by Nancy Reagin
5. Laurent Jullier in his book Star Wars: Anatomie d’une saga (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 17, wrote of how the prequel trilogy shows “our world” and “our anxieties.”
6. Press release by the White House, August 6, 1945, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/pdfs/59.pdf#zoom=100.
7. Brian Cameron, “‘What Is Thy Bidding, My Master?”: Star Wars and the Hegelian Struggle for Recognition,” in Kevin Decker and Jason Eberl, eds., Star Wars and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Press, 2005), 164, notes that “like all weapons of mass destruction, the Death Star’s military function cannot be easily separated from its political and policing functions—its purpose as a method of domestic control. Its objective power lies not in its actual use, but in the threat of its use, and herein lays the secret of the political function of justifying the exercise of power.”
8. Mary Henderson, in Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (New York: Bantam, 1997), 149, for example, comments, “The ultimate weapon of the Empire was also similar to that which played such a prominent role in the Cold War. In real life this was the atom bomb, and in Star Wars it was the Death Star. The goals of these weapons were identical: to render the enemy incapable of making war.”
9. David Allen Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 11–12. For more on Truman, see Richard F. Haynes, The Awesome Power: Harry S Truman as Commander in Chief (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). For more on the decision to use the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1995); Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs (January–February 1995): 135–152; and Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arm Race (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).
10. The President’s News Conference, November 30, 1950, http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/viewpapers.php?pid=985.
11. See, for example, Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” or Beatrice Heuser, “Victory in a Nuclear War? A Comparison of NATO and WTO War Aims and Strategies,” in Contemporary European History 7, no. 3 (November 1998): 311–327.
12. Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” 27–32. See also Douglas Kinnard, President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977).
13. The entire text of NSC-162/2 is available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-162-2.pdf.
14. For a general overview of U.S. nuclear strategy, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). Also important is Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2003). For more on Kahn, see Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The literature on Kissinger is immense (and much of it written by the man himself). Most of it obviously concerns his time as national security adviser and secretary of state. A few books that consider earlier periods are Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), and Stephen Graubard, Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind (New York: Norton, 1974).
15. Speech on January 12, 1954 (Department of State Bulletin, vol. 30, 107–110), http://wadsworth.com/history_d/special_features/ilrn_legacy/waah2c01c/content/amh2/readings/dulles.html. For background information, see Samuel F. Wells Jr., “The Origins of Massive Retaliation,” Political Science Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 31–52; Richard Immermann, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); or Frederick Marks, Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).
16. Speech given in San Francisco, September 18, 1967, http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence/Deterrence.shtml. For more on this, see Henry Sokolski, Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Washington, DC: Strategic Studies Institute, 2004), http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB585.pdf.
17. Walter Pincus, “Neutron Killer Warhead Buried in ERDA Budget,” Washington Post, June 6, 1977, A1. See also his subsequent articles in the Post, such as “Senate Pressed for Killer Warhead” on June 21, 1977, A2, or “Pentagon Wanted Secrecy on Neutron Bomb Production,” June 25, 1977, A1.
18. For more on this, see Clive Rose, Campaigns against Western Defense: NATO’s Adversaries and Critics, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1986), “Brezhnev Offer on the Neutron Bomb Accompanied by Threat,” The Times (London), December 24, 1977. The Soviet propaganda on the subject and much of the Western press reporting on the neutron bomb were exaggerated. Scientific American came to the conclusion that “the enhanced-radiation warhead promises to be neither the collateral-damage-free weapon that its supporters see nor the ‘ultimate capitalist weapon’ (destroying only people not property) that many people in peace groups fear.” Fred Kaplan, “Enhanced Radiation Weapons,” in Arms Control and the Arms Race: Readings from Scientific American (New York: Freeman, 1985). The original article was published in the Scientific American for May 1978.
19. For more on the controversy, see Vincent Auger, The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Analysis: The Carter Administration and the Neutron Bomb (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), and Robert Strong and Marshal Zeringue, “The Carter Administration and the Neutron Bomb,” Southeastern Political Review 16, no. 1 (March 1988): 147–174.
20. Tony Blair, speech on Iraq, House of Commons, March 18, 2003, House of Commons Debates, vol. 401, col. 762, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/debtext/30318-06.htm.
21. As Meyer points out, on page 113: “In stark contrast with the technological escalations that drive the arms race, Luke’s battles are fought with progressively less sophisticated weapons.”
22. There are a number of websites that support the idea that Artoo is the real hero of Star Wars. See, for example, http://kevinforsyth.net/weblog/?p=103, or http://boards.theforce.net/the_star_wars_saga/b10456/19722655/r19724406/. There is even a Facebook page titled “R2D2 Is the REAL hero of Star Wars.”
23. For more on this, see Elizabeth Cook, “‘Be Mindful of the Living Force’: Environmental Ethics in Star Wars,” in Decker and Eberle, eds., Star Wars and Philosophy.
24. “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” June 30, 1947. President’s Secretary’s File, Truman Papers, 36, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/pdfs/81.pdf#zoom=100.
25. The Italian general Giulio Douhet was one of the first to recognize the importance of air power for warfare in his book Command of the Air (Rome: Stabilimento poligrafico per l’amministrazione della Guerra, 1921, republished in English in the United States by the Government Printing Office, 1983). He warned that “to get an idea of the nature of future wars, one need only imagine what power of destruction that nation would possess whose bacteriologists should discover the means of spreading epidemics in the enemy’s country and at the same time immunize its own people. Air power makes it possible not only to make high-explosive bombing raids over any sector of the enemy’s territory, but also to ravage his whole country by chemical and biological warfare.” For the impact on Britain, see Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack on British Politics, 1932–1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980). See also Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Lee Kennett, The First Air War, 1914–1918 (New York: Free Press, 1991); and Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain
, 1917–1918 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
26. For more on this, see H. R. Southworth, Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
27. Stanley Baldwin, November 10, 1932 (Parliamentary Debates, Series 5, vol. 270, col. 632), http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1932/nov/10/international-affairs.
28. See, for example, Alastair Horne, To Lose a Battle. France 1940, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), and Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
29. Speech of Joseph McCarthy, Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950, at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6456.
30. For more on McCarthy, see David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). There has been a recent attempt on the American right, led by Anne Coulter, to rehabilitate McCarthy, and a number of books with this aim have appeared. For HUAC, see John Joseph Gladchuk, Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935–1950 (London: Routledge, 2006).
31. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966). See also Brian Murphy, “Monster Movies: They Came from beneath the Fifties,” Journal of Popular Film 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 31–44; Lori Maguire, “The Destruction of New York City: A Recurrent Nightmare of American Cold War Cinema,” Cold War History 9, no. 4 (November 2009): 513–524; Joyce Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Toni Perrine, Film and the Nuclear Age: Representing Cultural Anxiety (New York: Garland, 1998); and Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
32. January 17, 1961. The text of it can be found at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html.
33. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/military-industrial%20complex.
34. For a detailed presentation of popular reactions to Sputnik, see “The Impact of Sputnik I: Case Study of American Public Opinion at the Break of the Space Age,” compiled by Martha Wheeler George (Washington, DC: NASA, 1963), http://history.spacebusiness.com/sputnik/files/sputnik65.pdf. See also Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
35. R. W. Apple Jr., June 23, 1996, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/pentagon_papers/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=pentagon%20papers&st=cse. In June 2011, the complete text of the Pentagon Papers became available online at http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/.
36. Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997). James Curtis in “From American Graffiti to Star Wars,” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 4 (Spring 1980): 600, relates the film to Watergate. Stephen Paul Miller, in The 1970s Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), sees Star Wars as a reflection of the decade’s preoccupation with surveillance, noting that like Watergate, “Star Wars involves a struggle for tapes.” He also places it in relation to Vietnam: “After the Vietnam War, a credible war can only occur in the outer space of a distant future or past. . . . However, there is an ideological need for such a fantastic war.”
37. Will Brooker, Star Wars (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 81.
Part III
“Excuse Me, Sir, but That Artoo Unit Is in Prime Condition, a Real Bargain”
ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN A GALAXY LONG, LONG AGO
Chapter 9
From Slavery to Freedom in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Paul Finkelman
“I can’t believe there is still slavery in the galaxy.”
—Padmé Amidala, The Phantom Menace
Slavery is both a condition and an institutional arrangement.1 This was true in the ancient world, in the New World, and in the galaxy where Star Wars takes place. In the Star Wars movies, we find the public institutional operation of slavery, individual bondage, people in slavelike conditions, and examples of the modern state slavery similar to those created by totalitarian regimes in the middle third of the twentieth century. To the extent that Star Wars is a metaphor about human history and society, as well as a philosophical musing about humanity, it is not surprising that we find slavery in the galaxy, just as we find it in human history and in our time.
Although the substance of slavery has varied from place to place and over time, systems of slavery include most, or all, of the following conditions: people are owned by others and can be sold, traded, or given away; the status of slave is inheritable, usually through the mother; formal legal structures or informal agreements regulate the capture and return of fugitive slaves; slaves have limited (or no) legal rights or protections; and slaves may be punished by slave owners (or their agents) with minimal or no legal limitations, and masters may treat or mistreat slaves as they wish. Although some societies banned the premeditated murder of slaves and certain extreme or barbaric forms of punishment and torture, Rome, Greece, and other ancient cultures considered slaves to be “socially dead,” and thus it was not a crime to kill them.2 Masters also have unlimited rights to sexual activity with their slaves. Slaves have very limited or no appeal to formal legal institutions, they are not allowed to give testimony against their masters or (usually) other free people, and in general their testimony is not given the same weight as a free person’s. The mobility of slaves is limited by owners and often by the state, as well. Owners are able to make slaves into free persons through a formal legal process (manumission), but often these freed persons are not given full legal rights after manumission. Finally, slave ownership is supported by laws, regulations, administrative activities, courts, and legislatures, including provisions for special courts and punishments for slaves, provisions for the capture and return of fugitive slaves, and provisions and rules for regulating the sale of slaves.
A slave in ancient Rome combing the hair of her mistress.
In addition to formal systems of slavery, in the twentieth century massive systems of state slavery developed in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. In the 1930s and the 1940s, millions of people were forced into unpaid labor, not as chattels to be bought and sold, but as workers to be controlled by the state, working either for state enterprises or assigned to private work places by the state. In our own time, slavelike conditions have emerged for millions of people, usually migrants or refugees, who are exploited (often illegally). Most of this type of exploitation is found in the nonindustrialized world, but some people are also held against their will in modern, developed democracies, as they try to migrate to Western nations.
In Star Wars, we see many of these elements played out, including the buying and selling of slaves; the sexual exploitation of slave women; the torture and killing of slaves; the manumission of some slaves; and even free people accepting bondage as a way of moving or improving their lives, often with disastrous results.
The Universality of Human Bondage
At the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, the delegates had heated debates over the power of Congress to abolish the African slave trade. The debate was not over whether Congress could actually end slavery—no one imagined that possibility. Rather, the debate was over the power of Congress to regulate international commerce in general and this specific form of commerce in particular. Not surprisingly, the debate led to arguments about the morality of slavery itself. In responses to attacks on the slave trade and slavery, Charles Pin
ckney of South Carolina offered a spirited defense: “If slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” Citing “the case of Greece Rome & other antient [sic] States; the sanction given by France, England, Holland & other modern States,” Pinckney declared that “in all ages one half of mankind have been slaves.”3
Pinckney was mostly right. As sociologist Orlando Patterson observed, “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized.” Patterson found slavery in every “region on earth” and “probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”4 Many people are in fact the descendants of both slaves and slave-owners.
Charles Pinckney, governor and senator of South Carolina and defender of slavery, ca. 1800.
Indeed, while slavery in the United States is often called “the peculiar institution,” world history suggests that universal freedom—that is, an absence of slavery—is far more unusual. Slavery is one of the oldest known human institutions. Evidence of slavery is found in archaeological sites and in ancient legal records. With a few minor exceptions, slavery has existed throughout the world, in all cultures and societies. Slavery was one of the first legally defined statuses of human relationships and was justified in virtually all ancient legal codes, including the Mesopotamian, biblical, Babylonian, and Roman. An unsuccessful appeal for freedom by twelve Mesopotamian slaves more than 4,000 years ago is the oldest known freedom suit. Contract disputes over slaves and records of manumission date from around 2,500 years ago. Before the late seventeenth century, there were almost no visible opponents of slavery. Plato assumed there would be slaves in his Republic; Sir Thomas More provided for slaves in his Utopia, and John Locke saw no inconsistency between opposing inherited royalty and supporting a system where slaves inherited their status. To the extent that the Star Wars galaxy tracks human history, it would be hard to imagine that slavery would not appear on various worlds and even have the tacit support of those who proclaimed their belief in freedom. The first Star Wars movie—A New Hope—begins by telling us that there is a civil war “to restore freedom to the galaxy,” but as we learn in subsequent movies, slavery was always present in the galaxy and even in the Republic. This mirrors human history, where slavery has often existed in “free societies.”