by Nancy Reagin
Note how Blair plays up fears by his use of words such as toxin and poisons and how he lists anthrax first, in order to play on memories of the earlier attacks in the United States. Yet, of course, no WMD were found once Iraq had been conquered and thoroughly searched.
The so-called Star Wars SDI plan proposed by Ronald Reagan, and in a very modified form continued by later U.S. administrations, as a “defense” against attack can also be seen as a “super-weapon”: if successful (which is far from certain), it would destroy the entire premise of mutual assured destruction, which had prevented war between the superpowers for decades. The nation that possessed it would not have to worry about being annihilated and could presumably launch nuclear attacks without fear of retaliation—which is precisely what the Russians have repeatedly objected to. Its nickname of “Star Wars” undoubtedly came about due to the highly complicated descriptions of SDI’s lasers presented in the press, which in some ways do resemble the Death Star’s laser. And so we see how the mirrored parallels between real history and the Star Wars universe came to be: the Star Wars films were so strongly influenced by an awareness of the threat posed by nuclear weapons that their name actually became associated with one of the new “super-weapons.”
An artist’s conception of the SDI, 1984.
The Death Star fires on Alderaan. (A New Hope)
These highly controversial weapons and projects all received immense attention in the world’s press. The original trilogy of Star Wars also offers a devastating criticism of WMDs. As we have already observed, the Rebel Alliance, the heroes of the first films, seek simply to destroy the Death Star, rather than build their own. The ways in which they destroy it—and other weapons such as the AT-AT Walkers of The Empire Strikes Back—are often very basic.21 Of course, the Rebel Alliance is not a group of pacifists—they do use ordinary weapons to win their victory. Yet the Rebels clearly reject a never-ending arms race: the moral high ground belongs to those who refuse to use such weapons.
R2-D2 saves the day with his ability to interface with technology—yet again. (A New Hope)
Star Wars also demonstrates the advantages of technology. The droids C-3PO and R2-D2 appear in every single film and certainly figure among the heroes. In particular, R2-D2’s expertise and abilities repeatedly save the human heroes.22 In the first trilogy, the rebels use technology, as do the Jedi in the prequel films. The good guys are not antitechnological Luddites who want to return to nature (even if the presence or absence of natural scenery on a planet does reveal something about its inhabitants).23 Star Wars history only warns us against destructive technology—and most particularly focuses on the super-weapon of the Death Star. Built with the sole purpose of keeping the Emperor’s regime eternally in power by intimidating any dissent, it fails dramatically both times.
“Fear Will Keep the Local Systems in Line. Fear of This Battle Station.”
Of primary military concern will be the bomb’s potentiality to break the will of nations and of peoples by the stimulation of man’s primordial fears, those of the unknown, the invisible, the mysterious. We may deduce from a wide variety of established facts that the effective exploitation of the bomb’s psychological implications will take precedence over the application of its destructive and lethal effects in deciding the issue of war.
—1947 report by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Evaluation Board24
In the universe of Star Wars, the Tarkin Doctrine, expressed in a message from the future grand moff to Palpatine, states that the most effective way of maintaining order in the Empire is through fear and that this requires the creation of a super-weapon possessing massive destructive capability: the Death Star. In Star Wars, Tarkin explains its purpose: “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” He threatens Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet, with annihilation unless she reveals the secret Rebel base. When she (falsely) identifies it as Dantooine, however, Tarkin proceeds with the attack on Alderaan anyway, explaining that “Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration.” His fundamental goal is clearly to provide an example that will so terrify the galactic population that the rebellion will end of itself. As he says afterward, “No star system will dare oppose the Emperor now.”
Grand Moff Tarkin, a champion of fear. (A New Hope)
Fear has played a major role in many conflicts and, although it may seem paradoxical, has often been stronger before a war than during it. For example, fear undeniably influenced public opinion in Europe between the wars—in particular, because of the infant weapon of air power. Introduced at the end of World War I, many military experts believed that air power would be decisive in a future conflict. Certainly, fear of devastating aerial bombing played a major role in the peace and disarmament initiatives of the 1920s and the 1930s.25 Later, the terror bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War had a profound influence on public opinion (in that war, the German and Italian air forces experimented with massive aerial bombing, causing many civilian casualties).26 One can get a good idea of the terror engendered by air power from a speech by then British prime minister Stanley Baldwin to the House of Commons in 1932:
The speed of air attack, compared with the attack of an army, is as the speed of a motor car to that of a four-in-hand [a carriage pulled by horses] and in the next war you will find that any town which is within reach of an aerodrome [airfield] can be bombed within the first five minutes of war from the air, to an extent which was inconceivable in the last war, and the question will be, whose morale will be shattered quickest by that preliminary bombing? I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.27
The French were possibly even more afraid than the British, and a number of historians have cited this as a reason for France’s defeat by the Germans in 1940.28
A London aircraft spotter watches for German bombers during the Battle of Britain in 1940. St. Paul’s Cathedral can be seen in the background.
Obviously, fear was also a major weapon used by the Nazis, whether in Hitler’s speeches, in violent attacks such as Kristallnacht or the “Night of the Long Knives” or by the deliberate targeting of the civilian population in bombing campaigns such as the Blitz of British cities. The Soviet Union also relied on fear to maintain order, both within the USSR and in Eastern Europe. The list of examples is endless, and, certainly, Western countries, including the United States, have not been immune from using this tactic. As the opening quote to this section shows, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were very much aware of the terror potential in the atomic bomb.
Interestingly enough, it was the United States that experienced a massive panic after the Soviet Union exploded its own bomb in 1949. No longer the only nuclear power, the nation discovered that the Soviets’ new weapons, combined with the development of rocket technology, left it vulnerable. The creation of the “Iron Curtain” in parts of Eastern Europe and the communist victory in China in 1949 reinforced this disquiet. American anxieties intensified the following year with the revelation that the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, had given atomic secrets to the USSR. Many worried that there were other, still hidden, spies. A little-known senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, immediately picked up on this widely shared fear:
The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores . . . but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer . . . the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.29
McCarthy’s right-wing populism accused the federal government and the elites of the nation o
f espionage and betrayal. Because the Korean War began only a few months later, the panic that ensued is perhaps understandable. Many people argued that danger threatened from within, as well as from without, and that anyone, even the nation’s leaders, could be a communist.30
These fears found their expression in the popular culture of the time.31 George Lucas himself grew up in the shadow of the bomb and remembers the drills where children had to hide under their desks at school. Certainly, in his own lifetime he saw an explosion of panic that led to often appalling overreactions. Perhaps we can see this behind Yoda’s statement in The Phantom Menace: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.” In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
“Remember Back to Your Early Teachings. ‘All Who Gain Power Are Afraid to Lose It.’”
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower32
Why did a great Sith Lord such as Emperor Palpatine need the Death Star? The simplest answer is that one person alone—even someone so powerful—cannot control an entire galaxy. For that, a strong military force is necessary, and army leaders want the latest and best weapons. In a technological age, this means the existence of industries that supply the weapons and other necessary tools. These industrial groups, in turn, seek to maintain their position and continue receiving government contracts (and so a second Death Star is built, even though a first one has failed) and solidify their political power. In this, Star Wars reflects one of the chief debates of the Cold War, which revolved around what then president Eisenhower termed in his farewell address “the military-industrial complex.” The expression is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an informal alliance of the military and related government departments with defense industries that is held to influence government policy.”33
In the United States, the military-industrial complex began to grow in earnest with World War II. A noticeable sign of this was the construction of the Pentagon—one of the largest office buildings in the world—which was opened in 1943. The advent of the Cold War entrenched both the military and its civilian suppliers. During the next decades, the two superpowers tried to outdo each other in military technology, building ever more powerful and accurate nuclear weapons. The United States generally had the lead, but the USSR scored some important triumphs, such as the launching of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957. Sputnik provoked something of a panic in the United States and started both the Space Age and the Space Race.34
Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. (Revenge of the Sith)
On one hand, however, the 1970s were a time of détente, a policy that sought to reduce international tension. A series of events and agreements showed that the friction between the United States and the USSR and China was gradually easing. First, there was the winding down and the disastrous conclusion to the Vietnam War, as well as Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks the same year resulted in the SALT I agreements (including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), which controlled and limited armaments in both the superpowers. So the original Star Wars film came out during a period of détente. Indeed, the very year of its appearance saw the signing of a nuclear nonproliferation pact by fifteen countries (including the United States and the Soviet Union).
On the other hand, the 1970s saw something of a low point in confidence in the executive branch’s honesty. In June 1971, the New York Times began publication of what are known as “the Pentagon Papers”—a secret history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War prepared by the Department of Defense, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The newspaper later wrote, “They demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”35 The Watergate scandal followed, which would ultimately bring down the Nixon government, as did revelations about the U.S. government’s continuing lies regarding its interventions in Indochina, such as the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia. Indeed, Lucas apparently based the Emperor on Richard Nixon.36 Corruption in the highest places within the United States and the power of the military-industrial complex seemed all too obvious to many at the time.
In the prequel trilogy, naturally, we see only the origins of the Death Star. It seems that a dictatorship, once established, feels it must resort to fear and intimidation in order to maintain its hold on power. Yet if the earlier trilogy can be seen as a reflection of and about the Cold War, so the later trilogy reflects the worries of more recent history. At the end of Revenge of the Sith, the Death Star looks surprisingly near completion—in fact, it’s hard to imagine why it took another twenty years to make it fully operational. Perhaps this is beside the point, though, and the real purpose is to show parallels with more current events such as the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Certainly, a massive panic seized America after the 9/11 attacks, and this fear was exploited to justify the invasion of Iraq. The threat of terrorists armed with super-weapons has cropped up continually. Revenge of the Sith was made while much of this debate was occurring. It makes the point of showing the Galactic Republic being destroyed from within and with popular support. Indeed, Padmé Amidala comments, “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.” Will Brooker has commented that
The Emperor and Darth Vader view the Death Star, still under construction. (Revenge of the Sith)
this is the pattern suggested by Lucas’ saga as a whole—not a straight clash between good and evil, or even the character arc of Anakin Skywalker’s rise, corruption and salvation, but a cycle between apparently oppositional but in fact worryingly similar social structures, the Empire and Republic. Corruption, within Lucas’s model, does not appear from outside, but festers within, emerging when a complacent society allows it to flourish; it can rise again if it is not checked and controlled, as Luke does with his urges towards hatred and revenge, or it can be exorcised, as Luke does, by saving his father and destroying the Emperor.
Indeed, the only super-weapon in Star Wars belongs to the government. The vision of the Death Star at the end may be a warning to us all about the dangers to our own liberty of a new military-industrial complex.37
What had been the city of Nagasaki, Japan, after the United States dropped a nuclear weapon in August 1945. A Roman Catholic cathedral can be seen in the distance. A Japanese report described Nagasaki as “like a graveyard with not a tombstone standing.”
Appearing in four of the Star Wars films and central to two of them, the two Death Stars, the ultimate weapon of the Galactic Empire, are examples of the evil of absolute power, which inevitably seeks to preserve itself at all costs. Defeated by the simplest of weapons, the Death Star shows the futility of any regime seeking to perpetuate its power eternally. In this sense, it is a highly critical and yet optimistic commentary on the ultimate futility of the arms race, of much of the Cold War, and, indeed, of much recent history. It is also a reflection of the terror engendered by atomic power. Ultimately, Star Wars’ message here is that we should be focused on controlling ourselves and our own base desires (looking within for the source of our troubles), rather than on controlling others, and this is true for nations, as much as for individuals. Or, as Yoda tells Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, “Control, control, you must learn control!”
Notes
1. Speech at Brown University, June 4, 1983, http://tedkennedy.org/ownwords/event/cold_war. Kennedy first called SDI “Star Wars” just after Reagan’s speech. He is quoted by Lou Cannon in the Washington Post, March 24, 1983, A1, as saying, “Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) characterized the speech as ‘misleading Red-scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.’” This extract is obviously taken from a later speech, where he reused th
e image.
2. Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, http://www.hbci.com/~tgort/empire.htm. Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 93, talks of “Reagan’s transformation of the ironic rhetoric and vision of Star Wars into a serious mode of political discourse.” He also observes, “There was something very serious in his appropriation of the cartoon or comic-book phrase, ‘the Evil Empire,’ for a statement on the direction of United States foreign policy, as though the departments of Defense and State could be guided by the ethics of a Saturday afternoon sci-fi adventure.”
3. Juan Williams of the Washington Post wrote an article on March 29, 1983, A10, titled “Writers of Speeches for President Claim Force Is with Him,” mocking the “bellicose tone” of his recent speeches.
4. Although it contains a number of mistakes, David Meyer discusses this in “Star Wars, Star Wars and American Political Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 99–115. Lincoln Geraghty has commented, “Right wing Cold War politics were indelibly etched onto the characters and back story that informed the Star Wars universe: heroic rebels versus the evil empire became America against the Soviet Union. Intriguingly, for those opposed to the SDI, the rebellion in Star Wars could be seen as a metaphor for the left’s struggle against Reaganism and the politics of big business.” See Lincoln Geraghty, ed., American Science Fiction Film and Television (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 59.