You were right...tell your sister you were right.

More about Star Wars and Nazis

Have you ever noticed that during the final battle of Return of the Jedi, after one of the bad guy’s ships gets shot down and runs into one of the good guy’s ships, Lando says “Looks like they’re heading for the medical frigate.”? What would such a medical facility treat you for? Being blown up? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I know, we’ve talked about Jung and Star Wars a recently, but still, it is a good topic because a whole generation grew up to know who was good and who was bad based on how good they looked in dressed in black.  Johnny Cash Ethics? The Emperor looked weird and kinda fat, Vader looked awkward and stunted, whereas Luke just looked freaken cool.

Yeah, I know, another lame post about identity and personality...well I wrote a novel, my first, a few years back now and while it had been on my bucket list for a while, the framing point of it came one sunny Sunday afternoon in Sunnybank Hills, pushing a pram and listening to the week’s pod-downloads. On one of them was an interview with a philosopher turned House of Lords Politician speaking about Sartre in an informative and nice way, but she made the most bizarre claim towards the end of the interview: that Sartre, Derrida and their ilk became “deliberately obscure”. I’ve heard this claim before and all, but she painted it to that wonderful Sartre statement that “Existence precedes Essence...Whatever that means...” she stated.

I was horrified. I rushed home and wrote this weird little story about music that afternoon, which spurned into a novel over the following few months.

Existence precedes essence. That’s just freaken cool. You get to choose who you are. You get to be before you get to decide. Isn’t that a wonderful dream?

So the question of identity. Does one get to choose their essence and what is the effect of this on their freedom, on their very humanity?

One thing that has always puzzled me about Star Wars is why the Dark Side of the Force call themselves the ‘Dark Side’. From their point of view, if they truly saw themselves as being part of the correct understanding of the use of the force, wouldn’t they just refer to themselves as the Force, and the Jedis would be the scrawny side of the force?

Darth Vader as a character is most pertinent at this point as he was both at different times. In the first movie, nothing much is known of Darth Vader apart from a brief description by Obe-Wan describing him as the person that killed Luke’s father, Anakin. Vader’s actions in the movie are portrayed as irrational, yet exceptionally strong and courageous. His understanding of being correct is solely concerned with a natural order to things that he is in line with; the Force. While choking one of other bad guys, he is reprimanded for acting irrationally, immaturely almost, and apologises. He represents the epitome of fear and dread in all who deal with him, a role that continues through the trilogy, except for Luke’s latter dealing with him. It is essentially Luke’s tuning in to this irrational course of action, in very similar vein to his father, which results in the good guys winning.

Also mention must be made of Han Solo’s intervention, a very irrational act that lands him in hot water later on, but is true to the understanding of who he sees as himself through the eyes of the very lovely Princess Leia.

In the second movie, Vader’s character completely changes. He is passionate, quite orderly and his potential association with his long lost son is a source of pride and angst for him. We see him understand things and pre-empt things that the Emperor does not, or cannot.

As he describes it, the dark side of the force is the true nature of the force and is also considerably stronger. This may be two points, or it could be the same point. As there is no considered discussion on this point, it leaves open the question that the dark side of the force is either the better side due to a truth it perceives and/or it is the better side solely because it is stronger. However one must be careful here to understand good as being anti-strong. This is hard to console with the idea of an all-powerful deity.

In the second movie, there are the beginnings of references to qualities like anger and fear being powerful tools for the human mind; however, these are also the path to the dark side as proclaimed by both sides of the force. Yoda, Obe-Wan, Vader and the Emperor all hint at this. 

The reason as to why the good guys win in the final movie is firstly due to the same point as in the first movie, but rather than Han Solo, it is Vader who has a reassociation with his son via his own perception of an internalised other. He acts completely irrationally, using emotion over fear as it were. Or at least he acts in line with the person who he thinks he should be in the eyes of his kids. His relationship to what is good is redefined and it is his relationship with his son that wins out against the dark side. There was still ‘good’ in him “...your were right...tell your sister you were right.” Quite disgustingly we see in the final scenes a Vader then is weak and useless...but good.

In the final movie, the character of Luke changes completely. Not only is he now wearing black, he goes from a definite wimpy and rationally composed character to a cold and emotive warrior. He changes without blinking as it were, from attempting to bargain with Jabba for the life of his friend to merely recognising that there is no existing relationship left, and killing everyone except for his friends. Is he still a good guy by doing this? He is now the epitome of strength, facing crippling odds and does not even flinch. His enemies now appear more an inconvenience than a real threat.

But the most important occurrence is the supposed final battle between good and evil, between the dark and the not-so-dark sides of the force. Luke defeats his father by becoming angry, but then controlling that anger at the most opportune time. It is Vader’s recognition of a similarity between his scars and those of his son’s that forms a certain empathy, which is then described as not having all the good drawn out of him by the dark side. So good, in Vader’s eyes, is only the want to repel the ever-present evil.

Most notably to bring out this point further is the actions of the Emperor in tricking the good guys to pit the two armies directly against each other in a way that the stronger side will easily win. Then it seems that either the stronger did not win, or that the Empire was not the stronger. The two questions that concern us are; does the stronger side always win and what makes the good guys into the good guys and the bad guys into the bad guys outside of issues of strength?

 

But how do we, as people, attempt to understand whether we are good guys or not? Put yourself in the shoes of one of the Imperial troops for a minute. It must have been a common occurrence for Imperial troops to ask themselves this, to look at their uniforms, they sort of look bad, Russian or Chinese almost; then look at the colours that people have painted their ships, not to mention that the big one is called the Death Star, rather than the Groovy Star, Star of Hope or something like that. They would have to notice the fact that they are being lead by a weird robot dude that chokes everyone, and a weird old guy in a black cape who laughs in a sniggering way.

Wouldn’t you, in this situation, ask yourself, ‘Hey, I’m not a bad guy am I?’? But in the Star Wars movies, the troops who asked themselves this question would have to also understand that they outnumber their commanders by tens of thousands. So regardless of whether you’re an evil-robot-choking-everyone kind of bad dude, or whether you’re a black-cape-wearing, lightning-out-of-your-fingers kind of bad guy, the real source of your power comes from the inability of people to examine their lives and their roles in the situations that face them. True power isn’t their ability to use ‘the force’; it is in the minds of the people they are oppressing. As Malcolm X said, the most valuable tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Perhaps a huge part of the Nazi rise to power and the war that resulted was the German people’s Christian belief in ‘giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, giving to God what is God’s,’ In this context, it is in not realising who their leaders were and where they were being led. Too many people see this as something belonging to the ghosts of Christmas past, but we would do well to always assume that this can happen, that this indeed is happening right now, all the time. This, of its own rationality is a weakness, a failing of the worst kind.

So to come back to the main point; what makes the bad guys bad? What makes the good guys so good? What makes the Nazis bad and the allies good? In the end, in both situations, the good guys win, without favour, from way behind, in a way that they really should have lost big-time. The only explanation that we are given in Star Wars is that the Emperor is overconfident, and that is his weakness, but this then eludes us back to the point where strength, or at least winning equals good, and weak or losing equals bad. God smiles on ‘the right’ to make them victorious. The problem with this is that it only happens when God exists. Thankfully, to come back to real life, we can sort out a reason as to both why the Nazis were bad, and why they lost.

Maybe one could just review the concept that Hitler belonged to the wrong century. Compare the actions of Hitler with that of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great or William the Conqueror. Is there really much of a difference in what these people did and how? Do you think that it is just that we are too close to Hitler today to remove ourselves from it? Everyone can still lay claim to having a relative, acquaintance or close association to someone who was directly harmed by the actions of the man.

With hindsight, especially given that at the time, maybe the difference is that Hitler wrote out what he was going to do and why. Perhaps this is the source of the fascination with him. It is also amazing that the political leaders of the west didn’t really take any notice until it was really too late.

The rationality of strength, that good equals strength equals winning, which allowed the rise of the Third Reich can also be seen as its undoing. It can be seen as a great comfort to the end of Modernism, and the beginning of Post-Modernism that cultures of violence and injustice such as the Third Reich fail by their own hand, hoisted on their own petards. They should have realised that the English academics had broken the Enigma machines, they should have realised that the English had a working radar system and they should have realised that the Red Army weren’t being beaten that badly. It is, as it were, necessary to an unjust system that it contains the seeds of its own destruction: violence, decentralisation and deskilling.

The main element that Hitler brought to the table in warfare was the Blitzkrieg, lightning war. The Red Army had time to respond to this: the scorched earth.

The Red Army were engaging the Nazis and essentially allowing them to break the line, but then retreating very quickly. The Nazis didn’t expect the Red Army to last long against them, and made huge advances into the USSR very quickly. The problem was that they weren’t really crippling the Red Army and the land that they were taking had nothing on it to support them, no buildings, supplies, machines, nothing. Everything had been either removed or destroyed. Stalin had been able to mobilise the whole country, not just the military, but the civilians as well. So many historical and cultural places, homes and farms were simply destroyed under the idea that it is better that they are burnt than fall into Nazi hands.

With all these examples what was happening was that the Nazis were being decentralised and deskilled. Why would you go find relevant intelligence when it is easier to torture someone? Why would you admit a failing to a superior who would kill you or choke you to death as Vader did?

Then by not admitting these types of day-to-day events, there is no reliable central intelligence formed. The Nazis should have known that the Red Army were not being beaten that badly, that England were not being bombed that badly, that they were facing an ever-stronger enemy. Having said that, everyone was acting purely and wholly reasonably and rationally. Everyone was acting in their own self interest, yet without honour, without reference to a natural order or external reasoning of some kind, the end result will always be to become weak and wrong.

Essentially the strong, by their failure to accommodate the weak, became the weak. Strength without honour is just weakness postponed. Perhaps this is what Luke Skywalker was referring to as overconfidence.

This post's lame jokes:

Q:  What side of an Ewok has the most hair?
A:  The outside.  

Q:  How many Sith does it take to screw in a hyperdrive?
A:  Two, but I don't know how they got in it.

Q:  How many stormtroopers does it take to replace a lightbulb?
A:  Two; one to screw the bulb in, the other to shoot him and take the credit.