PT Historical references in the prequels

Right. I thought Palpatine was done very well in the prequels. I was thinking today about Lucas' original idea for ROTJ and the ST. Palpatine would not have died in ROTJ. He would have been the villian of the ST. I imagined him as being fearing of losing his power .

 

It would have been fascinating to see Palpatine in the ST. I imagine him as a ruler who has held power so long that he believes that no one can rule like he did. So he would start experimenting with the Force to extend his life. I imagine him as the kind of man who would want to take what he built with him. Meaning if he could not have it he would destroy it.

 

Thanx again, but in Ep.7 we have no clue why Luke is that way. We could make million speculations but unfortunately Luke is missing in almost the whole movie. And the political aspect that is so strong in PT and that's why we are discussing so much details here is practically absent in Ep 7. Why the rebellion couldn’t resist and "save" the gained of Anakin, Luke and the other heroes? Why they are still a Resistance and the other ones are the legal power (or it seems like that)?. There are too much holes for me in that aspect in Ep. 7 to talk about the new galactic order and that's why I couldn’t say anything about the new galactic order.

 

I agree with you. The movie could have done a better job at explaining the in's and out's of the new galatic order. But as a side question. What would you have liked to have seen from the ST? What would have been in your opinion a logical and interesting way to go with the ST based on your knowledge of history? I know this is not the thread to discuss this, but you are quite possibly the smartest guy on this forum. I would love to hear from you your overall idea for the ST please. Thanks

 

In a very evil aspect Palpatine is unique. He died and the Balance was restored and for me for me that is the end of the Saga anyway. I would prefer if they made the ST as something between the main events, but they preferred to make it after. So, in this case, they should change the type of the bad guys and the good guys also. So, OK, they tried to change the guy for girl, but that is not enough original for me. (for the record, I'm a woman, so the gender here doesn’t matter). I would make the bad guy as somebody like Tarkin. The bureaucrats could be more evil and soulless that any villain, remember they destroyed Aldeaaran, not Vader. But this is complicated to make it in a movie.

 

Hi. Thank you.

Yes, that is the genius behind Palpatine, but at the same time that's not the kind of personality I would ever see politicians voting dictator for life. Hitler knew how to fire people up, he was extremely charismatic and was a great orator. Caesar and Napoleon had earned great prestige in their careers as generals and also used intimidation.

Palpatine is not depicted as a great orator, he's not a general, he's just mild mannered and gentle, as you say. There is genius in how he gets other people to do the things he wants, but when it comes to ultimately declaring himself Emperor, the films need to sell me on the idea that he's some great leader that the Senate would applaud and eagerly welcome as their new leader who is going to carry the galaxy forward with greater stability and security. And I don't think the films succeeded on that front, mostly because he was so meek. It would have been one thing if he was the power behind the throne, like Richelieu. But he was the guy on the throne itself.

The cut scenes in ROTS, I think were really essential to showing that he was no longer behaving mild mannered, and that he was indeed amending the Constitution, curtailing the authority of planetary governors, and didn't really care about the petition against his policies, but those scenes didn't make it into the final film. I feel like that was the kind of ruler we needed to see Palpatine as.

 

I'm not sure I'm the smartest, but it is interesting for me to discuss this type of things. Unfortunately, Ep.7 gives us little material for that. If you ask what i have expected to see, well I have expected to see the Imperial forces as clandestine opposition and the Republic forces trying to bring order, prosperity and peace in the Galactic, including to fight the marauders and smugglers who are inevitable after the war periods. Maybe then we would have a real conflict between Lea and Han who for several reasons could back to the old habits (maybe in the beginning for good reasons). Maybe then we have more reasons to Ben to go with Snoke (if he doesn’t like that his mother is reckless towards the actions of his father, he will just leave, also if the Jedi training is hard and if Snoke promise is for a easy and fast path to real power, etc., etc.). So much lost opportunities and the biggest one for me is that Lea is not trained in the Jedi path. Luke practically promised that to her in ROTJ and now everything is just a parody: the strong Jedi Luke who helped for the redemption of his father, who practically saved him, who resisted to the temptation of the Emperor is hidden somewhere, after he broke the promise to his sister, etc. etc. I don't get it. It is not the Luke we saw in the OT. I'm OK that he may change but I cannot see the reason.

 

So, you like charismatic leaders. But I don't think Palpatine is supposed to be one of those. The Empire is big and people there don't need to know and to respect the personality of the Emperor, they should respect the Empire itself. That's why the Emperor is mysterious figure even in the OT and he rules there about 20 years or something. It is like used to be in China: the emperor lives in the Forbidden city and very few are those who had ever seen him. That's why I mentioned Cardinal Richelieu. Now he is more famous than the king Luis XV and is not only for the novel of Alexander Dumas. He is ‘the master of puppets’ in the shadows and that makes him effective and strong governor, a difference from the methods of the charismatic leaders.

 

But that's my point, I would think that realistically, he would either have to be one, and/or would have to utilize coercion. Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all used intimidation to some degree. Once the Empire was formed, Palpatine could slink away and be reclusive. But during that transition point, when the Republic is democratically making Palpatine dictator for life, the Senate would have to see something in Palpatine that he can do that the Senate cannot, or be intimidated by Palpatine.

Because that's why Palpatine is given emergency powers to begin with. The Senate could not function and come to an agreement on raising an army. So by giving Palpatine emergency power, he was able to bypass the Senate vote when faced with a crisis. That's where the value in Palpatine's emergency powers was, that the Senate was inefficient and could not respond to a crisis with any kind of speed.



In this cutscene for instance, it's mentioned that there are Senators frustrated that Palpatine keeps amending the Constitution.

Some more cutscenes

So as was shown in these cutscenes, he was cutting out procedure in the Senate. He was amending the Constitution. Several Senators saw what he was doing and tried to stop him (some people saw what Hitler was doing too). Bureaucratic Senators in TPM stalled the Republic's ability to handle a crisis, and again in AOTC, we see that Senate debate was preventing the authorization of an army, and so when there was an immediate threat to the Republic, the Senate gave away power to allow Palpatine to bypass the Senate.

The problem is that these scenes from ROTS were cut. So the only time we see Palpatine using any kind of emergency power is in AOTC, when it is given to him "reluctantly." In the theatrical cut of the film, there is no sense that Palpatine is any kind of a powerful leader. He comes across as mild mannered. And that's not the kind of person I could ever see a Senate granting power. The whole point of given him powers was to bypass the Senate, and if he is not shown to go against the Senate, then there's no point in giving him more and more power.

Those ROTS cutscenes would have showed him to be a powerful leader that was bypassing Senate procedure, and making some Senators fearful in the process. And that's exactly what happened during the rise of such figures like Hitler, Caesar and Napoleon.

TCW on top of this also shows Palpatine as mild mannered during war time, which those ROTS cutscenes would have contradicted.

There was a plot line in which the Senate was on the verge of bankruptcy in its efforts to produce more and more clones, and Lott Dod proposes that the Senate deregulate the banks, allowing them to extend greater lines of credit to the Republic, but Padme goes before the Senate and pleads for the Senate to reconsider the production of more clones and to pursue a diplomatic solution. She sways Senate opinion and Palpatine (who wanted that legislation to pass) backs down and agrees with the Senate. He then later vents frustration to Mas Amedda about how Padme could challenge his plan merely by giving a passionate speech.



He gets depicted still as a mild mannered guy that is going along with the Senate, which defeats the point of him having emergency powers, if the Senate is able to run things just fine during war time. Those cut scenes were essential in showing that the Senate did not feel it could properly function during war time and that it needed Palpatine to be able to bypass the Senate, trusting him to have sound judgement.

 

Augustus Caesar (the one who succeeded in transforming the Roman republic into an autocracy) was not a great charismatic figure. He was sickly looking throughout his younger years. He wasn't a particularly inspiring speaker. He delegated generalship to others who were better at it than he. All this in contrast to his adopted father Julius Caesar who was the most charismatic and greatest general in Rome's history. Yet Augustus was the one who was able to take total control of the state, permanently appropriate all the powers of the senate, and make himself accepted as a monarch in a society that had a deep rooted aversion to kings. He did all this be being a very astute and at times ruthless politician who knew how to pull strings and how to keep public opinion on his side even as he gradually accumulated power after power for himself, beyond anything the public would have willingly given even the most loved leader like Julius Caesar. Charisma, military skill, and popularity aren't everything. Julius Caesar was all those things and he was assassinated anyway. He was never willing to scheme and murder his enemies the way Augustus was in his younger days. So my point is that I think the characterization of Palpatine as not being very charismatic is actually realistic and makes sense for his character. He's not someone who gained his power by being the most likeable person in the room, but rather by plotting and scheming and outmaneuvering his political opponents.

 

Speaking of 9/11...did the Jedi Temple on fire in ROTS remind anybody of the World Trade Center on fire after the planes hit?

 

yes. that was intentional.

 

Interesting. I have never thought of that since the Jedi Temple has 4 towers (they don't look like the 2 towers of the tragic events in 9/11). LOTR has that problem with the 2 towers of the Black Gate and P.Jackson said they were aware to show the destruction of the Black Gate as something very different from the destruction of the 2 towers in New York (because many people could make this reference). I would say here that the destruction of the Jedi Temple and the destruction of the Senate Chamber are symbolical: the symbols of the Republic are destroyed the new dark era is coming. In the real world we cam mention many similar examples. In many parts of Europe and Asia many old castles, monuments and churches were destroyed by barbaric armies. So, I think intentionally Lucas showed that Empire is indeed barbaric in this aspect.

 

Reading up a little on Hiroshima and Nagasaki last night (happy topics, I know), I bumped into this page on history.com:

http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/hirohito

What struck me about it was how so much of the description under the heading "Hirohito as Emperor and the Rise of Japanese Militarism" echoed Lucas' earliest ideas for the conversion of the Republic into the Empire.

I admit, I don't know too much about Japan's escapades in the 20th Century, despite how notoriously bloody they were. The description there, however, really stood out to me, not least, I suppose, because Japan actually had an Emperor who was viewed as a god, and this was within Lucas' lifetime, and only a few decades before the creation of Star Wars and all those tantalizing backstory notes.

I'll quote it now. In these two concise paragraphs, you get the distinct feeling of a country and an entire hemisphere plummeting into deep crisis. These textual monads somehow communicate both the raw ballast and the abject horror of history abstracted or extruded through encyclopedia summaries. It is almost like reading a Star Wars crawl; or, indeed, the prologue to the original 1976 novelization by Alan Dean Foster. You get the appeal of history, and of telling a story, even when it encompasses depressing events from humanity's most bloody and cruelest century (from a certain point-of-view):


When Hirohito assumed the throne, a universal male suffrage law had just passed, and political parties were near the height of their prewar powers. However, a plunging economy, rising militarism and a series of political assassinations soon caused a crisis for the pro-democracy movement. Hirohito, who as emperor was the nation’s highest spiritual authority and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, essentially fired the prime minister in 1929. The next prime minister was shot and mortally wounded, and in 1932 yet another prime minister was assassinated by naval officers upset about a treaty limiting the number of Japanese warships. From then on, almost all prime ministers came from the military rather than from the political parties, which were disbanded altogether in 1940. More political violence occurred in 1935, when a lieutenant colonel slashed a general to death with a samurai sword. And in 1936, over 1,400 soldiers mutinied in Tokyo, seizing the army ministry and murdering several high-ranking politicians.

Meanwhile, Japan’s conflict with China was growing. In 1931, Japanese army officers initiated the so-called Manchurian Incident by detonating a railway explosion and blaming it on Chinese bandits. They then used the event as an excuse to take over Manchuria in northeastern China and set up a puppet state there. Excursions into other areas of the country soon followed, and by 1937 war had broken out. That winter, the Japanese army massacred an estimated 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war in and around the city of Nanking. Rape is thought to have been commonplace, and women throughout Japanese-controlled regions of Asia were brought in to serve as prostitutes. Hirohito did not condone the invasion’s more repugnant aspects, but—perhaps because he worried the military would make him abdicate—he failed to punish those responsible. He also sanctioned the use of chemical warfare and the uprooting of peasants.


Ugly stuff.

But as I was reading, this thread popped into my head. What is interesting is that the "credit" for the backstory of Star Wars normally goes to three rather distinct Occidental sources (in reverse chronological order): the United States under Richard Nixon, the rise of Fascism in mainland Europe, and military expansionism in Ancient Rome.

Yet the militarism of 20th Century Japan (and earlier centuries) is no less diabolical or salient, in my view, than those examples. Just read that brief description again. Then there is the highly notable Japanese influence on various concepts within the movies, from a Samurai ethic manifest in Vader's costume design and the behaviour, tenets, and political aspects of the Jedi, through to the films of Akira Kurosawa (mostly samurai period pieces) being a tremendous inspiration to Lucas when he entered film school (and so much of both ANH and TPM are essentially birthed from "The Hidden Fortress" and several other Kurosawa movies), right through to more stylized details like the constant presence of sliding (screen) doors and scene (screen) wipes.

It is, in fact, chiefly the militaristic aspects of Japan that might have left the greatest mark on Star Wars. In addition to Japan's 20th Century militarism, there is also the warring aspects of Ancient/Classical Japan to consider. TFN's zombie/Michael Kaminski, author of "The Secret History of Star Wars", wrote an entry on the significance of the Heiji Rebellion (sometimes referred to as the Heiji Disturbance), a civil war at the end of Japan's Heian Period, which occurred in 1159, as being antecedent to Star Wars' "civil war" tersely announced at the start of the original crawl. "It is a period of civil war." That could almost be the rubric for the whole series (especially right after the logo: STAR WARS). Just as the prequels (AOTC especially) are big on lineage, and the past seeding the future, so we rather auspiciously find a brief civil war, eight centuries before the advent of the Space Age and the real birth of global communication, as essentially having given birth to a fantastical space war, inside of a cine-mythology that now has global recognition. The prequels, of course, have their own civil war occurring: a "clone war". This one (actually a series of wars) is manifestly more exotic and abstract. Like the real-life Heiji Rebellion, it seeds, or reverse-seeds, the fantastical "period" of civil war in the original film(s). More on the Heiji Rebellion and how it led to Star Wars here:

http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/deepancestry.html

 

Really? Do you have any source for that?

 

the source is my eyes. it's pretty obvious. the movie came out just a few years later and it was a very powerful image

 

Oh, I thought GL might have said something about it. If you're American, I guess that's why it's obvious to you. I mean, I remember 9/11 quite well, but I never noticed the influence of the events on the Jedi Temple.

 

Very interesting, thank you for bring some Eastern historical reference here.

 

You're welcome, Tony.

I know that Lucas has somewhat stressed the other influences himself, and some of them are very obvious (e.g., Nazi Germany), but the Eastern links seem to get missed or downplayed.

I guess, on one level, they're not part of the Western psyche so much. It's easier to focus on clear-cut examples closer to home.

But the 20th Century saw various democracies imploding or near-imploding and a horrible ramping-up of death and destruction.

Star Wars seems to have emerged from the immediate aftershocks of these implosions, when the world had generally begun to incline a little towards peace.

Post-war prosperity, the counter-culture movement of the Sixties, along with Civil Rights, and the growth of the Information Age. These things seem to have helped.

And surely no-one seriously wants a nuclear war (which wouldn't exactly last long). The terror of the Death Star articulates this fear: the push-button ease of global holocaust.

May we yet escape our addition to myth and develop an Earth Consciousness that properly sees everything as interconnected and interdependent.

 

Many people complain that SW are simplistic as a story and especially the PT. Yes, sure, as we can find so much historical references in modern and medieval history.. I think an important aspect of a sci fi or fantasy movie is to show a metaphor of the real world and what is happening was happening in similar situations. Too bad that too many people see in SW only lightsaber duels and space battles.

 

The Trade Federation

I was easily related the Trade Federation with real armed commerce guild. My country was once occupied by VOC (Dutch East India Company). There's many films and myths about battles between local kingdoms and the Company.

http://www.starwars.com/news/the-trade-federation-and-neimoidians-a-history

 

Very interesting article!

 

The Federation battleships being converted freighters also plays into the early history of the trade companies, being space-faring analogs to the Indiamen in the age of sail.

 

I always thought that the Jedi temple burning reminded me of the romans who burned down the second Jewish temple in ancient Israel. The imperial empire is a combination of Roman empire and Nazis. The republic could be considered second Reich of Germany

First Reich was the roman empire, Second Reich German empire under the Keizer and have order 66 when the clones turned on the jedi a lot like how the Nazis betrayed the German Jews who severed the country loyally . Third Reich Nazis Germany.

 

Interesting observations, black_saber. In one of the threads of AOTC we discussed the beginning of the Clone wars. It strongly reminds me of the beginning of the First World War, which began in a peripheral European city with political murder that at first sight has no direct connection to the real reasons of the war. I have the feeling that WWI is popular only as the cause of the WWII, but is important to know what and why happened in the beginning of the XX century and to make a difference between the "opportunity" and the reasons behind the war. I mean the murder of the archduke wasn't the reason, but was the opportunity to begin and in AOTC we see similar circumstances with the plot of the clone army and the beginning of the clone wars.