Thread by @gravislizard

is there a popular article somewhere about how Lucas' Empire took all the teeth out of the nazis

when i was younger I didn't realize the empire were nazis. the uniforms just looked like military uniforms to me. I hated them because they were the bad guys. I never thought about why they were bad.

as an adult i went back and watched the movies after a long break, and noticed a million things I hadn't before. But one thing I noticed was that I wasn't really sure why they were the bad guys.

I had realized by then that they were meant to be Nazis. But I didn't see them doing Nazi things, and I stand by this - they're presented in that G.I. Joe, kid-friendly Generic Villain fashion, where the Bad Guys are nominally bad, but you never SEE much happen

i believe the extended universe books quickly move to make them racists - all aliens considered inferior. This is not in the canon anywhere that I know of offhand. No screen time in the original trilogy is spent showing us that they are racist.

The only real atrocity I can think of that's established in the original trilogy is the destruction of Alderaan. The US dropped nukes on Japan, what's the difference?

oh i'm sorry, the destruction of the jawa sandcrawler and its inhabitants just to cover up a search for a droid was definitely an atrocity. I'll probably think of others - but to be clear, this is something the US military would have done in WW2, korea, nam, Iraq

We see Stormtroopers running a checkpoint, but they don't beat anybody up or tear apart their vehicles searching for their quarry. Real cops do, soldiers in fascist regimes do. The stormtroopers are disciplined - real fascists aren't.

Beyond that, we just see soldiers doing what their government orders. They take prisoners instead of killing when possible, they don't beat those prisoners for fun. The stormtroopers appear to actually be much better cops than real cops, by keeping their emotions in check.

while the expanded universe doesn't count for cultural reasons, I will just comment that the books make it pretty clear you can live fairly happily under the empire's thumb if you just follow the rules.

Palpatine is completely fucked in the head, but he's *very* far from the front lines. Even Vader seems fairly with-it in terms of having a sensible picture of what he's doing, despite his drive being clearly selfish and personal

Anyway. So.
My point is that Lucas diluted the Nazis. He presented a view of fascists - in aesthetics, large-scale goals, and totalitarian approach to government - that made them look remarkably neutral. You don't hate them. Nobody hates them. They're just lightsaber fodder.

You can't have a fight without an enemy. The Empire exists to make our heroes look justified, but they never actually do much to make you hate them. We never met the Alderaanians, we found out their planet existed less than a minute before it was destroyed.

This is why I said earlier that I don't think Imperial cosplayers are lowkey fash. I don't think the Empire are fascists! It's not in evidence! It's not in the canon!

No amount of retconning or side-story books will change the fact that "Star Wars" is, first and foremost, three movies made between 1977 and 1983, and in those movies we are given very, very little reason to see the Empire as worse than the country we live in.

There's a difference between fascism and totalitarianism - maybe not in practice, but certainly in concept, and movies are made of concepts rather than reality. Lucas showed us non-fascists in fascist uniforms, and that fucked things up a lot.

This is why nerds have stormtroopers on their desks at work. Because they're basically neutral - you can imagine them working for the Rebels. They just take orders. Hell, I think there's a whole series of books ABOUT a Stormtrooper outfit that breaks off and changes allegiences

i realize that lucas ostensibly didn't *intend* for them to be nazis. well, he shouldn't have made them look like nazis then. I think he irreparably damaged our ability to despise those outfits and what they represent.