United States Wars

Reading the novelisation of The Force Awakens recently I came upon a passage where Princess (aka. General) Leia Organa declines an invitation to visit the New Republic Senate, because there are too many factions that would quietly want her dead. As a character who has become part of an old establishment, now turned into a warrior and leader, the comparisons with Hilary Clinton are striking.

It sets me thinking as a further reminder of how, unwittingly or otherwise, the Star Wars saga has been a semi-commentary for the course of American political istory too. Back in 1977, the US was recovering from the humiliation and the trauma of the Vietnam war (that Lucas admits was an early creative influence), but within 3 years, the "feelgood" factor, whether phoney or otherwise, spread its way from the culture of Star Wars into American politics. The subsequently elected president, Ronald Reagan, also declared the Soviet Union to be an "evil empire" and announced his Strategic Defence Initiative, quickly dubbed by the press, "the Star Wars strategy."

This was all of its time when Star Wars was still very much part of the zeitgeist, but the parallels with history continued: in 1999 out came The Phantom Menace, with its tale of an old Republic threatened from without (and within) by sinister forces and a seemingly unknown enemy - within 2 years the Republic of the United States was attacked for the first time on its own mainland in Washington and New York. When the second Star Wars prequel came out in 2005, Lucas reciprocated the eerie historical similarity, by showing the Jedi temple ablaze, in an echo of New York on September 11th (above).

We now have the reestablished Republic (in Star Wars) now under threat from a new sinister "First Order", with a new tyranny also threatening the United States, so the parallels look like continuing for a while yet.