The Sad Endurance of Tyranny

Unfortunately, tyranny is not brittle or weak, nor is it an aberration.  Liberty and Freedom are what we must constantly maintain.  We explore the threats through using the Star Wars canon, and historical examples to illustrate our points.  

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The Sad Endurance of Tyranny

January 2023

I love Star Wars; as a small kid, I still remember the excitement of seeing the original movie (now called A Reason for Hope to distinguish it from its cinematic siblings). 

It was not just the technology, though, that was stunning. But it was more than just a burst of incredible special effects. First, there was the bar scene with all the planetary creatures. 

The majesty of Alec Guinness, the incredible charisma from the unknown trio of Carrie Fisher (daughter of Hollywood Royalty), Mark Hamill, and most of all, the roguish Harrison Ford. There was humor in the scenes with Chewbacca, and one of my favorite exchanges was when a reluctant Han Solo is cajoled into helping Luke rescue the imprisoned princess:

Luke: She's rich (upon which Chewbacca starts moaning, knowing Luke has read Han's weakness correctly)

Han: How rich

Luke: Well, more wealth than you can imagine

Han: I don't know; I can imagine quite a bit! 

Yet even this epic movie focused on a particular form of tyranny. The evil entity, embodied by Peter Cushing's Grand Moth Tarkin and the unforgettable Darth Vader, is The Empire, to be more precise, the Galactic Empire, but no one spells that out in the movies. Not the XXX Empire but just simply, The Empire. It is not "the state" or "the regime" but rather the instant recognition of a colonizer, an occupier, or an imperial government.  

The first three movies, in the chronological order of the Star Wars movies, represent the fourth, fifth, and sixth movies far and away superior. Yet one of the few good things to emanate from the weak prequels was how the Empire began. Not as some massive invading and colonizing force, such as the Roman city-state conquering around the Mediterranean Sea, but rather the Star Wars Empire is built from within. The bureaucracy at the center of the Galactic Republic represents such an inefficient system that governance is rendered impossible. Instead, a Republic Senator named Palpatine takes control as Chancellor in order to get things done. Only later does he assume the title of Emperor. Clearly, George Lucas, founder of the Star Wars franchise and writer of the prequels, was making a point. 

Napoleon Bonaparte was a member of the French army and a supporter of the Jacobins and Robespierre. After the latter's fall, he retained his position by beating a Royalist uprising in Paris and continuing his ascent in Republican France. After more military successes, he became First Consul and then later Emperor. 

Though Benito Mussolini achieved absolute power with a march on Rome in 1922, he was a member of the Royal Army in World War I and served in the Italian Socialist Party before founding his own fascist one. A great defense of Mussolini's tactics, which included secret police and midnight murders of opposition figures, was that he "made the trains run on time." Hitler was a member of the Reichstag before he became Chancellor. Their people elected Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez before taking absolute power. I will provide more thoughts on this later.  

If the Star Wars prequels were weak, the last three movies representing movies seven, eight, and nine, are odious. That is why I was surprised by the excellent Star Wars TV series Andor. Based on a character that was, in turn, based on an ancillary Star Wars movie called Rogue One, Andor was a revelation. As with the best science fiction, the best sword and sorcerers, and the best superhero movies, today's special effects or CGI is the servant of the story, not the other way around. Though Andor is set in a galaxy far, far away, it could have been placed in colonial India, 1940s France, or even Russia today. But let me be clear. There are droids, intergalactic travel, and one aerial fight that was tremendous, but again, part of the story, but not the core of the story. 

"Industry" co-creator Konrad Kay noted, "To call it simply a 'Star Wars show' is to do it a disservice," he said in an email. "It's a political thriller, a workplace drama, a war film, a prison drama, a spy thriller. Instead of focusing on a key family, the Empire becomes "an organization governed by hierarchy, tedium, ambition and petty bureaucracies. Everything is in detail; the show had an ability to be macro and then zero in ruthlessly on the micro. It felt local, specific, and lived in—which is remarkable for something about an intergalactic struggle. A visually spectacular romp that was somehow also able to meditate on things like the banality of evil and the importance of the revolutionary spirit," 

In terms of the revolutionary spirit, as noted by Kay, there is within Andor a series of speeches around the nature of tyranny and rebellion and the cost of what that means. One of the characters is Luthen. He is not an open revolutionary but instead operates in the shadows, funding, planning, and enabling others to do the wet work or rebellion. Though he does not directly challenge the Empire, his role is vital, but at a cost. When a spy he is managing demands to know what Luthen, as played by the invaluable Stellan Skarsgard, has sacrificed, he exclaims, 

"Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace and made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago, from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. 

I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is... what is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything." 

I can give you chapter and verse about Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, Patton, or Churchill. But what of Jean Moulin? This is a name I did not know until I researched for this piece. After losing his prefecture office during the German invasion of 1940, Moulin joined the Résistance and escaped to England. He returned to France in January 1942 as General Charles de Gaulle's delegate general for the unoccupied zone. He played a leading part in the organization of the Maquis (French guerrillas who fought the Germans) and in the development of the National Council of the Résistance, which coordinated all the noncommunist resistance groups in France and secured their loyalty to de Gaulle's Free French movement. Moulin became the first chairman of this council in May 1943. His organizational abilities and political skills made him a legendary figure. In June 1943, however, the Gestapo arrested him at Caluire, near Lyon. Tortured in one prison after another and died on a train taking him to Germany.  

In Andor, a far more idealistic character than Luthen is named Karis Nemik, who states. "There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are constantly occurring throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause and know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority, and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this: try."

And along these lines, Andor's adoptive mother, Maarva Andor, says, "Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this: The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that there is darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it's here. It's here and its not visiting anymore. It wants to stay. The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep. It's easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it's true; maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it's too late. But I'll tell you this… If I could do it again, I'd wake up early and be fighting these bastards… from the start. Fight the Empire!" 

These are stirring words and some of the best entertainment writing of the year. But here, the enemy is obvious. Historically, it was obvious that slaves would revolt against Rome in the 70s BCE or the Jews in the 60s CE. Or that in the 19th century, Greece would rebel against the Ottomans, and later in World War I, the Arabs would join them. Gandhi's peaceful campaigns in India or the violent ones in Indochina in the 1940s and 50s. Whether it be Romans, Turks, British or French, these were foreign rulers imposing tyranny on subject peoples. This is in the spirit of Andor. But this tyranny is easy to spot, clearly seen if for no reason other than the ethnicity is different, something lacking in Andor. Aside from the uniforms, it is impossible to tell friends from foes in the show. 

But there is a creeping level of tyranny that is equally insidious and harder to spot. 

One of the greatest mistakes made by humans throughout history is to put their fates into the power of the state. Usually, in the form of a strongman (or, more recently, strong woman) who vows to fix all the problems and make things work. When progressive New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman yearns for the US to be China for a day, he means that our Republic can build shiny new airports, office towers, and whole cities as the Chinese have done over the past 30 years. Friedman would look at the 2006 Beijing Olympics and marvel at the 5,000-strong drum core. There are two things wrong with Friedman's vision. First, only through coercion can these things be done the way they are in China, and if a Friedman column began to question the government, Mr. China, for a day, would find himself in jail, with a sentence notably longer than a day.  

The other aspect of when progressives yearn for this type of control is that it is only reasonable to set their priorities and beliefs. If the GOP were China for a day and removed regulatory barriers, eliminated public sector unions, enfranchised more charter schools, and cut the staff of the Labor Department, the hue and cry could be heard all the way to Chinese-Occupied Tibet. 

And it should be noted that the government that Friedman extols is run by colonizers and people who run mass concentration camps. 

Not only does so much tyranny emanate from within, but the illusion that it is weak, ready to be torn down, is not correct. Bonaparte was torn down, but only after he unwisely invaded Russia with the eventual loss of most of his army. It is the same with Adolph Hitler. Suppose both had played the long game, not overestimated their forces, and underestimated Russia. It would have been interesting to see how long it would have taken to tear them down. And what about the person on the other side of the World War II Eastern Front, Joseph Stalin? During this career, he murdered over 30 million people. Yet Stalin was never torn down; he died in his bed in 1953. 

If you asked even knowledgeable people with a smattering of history, who was the greatest mass murderer in history in terms of total numbers, one would usually hear Adolph Hitler. 

The correct answer is Mao Tse Dung, with nearly 40 million murdered. 

Now, this sort of question is clearly a race to the bottom. But Mao was the worst.  

And did the Chinese rise up and overthrow Mao? He died in his bed in 1974, and his body continues to exist in the state. The current ruler of China, Xi Jinping, lauds Mao and wishes to emanate him. And despite this, there is no movement, no rebels on hand to overthrow Xi's form or tyranny.  Next door, we now have the third member of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. And in terms of rebellion, there is little evidence that Kim Jung Un is in any more issues than his father and grandfather, who both died in their beds. 

The lesson here is not to appease tyranny or give up. But rather understand its permissive nature and realize that this is not something that should be opposed when it is here, but rather vigilance is always in order. Ronald Reagan said, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."

And that much of tyranny in history did not begin by imposition from the so-called visitors in the Andor speech. The tyrannies of Germany, Russia, Cambodia, Cuba, and Venezuela were not from invading armies but, at one point, were supported by the peoples of these nations and maintained not by a conquering colonist foe but by the apparatus of the state. Despite the growing threat, there is little to fear from a Chinese invasion in some sort of Red Dawn movie fever dream. 

That means the greatest threat to our liberty will come from within. And we can see the cold threat of tyranny in the icicles forming on our Republic's eaves. These icicles come in speech codes that limit what a person can say or write. I am not talking about pure hate speech, such as a work that extolls mass violence. Instead, these codes would eliminate centuries-old words such as master, housekeeping, lame, minority, and grandfather. People take offense to these words. 

But instead of expressing that offense or debating the terms, the left would use the coercive power of the government to censor speech.  

We see it in schools. We see it in our regulatory world where a simple thing like a gas stove has been deemed a threat and thus must be eliminated. In this case, our liberties will succumb to tyranny not by a violent revolution but rather in dribs and drabs, as Maarva Andor states in the show, while we are sleeping only to awake to that state. 

In March 2020, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was lauded for going into extreme lockdown mode in the first wave. However, aside from the ease of doing this on a two-island nation, as noted in the Guardian, it was not to last, "If one can date the government's decline 17 August 2021 is it. On that breezy winter Tuesday, the prime minister announced the country would move to Alert Level 4 at midnight. Back then, public compliance was high, and the team of 5 million did its duty. That initial lockdown would drag into December as the Delta variant proved a more formidable opponent than the initial coronavirus variant, yet compliance remained high, with movement data indicating similar patterns to previous Level 4 and Level 3 lockdowns in Auckland.

When the usual cast of conspiracists and losers turned out to protest the lockdown in August, they could muster no more than 100 supporters. Yet six months later, some members of that same pathetic cast managed to turn out thousands of people for the clown convoy to Wellington. How? What distinguished the country's first extended lockdown in March 2020 from its second in August 2021 was that the first lockdown came with the social and financial support needed to sustain it.

Alongside freezing tax interest, freezing rents, and banning evictions came hundreds of millions of dollars in direct support to social service providers and a six-month mortgage holiday scheme for homeowners. But, unfortunately, a similar commitment to preventing hardship was absent in the August 2021 lockdown, and as Alert Level 4 and Alert Level 3 dragged on in Auckland, stories were breaking that detailed precisely what that hardship looked like.

In South Auckland, high school students often took jobs as essential workers. This is what did in the government's strong support from New Zealanders, allowing communities to fracture as hardship went unanswered and unsupported. 

Otherwise, people vote with their feet. This is a case study in government beginning with a presumably beneficial offering, keeping you from getting a disease, and morphed into something else, especially a year later when it was shown that COVID was a threat, but not consistently dire, to those over 65. For those younger? On the equivalent with the flu, though, this did not stop the zealous Ardern. 

I have written a great deal about 2012's Obama ad Life of Julia. Julia, who has no face, is depicted at ages 3 through 67, enjoying the benefits of various Obama-backed welfare-state programs. As a toddler, she's in a head-start program. Skip ahead to 17, and she's enrolled at a Race to the Top high school. Her 20s are very active: She gets surgery and free birth control through ObamaCare regulations, files a lawsuit under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and pays off her student loans at a low-interest rate. We get updates at age 31, 37, and 42--and then the narrative skips ahead 23 years when she enrolls in Medicare. Two years later, she's on Social Security, at which point she can die at any time. What is missing? Family, friends, churches, charities, and a spouse. What is there is that all of this largesse is not even granted by the American government or people; it is provided by "Under President Obama because, like China's Xi, he is there for life.  

The other side of the coin, not mentioned in the video, was that what the government gives, it can later take away. The threat is implicit in any governmental program in a way not relevant in the free market. I have been quoting from the writers of a TV show, but I wanted to leave you with the genius of one of the greatest thinkers of our time, Thomas Sowell. "What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. Don't expect Freedom to survive very long when you go down that road." And finally, "What is history but the story of how rulers and politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"

And finally another quote by the great Reagan. “There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism—government.