What Star Wars knew before we did
The War On Terror, horror in Afghanistan and the Star Wars prequels
It’s been a devastating week. The horrors unfolding in Afghanistan are a thing of nightmares, both for the Afghan people who call that place their home, and our remaining troops working hard to get people out as the Taliban reclaim power. Lives have been lost already in the tumult. Yesterday, ISIS affiliated fighters launched a suicide bombing on two targets in Kabul, resulting in the most U.S. causalities in one single event in almost 10 years. For Afghans, it was not outside of the norm. The fear. The death. Their lives being treated like pawns in a game by American media pundits and politicians. The War on Terror and in Afghanistan has been a sinkhole of fear, a generator of despair and a constant nagging pain in the body politic of the United States.
Is any of this suffering really a surprise? It shouldn’t be. Star Wars and the anti-war message that underpinned George Lucas’ prequel trilogy knew this was all a grievous mistake — long before our population came to its senses. Now, with renewed violence in Kabul and American lives lost, the same fear and totalitarian instincts that got us into this situation…are trying their hardest to take back the narrative and force American troops back into combat in Afghanistan. We mustn’t consent.
I want to share an excerpt with you from How The Force Can Fix The World, from the chapter on Fear, where I draw a line between Star Wars message on fear, control and unpredictability to America’s War on Terror and beyond.
Chapter 3: Fear: The Darkness Loves Your Good Intentions
Understanding the “War On Terror”
Every generation has a defining moment that alters the course of history and leaves an indelible scar on its young people. The COVID-19 pandemic is one such moment. Then there’s Pearl Harbor, Vietnam — you know the usual suspects. For me, it was September 11th, 2001. I was 11 at the time and sent home from school early to find my mother folding socks in the living room, crying as she watched the horror unfold on TV. I never want to feel like I did that day ever again.
If you’re at all like me, then how you processed 9/11 probably had a big impact on your politics in the years to come. It was my politically awakening moment, it was why I started paying attention to the world around me. Something I’m not proud of is how in the years following the attacks, I became quite the foreign policy hawk. Bush was talking about an America that wasn’t going to live in fear, he drew a line in the sand, saying "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." At the time, that sounded like strength. But like with Anakin Skywalker’s challenge to Obi-Wan, “If you're not with me, then you're my enemy,” it was anything but.
And so we went to war, to stop them over there so we didn’t have to face them over here. Twenty years, 801,000+ lives and $6.4 trillion dollars[1] later, with active operations in close to 80 countries, I think most Americans understand this wasn’t just a mistake but a form of cognitive dissonance about what it means to not live in fear.
The War on Terror has been an abject failure by its own metrics. In 2003 the Bush administration offered its core objectives for the War on Terror with a stated National Strategy to Combat Terrorism. It read: "The intent of our national strategy is to stop terrorist attacks against the United States, its citizens, its interests, and our friends and allies around the world and ultimately, to create an international environment inhospitable to terrorists and all those who support them."
If Bush’s goal was to reduce the spread and prevalence of terrorism abroad, then the war was an utter failure. According[2] to the Cato Institute, in the seven countries the US has invaded or conducted airstrikes since 2001, acts of terror rose by an eye popping 1900%.
If the goal was to save American lives, well we’ve spent more in pursuit of this goal than we lost on 9/11. 2,996 souls were lost on that day in 2001. As of November 2018, just shy of 7,000 U.S. soldiers’ lives were taken in Iraq or Afghanistan. If you factor in service member suicides and deaths of despair following combat tours, the situation becomes even more grim.
If the goal was to reassert American power around the world and spread democracy, well two things have clearly gone wrong with that. First, Americans grew undoubtedly war weary and skeptical of Bush era foreign policy, which in part led to the election of Barack Obama on promises to walk it all back (which didn’t happen). Then came Donald Trump in 2016, who pledged to withdraw from these conflicts and challenge our longstanding allies around the globe who he cast as freeriders on American power. To his credit, President Trump reduced troop deployments in a number of countries, but total withdrawal remained elusive. Between disrupting U.S. alliances and continuing counter-terrorism operations abroad, we’ve only lost more ground as a global power in the Trump years, same as during Obama’s tenure and Bush’s before him. While America has been distracted in the Middle East chasing the ghosts of 9/11, both Russia and China rose on the world stage in ways that objectively threaten U.S. interests far more than radicalized teenagers building IEDs in Afghanistan.
Second, liberal democracy has receded worldwide in the years since Bush called for a “global democratic revolution” led by the United States. In the Middle East where the brunt of American military operations has been felt the most, political instability, civil war and corruption has run rampant. Like in Star Wars, if you thought the Empire was bad — wait till you meet the First Order. Iraqis may have been free of Sadaam Hussein, a brutal dictator, but within a decade its people endured the rise of ISIS, a theocratic militia with no restraint and a bloodlust the likes of which the modern world had never seen.
Domestically, our own commitments to democratic governance have declined, thanks in no small part to the national security apparatus that popped up in response to 9/11 and the passage of the PATRIOT Act. An American’s right to privacy, due process, free speech and association has declined since 9/11. This isn’t an American phenomenon. The swelling of the deep state intelligence apparatus and shrinking of civil liberties in the name of fighting ‘terror,’ has crept into the lives of all the western democracies that America has historically called its friends.
What Star Wars understood before we did
It was something of a coincidence that the War on Terror and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would happen at the time of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy. The fabled creator of Star Wars has long boasted that he knew the backstory of Darth Vader from the earliest years of writing the original Star Wars. Lucas always had a political vision with those original Star Wars films, where he expressed his misgivings about the Vietnam War era and vaguely hinted toward the Nixon administration. The prequels were always bound to follow suit in channeling Lucas’s distinctly liberal politics.
But what has always struck me about Episodes I-III is how these movies that were supposedly outlined well before the turn of the century ended up meshing so perfectly with what was unfolding in the news at the time of their release. A threat to the Republic from a frightening new enemy, a congress all too eager to give its head of state a suite of robust emergency powers to meet the threat, and a war predicated on a lie. What Star Wars understood about this situation before the rest of us watched the saga play out on screen and in reality, was that the pursuit of total control by regimes past and present has almost never played out in favor of democratic ideals. This is a theme you can trace back to the original trilogy as well.
Fear, power, self-righteousness and even good intentions can corrupt and misguide the best of us. And when they do, you lose something along the way that more often than not you can’t get
back. Maybe it’s your liberties, your privacy, a loved one … or a hand. Reminder: Lightsabers are dangerous, use with caution.
You might recall in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s warning to Luke when he experienced a vision of Han and Leia suffering in Cloud City at the hands of Darth Vader. In a frenzy, Luke cuts short his training on Dagobah and mounts his X-Wing to fly to his friends’ rescue. Yoda and Obi-Wan are both emphatic that Luke is making a mistake, the same mistake made by his father when he was plagued by similar visions of his wife’s untimely death thirty years prior. Yoda tries to stop him, saying, “If you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.”
But Luke is convinced Han and Leia will die if he doesn’t intervene. I think we can safely say at this point that Luke was wrong. In the end, Leia escapes with the help of a reformed Lando Calrissian, and Han is sealed in carbonite and transported to Jabba the Hutt by Boba Fett — things that were already in motion when Luke arrives for his feeble fight against Darth Vader. Luke ultimately goes home short one hand, in need of a new lightsaber, and carrying the burden of knowing Darth Vader to be his father.
It’s the low point for Luke on his hero's journey, one that could have been avoided had he not let his actions be governed by fear and uncertainty. This is how the dark side works its will in Star Wars, and it’s what George Lucas has challenged fans to reflect on since Star Wars first began and continued on into the Bush years and our “War on Terror.”
That road to hell and whatever paves it
You don’t wind up with popularly used expressions like “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” without there being some merit or abiding understanding in the wisdom of such a proverb. “Facilis Descensus Averno,” reads Virgil’s Aeneid, dating back to roughly 25 BC — “The descent to hell is easy." You’re likely familiar with this notion and have heard it before. Star Wars is one of our epoch’s most effective funnels for timeless philosophy and spiritualism such as this. Characters like Yoda hold inside them all the greats: The Stoics, Buddha, Confucius, Christ (just to name a few) … and as such, Star Wars aligns nicely with those powerful few words from Virgil. Remember when Luke Skywalker asks Yoda on Dagobah if the dark side is more powerful? Yoda replies, “No. Quicker, easier, more seductive.”
This is something most people understand to be true. The American founders surely did. That’s why it’s baked into American government that so much of governing is somewhat slow, arduous and requires frustrating levels of consensus between political factions and warring branches (legislative, judicial and executive). As politics becomes more mired in gridlock, indecision and disagreeableness, naturally you hear a lot of “we must do something” proposed in opposition to process and coolheadedness.
But let’s face it, being ‘cool as a cucumber’ is not politically popular.
Taking action, doing something — anything — now that is popular. Action is the clarion call of politicians and fearful constituents. It’s the call of the loving parent who watches on TV as news of a school shooting unfolds just a few counties over. The sad reality is that most of us don’t have to imagine such a thing, considering national traumas like the massacres at Columbine, Sandy Hook Elementary and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High are etched into our memories for life. There will never be a day when I drop my own daughter off at school without experiencing flashes of pain in the form of CNN news headlines saying “yet another school shooting.” Now if you or I were to sit down in front of Master Yoda at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and ask, “Master Yoda, I’m plagued by visions of pain, suffering and death regarding my children. I’m afraid of harm that could befall them at school. What must I do?” There’s a good chance Yoda might respond similarly to the way he does regarding Anakin Skywalker’s visions of personal loss:
“The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”
Conservative author and public speaker Arthur Brooks has spoken a great deal about his appreciation for Buddhism and his meetings with Tibetan Monks including the Dalai Lama. On his podcast, “The Art of Happiness,[1] ” Brooks described asking one of the monks how to better understand bad feelings, such as anger, fear or disgust. He recalls the response: “You see them as a signal that you have an attachment that you need to address.” Remember what I said about Yoda being a funnel for real world philosophy and spiritualism?
Because I am an imperfect person, I for one would be agitated — maybe even furious at either response. Anakin appeared lowkey furious at it himself. You mean to tell me that my problem is not the mortal danger looming over my loved ones but that I am too attached to them? Bogus. No half-decent parent, sibling, spouse or friend can think this way. Sure, Anakin wasn’t supposed to have a spouse for exactly this reason while living his life as a Jedi. But I haven’t signed up to be a Jedi, and (probably) neither have you.
So what are we supposed to do? Yoda says to Anakin, “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” Should we embrace this kind of dispassionate zen as parents, as husbands and wives and as citizens? Probably not. We aren’t a society of monks. We should love big, but perhaps we should be willing to hold the reins more loosely.
I told you that certain battles with fear, like that of the War on Terror, may well be out of our hands at this point. There’s a saying that goes something like, “what freedoms you give up to the government, you won’t likely get back,” and in this case, that rings true to me. But one battle lost isn’t game over. There are other areas much closer to our daily lives, much more in our reach, where we can reject living in a fearful society. We can still change the culture.
I hope you enjoyed this short read and will pick up my book, on sale now.
If you follow my political work, here is the latest episode of my show which covers the Afghanistan situation and the choices we face there.
And for a quick dose of Star Wars and a great talk about the morality of the series to people on both sides of the political divide, check this out