Fascism = Imperialism: Comparative History Through Andor’s World

Empires are imperialist. So if the Empire is fascist …

The Deep Space Nine of Star Wars.

Tony Gilroy, the creator of Star Wars: Andor, has said in at least two interviews that the show’s portrayal of the Rebellion draws significantly from histories of the Russian Revolution; and along with others (like this one with Diego Luna, who played Cassian Andor, and this one with Denise Gough, who played Dedra Meero), these interviews show that there’s good reason to think a sophisticated, Left-leaning analysis of oppression and exploitation went into making this show. More than any other Star Wars media, Andor is serious about answering the question, What is oppression?

Of course, that’s all widely acknowledged already. The show has received tons of praise primarily because its depiction of fascism is so much better than just about any other in mainstream media — even, I’d argue, in most mainstream non-fiction works about historical and current fascism. So instead of spending the next 10 minutes further praising this show (which, admittedly, is tempting because it’s SO GOOD!), I’m going to try to fill a gap I’ve noticed in analyses of the show, and in analyses of fascism writ large: the similarities, often fundamental, between fascism and imperialism¹.

Corporatism in Colonial India

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor: a state and corporate partnership causing endless debt and war.

For a Leftist (like me), one of the pleasantly unique parts of Andor is that there isn’t just an evil government — a common trope in mainstream media that easily lends itself to (and is partly motivated by) neoliberal propaganda; there’s an evil corporation, too!

Preox-Morlana (Pre-Mor) is a corporation that, under the aegis of the Empire, governs the Morlana system. But after Cassian and Luthen Rael make a public and destructive escape from Pre-Mor’s security forces (effectively Morlana’s police force) on Ferrix, the Empire takes over governing the system because the corporation failed to maintain the profitable and passive status quo. As Maarva puts it in season one’s final episode: “We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone. … We kept their engines churning, and the moment they pulled away, we forgot them. … We were sleeping.”

This is an aspect of fascism that’s somewhat well-known; there’s an applicable phrase that’s often attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Granted, this quote is actually apocryphal — there’s no clear evidence Mussolini ever actually said it. But it does (over)simplify what he actually believed, as laid out in his government’s 1927 Labor Charter: “The Corporate State considers private initiative in the field of production the most efficacious and most useful instrument in the interest of the nation … the direction of which is the right of the employer, who has the responsibility for it … The intervention of the State in economic production takes place only when private initiative is lacking or is insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. Such intervention may assume the form of outside control, encouragement or direct management.” (emphasis added)

However, what isn’t well-known is that one of the best-known examples of these rules being put into action occurred not in Fascist Italy, but in colonial India. Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the British East India Company established its rule (known as the Company Raj), starting in trade and factory areas and eventually expanding, through typical colonialist methods (war and conquest, threats, corruption of local leadership), to cover the entire subcontinent. But after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (due to its scope — hundreds of thousands were killed, over 90% of them Indian — and historical significance, it’s sometimes called India’s First War of Independence), the British state² took over direct administration of India from the British East India Company with the 1858 Government of India Act. And for the next 89 years — some of Britain’s most profitable and powerful ones — the British Raj ruled over the Indian subcontinent.

Just like Andor’s Empire, the British Empire had held indirect control over the territory directly administered by a corporation. And when the corporation failed “the political interests of the State” by not keeping things passive and profitable, the Empire’s state intervened, taking over the job of “direct management.”

Karl & Karis, V.I.L(enin) & Vel

In at least one aspect, this show goes even further Left than depicting a corporation as evil and showing business and the state cooperating to oppress and exploit people. For about half a minute on Aldhani, it goes full tilt Marx.

Aldhani and Original Accumulation

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production …

Rosy indeed.

… These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”

In other words, in the majority of Marxian theories of capitalism and history, “primitive accumulation”³ is a cornerstone of how private property and capitalism get kickstarted from feudalism.⁴ Before gold or silver could be used to back up a national currency, the West needed to take “gold and silver” from the Americas; before office parks could be built on land previously occupied by Native Americans, “the aboriginal population” had to be killed or removed; before cotton and managerial techniques from slave plantations could be used in factories, Africans had to be hunted, abducted, and enslaved. As even Adam Smith, The Father of Capitalism, argued in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations: original accumulation was essential for transforming European feudalism into modern European capitalism. And it was done in less than three centuries, a fraction of the 1200+ years European feudalism had lasted since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Regarding Aldhani, another instance of real-life original accumulation is informative: the enclosure (sometimes literally, with fences) and privatization of land in England. According to David Harvey, today’s best-known interpreter of Marxist theory, original accumulation typically “entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat” — “a body of men who must work for others”, “reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings” (i.e. wage labor) in order to survive, as Marx put it in his economic history of England’s Enclosure Movement and early capitalism.

As Vel put it:

“Forty thousand Aldhanis all across the highlands. They were here for centuries, but it only took the Empire a decade to clear them out … Drove them [to] an Enterprise Zone in the lowlands. Factories, new towns.”

Freedom of choice: urban slums or rural starvation.

A landless proletariat forced into urbanization and industrialization. The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of the Empire.

20th- and 21st-Century Original Accumulation(s)

But this isn’t just relevant to 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Because no one ever said that capitalism arises everywhere all at once. It’s a social system — a part of a society. Therefore, it can, for example: arise in different places at different times; arise in multiple forms over time in one country — Britain, for example, saw agrarian capitalism, then later added merchant capitalism, and then industrial capitalism, and then finance capitalism; and even re-arise in parts of a society that were previously capitalist by using tactics like privatization and deregulation to repeal socialistic reforms made in those parts.

And as in the past, original accumulation plays a part. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Nazis took people’s land (settler-colonialism à la the United States) and “drove them” to centralized locations designated for laboring and production; whether the people (then or in the English past) were forced to go by guns or by starvation, and whether we call them labor camps or factories (or slave plantations), the result for the victims was the same: they had to go and labor, somehow fight back (and quite possibly lose), or die. Contemporaneous Japanese and Italian imperialisms — though sometimes different in important respects, such as in their practical implementations and ultimate goals (the stated ones, anyway) — certainly shared some similarities, such as in their economic motivations.⁵

But the most obvious real-world parallel to Andor’s depiction of original accumulation are Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Existing all across the former Second and Third Worlds (i.e. the “developing world” or “periphery and semi-periphery” in postcolonial studies), they mirror Aldhani’s “Enterprise Zone”. Often the most thoroughly industrialized and capitalistic parts of the countries in which they exist, their purpose is to enrich the country by promising foreign (usually Western, occasionally Chinese) investors high returns and low risk; and often, they deliver via extreme labor exploitation and oppression — as grimly demonstrated by the Foxconn Suicide Express in an iPhone factory in China’s Shenzhen SEZ.

SEZs (and their political-economic, imperialistic nature) aren’t even a completely new occurrence, either; in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, Western nations used military force and international law to coerce China into allowing them to trade and travel with and within it using specific ports, cities, and routes. The Western powers profited (economically and politically) far more than the Chinese people and government (though the government got some kickbacks), earning the associated postwar agreements and laws the moniker of “unequal treaties”.

So why would people go to the SEZs and become workers, putting up with imperial legacies and the likes of Foxconn? Well, they probably wouldn’t — if original accumulation didn’t force them to. It takes away the land of rural peasants, forcing them to move elsewhere to find subsistence; and it privatizes state and collective enterprises and services, leaving capitalism as the only game in town.

And when those are the only options the system offers you and just about everyone around you, why not Rebel against it?

“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

Plus, a Word on (Speculating About) Authorial Intent

The title of this section is more joke than honest belief. Perhaps the show’s creators intended for Nemik’s and Vel’s names to sound like Marx’s and Lenin’s. Or maybe, since Nemik is never referred to in the show by his first name, Karis, and always by his last name, Nemik, he was meant to be reminiscent of the Lenin-contemporaneous, Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary Nestor Makhno (i.e. NeMak). And maybe Nemik’s manifesto was meant to echo yet other revolutionaries. When he wrote that “[Freedom] occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly”, he sounds a little bit like Lenin writing, in What Is To Be Done, that working-class activism arises spontaneously; and even more like 19th-century anarchist labor activist August Spies, who said to the US court that sentenced him and six other Haymarket Martyrs to death:

“Here you will tread upon a spark; but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”

Really, though, I don’t believe authorial intent is all that important. (I haven’t written about it, but this video by YouTube video essayist Explanation Point approximates my general feelings on it; plus, it makes some good points about media criticism in general.) And I certainly don’t think Tony Gilroy is a revolutionary socialist (or even a Sanders-esque, reformist one).

I enjoy the mental exercise of deriving meaning from (among other things) a text — especially when that meaning is Left-of-Center in some way (anyone who has heard me rant and rave about 2018’s Black Panther can attest to that). And more politically, I think that meaning should be democratized in this way; we shouldn’t let anyone claim (or actually have) ownership over culture and interpretation. To quote one of the Left’s fellow-travelers: We shouldn’t let anyone tell us “what to think [or] what to feel.”

The Republic–Empire Venn Diagram

Well … Lucas is a Centrist, after all. Not the smartest bunch when it comes to using metaphors. Serious question, though: the Rebellion isn’t the Nazis, yes. But should we ever glorify anyone the same way the Nazis did? ’Cause glorification was kind of important to them, and that was a bad thing.

Continuity & Legacy

All that said, as happy as I am that there are plot points (like those discussed in the “Karl” and “Corporatism” sections above) that seem to be clearly Left-leaning (if not outright Leftist), the part of Andor’s world-building that I appreciate the most is that the governance and ideology of the Empire are explicitly shown to have roots in the Republic. In this show, as in no other Star Wars media, the liberal-democratic past of the Republic is prologue to the fascist present of the Empire. They aren’t diametric opposites; there wasn’t much “liberty” to “die with thunderous applause” in Revenge of the Sith because the Republic wasn’t much of a democracy. Rather, it and the Empire constitute a continuous statal-ideological entity.

For example, it’s continuous through some of its high-ranking officials — Wullf Yularen was a Republic commander who worked closely with Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars; now, he gives orders to the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) — the “worst of the worst”, as Bix Caleen puts it. And from the way the show builds up to a dramatic reveal of his identity, hiding his face in his first scene while we hear him speak to the ISB, it’s clear that the creators intended for this moment to be shocking and thematically significant. We liked Yularen in Star Wars: The Clone Wars; now, he leads the fascists who are hunting, torturing, and oppressing the people we like.

It’s continuous through its imperialism. The way the story presents the Republic ship, and the Republic as a whole, in the sequences from Cassian’s (Kassa’s) childhood on Kenari (his homeland) seems intended to feel colonial. They pose a fatal danger to Kassa and his people (one of the ship’s crew kills Kassa’s friend and leader, and Maarva and Clem take Kassa away from Kenari explicitly to protect him from the Republic — because it’s going to come and kill all the rest of them); and the Republic’s mining operation devastates Kenari’s environment, eventually making it uninhabitable. Mirroring the differences and similarities between the settler-colonialisms of fascist Nazi Germany and the liberal-democratic U.S.A.: it wasn’t as flashy or as fast — but Kenari suffered Alderaan’s fate before Alderaan did.

It’s continuous through its enemies and conflicts. Mon Mothma says to Tay Kolma, in a moment of pure honesty laden with character development and thematic weight: “[I appear to others as a Senator] fighting and failing to protect Separatist do-gooders and battle Empire overreach … The Grand Vizier has infiltrated my Separatist Coalition meetings.” This moment — clearly important given how it temporarily relieves a major character of their most significant obstacle, one they face throughout the entire season: constant, crushing secrecy and intrigue — also reveals some impressive and fascinating worldbuilding: the Clone Wars, like real-life wars (such as — oh, I don’t know — World War I), have an ongoing legacy. The causes and effects of a war don’t just cease existing when the war officially ends; “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means”, and clearly, the Empire’s policies toward the Separatists are no more friendly than the Republic’s warfare. The Empire is a legacy of the Republic; right now, the political conflict is just tilted more in the favor of this state entity than during the Clone Wars.

Why would Yularen serve both the Republic and the Empire? Why would indigenous peoples fear and suffer under both the Republic and the Empire? Why have the Separatists fought against both the Republic and the Empire? There’s still a lot we don’t know about these two things — policies, ideologies, internal workings, and more. We can speculate; for example, the fact that the Empire is still opposing the Separatists suggests that it and the Republic share an ideological preference for centralized, state authority. But over the past 45 years of Star Wars media, none of them — except, on occasion, for the non-canonical Legends and similar canonical works — have done much political worldbuilding, unlike Andor.

Regardless, though, the similarities between the Republic and the Empire and the implications of the foregoing questions indicate: 1) that these “two things” might be better considered as different administrations within the same state than actually different states⁶; and 2) that what comes next in Star Wars history — the failure of the New Republic (intended by its founders and leaders as the reconstitution of the Republic) to prevent the rise of the fascist First Order, ultimately culminating in the demise of this new Republic, too — was actually quite easy to predict. If we repeat ourselves, history will repeat itself.

Legacies of Anti-Leftism

Germany, 1918-’19. Yes, Germany, not Russia. What? You didn’t know Germany had an anti-WWI movement or that it started a socialist revolution that was essential for ending the war and democratizing Germany? Huh. I wonder why …

And so, too, in real life — for example, in Germany during the interwar period (i.e. 1918-’39, the period between the official end of World War I and beginning of World War II in Europe).

The Weimar Republic — Germany from 1919-’33 — was the predecessor to the Nazi government of 1933-’45. After having been a career military officer in pre-Weimar Germany and Supreme Commander of the Central Powers for part of World War I, Paul von Hindenburg became the president of the Weimar Republic from 1925-’34. Further mirroring Yularen, this military hero set the stage for the transition from the liberal democracy of Weimar to the Right-wing authoritarianism of Nazi rule. Though, actually, it’s more like he paved the road, and then shoved a gun in Germany’s back and forced it to march:

1. He appointed Hitler as Chancellor, putting the Nazis in control of the parliament.
2. He issued the Reichstag Fire Decree a month later at Hitler’s request, which effectively vested all state authority in Germany, which had previously been federalist, with the central government and its Rightist-majority parliament. The Decree also furthered his usual efforts to completely outlaw and suppress German socialism — the only real opposition to Rightism and Nazism in Germany for decades (more on that shortly).
3. He signed the Enabling Act of 1933 (passed by that Right-wing parliament) into law three weeks after that, using an established, completely legal provision of the (liberal-democratic) Weimar Republic’s Constitution to give Hitler and the Nazis the authority to unilaterally enact new laws — no president or parliament getting in the way of their rise to totalitarian power.

And finally, the Reichstag Fire Decree wasn’t the first or last time he (and, more generally, the political Centrists of the Weimar Republic) handed over greater power to Nazis in order to suppress the Left. Such an alliance was how the Weimar Republic was established in the first place: the reformist and Center-Left factions of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) purged the remainders⁷ of its revolutionary Leftist (i.e. anti-capitalist: socialist, anarchist, etc.) and anti-nationalist factions⁸ and helped Germany’s conservatives and nationalists — including the paramilitary “Freikorps” groups that eventually became Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the SA (a.k.a. “Brownshirts”, “Storm Troopers”) — politically and militarily crush the Left during the German November Revolution.⁹ And like the Weimar government before it, the Nazi government opposed Leftist groups: it outlawed all the other political parties by July 1933, beginning with violently suppressing the communist groups — the aforementioned Left which had been attacked over and over by the Weimar Republic (including having the Reichstag Fire blamed on them and being the first ones sent to Nazi concentration camps).¹⁰

With propaganda like this, who needs power and prisons? … Well, the Nazis did — because Germans still generally didn’t like them.

But then Hindenburg went yet another step further. Because the goal of Germany’s political and economic Establishment (i.e. figures like Hindenburg, the Army leadership, and the bourgeoisie) wasn’t to put the Nazis in power; it was to eliminate their own enemies — anyone who threatened their power. The Left did, the Right didn’t. Nazi rule helped them, and crushing the Party would’ve been a political headache; so they helped it.

Only, the Party wasn’t quite completely monolithic by 1933. It had a somewhat anti-classist wing¹¹, largely embodied in the Strasserist faction and, much larger and more powerful, the SA — which, by 1934, was disliked by just about everyone who wasn’t a Storm Trooper. Lest we forget, the Brownshirts were a paramilitary group — essentially a violent, fascist gang. The immense violence perpetrated by an actual military is typically more restrained by that organization’s internal, draconian discipline and its deference to state authority. But by 1934, the SA had grown into a political force unto itself:

• It, too, had internal, draconian discipline. But its role — the direction of its discipline — had always been to visit violence, terror, and disruption upon the Left and other enemies of the Nazi Party. Now — after crushing and killing Leftists to help set up the Weimar government, fighting and terrorizing them under it, and then helping destroy that government and drive all the Leftists either underground, out of the country, or into prisons and concentration camps — the SA’s learned propensity for violence was changing course. Fueled partly by habit — but also, at least as much, by economic ambition — they directed their violence toward (somewhat) new outlets, targeting and terrorizing pedestrians, police, even foreign diplomats. The Storm Troopers’ role — disruption — had started destabilizing Nazi rule now.
• It numbered over 3,000,000. The size of the German Army, forcibly limited by the post-WWI Treaty of Versailles, couldn’t exceed 100,000. Plus, they didn’t like each other — the SA was ‘the rabble’ loudly and publicly declaring that it should become the core and leadership of the German military, and the military (with its aristocratic leadership) was ‘the counter-revolutionaries’ protecting entrenched economic interests from the SA’s desired “second revolution”.
• And the biggest problem that every German leader still around, Nazi and Centrist, had with the SA: that aforementioned economic ambition. Particularly through its leader, Ernst Röhm, it had recently started calling for a “second revolution” — the “first” having been the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship — to redistribute wealth to benefit the (White) working and lower-middle classes. Not exactly music to the ears of Hindenburg and his rich and powerful friends — or Hitler and the other Nazis who wanted to enter and/or control those inner circles, not dismantle them. The SA had always been closer to being working-class and anti-capitalist than nearly all of the rest of the Nazi Party and its allies; in the past, their resultant dislike and distrust of it¹² had been vastly outweighed by their desire for an instrument of violence to use against the Left. And now that the Nazi Party was in charge, the SA was asking for the reward that all of that propaganda had promised them.

Hitler’s answer? On July 6, 1933, just a few months after the Nazis’ political revolution culminated in his dictatorship, Hitler cut down the chimeric dream of a people’s herrenvolk revolution that had drawn in so many: “The stream of revolution has been undammed, but it must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution.” And disillusionment brought dissent. As under the Weimar Republic’s pro-capitalist government, so, too, under the Nazi Party’s pro-capitalist government: the SA would not defer to state authority; the government had changed, but the state had not.

In a military, when those two aspects — discipline and deference — fall by the wayside in the face of the military’s determination to see its will done, a coup isn’t far from view. So, too, with the paramilitary SA — at least, from the fearful perspective of Germany’s political and economic Establishment.

And this ruling class — Germany’s major continuous element from even before the beginning of the Republic — wasn’t the only group who disliked the SA’s power. The leadership of the Nazi SS, ever since the organization’s creation back in the early 1920s (as the aforementioned buffer between the Party leadership and the “suspect mass”), had never liked the fact that the SA held authority over it. Heinrich Himmler, after he took charge, worked for years to change that. And he took every opportunity. He managed to increase the SS’ numbers from under 300 in 1929 to over 50,000 by 1933. On April 20, 1934, Hermann Göring transferred control of the Gestapo to Himmler specifically in order to weaken the SA and its influence within the Nazi Party. And then, the counter-revolutionary stars aligned — no all-encompassing conspiracy needed.

In June 1934 — after crushing and killing Leftists to set up the Weimar government, opposing them under it, and then helping the Nazis destroy that government and drive all the Leftists either underground, out of the country, or into prisons and concentration camps — Hindenburg and Germany’s Establishment issued Hitler an ultimatum: crush the next threat to their power — the Leftmost wing of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — or else Hindenburg would dismiss Hitler from his position as Chancellor and declare martial law, thereby turning over control of the government to the anti-SA, only-somewhat-warm-on-Nazis military.

Not exactly opposed to killing their political and ideological opponents, the Nazis once again took a Centrist-given opportunity and ran with it: less than 10 days later, in Operation Hummingbird (a.k.a. the Night of the Long Knives), Hitler and the SS (with some assorted friends) executed the requested purge (with a few more of their political opponents added to the list); dozens, potentially hundreds, of people died in just 3 days. “The [undammed] stream of revolution [was] channelled into the secure bed of evolution.”¹³

Knowingly or not, the SS followed the example set by the SA from 1918-’34: deluded by nationalism and desperately drunk on the propaganda spouted by fascist leaders promising to change things, they violently crushed all opposition to the Nazis — primarily to the benefit of Germany’s political and economic Establishment, which was what those fascist leaders wanted all along because if they weren’t already part of that Establishment, their primary goal had been to join it.

Even in the most nationalistic view (i.e. ignoring all the numerous and/or essential international factors and influences), the “stream of revolution” in Germany had always been the invention and property of all Germans; like the SA, the SS helped the Nazis retroactively claim it as their own. Because the last thing the Nazis wanted was for the people to realize that there had, in fact, been no revolution: Weimar Germany’s Establishment was Nazi Germany’s Establishment, minus the few bourgeois Jews and plus some Nazi leaders. The suppression of the November Revolution, the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act — real revolution had been dammed up over and over, crushing the only people who had actually been fighting for change. The Night of the Long Knives was the first and last time the powers that be even considered a Nazi a revolutionary — nevermind any Nazi actually being a socialist.¹⁴ And the fascists are more powerful for it; the ruling class knows who its friends are.¹⁵

“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges … We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with fascism.”

Anyway, TL;DR: a war hero of the Republic did more-or-less everything he could to hand over control of the state to a bunch of fascists — not least because whatever opposition he had (or didn’t have) to their fascism was outweighed by his (and others’) desire to work with them to crush his and his Republic’s ideological opponents. They say you can judge a person by the company they keep. Can you judge a government — really, a state — by which enemies it’ll do anything to crush?

Continuities of Colonialism

But even more than the Weimar Republicans, Western imperialism has provided the most obvious example of statal-ideological continuity in the real world. Indirect colonial rule centered on co-opting, adapting, and reinforcing existing indigenous power structures to facilitate colonial dominance. This tended to be cheaper, less unpopular at home (consider the backlash in the U.S. against sending troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), and — at least in the short-term — typically incurred less resistance from the colonized. It was adopted in many places across the former Third World by Western empires — particularly by Britain, which used it nearly everywhere (even in colonial North America, where Salutary Neglect constituted a version of it). One of the most infamous examples, though it’s not widely considered as such in the West, was in Rwanda.¹⁶

Creepy-looking? Yes. Historically accurate? Except for the guns used to get the African rulers in the boat — those are just out of frame.

To control the African territory that became the country of Rwanda, the Germans, and the Belgians after them, supported the colonial reign of the politically powerful pre-colonial Tutsi elites.¹⁷ And a not-insignificant part of this support was taking the lead in warping and racializing the indigenous perceptions — and practices — of ethnicity and the ethnic differences between the Tutsis and other Rwandans; in particular, the new Tutsi ‘race’ constructed by Western imperialism was positioned as superior to the Hutu ‘race’.

And then, 1962 — independence. But it wasn’t ‘African savagery’ or ‘age-old ethnic conflict’ that ‘suddenly, yet unavoidably’ resulted in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide of half a million to a million Tutsis (and some Hutus) by Rwanda’s Hutu majority. It was instead, argued historian Gérard Prunier, the failure of that “independence” to mean independence from the colonialism that had infected (to no small extent, created) Rwanda’s state and ruling ideology — ones that endured to 1994. That Genocide was the climax of the Rwandan Civil War, which was itself largely the result of: 1) Western imperialists’ machinations to consolidate their ongoing, neocolonial power in ‘independent’ Rwanda; and 2) the failure of the new government to break from the racialized (not “ethnic”), undemocratic structures and processes that had been central to the colonial government. Far from being “sudden” or caused by any inherent “savagery” of African biology or culture, the Genocide was largely directed and spurred on by that not-so-new (now Hutu-dominated) state; which, to gain more power during the instability of the Civil War while also avoiding Western ire, specifically chose to exploit only the most politically superficial and empire-blind¹⁸ memories of the oppression Hutus had suffered only one or two generations earlier (not “age-old ethnic conflict”) under the Tutsi-dominated, not-so-long-past racial–colonial state.

There was nothing innately “African” or “unavoidable” about the oppression and violence. Like the very concept of “African” — at least, in its restrictive, static, and demeaning formations — it was colonial, from beginning to end.

“Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” — some guy who got locked up in a jail in Birmingham

Legacy & Continuity & …

And so it has remained, all the way through to today; just like the world of Star Wars repeats itself again and again — dying ‘democracies’, imperial horrors — so, too, is ours. The rise of (neo-)fascism in (for example) the United States in recent decades has hardly been unfamiliar:

• Decades of Cold War McCarthyism and “bewildering” political moderacy has left Leftism catatonic and near death, as Red Scares and state repression did in the 20th century.
• Relatedly, this generation’s “Great” economic recession stirred up Leftist and (elite-backed) Rightist populisms; but the Leftist one garnered substantially more violent and repressive responses from the state and from moderates.
• The state supported anti-Left paramilitary groups in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) in fighting and suppressing Leftists, which (as with the SPD) came back around to bite it and (as with Rwanda) has contributed heavily to immense, continued suffering in the former Third World.
• And all of this culminated in the United States’ national government being led by someone who’s so far Right, even liberals eventually got around to opposing him (though only after more of their same anti-Leftism helped pave the orange brick road, again).

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

Just like during the rise of the Nazis.¹⁹

Conclusion

This essay is, by NO MEANS, exhaustive of all the fascinating historical references in the show. Just a few things I never got into:

• The Aldhani robbery to fund the Rebellion? Tony Gilroy took that straight from the chapters of a biography on Stalin that discuss how he and others robbed banks to help fund the October Revolution.
• The Empire’s use of prison labor on Narkina 5 to manufacture parts for the Death Star is reminiscent of similar arms-production practices in Europe’s African colonies during World War I, Nazi Germany, and the present-day United States.
• Dedra Meero’s character closely mimics Himmler in many ways, such as his exceptional organizational skills, his desire to tighten and centralize control of security operations, and his power plays against other government officials. Her desire to restructure and centralize Imperial security and intelligence operations is similar (in motive and effect) to both his reorganization and centralization of German policing, and the numerous similar reorganizations of the U.S. national security–military apparatus since World War II.
• Cassian is radicalized (i.e. becomes serious about the Rebellion’s anti-imperialist cause) due to his experience of working in and struggling against a factory-like environment on Narkina 5 — and, specifically, doing so as part of a collective of similarly-positioned workers. This connection mirrors the one between socialism and anti-colonialism that formed the popular basis for most of the Third World independence movements in the 20th century; and this character development — plus the fact that it didn’t happen earlier in his life, not until he went through this specific experience — pretty accurately demonstrates orthodox Marxist notions (questioned by many Leftists) about how solidarity and revolutionary consciousness develop among the proletariat versus the lumpenproletariat.²⁰

Similarly, I didn’t get into any of the show’s thought-provoking ideas about, and presentations of, how fighting against oppression actually works (or my criticisms of the show on that count). Among others:

• Mon Mothma’s counter-surveillance tactics and the ways she manufactures and maintains her public image.
• Luthen Rael’s information control — his insistence on always playing his cards close to his chest, to the point where he tells practically everyone around him something different about everything, so that he’s the only one who has all the information.
• The process by which Kino Loy — who’s both a manager of workers, and therefore has narrow interests contrary to theirs, but is also a worker himself — is radicalized. (And the possible thematic meaning of him being unable to reach freedom because he doesn’t know how to swim so that he can get there.)
• The Aldhani heist’s use of tactics that are typically considered “terrorism” or “terrorist tactics” (e.g. threatening to kill Beehaz’s wife and child to make him cooperate).

Instead, I simply wanted to use Andor as a jumping-off point from which to compare various historical examples of fascism and imperialism to argue that the two are — at least in the most significant ways — the same. Quite simply, I don’t see many works comparing and contrasting them at all. Besides the resources in the “More Explorations” section below, I couldn’t find any (especially recent ones) that explored and developed even parts of a comparison beyond the absolute most superficial levels (e.g. that both fascism and imperialism involved biological racism, which constitutes most of Hannah Arendt’s engagement in The Origins of Totalitarianism).

It seems that, even more so than the nuances and potential benefits of socialism or communism, the West doesn’t want to even consider that fascism may just be business-as-usual for the West. Which makes it quite difficult for non-Westerners and dissident Westerners to publish, write about, or even conceive of the idea.

Honestly, the essay above is itself rather rudimentary. I do believe that fascism and imperialism are effectively the same. But I refuse to be like Luthen, acting as though I can and should hold all the answers and all the cards; lord knows the Left already has too much elitism and vanguardism: more than none.

Fascism rises and falls, and rises and falls. And if we’re going to stop it from rising again, it would help to understand the enemy better — clearly, we didn’t after World War II, and it has cost the world dearly. In fact, it never actually stopped costing the world because fascism never actually stopped; as before and during World War II, it was once again outsourced to the non-Western world after the war, leaving the West free to just go on ignoring it — out of sight, out of mind …

“Fascism is capitalism in decay.” | “Imperialism [is] the highest stage of capitalism.”

… But never actually gone.

So all I’m trying to do with this essay is encourage constructive criticism and further discussion; not lead — just incite some questions, inspire some critical thinking. Y’know, light a spark of hope?

Well, this is me trying — it’s up to you to determine whether or not I do.

More Explorations of “Fascism = Imperialism”

• F@scism and its secret best pal, Colonialism
• Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire (my introduction to this idea)
• Imperial Boomerang Effect
• Let’s Remember How Dark Teddy Roosevelt’s History Was

Endnotes

1. For simplicity’s sake, in this essay, I use “imperialism” and “colonialism” interchangeably.
2. In this essay, I use the term “state” not in the sense of Texas or California — the states within the United States — but in the sense of an administrative authority. The beginning of this Wikipedia article, plus this section of the article, gives a sense of my meaning.
3. For reasons I can only make semi-educated guesses about, the standard English translations of Marx’s original German writings use the term “primitive” instead of, for instance, “original” (a term closer to the exact translation and less loaded with colonial and cultural bigotries). From here on, I’ll be using the term “original accumulation”, my preferred one.
4. In Europe, anyway — the source of most of Marx’s data. Over the decades, there has been lots of arguing on the Left about how applicable Marx’s theory of how a society changes over time has been and is to non-European societies, and even how applicable it has been to Europe itself during and after the mid-20th century; and there has also been arguing about what Marx himself thought about how applicable his theory was to societies outside of Europe. I’m not going to dive into that can-of-worms–filled rabbit-hole here.
5. Japanese fascism claimed it would liberate Asia from Western imperialism — “Asia for the Asiatics”, as they put it; sort of half-Monroe and part-Garvey. But, rather predictably, the potential for Hakkō ichiu — more generally, the potential for the idea of one group liberating another, (White-)savior-like — to authorize and even encourage enlightened absolutism made it a good cover and justification for imperialism. Which is hardly a new occurrence:
   >> the British (and others) played up and exploited The Spanish Black Legend and the slave trade within Africa to justify colonizing, respectively, the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Africa in the 19th century;
   >> Italian fascism claimed it would civilize and develop the peoples and territories it conquered — saying (almost like a warning, given that it was quite correct in regard to both its practice, and its propaganda) that it was emulating the Roman Empire;
   >> and the U.S. relieved itself of its “Burden” in Native American reservations, the Philippines, and all across the Third World — and still does so today.
6. See this link on the difference between a “government” and a “state” (taken from the previous endnote on defining “state”) for one useful way of conceptualizing this distinction.
7. By now, the Party had been fighting internally and rapidly losing members for a few years primarily because the reformist and Center-Left factions were also largely pro-World War I; the revolutionary Leftist and anti-nationalist factions, on the other hand, were (predictably) opposed to sending one lower class off to kill other lower classes for the sake of imperial glory and capitalist profits.
8. Barring the years of Nazi rule (during which it was banned in Germany), the SPD, Europe’s very first social democratic party, has been one of the most voted-for political parties in Germany — often the most — since the 1890s. It was established in 1863 with Marxism as its official theoretical foundation. “Social democracy” entered the modern political lexicon in the 19th century; particularly since the late 19th century, its meaning has changed: from (roughly speaking) revolutionary socialism/Marxism to reformist, parliamentary/democratic socialism to reformist social/New Deal liberalism. The SPD’s 1959 Godesberg Program is a useful example of the final stage of this transition; it formalized the actual, Rightward shift the SPD had been making since the early 20th century from, among other things, anti-capitalist and anti-war positions to reformist-capitalist and pro-war positions.
9. This same alliance continued these same violent and deceptive tactics against the same ideological enemy after the Revolution period, too, in order to maintain the Weimar Republic — and their rule with it. As mentioned in the previous endnote, the present-day ideology, character, and strategies of social democracy were coming into focus in the early–20th-century SPD, as elsewhere (in the United States, for example: the liberal Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party and its suppression of civil liberties and the Left in order to strengthen its pro-war position during World War I; and the New Deal Democratic Party and its empowerment of the FBI to surveil “subversives” and opponents of government policy, particularly the Left).
   ___Contrary to what many expect, social democrats don’t always side with socialists — particularly when they can gain power and/or side with state authority, instead. And in that Weimar Republic, maintained by an SPD-Centrist-Rightist alliance suppressing the Left, a leader of the SPD preceded Hindenburg as one of the Republic’s only two presidents and the SPD held a plurality of seats in the parliament throughout the Republic’s entire existence until the Nazis took over in 1933. Historians today generally agree that by siding against the Left and the Revolution with the old elites and the bourgeoisie — who had always been hoping to roll back the limited democratization that came with the Weimar Republic’s modern liberal democracy — the SPD doomed Germany to Nazi rule by instantiating the structural problems that led to it. Hence (plus other reasons, such as recent letdowns), today’s socialists typically consider social democrats conditionally reliable, Center-Left allies (at best).
10. The SPD, despite being the Nazi Party’s ally for much of the Weimar period (like the other non-Leftist political parties), was also outlawed; and before that, the Nazis used the Reichstag Fire to justify harassing, threatening, and arresting some of its members before and after the upcoming election — a precursor of things to come. Ultimately, the SPD was the only non-Right party left in the parliament when the Enabling Act of 1933 came along, and the only one that voted against it. Too little, too late.
11. “Somewhat” because it wasn’t uniformly, or even mostly, opposed to the existence of class inequality; only to the existing distribution of wealth. None of the Nazis were anti-capitalists or Leftists (more on this later). But if you consider the Party as being like a spectrum positioned entirely on the far-Right end of the political compass, then this was the part closest to the Left. Its Leftmost wing. (I say this with the understanding that: 1) The Political Compass immensely oversimplifies, and sometimes severely misjudges, political ideology; and 2) this is still giving that wing of the Nazi Party way too much credit. Again, more on this later.)
12. Hitler, for example, set up the SS specifically to avoid entrusting the safety of the Party’s leaders to the Party’s “suspect mass”, like the SA.
13. That “evolution” being the Nazification of Germany, spearheaded by Himmler’s SS. Done at the bourgeoisie’s and Centrists’ behest, cutting the SA off at the head and knees was a double victory for the SS. For starters, Hitler rewarded them by removing the SS from the SA’s control and making it answerable only to him, thereby enabling Himmler to enlarge and empower it without being restrained by anyone who might’ve feared its growing dominance. Building on that, the fall of the SA as the Nazis’ primary instrument of violence opened a power vacuum that Himmler and the SS not only eagerly filled, but also exploited in order to restructure Germany’s state apparatus to make it better serve the Nazi cause — nationalist ideology, political repression, territorial conquest, camps, and all. And all of this more agreeable to Germany’s continuous Establishment than the SA’s idea of redistributing wealth.
14. Similar to how everyone to his Right considers Bernie Sanders a Leftist, even though most of what he advocates is just present-day social democracy, making him just barely Left-of-Center. While he has said outright once or twice that he’s an anti-capitalist, his is a very gradualist, reformist, parliamentary socialism — socialist goals using a liberal-democratic procedure, in a sense. (Though I still give him credit for being much more populistic and anti-authoritarian than is the norm in a liberal democracy.)
15. Though no one should have to, we evidently do, so I’ll say it once more and explain the point as clearly as I can: the National ‘Socialists’ — even the likes of the Strasser brothers and Ernst Röhm — were NOT socialists or Leftists. Much of the propaganda they used to build their numbers was intentionally designed to superficially gild their sexist, nationalist, anti-Bolshevik, and pro-capitalist beliefs, activities, and policies with recuperated, disfigured renditions of socialist rhetoric (for instance, adding “Socialist” to the name of their organization); and the primary way they gained institutional power, and their priority once they took control of the German state, was violence and suppression against the Left — their sharpest ideological contrast, and their most dedicated opponents in the parliament and in the streets.
    ___“But what about Stalin? What about sexist manarchists today?” Yeah, those are good questions. Defining who is and is not a Leftist (or socialist or anarchist) is a choice each of us makes about what definition to use for “Leftism”. My chosen definition (really, notion) of Leftism is a bit vague, but it definitely aims for utopia: it partly draws on the pro-change, pro-equality etymological roots; it advocates abolishing kyriarchy, and organizing society along social-ecological lines (that basically means eco-anarcho-communism). And because it’s so idealistic, few (if any) people typically described as Leftists will perfectly fit my definition of a Leftist — which certainly includes me, too! But that’s a big part of what motivates me to rigorously question, and constantly strive to improve, myself: aiming for perfection is worth it because it’s a good thing to do; only my ego, not my ethics, cares that I (like anyone else) will never reach it: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
    ___So partly for historical reasons, and partly because I use “Leftism” to describe a goal far, far better than anything any of them ever aimed for, I see no value in considering the Nazis socialists. Do you? And regardless of the answer, do what I try to do and really ask yourself: why is that your answer, and what (or whose) goals does it serve?
16. All the facts for the following section come from this book (which also contains some of the same analysis), and from the (thoroughly researched) Wikipedia section on Rwanda’s history.
17. And, as in other cases of indirect rule, in exchange for the Tutsi elites’ obedience, the colonizers wouldn’t use their military and political power to depose them, and replace them with someone more corruptible. It’s important to remember that whatever contempt we rightly reserve for colonial collaborators, in the final analysis, it was the colonizers above them who held the power and used it to oppress all the colonized — collaborator and non-collaborator, upper-, middle-, and lower-class alike.
    ___Important because, today, we often visit that same contempt upon people we consider to be “one of us” because they occupy positions within, and take actions that support, oppressive systems and classes. They’re hypocrites, oreos and coconuts, female misogynists, and so on. I’ve done the same, even in this very essay! In the “Venn Diagram: In History” section, I thoroughly take Hindenburg to task for his role in the Nazis’ rise to power, and it’s largely because he was a Centrist; like all of them, past and present, he talked a big game about defending liberty and equality and democracy — and didn’t practice what he preached (even with how limited it was, being liberal-democratic ideals). He was a hypocrite.
    ___But he was also a person, influenced, pressured, and even somewhat controlled by established state and economic interests. He was a person — an individual living within massive institutions shaping what he could do, and even what he could think. People like him, whatever else they are and however understandably — even rightly — we castigate them for it, are just a symptom of the problem. They’re just people, coerced, blinded, and incentivized by a system that pits people against each other and oppresses everyone it can — because it knows. This web of socio-psychological relations is inanimate and non-human, yet dynamic; intangible and hidden, yet real. And it carries an insight — learned while it grew, across centuries of time and thousands of miles of space, into its current form; an insight that has become a cornerstone of its structure and reflexes: it knows that any hint of instability, at any level in the structure, could snowball and eventually bring it — the system — crashing down. “The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. … It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”
18. Carries the same meaning as “powerblind”, but specifically referencing the history and reality of Western imperial pressure and coercion.
19. If you’d like to further explore, and/or interrogate, this proposed connection between similar societal circumstances/events and the eventual outcome of fascist ascendance, I’d suggest considering the role of capitalism. Besides the support given by the capitalist ruling class to rising fascists (mentioned at various points in the “Corporatism” and “Venn Diagram: In History” sections above), according to Lenin, “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” Building on this, my theory (to significantly oversimplify) is that, including — but also beyond — the individual choices and agency of members of the bourgeoisie, fascism arises out of capitalism due to structural, systemic reasons. It keeps reappearing because the social system of capitalism, a similarity shared between the societies of Weimar Germany and the present-day United States — among others, like the ones that colonized India and Rwanda — actually resurrects it over and over again. And so, fascism will keep returning to haunt and harrow humanity unless and until capitalism is abolished (and replaced with socialism).
20. Furthermore, the fact that this character development hinges on him learning from taking the “one way out” of exploitative labor conditions such that he goes on to take the same “one way out” of imperial/fascist domination, suggests that there really is only the “one way out” of ALL oppressive situations: collective, revolutionary struggle.