0:07      Kay Summers: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World where we talk about something in the world that really matters.

0:15      KS: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a very large collection of societies, comprised of many different planets, filled with different cultures and peoples. For a while, it was a republic, but for much of its popular recorded history, it was an empire, led by an autocratic strong man with evil, sorcerer-like powers. He started out as an elected official, by the way. He was a Senator, I believe. The empire was eventually overthrown by an organized rebellion and from the ashes, folks tried to fashion a way of living that allowed them to eat and find shelter and raise children and basically live.

0:53      KS: If you change the setting away from different planets and get rid of the sorcerers, it looks a lot like parts of this world. So today we're talking about imperialism, post-conflict societies, and Star Wars.

1:06      KS: I'm Kay Summers and I'm joined by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Patrick is a professor here in the School of International Service and he's the chair of our Department of Global Inquiry. He's also a researcher of culture and agency, international relations theory, ethical action in light of climate change, the concept of Western civilization, and most appropriately for our conversation today, popular culture and politics.

1:28      KS: Patrick, thanks for joining Big World.

1:31      Patrick Thaddeus Jackson: Thanks for having me. I'm delighted that we're actually able to sit and talk about Star Wars, which as you know is one of my favorite subjects.

1:38      KS: I do. We will get serious, I promise. But first, who is your all-time favorite Star Wars character?

1:46      PTJ: I go back and forth because my childhood idol growing up was Luke Skywalker.

1:54      KS: Me too.

1:57      PTJ: I have to say though as I've gotten older, I have a greater appreciation for Obi-Wan Kenobi than I did when I was younger. It kind of goes back and forth between the two of them. I think on balance it's still probably Luke, particularly in the light of the grizzled, cynical Luke clawing his way back to the crusade that you get in The Last Jedi, which I-

2:23      KS: I loved it.

2:24      PTJ: ... really, really appreciated that particular part of his journey, so probably Luke on balance. My most extensive cosplay outfit is a Luke from the end of Force Awakens, beginning of Last Jedi. That's the Jedi outfit that I parade around in.

2:41      KS: The scene where he's astrally projecting to fight Kylo Ren, and they shoot everything they have at him and he just dusts off his shoulder? Oh, I loved it. That was like 30, 40 years of just being a fan. That was great.

2:56      PTJ: Absolutely. The fact that Rian Johnson managed to get, and every time I've seen it, it's been the case that the theater burst out into applause at an image of a guy meditating on a rock.

3:06      KS: Yeah.

3:06      PTJ: It's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Such a beautiful Luke move to win without fighting.

3:15      KS: Oh, absolutely. Then when he dies and his cape blows away, and you get that same moment that you had with Obi-Wan where the cape is all that's left, but in his case it blows away. Yeah, that was, yeah, I really love that.

3:28      PTJ: The fact that they were able to shoot that in such a way that you get the two-sun effect. So it looks like the two suns on Tatooine.

3:33      KS: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I have to say, character, last thing, I love Luke and I have an affection for a lot of the characters that are in some of the lesser-known material or maybe lesser-known to people who haven't dived deep, the Clone Wars, Rebels, those characters. One of my favorites from there is Ventress.

3:51      PTJ: Ah. Yeah.

3:54      KS: I really feel like the shows have done a better job on the balance of presenting really complex female characters.

4:03      PTJ: If we're going into the more extended universe kinds of characters, then I would definitely confess to have great affection for Ahsoka Tano and just the journey that she goes on. Particularly the way that then she gets woven back into the main story and the way that they've so cleverly put it in such a way that you could almost believe that yeah, she was standing in the wings of some of the other films when of course we know that she wasn't there because they hadn't invented Ahsoka Tano until afterward and Star Wars is one giant retcon.

4:35      KS: I agree. I love that. We're going to talk about Ahsoka a little bit. We're going to get to work now. Okay.

4:41      KS: Resistance and rebellion under imperialism. These are key themes and what fans think of as the original Star Wars trilogy. More recently, Star Wars has looked at the impacts of living under an autocratic imperialist regime for real people as opposed to the people who were really closely tied to the resistance movements and who are right at the center of the action. The shows now are looking at people who were a little more far removed and have a little bit, maybe even have a little bit more to lose like in the show Andor. I'm going to start with an easy way in. For people who haven't seen much of Star Wars beyond the movies. How do the original movies, A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, how does that trilogy address the challenges of organizing resistance movements?

5:26      PTJ: It's a good and easy place to start because the answer is that it doesn't, right? Anyway, Star Wars Empire and Return of the Jedi, the rebellion is just there already as a going concern. Part of that is a storytelling technique that Lucas is very fond of and was very fond of in those films in particular, which is just dropping you into the middle of the action without explaining much. We don't get much of a backstory of where the rebellion came from. We just get, there's the empire, there's the rebellion, good guys, bad guys, they're fighting. Everybody knows that this exists even in backwater planets like Tatooine. Luke has heard of the rebellion against the Empire and gets super excited about it, but we really don't get many details. The closest we get to a look inside how the rebellion works, is that scene in Return of the Jedi where they're planning the attack on the second Death Star because there you suddenly get the sense that, "No, no, there's an intelligence wing. There are different parts of the fleet, there are different elements of command structure," and that had been sort of hinted before, but it was never really spelled out until you get to that moment. But that's about all we get. It's not until you start getting to films like Rogue One where you start to see more of this, "Well, where exactly did the rebellion come from?"

6:52      KS: Right, Rogue One, what a great movie. Rogue One is where you first encounter the character of Cassian Andor, and at that point he is fully a part of the resistance movement. But the show Andor starts before that. How does the show Andor expand on the idea of what it's like to be a normal guy living under an autocratic regime? How does Cassian's experience differ from that of the royalty and the elites and the high government officials that we see in the original trilogy?

7:22      PTJ: What's interesting about Andor the show, not just Andor the character, is it gives you several ways into ordinary people under the autocratic regime. You have Cassian himself who's kind of a ne'er do well, small-time criminal, basically, who is trying to make a living as best he can in this backwater place and stealing things and getting in trouble with the law as one does if you're on backwater planets in the Empire. But you also have parts of the show that follow people like Mon Mothma, who's a senator. You have following Syril Karn, who is a junior imperial bureaucrat. You have a number of other kinds of ordinary people who are floating around here trying to make their way.

8:12      PTJ: What's fascinating about the show, and I think what they really get right is that from a small-scale day-to-day living perspective, Empire, not Empire, whatever, is kind of the same. You're sort of trying to make your way the best you can and that things change around the edges and who you're arguing with and who you're trying to bamboozle and who you're trying to make a quick buck or quick credit off of changes a little bit. But you don't get the sense that Cassian would be doing much of anything different under the Republic than he is under the Empire. There's always some light smuggling to do. There's always some light crime to be engaged in. He's a ruffian, right? That's kind of the character that he is. Straight survival is very non-ideological.

9:01      KS: Right, right.

9:02      PTJ: I think that rings very true to life to me, that unless people are really directly involved in this, ideologically-motivated cause, you're just trying to survive.

9:16      KS: You're just trying to get by. This is pretty prosaic, but what does the show Andor teach about the challenges of bureaucratically administering an empire? What does it show about corruption in these states that rings true to life or parallels to ours?

9:31      PTJ: The Empire, as depicted on screen, has always been an interesting amalgamation of, say, the US military-industrial complex and elements that refer back to Nazi Germany. That's kind of usually been the blend that Lucas and his successors have presented. It's not subtle. Star Wars is not known for its subtlety.

10:00      PTJ: The Shock troops of the Empire are called Storm Troopers, and you have people dressed all in black. It's appropriately presented in a kind of fairy tale system. You can't like the Empire. The Empire is the bad guys. They're the bad guys from the beginning. It's not a specific reference to a particular part of the US military industrial complex. It's more that kind of idea of the military industrial complex, and then these Nazi Germany kinds of things. And one of the fascinating things about Andor is it finally shows us that the Imperial Security Bureau is basically the SS. So they are a state within a state. They have different kinds of authority to enforce directly the will of the emperor versus the law, which is sort of what the regular constabulary are supposed to be doing, which is very similar to the structure that you get in Nazi Germany, where you've got a series of regular police. And then you've got special police, and you've got the SS sort of running around doing their own kind of authority.

11:08      PTJ: So you've got these overlapping authority structures that are coming together, and they're all kind of jockeying with each other for power and influence. And there's a lot going on within the individual structures. So you get this story... One of the storylines within Andor, where you have Dedra trying to make her way up in the Imperial Security Bureau by noticing that there's something odd going on with these patterns of attacks on Imperial assets and saying, "Okay, cool. So we can use that to help protect the Empire," but also allows her to get a bigger administrative portfolio so she can force this other guy out. And she could rise up in the ranks and so on. So it's a combination of bureaucratic politics and glory to the Empire. So it's putting the two things together.

11:55      PTJ: In terms of questions of corruption, probably the best example of that in Andor, the one that really rang true to me, is when Cassian initially kills two security guards, and the company that is an Imperial contractor is attempting to figure out what happened. The local supervisor says, "Well, let's not bother to report this further up the chain, because it'll make us look bad." It reminds me of the reports that would filter up in parts of the Soviet Union about people being able to make production quotas, and of course, they weren't actually making production quotas. But if you said you weren't making a production quota, then you would get kind of the coercive apparatus of the state coming down on you.

12:40      PTJ: Still, the idea here is, "Yes, we're trying to serve this cause. We're trying to survive but also stay in line. Don't report how bad things actually are." I mean, as far back as Machiavelli, we've known that advisors have a tendency to tell their sovereigns what the sovereign wants to hear, which is why Machiavelli recommends getting advisors that they're going to disagree with you, tell it like it is. Because you need people who are actually going to be able to tell you what's going on, because otherwise, you're not going to be able to get good information about what's actually happening out there on the ground.

13:16      PTJ: The big thing it tries to communicate about the bureaucratic administration of an empire is it is extraordinarily difficult to avoid that kind of institutionalized bias towards successful reporting, which clearly Palpatine understands, because part of the whole rationale to produce the Death Star is to get rid of the bureaucracy. Because then if you don't have the bureaucracy... And this is what they're all incredulous about in that meeting in the Death Star in episode four, how will the emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy? Well, what does Tarkin say? Fear. You just got to rule straight by fear.

13:58      PTJ: And that's it. The Death Star, because it can destroy planets, you don't need the bureaucracy anymore. So then you can eliminate that particular kind of institutionalized corruption problem and faulty information problem if you don't have the bureaucracy. That's partially why the emperor can't be presented as just a corrupt politician who's having bureaucratic problems administering the Empire. He's also, and I think even more importantly, an evil person who wants to destroy the Jedi and anyone else who tries to use the force in a way that is not contributing to his power.

14:31      KS: Do you think that there is some danger in that very seductive way of presenting that universe, where there is a clear embodiment of evil, and to stand against that person is to stand against evil? Because it's great storytelling, and it does have a good sense of self-righteousness when you know you're on the right side. But we know that, in our world, there's so much gray. Do you think it's dangerous that we may have adopted that tendency to see any leader as a possible embodiment of evil?

15:18      PTJ: Yeah, yeah. It's a great question, and it's actually one that I'm playing with a bit in the book I'm writing right now about Star Wars and US foreign policy. I think what Star Wars is able to do is it's able to hold up some of those assumptions that we make about good and evil, say, in our world and say, "Okay. First of all, if you want to actually go with good and evil, you have to buy the whole package. So good and evil can't just be that leader. It has to be like the entire universe is somehow enchanted by this mystical energy that runs through it. So you'd have to sort of adopt all of that."

15:53      PTJ: But then if you did that, then the second thing, I think, what Star Wars does really well is every time anybody in the narrative claims to be on the side of the good and the right, or the true or whatever, the narrative comes along and slaps them in the face. Because even those who are serving the light rather than the dark end up doing awful things. They have to, which is why the most powerful thing that Luke Skywalker does is not fight.

16:29      PTJ: So at the end of Return of the Jedi, throwing the lightsaber away. "I'm not going to kill Darth Vader," at this point. That kind of self-renunciation gesture, that kind of backing away, that's what the narrative really wants us to look at. The narrative really wants us to side with people who don't think of themselves as being the agents of the chosen power of the universe, as much as people who are striving to create balance and striving to create space and striving to create opportunities for the force to work its will. Those are the good guys. Those are the ones that we end up seeing all the time, and those are the ones the narrative really wants to incline us towards. It's very different than the kind of political narratives we too often get, where any of our opponents just become evil.

17:19      KS: All right, we're going to jet ahead to post-conflict societies, because I want to get to that. So okay. So once the Ewoks stop dancing, and everyone calms down after the credits roll in Return of the Jedi... And I love the Ewoks. I don't care what people say. I love them. I think they're the embodiment of people being underestimated and having strengths that no one could foresee. So after the credits roll, they had to rebuild a galaxy. And recently, we've had two shows that look at this from very different perspectives, Ahsoka, as we mentioned, and also the Mandalorian. These show post-conflict societies struggling to build a new normal and people who were trying to get past conflicts in every conceivable circumstance. How do the Star Wars shows depict the nature of conflict, other than just political conflict?

18:09      PTJ: So what's fascinating about both shows is... And both shows here being Ahsoka and the Mandalorian, is that in trying to figure out what the post-Imperial Galaxy looks like, because they are true to being Star Wars shows, they treat that not just as a problem of political organization. Although, there's political organization, and there's bureaucratic oversight. And there's what happens when the local crime boss decides to go legit and becomes a governor? So, "Hey, let's see how that works out."

18:46      KS: Are you speaking of Boba Fett? Or are we speaking of the Carl Weathers character?

18:50      PTJ: A little bit of both. A little bit of both. Greef Karga is trying to go legit, and that's very strong Lando Calrissian vibes there too. Like, "Hey, I'm kind of a smooth talker, but you know what? I can govern. I can do these things." And, of course, Greef Karga turns out to be super important to what happens to the Mandalorians, because then they end up settling before they go back and retake Mandalore.

19:13      PTJ: So, again, this is not a spoiler-free conversation. I really hope your listeners understand up front, it's totally not a spoiler-free conversation. Both of them talk about the challenges of rebuilding legitimate authority. They both acknowledge that legitimate authority has what Max Weber would call a charismatic element to it. But the charismatic element in the Star Wars universe means that it is somehow connected to the mysterious unity of the universe. What The Mandalorian, as a show, tells us is you need that. To create a functioning society, you need to have people who believe in the justness of whatever the center

20:02      PTJ: is, which is an interesting contrast, because we never get anyone, even Imperial sympathizers saying that they believe in the Empire. What we get on the screen is we get people saying, oh, the empire is not so bad. You can do some things with it.

20:16      KS: Well, you also get the people who, for whom the Empire, it was an organizing force, it prevented chaos. All the things that the Empire said they wanted to restore order in some fashion had worked for them, and now there is chaos and they are just like, "Yeah, the Empire wasn't so bad. At least the trains ran on time."

20:36      PTJ: When you called the police to deal with these criminals, somebody showed up, now you got criminals. Who do you call?

20:42      KS: Right. When you're late in the Timothy Oliphant arc there with the town that he was trying to marshal and he had the Boba Fett armor, and he was just trying to take care of the people. He was just trying to be somebody they could depend on because they had no other organized security.

20:59      PTJ: And who do they end up with though? They end up with Din Djarin. They end up with the Mandalorian coming in as an interesting combination of the Mandalorian Honor code and the transformation that's been wrought in him by his care for Grogu. And that combination gives you some different kind of authority, some different kind of leadership. It's like, "Oh, okay, well, we can actually kind of build something else."

21:32      KS: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, it's time to take five. You get to put your spin on the world. This is going to be kind of a lighter question than we normally do for an episode, but I think it's appropriate. What are your five favorite lightsaber combat sequences?

21:49      PTJ: There are so many good ones. So it's what makes a good lightsaber combat sequence for me is not just the choreography, but the emotional stakes and the importance of the lightsaber combat to the mythology. So for five, I would put in Rey and Kylo Ren's fight on the remains of the Death star in Rise of Skywalker. Both because it's visually quite stunning, but more to the point, it is a combat where neither of them can actually take the other one out. So they fight to a standstill, and as they get to the end, it's very clear that they're just, they could do this forever, that they're not going to win by combat, which I think is just brilliant. The only reason Rey wins is because Kylo gets distracted by Leia.

22:45      PTJ: So I think that one would show up as show as number five. I would have to say that number four would probably be Ahsoka and Baylan Skoll in the Ahsoka series, because we've got Ahsoka kind of doubting herself and not really letting go because she's afraid of darkness within her, which then leads to the whole world between Worlds sequence with Anakin. And so she can realize that no, no, no, she can transform this darkness and use it. And so then when they fight again, it's like, oh, okay, cool. So that sequence I think is incredibly, incredibly meaningful. The sequence at the end of the Phantom Menace, the fight with Darth Maul, you got Obi-Wan in the back, kind of walking back and forth, what's going on? He's a caged tiger. And of course, Maul is sitting there going, can I get through this? And Qui-Gon's like, "All right, dude, sit down, meditate for a few minutes, and then we're going to center ourselves and we're going to be ready to go."

23:52      PTJ: So I think the pacing of that and the connection of fighting to being at peace with the force is I think really, really, really well handled there. The final confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of the Obi-Wan series where he again, almost is able to kill him at the dozen. The moment where Obi-Wan realizes that if he's continuing just to fight for himself, he's not going to be able to win this. But if he remembers this bigger stakes of the struggle, then he's able to tap into something else and where he's able to lift all the rocks and throw them at Anakin, and it's just like, oh, okay, there, there's Obi one. He's transformed that moment of, I've won. I could kill you, but you are already dead. You're not here anymore. I'm not going to take the burden of killing you on myself.

24:47      PTJ: You're gone. And Anakin weirdly is charitable to Obi-Wan at that point by saying, "You didn't kill Anakin Skywalker. I did." So it's like, okay. But that allows Obi-Wan to get over that a little bit. But that whole sequence I find fantastic. I think putting all of the different pieces of it together. My absolute favorite one is the Luke Vader confrontation at the end of Jedi. There you have Luke walking right up to the press of this, Vader's down, he could kill him, and Palpatine says, "Fulfill your destiny. Take your father's place at my side." And Luke turns off the lightsaber and throws it away. I'm a Jedi like my father before me. And that moment is like, oh wow. After all of these great pyrotechnics and after all of this lightsaber combat, again, the consistent message is you're not actually going to solve this problem with lightsabers. You're going to solve this problem by fighting to a standstill and then walking away.

25:47      KS: I love that. Thank you. All right, parallels to the world that we're in. In an expansive galaxy, we talked about many cultures and species. After the Empire falls, there are lots of cases of power struggles. There's factionalism, there's tribalism, there's ethnic conflicts on various planets. How do these fictional power dynamic issues parallel real life issues in post-imperialist or post-dictatorial societies? And I know we have lots of examples.

26:20      PTJ: Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, in almost every historical case that we know of, after you have an authoritarian regime falling or loosening its grip in some way because that regime had structured parts of everyday life and had put in place procedures and guardrails, and because of what we were talking about earlier in terms of ordinary people, just kind of a adapting to survive under that, well, you kind of build those procedures in because those are the procedures that are there, and you learn to work with it and whatever, and then it changes, okay, what does this do? It produces a kind of crisis of meaning. How do we organize ourselves now? How do we go on in this situation when we no longer have the central bureaucracy that we were supposed to be reporting to, or we no longer have this kind of passport scheme that we're supposed to use.

27:14      PTJ: So now what do we do? Okay. And in many ways what's interesting about those authoritarian structures is they never stamp out other kinds of stories of belonging. They're always there. There's always other sorts of stories about community, but they're told in private spaces or they're told in family gatherings, they're told at church, if the church has a little bit of autonomy from state structures, they're traditions that get kind of passed down through generations. So these are there. So you think about the Soviet Union and it's not, or think about former Yugoslavia, it's not as if having this one unified government somehow stamped out all of those stories of nationalist belonging. They were all still there. They just weren't politically operative in the same way. And once the constraints are removed, well, those are the stories that are already circulating, and people are now having a crisis of meaning, and they're looking for some other way to organize themselves.

28:10      PTJ: I wonder what they're going to use. So they use the stories that are in fact already there and already kind of circulating. This is a standard kind of thing that's been going on as long as we've had recorded history. So this doesn't surprise me that you end up with these kinds of conflict dynamics because people's identities have shifted and because at the end of the day, these things are not driven just by detached rational calculations. They're driven by meaningful stories of identity that people tell and retell to make their actions meaningful, put their actions in a meaningful context. And those, unless they are the kind of story that explicitly leaves space for difference that can be respected, those are going to be stories that lead to conflict in various ways.

29:04      KS: I know one of the examples we spit balled, and we were talking about this months and months ago, was when you have a autocracy or some sort of large autocratic bureaucracy fall, there's a tendency to want to purge anybody who had anything to do with it. And you lose a lot of expertise. You have the Bath Party in Iraq is an example of when you say "No one who is associated with any part of this has a role in the new government going forward." And you lose a lot of people who were good at what they did, who went along to get along and maybe weren't true believers, but you've put a litmus test in place. Are there examples of that other than that Iraq example that come to mind?

29:46      PTJ: I mean, the classic example from cases that I'm really familiar with, a classic example of that is Denazification after World War II, although that also shows the ambiguity

30:00      PTJ: ... of the procedures because denazification often led to certain kinds of technical expertise being captured for other kinds of post-war products and projects. So in particular, you get the US Missile and Space program, which took a whole number of German rocket engineers and kind of denazified them and then brought them over to help with what's going on in the US. So of course, the Soviets are doing the same thing so not just the United States as ways of doing this. There's example, there's a more contemporary example in Poland say with the sort of illustration procedures where they're looking through finding people who had anything to do with the secret police, with informing on others, and then sort of drumming them out of public life or attempting to, and then creating situations where things just don't work because you don't have anybody there who kind of knows how to do anything. It's tricky. It's trickier in our world than it is in the Star Wars world, because in the Star Wars world, if you really wanted to figure out whether somebody was good or evil, there would be some sort of discernment test you could do, and you could say, "Okay, yeah. So they did some bad things, but everybody could be redeemed, so we're going to redeem them, we'll put them in a situation. We go from there." Whereas in our world, the story doesn't end and everybody's kind of mixed bag, a mixed character, and it's like, all right, and this is the classic thing that's been going on for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, where political philosophers have pointed out that politics in many ways is just doing evil. You have to do evil things. You have to deviate from these moral codes, moral purity notions in order to get anything done.

31:41      KS: All right, last line of questioning here. So in many of the Star Wars shows, we see characters whose lives and journeys were definitely shaped by conflict because there was so much of it. And the Last Jedi, a movie, both of us like a lot, Luke Skywalker has basically pulled a Greta Garbo. He's gone into seclusion from the pressures of being a legend and the failure of his own expectations that he was going to successfully train a new generation of Jedi. But he's the elite. He has virtually nothing in common with the billions who suffered and lived under the boot of the empire. So how does Star Wars use the Mandalorian and Ahsoka in a way that it doesn't use movies to explore the impact of imperialism and post-imperial conflict on characters and societies?

32:26      PTJ: You probably get the best examples of this in the Mandalorian. The show doesn't do... Because it is a character driven narrative it spends a lot of time with Din Djarin so you end up with these, not quite as elite as Luke Skywalker, but these kinds of characters who are centrally involved. But Djarin is clearly traumatized by the loss of his birth family and his adoption into this Mandalorian Creed. Part of the reason why he's so adamant about this is because he's adopted this as a foundling and he's become like, "No, I'm really involved in this." And it's really that that gets him to care for Grogu. It's like, oh, Grogu is an orphan too. Grogu is a foundling. Whoa. So that kind of connection between the two of them. So there's a lot of... A lot of the journey in the Mandalorian is about trying to restore some sense of what it really means to be Mandalorian, and how do you get away from, how do you get over this trauma of what's been done to us by the Empire?

33:23      PTJ: So I think the message that we consistently get is that trauma has to be processed and transformed in some way. The argument in Ahsoka where they're trying to strip Hera of her command for being concerned about whether Thrawn is going to come back and so on, and they get the nice intervention from C-3PO coming in to say, "No, no, no, Leia says that you should be trusting this person." It's a nice link back to the central mythology. But a lot of that is no, no, we shouldn't be simply treating this as a kind of management problem. We certainly shouldn't be treating it as a let's just go beat up on the bad guy's problem. We got them on the run, let's go get them. No, no, no, there's a bigger picture here. We've got to go back to thinking about that bigger picture, and I think that's a hard message to hear if you are in a situation of trauma.

34:24      PTJ: It's a hard message to hear if you are a people that have been crushed under the imperial boot, because then of course, what do you want to do? Well, you want to get something back. You want to organize, you want to fight, you want to go out and resist, and Star Wars says, "Yes, do that, but don't do that so much that you then turn into the thing you hate." I would argue in some of the pro-empire characters, we see untransformed pain and trauma saying, "Of course, I like order. I like order to be enforced. I like things to be calm and safe. I like to be safe. Everybody's safe now because there's order and everything is imposed, and it's just, this is a system I'm very comfortable within. From the more spiritual transformation perspective you say, well, you're not really comfortable within it.

35:15      PTJ: You're just living with a set of unresolved traumas that you haven't interrogated and you haven't started thinking about why are you more comfortable with this? Why are you okay sacrificing autonomy and difference for safety and security? What's up with that? I mean, we talked about Luke a little bit, but honestly, the best example of this, I think in the entirety of Star Wars is Leia. And the reason why I think Leia is the best example of this is she watched the destruction of her home planet at the hands of the Empire. She watched as Tarkin turned the death star on Alderaan, which is peaceful and has no weapons, and blew it out of the sky. Completely destroyed. Billions of people die. Everybody and everything she's ever known as home is completely destroyed. Yet though she continues to be a rebel and continues to fight against the empire, she does not become someone who makes it her life mission to make the empire suffer.

36:19      PTJ: That notion of not allowing the anger, not allowing the pain, not allowing the trauma to dominate you is recurrent in Star Wars. And if it isn't directly related to these other kinds of mystical faith traditions around the world, it's certainly to use Lucas's word rhymes with them. It channels that same notion. So the message I would argue is, yes, your life, your journey has been shaped by conflict. Yes, there's pain. Yes, there's trauma. You have to work through that. You have to get over that. If you can't get over that, then you just become a tool of the dark side.

37:03      KS: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, you and I could do this all day, but we can't. Thank you for joining Big World to discuss imperialism, post-conflict societies, and Star Wars. It's been great to speak with you.

37:16      PTJ: Likewise.

37:17      KS: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. If you leave us a good rating or review, and please do, it'll be like finding an uncorrupted, unbroken, kyber crystal in your backyard. Our theme music is, It Was Just Cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.