and even Senator Palpatine as fallen figures, talented men who fell prey to their own overweening ambition and all-consuming paranoia.
All of us have tendencies toward the dark side, Lucas suggests in Star Wars. As Yoda confesses, the path to the dark side is easier, quicker, more seductive. It grants to its followers the illusion of illimitless power. Palpatine, in his quest for absolute power, gives himself up entirely to the dark side. He may cloak his quest in polite, diplomatic language, coyly asking for “emergency” powers, so that he might restore order and calm to an increasingly unruly galaxy. Yet his true megalomania is revealed in Revenge of the Sith, when he baldly states, “I am the Senate,” echoing the absolutist illusions of King Louis XIV of France, who famously declared “I am the State.” Even worse, Palpatine seduces Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, by twisting Anakin’s honest, yet forbidden, love for Padmé into a fevered pursuit of boundless power whose goal it is to cheat death for the sake of his beloved. Her death in childbirth completes Anakin’s tragic descent into evil, his bottomless despair being exploited by the pitiless Sith Emperor to complete Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader.
; Emperor Palpatine, also known as Darth Sidious. (Return of the Jedi)
President Richard Nixon flashes a V for victory on the campaign trail in California in 1968.
In detailing the psychodrama of the Emperor and Vader, we appear to have traveled far from rebellions and People’s War. Yet surely the Star Wars universe is a reminder that power corrupts us all, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even Senator Palpatine emerges as something more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Like Nixon, perhaps, he is a man of considerable gifts who is led down a dark path by an unquenchable thirst for power, a thirst unconstrained by moral qualms due to Palpatine’s (and Nixon’s) mistrust of nearly everyone around him.
As grim as that reading of human nature may be, Star Wars also serves as a reminder that power, however dark or evil, will never fully extinguish hope, and that its relentless exercise will always generate resistance. Hitler and Himmler, after all, met their demise; so, too, did Stalin and Beria. Anger, fear, and aggression may triumph in the short term, but goodness, if fought for with conviction, courage, and faith, will triumph in the end. Or so the ending of Return of the Jedi suggests.
Nevertheless, Lucas’s revelation that Nixon was an inspiration for Palpatine casts the Star Wars passion play in a new light. Lucas, I believe, is affirming here that there is a thin line between good and evil, love and hate. Put differently, good and evil, love and hate, are dualities that are more labile than we care to admit. Negative emotions and unrestrained compulsions for power and control can channel the noblest of causes—even love—into the darkest of avenues.