Star Wars Episode III, The War on Terror, & The Wars To Come

Photo by Author: John E. Smith Wikipedia uploader was Mary Land Bay at en.wikipedia, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

On May 19th, 2005, “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” released in theaters. This year, it turns 18. The end of the once-much maligned Star Wars prequel trilogy, the film has seen a renaissance as the generation which first watched it has themselves now become adults. At the same time, the themes which George Lucas cleverly wove into the trilogy have grown clearer with age—and the very real-life warnings this science fiction movie proffered have become more prescient. After all, the central themes of the film — corrupt establishments, democracy withering from within while fake conspiracies from without are blamed, false ideological struggles — are all still painfully relevant today.

For those unaware, Episode III concludes the prequel trilogy with the collapse of the Galactic Republic into the Galactic Empire. But there is no climactic invasion which finishes off this fictional democracy: the “good guys,” the Jedi Order, are destroyed by Republic troops, and the Republic is willfully brought down by its elected leadership (one Chancellor Palpatine) to the sound of “thunderous applause,” in the words of peacenik Senator Padme Amidala.

Watching this as a child, it seems clear cut: the good guys have lost, and the bad guys have won.

But watching as an adult, however, some things stick out. Up until that point, everything Palpatine had publicly done was legal. He had legally stayed in office longer than his term, thanks to votes in the Senate, and had only acted on emergency powers given to him by representatives. But the Jedi, who have no role whatsoever in democratic government and have absolutely no evidence of illegality (they moreso acted as advisors and mediators), seek to remove him anyway. Essentially, unelected magical bureaucrats decide they’re going to end democracy “in order to secure a peaceful transition,” in the words of one. Later on, they outright admit that their primary motivation is survival of their own order, not democracy.

The entire conflict around which the movie is centered—the Clone Wars, a galactic civil war—is even used by conspirators (including Palpatine) as a set-up, merely to end democracy. Clones and droids — two disposable forces — are fighting in an ideological civil war instigated over a trade dispute which sees massive and very real collateral damage in the form of life around the galaxy.

We are not in a galaxy far, far away. But the similarities between theirs and ours are obvious—and purposeful. Lucas, writing in the midst of the War on Terror, understood then what many still fail to today: democracies rarely fall from outside. Yes, there is the historically occasional occupation from abroad, but such occurrences are historically rare. We treat World War II as if it were a mighty battle between democracy and fascism, but it wasn’t. Post-World War I, new democracies were formed throughout Europe, including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and of course Germany. By 1937—before Hitler began seizing territory—almost every single one of those states had become either dictatorial or openly fascist. And of course, when World War II finally did break out, the Allied Powers primarily consisted of one democracy (the US), one democracy with a gigantic and decidedly un-democratic empire (the UK), and one communist dictatorship (USSR). Democracies simply do not often fall to outside forces, and they sure do not fall to memes, no matter how many articles the New York Times writes.

So how do states collapse? Oftentimes, due to trade issues. Trade is arguably one of the major themes of the prequels, brought to its fruition in Episode III. When the prequels were released, the idea of trade negotiations being central to the plot was lambasted as boring and unrealistic. But Lucas was again correct: trade is what lights the fuse which brings empires and democracies alike down. They do not collapse wildly—it is often a slow burn.

While the Byzantine Empire fell in a climactic siege, the true collapse began over two centuries earlier—in a conflict with Venice over trade routes. But we need not look to the distant past for trade relevancy. Today, we have seen two successive—and soon to be three—back-to-back presidential elections where trade was central to the issues. Before 2016, complaining about trade would have seen you labeled a nut. After all, who cares about trade when history ended with end of the Cold War?

But perhaps the greatest lesson of Episode III is the falseness of certain black and white ideological conflicts. After all, the Clone Wars, instigated by very real feelings over a trade dispute, erupted into an entirely stage-managed affair by Palpatine, only with the goal of increasing his power.

If this 2005-era story does not sound familiar to real life, you’ve slept under a rock for the last 20 years. Lucas is reported to have written III with the War on Terror in mind, and it shows. After all, the film’s climax—in which Anakin Skywalker, now the Sith Lord Darth Vader, tells Obi-Wan Kenobi, his former master, “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy”—is a thinly disguised shot at George W. Bush’s “You are with us or you’re with the terrorists.”

But that framing—the War on Terror—has worn thin. Now, the Joe Biden administration is going bigger: a war on autocracy, which, instead of being centered on the Middle East can now be spread to…well, anywhere. You are with democracy—i.e., the latest progressive trends—or you are with fascistic autocracy. There is no in-between.

Lucas was of course not making the argument that there is no right and wrong. Far from it. The existence of good and evil—and the former triumphing over the latter—is, after all, the point of Lucas’ entire six-film Star Wars saga. To Lucas, “balance” in the Force is the elimination of evil. The conflict does not get clearer than that.

But the point of Episode III itself is that that very real conflict can be obscured with fake ideological strife. Our democracy will not be killed by a Russian meme. Our unelected bureaucratic class does not truly put democracy first. After all, they’re not elected; it wouldn’t be in their interest. And wars on ideas are not necessarily as clear cut as the framers of those conflicts would like you to think they are.

In response to Anakin’s “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy,” Obi-Wan responds with an unknowingly hypocritical, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”—which is itself, of course, an absolute. Even at the end, he failed to realize the hypocrisy of the Jedi Order and lost focus on what truly mattered.

In ending Episode III on such a note, Lucas asked his audience, in the midst of the War on Terror, whether they too had lost focus on what truly mattered. Now, 18 years later, as the Biden administration gears up to expand the war on autocracy to heights unseen, we must ask ourselves the same question.