World War II ended in Europe 80 years ago, on the 8th of May, 1945. War raged on in the Pacific theatre, the full extent of genocide against the Jewish people was being unveiled, a messy process of decolonisation would ensue, and Europe itself was to be divided under the US-Soviet saw, but at least—at last—fascism had been quelled. It was Victory for the United States, Great Britain, France etc., and rebuilding Europe paved way for the relative prosperity of what we know as "the West" and the past several decades of the US-led international order with institutions like international law and the United Nations. People generally have a strong sense of good and evil about WWII. How does Star Wars make use of this?
The realities of oppression should not be taken lightly, but we may as well use Star Wars to learn a few things about our world. From George Lucas to creators beyond, Star Wars has taken extensive inspiration from WWII, which we'll explore here. I'm going to focus on the war in Europe here, and I'll draw from both canon and Legends continuities (perhaps this is worth some follow-up posts on the Asia-Pacific front, and also the consequences of the war not on lore but on people who have worked on Star Wars).
Let's start off with a George Lucas quote from 2005—
"History is fiction, but people seem to think otherwise. The thing I like about fantasy and science fiction is that you can take issues, pull them out of their cultural straitjackets, and talk about them without bringing in folk artifacts that make people get closed minded."
Mythology, in this sense, refers to stories shared between people that ties us together, not a judgement on whether something is factual or not. Stories reflect and evoke emotional truths.
[We Can Do It! poster, based on the American "Rosie the Riveter" poster]
Myth as Memory: as time goes by
Star Wars came out in 1977, only 32 years away from WWII. 32 years before the present year, 2025, was only 1993! The director: an American filmmaker called George Lucas who resisted the established Hollywood system. We may call it science fiction, but Lucas wrote Star Wars as a "fairytale" with the tumult of 1960s America fresh on his mind: social unrest over the Vietnam War and ingrained racism against Black people. It wasn't so much about the future but about "timeless" psychological motifs common to human stories of brave heroes overcoming impossible odds. He feared for the freedom of Americans, feeling that the democracy that protected it was being threatened by political corruption. Any good story needed some kind of conflict, an opposing force, and a black-and-white morality of a princess and her friends facing an evil Empire seemed to do the job.
The aesthetics of the Empire were directly inspired by WWII gear, from uniforms to guns to aircraft carriers. George Lucas gave his ILM visual effects department wartime film reels he had personally cut together for the space combat sequences. The iconic stormtrooper was meant to look like a skeleton and was named after the German stormtroopers. The whole shebang screams fascism, sewed into the pulpy but timeless battle of good against evil. Star Wars' visual language evokes very clearly a sense of evil to the post-war public (American) imagination.
But those are just flashes of war. What is the story behind the fire and fury? Lucas turned his backstory into another trilogy—the prequel films, starting with The Phantom Menace, set 32 years before A New Hope, before jumping ten years ahead to the legendary Clone Wars. At its root is the past of human history to answer Lucas' question: how do democracies turn into dictatorships?
Lucas worried about the direction of American democracy, with the phantom of history at risk of repeating itself. The fall of the Roman Republic with the rise of Caesar and Augustus; the failure of the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Empire; the failure of the united German states with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Reich, most recently foiled by the Allied Powers in WWII. Hitler used the Reichstag as pretext for suspending civil liberties; Napoleon crowned himself emperor; Palpatine accused the Jedi of attempting a wartime coup and appointed himself Emperor.
We see that the Empire of Star Wars didn't conquer the galaxy. Instead, the Republic voted for a dictatorship that offered easy answers to mounting crises. The prequels generalised the rise of Nazism into a timeless tale that could be applied across human history, and indeed, as Lucas worried, recent events too. As the memories of WWII morph into a modern mythology, the mythos of Star Wars invites viewers to compare it with the fresh memories of new events. The prequel trilogy ended in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith, and Lucas remarked about the similarity of his story, which was born of WWII and the Vietnam War of his youth, with the Iraq War happening then.
Interlude: Putting the War in Star Wars
WWII reshaped American and European identities in relation to war, and memories of war have morphed into popular mythology dramatising the war, firstly to films about the war itself, then to Star Wars. Cinematically, films about action in the European theatre of the war, sometimes made during the war itself, are an abundant supply of inspiration.
The climactic Battle of Yavin in the original Star Wars was based on film reels Lucas had cut from WWII films, including The Dam Busters (1955, by Michael Anderson) and 633 Squadron (1964, by Walter Grauman), based on the British Royal Air Force's operations. Lucas later hired Richard Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi (1983) given Marquand's experience in directing both English theatre and the war film Eye of the Needle (1981). For The Clone Wars, Henry Gilroy wrote the Ryloth arc partly based on The Guns of Navarone (1961, by J. Lee Thompson), a film on a fictional Allied mission to destroy a fortress blocking the British Royal Navy, together with a negative view of the US-led war in Afghanistan in the 2000s. If the latest military conflicts are looked on with misgiving over a collective loss of innocence, the triumph over Nazism by everyday citizens remains a cornerstone of a global cultural fabric.
George Lucas produced the film Red Tails (2012), which is about the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of Black servicemen of the US Army Air Forces who served in Europe during the war with a distinguished record despite racist policies and attitudes against them. Inspired by this, the reference book The Essential Guide to Warfare introduced the Fourteenth Army "Red Tails Command." Additional Star Wars reading material have built on the legacy of WWII too. The Imperial SAGroup of young people, whose emotional vulnerabilities were exploited for the capacity to become zealots, echoes the Hitler Youth. Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston's X-wing novels in the 1990s featured rebel pilot Gavin Darklighter to give a perspective of innocence, based on teenage boys who enlisted to fight in WWII despite being underaged. The TV series Star Wars Resistance (2018-2020) was born of Dave Filoni's interest in WWII fighter pilots. Fictional propaganda poster designs, included in this essay, were inspired by real ones from WWII.
But is Star Wars actually relaying lessons from WWII? Following the original film's release, China's People's Daily dismissed it as another movie that reflected how Americans' "dissatisfaction with reality" was pushing them to "seek comfort in an illusory fairyland." Once Star Wars moves beyond George Lucas and into the minds of audiences and other creators, is it just an escapist and really expensive soap opera?
[We Will Beat Them Again poster, based on the British poster "We beat 'em before. We'll beat 'em again!"]
Nothing is sacred with the banality of evil
"Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure."—Luke Skywalker, in The Last Jedi
For The Last Jedi (2017), Rian Johnson read the book Vertical Warfare from the Skywalker Ranch library and screened to the cast and crew Twelve O'Clock High (1949, by Henry King) and Sahara (1943, by Zoltan Korda) about Allied bomber pilots and soldiers. The movie is fashioned after war films, but the Jedi Luke Skywalker adamantly rejects Rey's plea for him to rejoin the fight since the legacy of Jedi involvement, he claimed, "is failure." But Yoda reminds us that "the greatest teacher, failure is." The Cold War has shown very quickly that WWII was never the "war to end all wars," but the myth of resisting fascism in Europe is strong, not least because its legacy has informed so much of Star Wars. Likewise, the myth of the Jedi in the Star Wars galaxy is strong enough to inspire a younger generation of heroes, whether it's Rose or that little boy on Canto Bight, that they can carry the torch of resistance; the rebellion is reborn.
For both The Force Awakens (2015) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), J.J. Abrams has said that part of the inspiration behind the First Order was: what if the Nazis who fled to Argentina managed to band together and threatened the status quo? Surrounding novels and reference material have added that the First Order rose within the context of a New Republic that had demilitarised and dismissed warnings about the revisionist regime. The memory of the Empire as an unjust tyranny was held sacred, but revisionist neo-Imperialists challenged this status quo and insisted that the new galactic order was "disorder." Democratic backsliding happens in much the same way in the modern day. Most interestingly, Abrams said that he chose a different approach for The Rise of Skywalker, moving away from nostalgia to focus on the new generation of heroes' confrontation of the "debt that has come before," "less about restoring an old age" but "more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed."
Kijimi City in The Rise of Skywalker was partly based on Nazi-occupied Paris and the wartime romance film Casablanca (1942, by Michael Curtiz), set in the Moroccan city under Nazi-collaborationist French colonial control. Casablanca is a beautiful 40s romance film, but this, plus the host of other films from which Star Wars has borrowed in tone and sequences, do beg the question: is the exaggerated action-adventure of the franchise glorifying violence, romanticising war, or simply prickling at audiences' nostalgia for the older films? In French historiography, there is a criticism called résistancialisme, accusing some historical accounts of exaggerating the prevalence and glory of French acts of resistance during WWII. The Star Wars Visions short "The Spy Dancer" (2023) is explicitly based on the French Resistance in Paris, but director Julien Chheng said he was also influenced by his family's history in Cambodia during the genocidal Khmer Rouge communist regime, and the short was well-received by audiences not only in Cambodia but also in Argentina, which transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy in 1983.
In the real world, some fascists did flee Europe to the Americas at the end of the war though "ratlines," particularly to Argentina. One notable case was that of Eichmann, a leading perpetrator of the Holocaust. He was notable due to his trial in Israel in the early 1960s and the report of the trial by Hannah Arendt. She noted that Eichmann was apparently an ordinary man living an unremarkable life in Argentina, suggesting that perhaps evil is not exclusive to individuals considered notably evil like Hitler, but could be done by common everyday people—Arendt called this the "banality of evil." Fast forward to the Andor series (2022-2025), Syril Karn's actor, Kyle Soller, said his character was an unexceptional bureaucrat "desperate to be loved" who showed "the banality of evil." He would fulfill his orders, whatever they were, including committing atrocities just to get promoted.
[Mandalorian mural, after Picasso's Guernica]
Beyond Good and Evil? Keep Calm and Carry On.
The repercussions of genocide and war, like the Nuremberg trials, also prompted debates about guilt and human nature. Is a Nazi underling as complicit as Nazi leaders? The Eichmann case inspired the famous Milgram experiment in psychology, about how susceptible humans could be to obey authority and do bad things; just "good soldiers who follow orders." In Germany, Vergangenheitsbewältigung refers to a very real and very much ongoing process in which people collectively address the legacy of war and oppression. In Alexander Freed's Alphabet Squadron novel trilogy (2019-2021), individual Imperials grapple with their implication of their immediate part in sustaining Palpatine's regime. From the wartime commanders to civilian staff, their deeds were not only ordered by the Emperor but meticulously recorded by the Emperor, making their complicity undeniable. To what extent would the New Republic seek retribution? How to cope with impossible burdens?
The politics of memory are controversial throughout Europe, including in Spain. While not directly involved in WWII, Spain underwent a bloody civil war in the 1930s and was ruled by General Franco until 1975. The Pacto del Olvido, Pact of Forgetting, was a political agreement during Spain's transition to democracy to suppress painful memories of war and repression. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by fascist Italian and German forces at Franco's request prompted the artist Picasso's painting Guernica in 1937. The painting drew widespread attention to the Spanish Civil War, and the Mandalore arc of The Clone Wars (2013) included an imitation of Guernica in the cubist style, albeit with Mandalorians and Jedi. The ancient battle against Jedi remains largely implicit in Star Wars and is rarely mentioned in narrative media, and though Mandalore is proudly neutral in the galactic conflict, the clear divide between pacifist and militant/terrorist Mandalorian factions in The Clone Wars leads inevitably to a local war adjacent to the pan-galactic war. Perhaps there is no such thing as neutrality in Star Wars.
You may ask: If values and memory can be redefined, then aren't the notions of good and evil artificial? Is "truth" therefore not an invention? Maybe neither Star Wars nor WWII has any inherent "message." Well, Lucas' interest in anthropology was what created the Force, and good and evil and truth are human concepts, yes—and they serve a social purpose. They are like propaganda. Paper and pixels aren't inherently patriotic or truthful or misleading—the magic happens in the eyes of the beholder. Notions of morality and feelings of truth underpin common stories and keep societies together, making them united for common causes like public utilities, maintaining a social contract, or indeed mobilising for defence against any perceived threats. Different societies have different cultures with their own nuances, just as each individual is unique. Our choices and beliefs have evolved to adapt to reality so that humanity could survive ourselves; the tree that won't bend will snap in the wind.
After the proud "Blitz spirit" of WWII, aside from the war defending the Falkland Islands from Argentina that precipitated the fall of the military junta in 1983, and before the return of war in Europe with Russia's attack on Ukraine, the UK grappled with an internal armed conflict—the Troubles in Northern Ireland—for which I think a good quote from Chris Patten addresses the politics of memory well: "we should remember the past the better to forget it." That is, we remember so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, but remembering is ancillary to society's goal of doing what is now possible to make the future better, not the other way round. Being unable to let go of remembering is also a mistake, and revenge is not the Jedi way. That's how you get V-2 rockets. It's like that recent short from Tales of the Underworld, with Ventress helping to reconcile the Separatist veteran with the local populace so that they may all live in peace.
You ask again: Is Star Wars about fascism in WWII, or imperialism leading up to WWII, or communism after WWII, or... doesn't Star Wars tend to give a simplified dichotomy of "good versus evil" or tell stories for nostalgia's sake, repeating the same "timeless" stories about greed and letting go? I suppose all of those things can be true. What matters is what we make of it.
[A new dawn at the end of the Shattered Empire comics]
We'll meet again: "It's like poetry; it rhymes"
"This is a new day, a new beginning."—Ahsoka Tano, in Rebels (2015)
The grand historical narrative, backed by at least most Western leaders with the "victory" of 1945, is that the war was a righteous cause for humanity's freedom from fascism. It is not just another war between states or a war based on a political ideology against a point on the political spectrum, but a universal struggle against an evil that wages war against life itself. History may be written by the victors, but this narrative of universalism, this story, has been popular just as Star Wars has been popular because people feel it to be true, because our understanding of reality informs how we feel; lightsabers may be fiction but the light side of the Force is real. Without truthful inquiries about ourselves and our world, our feelings become dark weapons against ourselves, but if we strive to be in tune with emotional and empirical truths, to truly honour the vows of remembrance and "never again," we can begin to recognise the significance of the Second World War and defend what we value.
Myths, as with norms and values, are socially constructed; it is up to us as to how they endure. I think normality means to be at home, and if stories come from the heart of artists, then stories out there are to be brought home to heart. As troops from China and North Korea join the Moscow Victory Day parade today and European states attempt to re-arm, Europe is well into its fourth year of returning to full-scale war with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and AI-integrated repression of free speech together with the proliferation of disinformation accelerate the death of truth. While the spectre of war, genocide, and all forms of authoritarianism continue haunting the world, it is perhaps our duty not to mourn and fret but to be clear-eyed about our myths, to bring home these emotional truths about ourselves, and to persist in living normally—helping those around us to lead more normal lives—in an abnormal world.
Addendum
Myths are grounded in the brutality and beauty of reality. Every moment of light and life matters if you think every moment of light and life matters. Star Wars is as serious as you want it to be, but at the end of the day, the lore and real-world inspirations and silly debates online don't need to matter. Sometimes, it might actually be better to just think of it as that cool show with talking dogs throwing lasers and sh*t around. As Lucas said in 1999, the premise of Star Wars is a belief in humanity, that "we are both good and evil, and we have a choice." If tyranny is fear, then the bravest form of resistance is to choose happiness, wherever you can find it. Your focus determines your reality.
