by Nancy Reagin
Although the pretext is different, the proclamation of Order 66 by Darth Sidious in Revenge of the Sith and the great Jedi massacre that follows echo the massacre of defenseless soldiers at Fort Pillow. After the Emperor issues the order, clone troopers turn on their Jedi generals and attack them mercilessly. Just as the surrendering soldiers at Fort Pillow were betrayed by their captors, given that the soldiers expected that their surrender would stop the fighting but would not lead to their own deaths, so, too, are the Jedi betrayed by their clone troopers. In leading their troops against the Droid Army, the Jedi are essentially defenseless against the forces that have been under their command just minutes earlier. Shortly thereafter, Anakin Skywalker, now under the sway of the dark side, enters the Jedi temple and slaughters all individuals inside: the Padawans, staff, and Younglings all meet their end by his lightsaber. In both massacres, defenseless lives were lost; people who had no expectation of being massacred were killed in cold blood.
After turning to the dark side, Darth Vader massacres Jedi Younglings and turns on his former friends. (Revenge of the Sith)
Their murders were a violation of the laws of war. Lincoln, in 1863, had codified wartime law and then distributed it not only to the U.S. troops but to the Confederacy. Some of these provisions included maintaining communication between enemy forces, truce, prohibiting torture, prohibiting assassination, and protection of prisoners. Certainly, Forrest, as well as the Sith Sidious, but especially Vader, forsook these codes of conduct and perpetrated what are thought of as the most callous of acts thus far in either war. Both the Jedi code and the code of war understood by nineteenth-century Americans were thus violated by leaders who had professed to support these codes.
Nathan Bedford Forrest led the massacre of hundreds of African American soldiers at Fort Pillow. After the war, he led the creation of the Ku Klux Klan.
“You Were My Brother”: Border States and Uncivil Divisions
The Civil War is often referred to today as a time that pitted “brother against brother.” Sometimes this division was literal, as in the case of brothers Alexander and James Campbell, who fought for the North and the South, respectively, at the Battle of Secessionville in 1862.11 Divided households were not as common as often supposed today, but families in the border states—such as Kentucky, Missouri, and especially the “Bleeding Kansas” territory—were often divided in their loyalties and military service, even as Anakin and Padmé ultimately choose different sides in the Clone Wars and the newly turned Sith apprentice, Darth Vader, turns his lightsaber on his onetime Master and mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who mourns his Padawan as a brother.
Kansas was so bitterly torn between pro- and antislavery supporters that the Civil War in effect started several years early there: after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had opened the state to white settlement, supporters of both sides had poured in, seeking to dominate and control the territorial government. Territorial elections were marked by widespread fraud, and the pro-slavery local government that resulted soon faced competition from a second, “shadow” antislavery government based in Lawrence, Kansas. After several violent skirmishes, supporters of both sides took to arming themselves and mounted guerrilla attacks on communities on the other side. By 1856, the territory was in a state of constant low-level warfare, which led it to be called “Bleeding Kansas.” The war there essentially persisted through 1865, with communities regularly mounting attacks on neighboring settlements. The border state of Missouri was similarly divided, and by 1861, Missouri had two competing (pro- and antislavery) governors and state legislatures, as federal troops battled against a pro-Confederate state militia. The Mandalorians of the Star Wars galaxy exhibit a similar division, with Jango Fett’s cloned troopers forming the corps of the Grand Republican Army in the Clone Wars, even while his homeworld of Mandalore defects to the Confederacy’s cause.
“You were my brother”: On volcanic Mustafar, Anakin and Obi-Wan are torn apart by their divided loyalties. (Revenge of the Sith)
Kentucky senator John Crittenden tried to stay neutral at the start of the Civil War, but ultimately his sons served in different armies.
Kentucky, which occupied a central location between the Union North and the Deep South, is another example of how communities could be torn apart through civil warfare. The state contained both pro-Union and pro-Confederate supporters, and the state legislature, its governor, and Kentucky senator John Crittenden initially attempted to maintain a neutral position between the U.S. federal government and the Confederacy when the war began. The state legislature passed a formal declaration of neutrality in May 1861, but the state’s location was too strategically crucial for either side to ignore it. President Lincoln famously commented that “I hope to have God on my side, but I have to have Kentucky.” Union forces took up positions just north of the state, in Illinois; Confederate troops constructed forts just across from Kentucky’s southern border in Tennessee; and Ketucky’s citizens formed two competing state militias, one pro-Union and the other pro-Confederate.12
General Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union Army, married into a family that was strongly pro-Confederate.
The stalemate ended in the summer of 1861, when Confederate forces invaded the western corner of Kentucky, and then General Ulysses S. Grant led an invasion of Union forces from the north. Pro-Confederate supporters fled to the southern part of the state to establish a second, “shadow” state legislature in late 1861, and the state became a battlefield for the next two years. Senator Crittenden’s own family was torn apart, as his oldest son, George, became a Confederate Army general, while his younger son, Thomas, served as a general on the Union side.
Another prominent Kentucky family—that of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln—was similarly divided. While Mrs. Lincoln lived in the White House, five of her brothers or brothers-in-law fought for the Confederacy. Three of them died.13 Like Abraham Lincoln’s, General Grant’s in-laws were also pro-Confederacy. Ulysses Grant’s wife, Julia, came from a Missouri slaveholding family; they were married at her father’s plantation, and Grant’s parents did not attend the wedding because they disapproved of his marrying into a slave-owning family. Unsurprisingly, when the Civil War began, Julia’s childhood friends and her family supported the Confederates.14 Although not a blood family, even the Jedi are divided by the Clone Wars: Dooku’s defection is matched by many of his peers’ during the course of the conflict, including the assassin Asajj Ventress and eventually his replacement, Darth Vader.
“No Time for Sorrows”: Costs and Consequences of Civil Wars
The American Civil War took a huge toll in life, blood, and treasure. Out of a total population of 31 million people, North and South, 620,000 died. Of these, 360,000 served in the U.S. military, and 260,000 served the Confederacy. Furthermore, “The number of southern civilians who died as a direct or indirect result of the war,” as historian James McPherson has noted, “cannot be known; what can be said is that the Civil War’s cost in American lives was as great in all of the nation’s other wars combined through Vietnam.”15 The Civil War battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, was the single bloodiest day in American history: 6,000 Americans were killed.16 Other battles caused even greater loss of life, but over multiple days. Overall, roughly one in four Southern white men of military age was killed, for a ghastly toll of 5 percent of all Southern whites.17 An even bloodier toll is suffered in the civil wars of the Star Wars galaxy, in which the entire planet of Alderaan is destroyed, and vast populations obliterated. Those wars are depicted as involving more destructive weapons than even the new repeating rifles of the Civil War era. The point here is not to compare actual historical casualties to those in the Star Wars civil wars, but rather to stress that the high cost in life and suffering of the American Civil War was analogous to the costs of the epic struggles of the Clone Wars and later the Rebels versus the Empire, which is why both have so much dramatic appeal today.
The American Civil War resulted not only in the destruc
tion of slavery in the United States, but in a process of Reconstruction that included the granting of citizenship to the former slaves. This promise of equality, embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, was more violated than practiced in the century after the Civil War, but the existence of this promise became a powerful weapon for the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, the Empire regularly discriminated against nonhumans, while their enemies in the Alliance built their coalition on interspecies cooperation and respect that fully incorporated all sorts of life forms, including Wookiees, Bothans, Mon Calamari, Ewoks, and others.
The economic consequences of the American Civil War varied by region: “If economic devastation stalked the South, for the North the Civil War was a time of unprecedented prosperity.”18 The outcome was probably the same in the Star Wars galaxy: certainly, the droid foundries of Geonosis are profitable, as must be the production of every Star Destroyer or measly TIE fighter. In war, the people lose and the corporations win, regardless of one’s galaxy.
In Star Wars, one civil division, the Clone Wars, is directly followed by another conflict in which the Galactic Empire has become an oppressive force. The second Star Wars civil war resembles an Abolitionist view of the American Civil War: both in the United States and in the Star Wars galaxy they are wars of liberation. In these films, the Empire has oppressed every free society into submission, with the exception of the Rebel Alliance. The Rebels’ call for freedom strongly echoes the moral arguments put forth by Abolitionists. Some Abolitionists appealed to slave owners to repent of the sin of owning slaves by immediately freeing their slaves. This resembles the rallying cry of the Alliance, which calls for personal freedoms that were unjustly kept from them under the yoke of the Empire.
Darth Vader redeems himself and reunites the galaxy when he kills his Sith Master, Darth Sidious. (Return of the Jedi)
In the final battle scene of Return of the Jedi, the murderous Darth Vader, loyal servant to the dark side, is transformed and redeemed by the long-suppressed love for his son: Darth Vader ultimately cannot stand to see Luke Skywalker defeated and killed by the Sith Emperor. Deep inside, he retains the capacity to love, and that love inspires him to rebel at the last moment. Darth Vader turns against the Emperor and kills him, thus ending the second civil war. In doing so, he saves his son, reclaims his humanity, and becomes a free man, just before dying. He is, in the end, redeemed and the galaxy is reunited, ending the divide that split families and cost billions of lives.
During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass held that the horrible loss of life was the price the country had to pay for the sin of slavery—and that the sacrifice was redemptive. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he expressed much the same idea that Douglass had proclaimed since the war started:
Frederick Douglass, former slave and Abolitionist leader.
If God wills that [the war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”19
The experience of the American Civil War made the United States into a nation that could evolve into the country we know today. The people of the Star Wars galaxy also pay a terrible price to end oppression and restore freedom. The joyous celebrations that span the galaxy from Endor to Coruscant at the end of Return of the Jedi, however, show that the terrible cost is justified to restore freedom to all.
Notes
1. Benjamin Irvin, “Tar, Feather, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 2 (June 2003): 237.
2. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), 773–793.
3. From the opening crawl of A New Hope.
4. From the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace.
5. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) masterfully describes the rise of global empires that came to control and monopolize the surplus production of local societies, often through extracting taxes. Wolf’s work is a useful lens with which to view the Star Wars story.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.,1935), 61, for a quotation from Frederick Douglass in 1865 on how the war started with both sides fighting for slavery—the Confederates for its survival out of the United States, the North fighting for its survival in the United States.
7. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London, New York: Verso, 1997).
8. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100.
9. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 100.
10. Ibid., 115.
11. J. Tracy Power, “‘Brother against Brother’: Alexander and James Campbell’s Civil War,” South Carolina History 95, no. 2 (April 1994): 130–132.
12. For an overview of the divisions and conflicts in “Bleeding Kansas” and in the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, see McPherson, Battle Cry, 145–169, 290–297. For Kansas, see Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
13. See McPherson, Battle Cry, 297; see also Lowell Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975).
14. Carol Berkin, Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant (New York: Knopf, 2009), 227–260. See also the official White House biography online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/first-ladies/juliagrant.
15. McPherson, Battle Cry, 854.
16. James McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
17. McPherson, Battle Cry, 818, 856.
18. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 18.
19. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, in William E. Gienapp, This Fiery Trial: The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 221.
Part II
“Join Me, and Together We Can Rule the Galaxy as Father and Son”
POLITICAL HISTORIES IN STAR WARS
Chapter 5
I, Sidious
Historical Dictators and Senator Palpatine’s Rise to Power
Tony Keen
“Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.”
—Senator Amidala, Attack of the Clones
This idea of a democracy being given up—and in many cases being given up in a time of crisis—you see it throughout history, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. You see these democracies under a lot of pressure, in a crisis situation, who end up giving away a lot of the freedoms they have and a lot of the checks and balances to somebody with a strong authority to help get them through the crisis.
—George Lucas, audio commentary, Attack of the Clones DVD
George Lucas’s Star Wars saga is, at heart, an adventure story. The political narrative within the movies serves the purposes of that story: the tale of the overthrow of the benign but weak Galactic Republic, replaced by the oppressive Empire, before the Empire is itself destroyed by the heroes. The story represents the triumph of good over evil.
Nevertheless, as is demonstrated elsewhere in this volume, Lucas clearly used elements taken from actual human history to inform the course of events “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” This chapter looks at three instances in the past when a democratic state was overthrown by a dictator, how they parallel Lucas’s future (or past) history, and specifically the coup d’état that is carried out by Senator Palpatine from Episodes I to III.
The three historical examples that best para
llel Palpatine’s rise are found in the lives of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler. As in Star Wars, in each of these cases a republican form of government was replaced by a dictator who received crucial support from many of the republic’s own representatives: republican forms of government—in Rome, in Paris, in Berlin, and on Coruscant—thus subverted themselves.
The Roman Republic, Augustus, and the Sith Lord Emperor
The man who has become recognized as the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, was born Gaius Octavius in 63 BC.1 His great-uncle was the Roman politician Gaius Julius Caesar, who was on his way to the ascendancy within the Roman state. Julius Caesar’s impressive military victories and political skills culminated in his appointment in 48 BC to the post of dictator and his assassination four years later.