Essay by Gluph Shiddo, Ph.D, Skulden Chair of Galactic History, People’s University of Marang

Historiography, both as a field and as a process, never stops; it is continuously moving. In ordinary times, this constant motion happens in the shadows of academia, out of the gaze of the general public. But these are not ordinary times. In a galactic metacivilization that is still very much in recovery mode after several generations’ worth of civil war (or, possibly more accurately, one very long multiphasic civil war punctuated by periods of uneasy peace in between its phases), a historiographic question elbows its way to the front: what was all of that? What was all that fighting actually over? To put it bluntly: was that a material conflict, or a spiritual one?

This is no abstract question! The course of galactic reconstruction hinges on the answer. Surely everyone who is simultaneously lucky and unlucky enough to have lived through any part of it (lucky in that they survived; unlucky in having had to experience it) agrees that “Never again” must be one of our guiding principles. But how exactly to safeguard against an “again” changes quite a bit depending on whether we are trying to safeguard against another material political crisis or against the return of what might be flippantly but accurately described as an evil wizard.

My good friend and colleague Dr. Stang Raxdor examines this question in admirable detail in this volume; while I might disagree on some particulars, I have great respect for her methods and work ethic, and I was honored when she asked me to add my own thoughts on the matter in this preface. And so I shall, albeit at a considerably more abstract and brief level than Dr. Raxdor.

A QUICK NOTE ON SOURCES

Historiography is, of course, a debate that pivots on two axes: sources and interpretations. The interpretive pivot is this entire preface (and Dr. Raxdor’s entire book); the source question is more acute.

As is often the case, lack of sources is not the problem. We have many; documentarians seemed to be everywhere during the chain of galactic wars, and new documentaries come out constantly, highlighting or recontextualizing this or that aspect of the conflicts. New print materials also make their way into the arena at a puzzling rate. There is no shortage of information! But not all information is created equal. Many of the documentaries are slanted or of dubious veracity or applicability. I’ve found it useful to base my analysis on a fairly small pool.

Although his work is far from perfect (and in due time I’ll be devoting much attention to questioning his biases), the big dog of the documentary world is George Lucas, working both alone and with his collaborators. Equally crucial, and serving as a necessary countering viewpoint to Lucas et al, is the stunning documentary work done collaboratively by the team lead by Tony Gilroy. Indeed, one could probably reframe the entire material-vs-spiritual question as Lucasian -vs-Gilroyist.

Troublingly, the documentary work capturing the situation after the fall of the Empire is of significantly more varied quality, sometimes contradicting itself to such a degree that one throws up their hands and wonders if any of it can be relied on (indeed, to air a bit of gossip from the faculty lounge, there’s widespread belief that at some point the academy will disavow en masse  the veracity of the First Order-era material entirely, particularly the later Abrams work). This is unfortunate, because that troubled second Abrams piece would, at face value, appear to tip our debate decisively in one direction; I don’t believe that material can be taken at face value, but it must certainly be reckoned with, and I shall of course do so in the course of this analysis.*

*To break kayfabe once and only once: in other words, this is all based on the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, Rogue One, Andor, and as much of the sequel trilogy as can be absorbed without shit getting completely bonkers. Although I like thinking about Star Wars, I’m neither a completist or a masochist, so I haven’t watched a bunch of the tv shows and I’m not going to. If there’s something in a Clone Wars episode that contradicts me, I’ll just have to live with that. I still think it’s worth thinking about this with my limited source list. Ok. Kayfabe resumed.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE: THE LUCASIAN CASE

Lucas and his collaborators were the first movers in the space of popular history of the Galactic civil wars, and as such, their point of view enjoyed a long stretch of weakly-challenged orthodoxy. Lucas’ initial three documentaries (two of them made in collaboration with Kirshner and then Marquand) capture elements of the mainline Galactic Civil War, the middle conflict in which the Rebel Alliance overthrew the Galactic Empire. Lucas is a scholar who deserves the massive respect he gets, but he is also a man with a point of view; specifically, the belief that history pivots on the actions of heroic (or antiheroic) individuals. His work conveys this unambiguously. In Lucas’ work we see a Galactic Empire that is nearly synonymous with a handful of powerful figures high in its hierarchy: Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and, increasingly, Emperor Sheev Palpatine. Similarly, in Lucas’ view the Rebel Alliance boils down to the actions of a handful of prime-mover figures, most notably Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Han Solo. To be sure, other figures do present themselves on both sides, but generally in support roles (one notable exception being the political leader of the Rebel Alliance, Mon Mothma, who figures much more prominently in the Gilroy materials).

Lucas’ approach makes the narrative easy to follow, of course; but it also, as his documentaries proceed through their sequence, appear to choke down the scale and scope of the conflict. Rebel heroes Skywalker and Organa are—shockingly—the offspring of Palpatine’s lieutenant Darth Vader. This is a matter of historical fact, but it also presents a smaller version of our larger conundrum: is this a political battle, or a widescale spat within the Skywalker family?

Lucas’ fourth, fifth, and sixth documentaries are concerned with the end of the Old Republic, the events bracketing the Clone Wars, and the rise of the Galactic Empire. They also center tightly on Anakin Skywalker and his slow drift into the service of Chancellor-turned-Emperor Palpatine, at which point he assumed the persona of Darth Vader.

And in these documentaries, as in Lucas’ first series, the accumulation of religious beliefs and practices surrounding “the Force” is of primary concern. Throughout his work, Lucas presents the conflict as one driven by the Force. Palpatine presents to the galaxy the visage of an anodyne politician from Naboo, but is secretly an adept to whom the Force grants supernatural powers; Palpatine uses his supernatural powers to “seduce” Anakin Skywalker, a member of the Jedi Knights, a group of warrior-priests who also gain supernatural powers from the Force. Indeed, in Lucas’ telling, the rise of the Empire is inextricably tied to the spiritual defeat of Anakin Skywalker and the other Jedi. Motivated by his beliefs in Palpatine’s power, Lucas shows Skywalker/Vader helping the Chancellor liquidate the Jedi, the paramilitary arm of the Old Republic, and declare himself Emperor.

It’s a matter of historical record that Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star, the Empire’s superweapon that represented an attempt to establish a new political order free of the last vestigial organ of the Old Republic, the Galactic Senate. Lucas, again, presents this specifically as a triumph of the Force, with Skywalker being supernaturally guided in his shot on the battle station’s thermal exhaust port. The record is, of course, clear that Skywalker did in fact turn off his targeting computer before shooting (and one wonders what the Rebel personnel back on Yavin IV thought of that, learning that this raw pilot who had been a farm worker the week before was engaging in that particular bit of bravado as a planet-killing weapon was bearing down on them); whether or not Skywalker’s shot was the Force, skill, or blind luck is an unanswerable question. Even Skywalker’s own testimony can’t be taken as gospel on this matter; all we know is that this is what he says he believes.

Even more tangled is the role of the Force that Lucas and his collaborator Marquand present at the Battle of Endor, which resulted in the destruction of the second Death Star, the deaths of Palpatine and Darth Vader, and the beginning of the endgame of the Galactic Civil War. The documentary presents, roughly, the following scenario: the Emperor is on board Death Star 2, which is defended by an impenetrable energy shield. A rebel strike team, which includes Luke Skywalker, is dispatched to the moon of Endor to disable the energy shield in advance of an attack on Death Star 2. Skywalker is captured and taken to DS2 to be interrogated by Palpatine and Vader. As they speak, two things happen: Skywalker induces Vader, his father, to turn on and assassinate* the Emperor; and the rebel strike team, working with local guerillas, destroy the shield generator and clear the way for the rebel fleet to destroy DS2, which they do.

*The alleged non-finality of this assassination is, of course, one of the many reasons Abrams’ second documentary is viewed as suspect at best and completely untrustworthy by some. Abrams’s material asks us to believe that Palpatine escaped certain death twice in the space of a few minutes; first when thrown down an energy shaft by Darth Vader and then second shortly after when the entire structure was destroyed. This would stretch credulity even if the rest of the material presented in the film was uncontroversial, which is very much not the case.**

**Abrams establishes that a person at Exegol claimed to be a resurrected Palpatine and to possess amazing powers; in my opinion, he does not in any way prove that this person is correct and truthful, and much of the surrounding material seems fanciful and contrary to everything we know about armed conflict in the galaxy.

Lucas’ editing strongly conveys his personal conviction that of these events, it’s the spiritual chain that matters. Palpatine and the Skywalkers are engaged in an essentially theological debate, and when the younger Skywalker convinces his father of the truth of his spiritual point of view, the Emperor is killed and—the film silently asserts—the other dominoes tumble. It is not an accident that Lucas ends his chronicle of the mainline Civil War with a spiritual reverie on the part of Luke Skywalker; in Lucas’ point of view, this was the crux of the whole conflict.

MATERIALIST WARFARE: ENTER THE GILROYISTS

Lucas’ interpretation of the sequence of events around the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire as an essentially spiritual crisis with farflung political implications enjoyed a long period of orthodoxy. But eventually a challenging viewpoint arose. First came Rogue One, Gilroy’s collaboration with Gareth Edwards to document the events shortly before the beginning of the original Lucas cycle; and then, in much more detail, a Gilroy-led team effort to create a docuseries examining in toto the rise of the Rebel Alliance and the zenith of the Empire in the five years before the battles of Scarif and Yavin, and, with them, the onset of the Galactic Civil War proper.

It is not our mission here to recapitulate the narrative depicted by Gilroy and his collaborators (no one reading this preface or this volume would be unfamiliar with them, one assumes); but rather to look at what these materials document. Because it is very different from the Lucas materials.

Gilroy and Co. show us a struggle that is almost entirely material, political, and non-supernatural. The Empire is brutal, but in material ways; it is ruthlessly punitive, both in general society and within the forced-labor crucibles of its prisons. It is rapacious in venues for its extractive industries. It is genocidal at both the cultural level (several episodes spend some time commenting on Imperial efforts to scrub the Aldhani people of their native cultural and assimilate them into the Empire’s economic engine) and the species level (an Imperial technician spends some time talking about how the extermination of an entire sentient species during an Imperial construction project yielded as a byproduct some horrific noises that were useful for torture!).

The Galactic Empire as presented in Gilroy’s materials is a political entity that is abhorrent in material ways. Emperor Palpatine is never visible, but his name is invoked often, and the Imperial officials we see doing horrible things can be presumed to be “working towards the Emperor,” acting in the ways they think would gain them favor with him. It is notable that in no cases do we hear them invoke the Force religion (although, to be fair,  in the Edwards collaboration, we do have footage of Darth Vader employing what appears to be Force-derived powers. But—critically—these actions matter only at the tactical level in a fight on a starship; they do not guide the larger course of Galactic history except in the most marginal and contingent way).

If Gilroy and his collaborators show us an Empire that does not need the Force religion to manifest as its malign self, much the same dynamic applies in their depiction of the Rebel Alliance. Gilroy’s proto-rebels and, eventually, capital-r Rebels are not Jedi or even Force training adepts; they are ordinary people who are disgusted or horrified at the Empire and work to overthrow it through the tools of espionage, small-scale direct action, and, eventually military confrontation. They seek to bring down Palpatine, not to restore the Jedi order. Their guiding document is an entirely secular document, the manifesto of Karis Nemik (one wonders if the Rebellion’s eventual turn towards at least mild Force religion—“May the Force be with you” as a parting statement to pilots setting out on a strike mission—would have been preempted by something more secular if Nemik had not been killed in action and had remained free to further develop a secular base of political theory for the Rebellion). Where the Force does appear in Gilroy and co’s materials, it is again not relevant beyond the scale of an individual tactical action, or as a dubious curiosity at a Rebel base.

Gilroy and his team show the rebels coalescing and then both succeeding and failing on a basically secular track, then. Palpatine is denounced and opposed, not as an evil wizard, but as a bad ruler who must be overthrown. And this overthrow is sought not through study of the Force, but through intelligence-gathering and military action.

CROSSING THE STREAMS

The emergence of the materialist Gilroyist frame of reference serves to throw some of Lucas’ material into a different context. Lucas’ first documentary, eventually titled A New Hope, depicts actions occurring directly after the end of the Gilroy team’s materials. Viewed through the Gilroyist perspective, a large, diffuse coalition of secular activists and agitators worked at great cost to establish a Rebel military and intelligence operation and used these combined operations to acquire crucial military intelligence about the Imperial Death Star project. Then a farm kid from the outer rim showed up at the decisive moment, helped to fill out a fighter squadron depleted from the just-completed Battle of Scarif, and managed to strike the decisive blow, with or without the supernatural aid of the Force. The New Hope footage is (mostly*) unchanged, but it tells a slightly different story with this added context; Skywalker is just one hero among many, and if he can strike harder than some before him it’s because he’s standing on the shoulders of giants, none of whom had anything of consequence to do with the Force.

*Subtle changes to different editions of Lucas’ documentary materials remain an ongoing frustration of serious historians.

And so now we come to the crux: which of these frames is the correct one? Clearly, they must coexist to some extent. Documentary materials from both interpretative streams unambiguously show supernatural Force-based abilities, so they clearly existed; but the Gilroy materials’ recontextualization of early Lucas provides a strong hint that the old master was letting his biases get the better of him when he moved the Force more and more towards the center of his documentaries.

Consider the hinge point of the entire question, the Battle of Endor. There is no question that Lucas’ footage is genuine; the man has detractors, but no one has ever accused him of fabulism. But a close examination of this footage as assembled by Lucas makes one question some long-held assumptions. As mentioned previously, Lucas’ crosscutting from the theological-debate-turned-melee in Palpatine’s throne room to the guerilla battle on Endor to the star battle outside the Death Star suggests a causal relationship between the three. But there is no proof here, only innuendo.

Clearly the guerilla action and the fleet battle are causally entangled; but, outside of the timing of some crosscuts, absolutely no evidence is presented that the spiritual action in Palpatine’s throne room has any bearing on the materialist action in the other theaters. Palpatine acts as if it does (and he may well believe it does); but 1) it’s in Palpatine’s interest to claim powers and influence beyond what he has (it’s clear that preemptive awe is key to Palpatine’s governing approach) and 2) Palpatine is shortly proven to be wrong about several things (most notably his belief that he has a supernatural source of information about the set outcome of these events, and his confidence that he has a supernatural hold on the loyalty of Darth Vader). Assuming a causal relationship between Palpatine’s death(?) and the Rebels’ military and then fleet successes grants his premise of spiritual power in a way that lacks any supporting evidence beyond the boasts of a man with strong incentives to claim influence he didn’t have.

In other words: questions of interpretation can never be conclusively determined. You look at the evidence, you read the arguments, and you see where your own deductions take you. It is clear to me—beyond question—that George Lucas thought he was documenting a spiritual struggle centered on two wings of the Force religion. But looking closely at his own materials through the Gilroyist lens, I believe I dissent. Nothing is proven beyond the fact that Palpatine said some things and exerted some Force powers that—consistent with other Gilroyist material—had no effect beyond the immediately tactical. It is entirely consistent with long-established documentary footage that the Rebel guerilla team would have brought the shield down and the fighter squadron would have destroyed Death Star 2 no matter what happened in the throne room.

So, then: I don’t argue that the Force religion is false or that its practicians are charlatans. And I don’t argue that it had no role in Galactic history; belief in the religion was clearly a motivating factor for both Skywalkers (albeit in different directions) and for at least some of the fringe lunatics who reconstituted old Imperial remnants into the counterrevolutionary First Order. But I do think that George Lucas, as revered a historian as he is, overstated its importance in Galactic history. And I think this is important as the Galaxy moves into the Third Republic phase and looks to end the ongoing cycle of violence. We can, should, and must safeguard against secular authoritarian political projects. The legislative branch must remain vital and decisive, and no chancellor should be handed dictatorial powers, no matter how tempting the circumstances might be. As for safeguarding against the return of an evil wizard (or even a charlatan claiming to be one), this is necessarily beyond the scope of a secular government.    

And with that, I invite you to dig deeper into Dr. Raxdor’s work and decide for yourself where you land.