The Galactic Empire Is Actually Bad, You Guys
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to Jonathan V. Last’s 2002 article “The Case for the Empire.” I read it, and then Last’s recent follow-up, “Decline and Fall of the Empire,” which quotes heavily from Ben Domenech’s “The New Star Wars Trailer, Analyzed”—which has the much sexier subtitle “Empires don’t just disappear, baby” (although the “baby” feels … forced). This is a response to those three articles in particular, but also to the broader “the Empire is actually good” school of Star Wars interpretation.
The short version: they’re wrong.
The longer version is below. Rather than take a line-by-line approach, I’ve addressed the two sources of Last’s and Domenech’s various wrongnesses. First, they have an appalling political philosophy. Second, they don’t know how to critically analyze fiction.
“Nasty, brutish, and short”—like the Ewoks
At the root of arguments for the (Galactic) Empire is Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, his most famous work, was published in 1651, at the end of the decade-long English Civil Wars and the beginning of the decade-long, increasingly-unpopular Protectorate. Hobbes was a staunch monarchist, and Leviathan’s central thesis is that absolute monarchies are the best possible form of government.
The argument goes something like this. Life for humans in the state of nature — that is, without government — is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” because, when everyone is equal, anyone can kill anyone else: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.” Nothing can get done when anarchy reigns: “in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. And therefore, as long as this naturall Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man.” People in such a state, then, with “foresight of their own preservation,” bring about “the introduction of restraint upon themselves” — and this, in turn, requires “the terrour of some Power” to enforce, because “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” So people in the state of nature have to appoint a sovereign who can enforce order:
“The only way to erect such a Common Power … is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will … and therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgments to his Judgment. … …he that carryeth this Person, is called SOVERAIGNE, and said to have Soveraigne Power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT.”
In the state of nature, everyone is a sovereign, because anyone can exercise the power of life and death over anyone else — and, because there is no law without a lawgiver, this is totally fine. Might makes right in the Hobbesian state of nature. Here’s the problem, though: in Hobbes’s commonwealth, might still makes right, because the sovereign is still in the state of nature. The people banding together to renounce their ‘natural rights to everything they can take’ appoint a sovereign by ‘conferring on him [and it’s always a dude, for Hobbes] all their power and strength’ — that is, their power to injure or kill anyone, at any time, for any reason, without repercussion. A Hobbesian sovereign is able to maintain order because he is above and outside the law; Hobbes specifically and repeatedly asserts that a sovereign’s subjects cannot accuse, impeach, or remove him. The sovereign’s power is absolute.
Hobbes wanted a sovereign strong enough to keep people in line, because he thought that people were, at heart, violent anarchists. He saw no middle ground: either absolute order, or total chaos. Last and Domenech agree. Here’s Last, from 2002: “The Empire doesn’t want slaves or destruction or ‘evil.’ It wants order.” (Let’s ignore, for the moment, that Last’s evidence for this assertion is Vader’s attempt to turn Luke to the Dark Side so that they can overthrow the ‘legitimate’ sovereign and establish an illegitimate government in his place.) Last then admits that the Empire can sometimes be “brutal” in its enforcement of order, citing the deaths of Owen and Baru and the destruction of Alderaan as examples. He argues that the executions of Luke’s aunt and uncle were justified, because they were traitors (an assertion that can’t be supported with textual evidence). Last’s defense of the destruction of Alderaan is more serious, and worth looking at in more depth.
Here’s Last’s defense of planetary genocide:
“…since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia. Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.”
The parallels to real-world arguments for bombing Middle Eastern countries from which terrorists sometimes happen to come should be obvious — if it isn’t, you’re not paying attention. Essentially, the potential — unproven — existence of some ‘enemies of the state’ within a certain population justifies the elimination of as much of that population as the sovereign deems necessary to eliminate the threat. Preemptive strikes with high collateral damage: business as usual. Also, note the subtle way Last positions the Empire — which controls the galaxy and commands limitless resources — as morally superior underdogs, “engaged in a fight for survival” against a much smaller, much weaker foe.
Domenech, ostensibly analyzing the third trailer for The Force Awakens, reads “the revived Sith and their authoritarian aims in context as an expression of galactic Putinism in an era of anarchy”:
“The rebellious fools with their ancient weapons and bizarre belief systems slaughtered soldiers and smashed the state to make another misguided attempt to let the universe spin according to their ideals of ‘democracy’ — and all it did was send the universe once again spinning toward the desolation it will always have absent the assertion of order at the end of a blaster.”
Again, we see in that last clause the belief that the only way to maintain order is with overwhelming violence. At what point does this become a justification of, say, bullying in the workplace, or child abuse? It’s already a justification of police brutality. And Domenech seems happier about the need for some brutality than Last — almost gleeful, even, as he ends with: “The Empire is back, baby, and it’s going to show these hippies who’s boss.” Dissent and pro-democracy agitation are to be met with state violence; a boot stomping on a human face forever, &c. (Also, “hippies”? Calling the members of the Rebellion/Resistance “hippies” is functionally equivalent to calling, like, Alexander Hamilton a hippie — it doesn’t make any sense.)
Jonathan Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard (where both of these pieces were posted); Ben Domenech is co-founder and publisher of The Federalist (same). Both of these guys, that is, are staunch neocons with libertarian leanings, ostensibly in favor of small government and individual liberties. It should seem contradictory that they’re arguing for the Galactic fucking Empire, a sprawling bureaucracy that doesn’t give two shits about the people it rules. (Both of them seem oblivious to the fact that they’re rooting for the British against the American revolutionaries.) But the dirty secret of contemporary neocons and libertarians — maybe it’s not a secret, I don’t know — is that they’re all Hobbesian at heart, yearning for a strong sovereign to put everyone in their places and keep them there. If you look at it from the right direction, after all, an Empire is the smallest possible government, because it’s just one person.
Parlez-vous Bocce?
Last and Domenech’s other problem is that they’re bad readers.
The tricky thing about Last’s “Case for the Empire” is that it’s almost convincing. It was probably more almost convincing in 2002, right after Attack of the Clones was released, which explains why Last is still the go-to pro-Empire apologist. In his defense, sort of, there’s no way anyone could have really known at that historical moment how poorly the original trilogy and prequel trilogy would fit together. Here’s the thing, though: they don’t work together. Like, at all.
A digression into the history & current state of the Star Wars canon is necessary, and I’m going to sacrifice lots of detail for the sake of brevity. Before Disney purchased Lucasfilm, there was a complex and convoluted system of “canonicality” which organized all the various pieces of the Expanded Universe (novels, comics, games, &c) into levels of truthiness. The original trilogy — and, later, the prequel trilogy — trumped everything else. Disney simplified things by getting rid of everything but the six films and the two TV series, Clone Wars and Rebels. The novel A New Dawn, published in September 2014, inaugurated a new EU which — and this is crucial — is a ‘flat’ canon, wherein nothing is more canonical than anything else. Well, mostly flat: the six films are “the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.” The problem, as I said above, is that the two trilogies don’t align with each other. The details of this incompatibility have been written about elsewhere: Aaron Diaz (who does the amazing webcomic Dresden Codak) has several thoughtful posts about this, and Donna Dickens recently explicated Obi-Wan’s terrible tactical decisions. I will only add that the case for the Empire and against the Jedi can only be made by using the prequel trilogy as evidence, which requires privileging it over the original trilogy everywhere the two sets of films are in disagreement.
(There’s a second digression here, which I’m not going to take, except to say that George Lucas was only part of the creative team behind the original trilogy — Empire and Return had other screenwriters and directors — but he had complete control over the prequels. Last’s appeals to Lucas’s ‘original intent’ are therefore problematic, to say the least.)
None of this helps Last, however. His pro-Empire arguments are, as I said, almost convincing — until one looks at his evidence. Recall that he justifies the Empire’s destruction of Alderaan primarily because Leia lies to the Empire both about her mission and the location of the rebel base; and since she lies, the Empire — and, by extension, we the audience — should mistrust everything she says. But Last takes Palpatine at face value! When Palpatine says that the Galactic Senate has “no interest in the common good,” Last would have us believe that Darth Sidious, who orchestrates a protracted and bloody civil war in order to seize Imperial power, does have the common good at heart? Bullshit. When Padmé laments that “the Republic no longer functions,” she does so because Palpatine is fucking things around, laying siege-by-proxy to his own planet. Every word he says without his Sith hood on — and most of what he says with it on — is a carefully calculated lie, and Last accepts them without question. He does admit that Leia’s lies are “perfectly defensible [because] she thinks she’s serving the greater good” — so perhaps his acceptance of Palpatine’s lies is similarly defensible. But Leia’s lies made her unreliable, which made the murder of millions totally fine; Palpatine’s lies, then, would make him unreliable, justifying the destruction of the Death Stars, no?
Last’s “Decline and Fall of the Empire” is largely unremarkable — most of it is quotation from other articles. Two things are worth noting: the first is that Last concludes by doubling down on “The Case for the Empire,” which is why I’ve taken so much time responding to a blog post older than my teenage daughter. The second is Last’s claim “that over the last decade or so, all of the intellectual energy in Star Wars has been on the side of the Empire” — by which he means, apparently, two blogs written by people totally unconnected with Lucasfilm. He makes absolutely no mention of The Clone Wars, Rebels, or anything from the EU—such as the Darth Bane novels, which actually do some serious work justifying the Sith and the Rule of Two. This oversight demonstrates a level of intellectual laziness that I find inexcusable.
Domenech’s analysis of the third Force Awakens trailer is sloppy, and I’m only addressing it because he’s attempting to apply Last’s pro-Empire rhetoric to the new film before it’s even out, when we know almost nothing about it. His first point is that “the galaxy doesn’t care about you,” because nobody is important enough for other people to care about, or something. I have a hard time understanding what argument he’s making about the trailer, because most of this section is a thinly-veiled rehashing of tired complaints about millennials: “This is the problem with thinking every story is about you. … Only you think of yourself as the protagonist of reality. The galaxy does not care about you.” This raises an obvious question: who in this trailer — or, really, in the original trilogy — ever claims to be the “protagonist of reality”? Palpatine, sure, and Kylo nothing-will-stand-in-our-way Ren—but the Rebellion (and, one assumes, the Resistance) is full of people who recognize that life is a team effort. On a more basic level, Domenech seems not to understand that narratives generally have central characters, because protagonists and antagonists help give a story coherence. Being the “hero” of a particular story doesn’t mean, and never has meant, that you’re the hero of every story. The Star Wars films have focused on the Skywalkers thus far not because they’re the most important family in the galaxy, but because their story is interesting (well, Luke’s parts, anyway) and because it allows the storytellers to explore a larger narrative world.
Domenech’s other argument essentially recapitulates Last’s “the Sith are the ones enforcing law and order” argument, which I feel I’ve thoroughly addressed above. This section makes a cursory reference to the trailer — Kylo Ren’s “I will finish what you started” — before embarking on a screed that somehow compares the destruction of the second Death Star to a hypothetical second attack on Pearl Harbor. The more I read it, the more exhausting I find it. I’m walking away, shaking the dust off my feet.
“APPLECART IN SUMMARY”
The Empire is actually bad, which is what most of us thought all along. People who think the Empire is good would prefer to live under a dictator whose senior staff destroy planets full of innocent people in order to keep other planets living in fear, because fear makes people easier to control. They also think that The Phantom Menace is a better film than The Empire Strikes Back, and cannot be trusted.
The simplistic ‘good v. evil’ dichotomy that runs through much of Star Wars does get old, so I can sort of understand the to impulse to make things more nuanced — but what Last, Domenech, and all the other pro-Empire apologists are engaged in is just a reversal, which doesn’t actually add any depth or complexity to the moral framework of Star Wars. You want a more nuanced take on the Empire? Read Claudia Gray’s fantastic Lost Stars, part of the new canon and one of the cornerstones of the “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens” lineup. It convincingly demonstrates that good people can be part of — and committed to! — the Empire, while also showing that the Empire is evil in ways that are more pervasive, insidious, and mundane than just trying to quash a democratic uprising.
Because, really — one more time — the Empire is actually bad.
