Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Starfleet and fascism

It would be odd to call Starfleet, as portrayed in various versions of Star Trek, as fascist. Yet there it is, a large military organisation with uniforms and ranks that appears to have taken on multiple state functions: science, diplomacy, policing, exploration. What we see looks like a state run along military lines, which, sounds a lot like fascism. Partly this an illusion of focus. There is ostensibly a civilian led Federation but the dramatic narrative follows a Starfleet crew, so we see this future society mainly through the lens of Starfleet. If the USA was primarily depicted via narratives set on aircraft carriers, it would also look a lot more inherently fascist, even if all the crew were generally nice to one another.

Fascism can be hard to pin down but one way of looking at it is to see it less as a coherent ideology and more as a set of aesthetics. Science fiction frequently plays with the more superficial elements of that aesthetics to suggest more general authoritarian tendencies e.g. the uniforms of the Empire in Star Wars. Star Trek also has used aesthetic changes to uniforms to suggest varying degrees of oppressive tendencies. One of the most subtle was in the alternate-timeline episode of The Next Generation “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. In the episode, a timeline shift means the Federation are in the midst of a losing war with the Klingons. The basic uniforms are the same but the crew have additional belts and holsters so they look just a bit more warlike.

Starfleet is not fascist even though I would imagine in reality, a human-led huge military organisation would naturally tend towards militarism just to justify its own existence. What stops it being fascist is also what powers the faster-than-light travel of its warships: the power of fiction. It’s not fascist because the writers don’t want it to be, so we get a humanitarian, vaguely liberal, navy with the power to wage planetary war that chooses instead to be nice (on the whole). So, the crew of the Enterprise may have all the tools they need to be oppressive militaristic brutes but don’t dress or act like militaristic brutes.

But there is a tension there that keeps bubbling up in Star Trek stories. In the original series it bubbles up in the Mirror Universe episode, in the “nazi” episode “Patterns of Force”. The Next Generation has also had its fair share of episodes were Starfleet’s abusive, militaristic side comes to the fore. DS9 and Discovery delved into these darker aspects of Starfleet even more.

I don’t think this a flaw in Star Trek and I don’t think the way it portrays Starfleet is some kind of subtle fascist propaganda. It’s a weird set-up when you dig into it but that weirdness has had a creative influence on the stories told.

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45 responses to “Starfleet and fascism”

  1. When Nimoy died, we watched a bunch of ST:TOS. It was kind of odd how often unsupervised senior Starfleet staff with time on their hands went a bit funny, almost like one of Starfleet’s purposes was to collect those guys and keep them too busy to, oh, Nazify a planet.

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    • This reminds me of a remark in the novelization of ST:TMP, in “Kirk’s” introduction, which suggests that Star Fleet had tried recruiting the smartest, most creative people, but those people tended not to come back (having found an alien pattern of thought more appealing than continued service and eventual return to Federation civilization life) – so by Kirk’s generation the recruiters were looking for other qualities than pure intellectual ability.

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      • Here’s the quote from “Kirk”

        Some critics have characterized us in Starfleet as primitives. And with some justification. In some ways, we do resemble our forebears of a couple of centuries ago more than we do most people today. We’re not part of those increasingly large number of humans who seem willing to submerge their own identities into the groups to which they belong. I am prepared to accept the possibility that these so called “new humans” represent a more highly evolved breed capable of finding rewards in group consciousness that we more primitive individuals will never know.

        For the present, however, this new breed of human makes a poor space traveler and Starfleet must depend on us primitives for deep space exploration. It seems an almost absurd claim that we primitives make better space travelers than the highly evolved, superbly intelligent, adaptable new humans. The reason for this paradox is best explained in a Vulcan study of Starfleet’s early years. During which vessel disappearances, crew defections, and mutinies had brought deep space exploration to a near halt. This once controversial report diagnosed those mysterious losses as being caused directly by the fact that Starfleet’s recruitment standards were dangerously high. That is Starfleet Academy’s cadets were then being selected from applicants having the highest possible test scores on all categories of intelligence and adaptability. Understandably, it was believed that such qualities would be helpful in dealing with the unusually varied life patterns which starship crews encountered during deep space exploration. Something of the opposite turned out to be true. The problem was that sooner or later starship crew members must inevitably deal with life forms more evolved and advanced than their own. The result was that these superbly, intelligent and flexible minds being sent out by Starfleet could not help but be seduced eventually by the higher philosophies, aspirations, and consciousness levels being encountered.”

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    • A key difference between late 20th century US fiction and contemporary US fiction is that most of the old writers, like L. Sprague de Camp, Harry Harrison, Gene Roddenberry, or David Drake, had been in a conscript military or had friends and spouses in a conscript military and come away with a certain cynicism born from experience. There are people who could write those stories today but they are mostly visible minorities or poor and I suspect that American science fiction is not the place to market them any more.

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      • I’ve noticed something similar in the way comics portray veterans. In the Silver Age characters having military service in their past didn’t affect their personality or story much; today’s comics veterans are defined by their service. I suspect that’s because when the draft meant lots of guys put in “a hitch” — even Rob Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke show was a vet — it wasn’t seen as such a big deal.

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        • Yeah. In an environment where veterans were a large plurality, “being a veteran” couldn’t be used as a substitute for actual characterization. Barney Fife was a veteran, Howard Cunningham was a veteran, Archie Bunker was a veteran – three very different fellows.

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          • In the 50s-mid 60s, most US men were veterans. What with WWII and Korea, damn near every male of an age for any responsibility was. Dads were vets; so were doofuses like Barney. It was just what you did for a couple years, presummiably that’s what Barney or Rob Petrie did. My uncle was of an age to go to WWII, but he had a degree that was super-useful in purifying uranium, so he spent the war in Tennessee.

            Also plenty of guys volunteered for WWII, like my dad.

            Rich or middle-class men don’t enlist in the military any more since the end of the draft. It’s the poor/black and brown men and women who do now, which fascists like the GQP love.

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        • And for lots of those folks, being a vet didn’t mean they were near combat – for every GI who landed on D-Day, there were probably a dozen or more who spent their time as shipping clerks or mechanics or something like that.

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          • Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke Show) was stationed at a base in the US and didn’t see combat. In comics, they usually are combat veterans: Hal Jordan was a Korean War pilot, Ben Grimm was a WW II Air Ace of Jimmy Dolittle-sized fame and Reed Richards was OSS (today they’d never have anyone with his brains in the field — he’d be cracking codes or working on the Manhattan Project).
            A running joke in the old Doc Savage pulps was that he and his team wanted to enlist but they were too valuable on the home front and espionage missions — which the Army kept pointing out meant they saw way more action than the ordinary soldier (“How many times have you been shot at just in the past month?”).

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          • That is just in the nature of industrialized war. It takes a lot of people to keep feeding hay and artillery shells and digital cameras to the fighting troops, and keep the horses alive and the rocket launchers firing and the drones buzzing. So it was the same in WW II, Korea, and Vietnam which gave pre-1990 American SF its often cynical attitude to war, militarism, and armed forces.

            The young servicemembers who read Baen novels and military science fiction in the 1990s and 2000s often had mundane military jobs too, the military specialties of Elizabeth Moon, John Ringo, and MZW are a matter of public record.

            Fred Pohl was in the meteorological service, Cyril Kornbluth was a technician until he got a chance to go Stateside and get a college degree to become an officer, then got transfered to the Battle of the Bulge to serve as an infantry replacement. L. Sprague de Camp was an engineer in the Navy Reserve. David Drake was an interrogator. Harry Harrison was an aircraft gunnery instructor. Heinlein was disabled before seeing action.

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            • I think this also factors in the Justice Society retiring at the end of the 1940s; just like citizen soldiers in WW II, they’d served their country, now they were going to live normal peaceful lives. By the end of the 1970s DC did a story explaining they’d been forced into retirement by HUAC — apparently the idea of them just quitting was no longer thinkable.

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  3. We so rarely saw people on average planets just doing life things unless the Enterprise was rescuing them. Occasionally we’d get to see Sisko’s dad’s restaurant, or the Picard winery, but like you said, it’s a show about an aircraft carrier. We don’t see your average Vulcan or Klingon shopkeeper either, or much of Earth farmers either.

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    • In TOS we see miners (in a couple of different forms – company miners dealing with a Horta, and freelance miners getting mail-order brides from Mudd), isolated civilian researchers (a few times), and civilian development areas (Tribbles), as well as a civilian wedding ceremony, and a religious separatist group. But Roddenberry deliberately steered clear of ordinary Federation life for the most part, reportedly to allow the audience to imagine that the Federation was a utopia of whatever flavor they preferred. It’s somewhat unfortunate that the later series, which did go back to Earth more frequently focused their Earth stories so much on Star Fleet (“The First Duty,” etc.).

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      • Even those were all isolated groups that either needed rescuing or dealt with, or both. Just like an aircraft carrier.

        I’d have liked an occasional accountant or something, but I guess Starfleet doesn’t need to help out in a cubicle farm.

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  4. I’ve always assumed that there was a whole lot to the Federation that we weren’t seeing, simply because it didn’t involve the sort of stories the Enterprise got into. For that matter, there’s a lot of stuff in Starfleet that we only catch glimpses of; I suspect the average Starfleet captain isn’t much like Kirk or Picard, more like Harriman on the Enterprise-B or Esteban on the Grissom – great guys for peaceful exploration and managing departmental meetings, not so hot on the whole fighting-Klingons thing.

    I’ve always assumed, too, that Starfleet is much more diverse than we saw on the shows, mainly for budgetary reasons. After all, the Federation was founded as a cooperative venture by humans, Tellarites, Vulcans and Andorians, and although Earth’s Starfleet became the official Federation military (possibly because none of the other three would trust each other with the job), the early Starfleet would have benefited quite a bit from input from the Andorians on space combat, the Vulcans on exploration, and the Tellarites on logistics. (The image we see of Tellarites is that they’re best known as traders, though it’s clear enough that they won’t back down from a fight, either.)

    (An idea of what I think civilian life in the Federation might be like can be found here: https://shevetsstoryblog.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-three-handed-game-5.html – you don’t need any context, particularly, to gather what’s going on.)

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    • So, what thoughts on the equivalent questions about Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5?

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      • Hmm. Both those shows involved a lot more civilian politicking than Star Trek – enough so that we could see that neither one was any sort of futuristic utopia; both had political systems and cultural values that were broadly similar to (first-world Western) society today. Both the Colonial armed forces and Babylon 5’s EarthForce were explicitly military organizations (EarthForce did have long-range explorer ships, but they were designed to be self-sustaining on missions lasting for years, so they didn’t turn up much.) And, of course, B5’s military did end up going down an explicitly fascist route.

        Both of those shows feel, too, as if they’re on a smaller scale than Star Trek. This might just be a function of there being, well, less of them, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. BSG, of course, was largely confined to the Colonial fleet. B5 sometimes talked itself up as being on the galactic scale, but… Earth, in the B5 universe, has only one substantial colony (Mars, which is already getting stroppy about independence); the station itself, which is on the fringes of human-explored space, is only what, ten or twelve light years from Earth? And we know that the Narn homeworld is only twelve light years from the station – so it seems that this galactic drama fits comfortably within a couple of decaparsecs radius, and that scene where Morden shows Londo how the Shadows plan to partition the whole galaxy is… wildly optimistic, I suspect.

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      • Time for my unpopular post, I think the show that is to Pro-Military is BG. (To be fair it is the one where I watched a lot less than B5 or ST)
        Star Trek is a bit weired that the show is about a military crew but not military fiction. My question for the day, what purpose do the uniforms serve?

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        • I haven’t watched the reboot Battlestar Galactica but I think the original one is not so much depicting a militarist/fascist society as depicting how people who might be sympathetic towards the option of a military dictatorship imagine it all turning out for the best. Adama is a wise father figure for what remains of humanity who live under his benevolent command.

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          • Of course, it does this in no small part by have the non-military part of the survivors be ABSOLUTE MORONS. Like, why is the Cloud Nine STILL a luxury cruiser in the post-apocalypse. Why is money? Why is that one kid whining about having to do refinery work FOR EVERYONE TO LIVE, saying “I’m an art student.” IT’S THE APOCALYPSE, BUCKY. NO ONE IS AN ART STUDENT ANY MORE.

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  5. My husband would say that you’re misusing the word fascism, which is in part because it’s become the catch-all synonym term in our societies for autocracy/tyranny. But for political scientists and sociologists, fascism is a sub-set of autocracy, a particular type of autocratic philosophy that has specific requirements/aspects and conditions to be called true, sparkling fascism. Fascism doesn’t just equal militarization, even though both fascism and military forces rely on hierarchies and fascism uses militarization. But the military hierarchy is, ideally, one based on job responsibilities — an automatic chain of command in the field, while fascism is based on the idea of superior, innate (and sometimes divinely granted) qualities of rulership in people as a whole.

    And fascism isn’t simply the same as imperialism, though fascism also utilizes imperialism. Fascism is a world view that states:

    There are some people who are truly human, innately superior, meritorious, etc. who should naturally rule over and direct the rest.

    These people are part of a glorious nation/ethnicity which should naturally rule over the rest (imperialism, nationalism.)

    In the better past, the superiors did rule and accomplished all the important stuff but then were betrayed by inferiors and barbarians and the glorious nation/superior ethnicity was cast into degeneracy and decline.

    That glory can be recaptured by superiors through the use of militarized force that enslaves and slaughters the inferiors (opposition,) united under great leaders/authorities willing to do what must be done and who should be devotedly followed for the good of the nation, etc.

    Roddenberry was doing wagon train in space and conceived of Starfleet as the cavalry out on the frontier, but also wanted the idea of a future military that was something more than patrol guards, able to do exploration, diplomacy and scientific research, making peace with aliens (indigenous) instead of just slaughtering them. (And some modern militaries do some of those things.) Starfleet was given a lot of latitude out on the frontier, but was also subject to civilian oversight. And there was a lot of material in the shows about those civilian-military relations, (which is a whole area of political science study my husband does.)

    While there’s a lot to mine about Federation political splits, imperialism, unethical compromise, etc., Roddenberry’s vision of Starfleet might sometimes have drifted into autocracy and great leader territory (Kirk) but didn’t have the fascism narrative. Starfleet and the Federation were born out of devastating wars. They did not want to go back to a glorious past they felt had been stolen from them in the present — they were trying to move forward. While they didn’t always follow it, especially Kirk, they had the ethos of trying not to be imperialistic with societies they encountered, instead seeking alliances. And Roddenberry deliberately had characters played by actors his society saw as inferiors being full fledged heroic officers — the idea that the Earth had abandoned the ideas of nationalism and superiority/inferiority, except for sexism which was apparently a bridge too far at the time.

    Instead, the Klingons and the Romulans were presented as fascist, militarized autocracies, which had simplistic racist, anti-Eastern components to it that fed into white supremacy American nationalism. They worked on that in later entries to have those societies be more complex and show their evolution. That’s one of the reasons I was very disappointed with the first season of Disco — being unable to do the Klingons exactly as they had been in later t.v. shows due to contract property rights complications, they turned their version of the Klingons into a fully fascist, white supremacy racist society, complete with the loss of the glorious past narrative, even worse than the original version of the Klingons.

    I think the Picard show has probably done the most exploration of the potential for fascism as well as imperialism that can lurk in Starfleet. But that show also showed how Starfleet is hampered by civilian rule — the decisions over the androids and the decisions regarding the attempted rescue of the Romulans. In its mirror episodes from the second season, it showed a version of the Federation that was not only run by Starfleet, militarized and autocratic (like the Mirror Universe) but fascist in its narratives about superiority, the loss of a great past that was reclaimed and must be maintained, etc. So fascism doesn’t overall lurk that much in the mere existence of Starfleet in the show, but it is presented as a dangerous alternative that Starfleet needs to avoid becoming. And Discovery in its time-jumped seasons also does a lot of that civilian-military relations wrangling about fascism, slavery, etc.

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    • “Fascism is a world view that states:

      There are some people who are truly human, innately superior, meritorious, etc. who should naturally rule over and direct the rest.

      These people are part of a glorious nation/ethnicity which should naturally rule over the rest (imperialism, nationalism.) ”

      So “Space Seed” is another episode that directly addresses a fascist foe – Khan and his people (and shows that some people in Starfleet had a sneaking sympathy with Khan).

      The Chris Pine Star Trek movies also have an alternate-Kirk who doesn’t have to earn his rank and authority, but instead is somehow recognized as worthy of command immediately.

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      • This was something that bothered me a lot about Pine-Kirk. One of the results of the timeline divergence was that Pine-Kirk grew up without a father, and I guess it’s plausible that he might grow up a bit wild and a bit resentful because of that. So, the character of Pine-Kirk makes sense. What *doesn’t* make sense, as you say, is that Pine-Kirk is treated as being just as worthy of command as Shatner-Kirk, when he very obviously isn’t. Pine-Kirk is a grandstander, a show-off, who thinks very little of other people’s feelings (we know very well that people like that don’t make good Presidents of the USA or Prime Ministers of the UK, so I don’t see them doing well on the bridge of a starship, either.)

        It strikes me, in fact, that one of Shatner-Kirk’s main assets, as a commander, is a very high level of emotional intelligence. This Kirk knows very well when to turn on the charm, when to play it cool, when to make! an! impassioned! speech! and so on. He knows what buttons to push. to get the results he needs from people. And this is how he gets a crew who will follow him, willingly, into a war with the Klingons or a giant space amoeba. And, naturally enough, it makes him a success with the ladies, when he wants (or needs) to be. The Pine version doesn’t have any of that, and it makes him completely wrong for the job.

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        • Prime Kirk and his family living through Kodos the Butcher’s mass murders means he had it a hell of a lot harder than Pine-Kirk. But as you say, that became a strength rather than a liability.
          Pine-Kirk is the stereotype of what many people think Prime Kirk was.

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        • I get what you mean about the character differences, but I wouldn’t say that Pine-Kirk was “treated as being just as worthy of command as Shatner-Kirk”. That’s the whole reason the 2009 movie had to set up a plot contrivance for all the cadets to be thrown into positions of responsibility due to a crazy emergency– because they were nowhere near getting such jobs through the normal process. And then when they succeeded, having saved the universe gave them a career boost.

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          • *Starman Jones* seems more realistic – Jones is a ship’s steward when a crazy unlikely circumstance makes him Captain. He saves the day – and is rewarded by being made a junior astrogator, not a Captain. Pine Kirk earned a boost to his career, but not a permanent assignment as Captain.

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            • I’m not saying anything about it is “realistic”, just that it’s not the case that this Kirk got his position through any kind of normal career process resembling how the other Kirk did. Also, Rear Admiral Pike might have been a little biased at that point.

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              • That’s kind of my point. Shatner’s Kirk earned his Captaincy, while the universe arranged a situation in which Pine’s Kirk had Captaincy thrust on it, as if the universe itself recognized his greatness needed an opportunity to be shown, and he was then (through other plot machinations) allowed to continue in that position, as if his success in one unique situation established that he had all the skills needed for any number of other situations.

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                • Well, it was more that Spock did it. (Which is of course the writers arranging the universe in that way, but not so much special destiny.) The main fleet was too far away to get to Vulcan supposedly. So they load almost all the cadets onto Pike’s new ship with a few senior officers. Spock has been extraordinarily promoted to first officer of the ship, in part because he was running cadet programs and the crew is cadets, but Spock isn’t particularly adept and experienced at command in this alternate timeline universe. Kirk warns Pike that the attack on Vulcan is a trap, and does show leadership skills if flashy style. Pike doesn’t listen enough, and they are defeated. Pike appoints Spock acting captain and makes Kirk first officer because Kirk had shown both field perception and leadership skills. So Kirk is no longer a cadet, he’s a high ranking officer on the ship. Kirk, Sulu and their senior engineering officer run the mission to stop the drill and the engineering officer is killed, thus depriving Spock and the cadet crew of further experienced leadership on the ship.

                  Spock, who is too inexperienced to be captain, clashes with Kirk, who is too inexperienced to be captain but does show better assessment skills of the situation than Spock. Spock has just lost his mother, his people and home planet and can’t handle Kirk or the situation. When Kirk stages a mutiny to relieve Spock of command, Spock breaks protocol to dump Kirk on a nearby ice planet. When Kirk gets himself back on board, he follows Prime Spock’s advice and goads Spock into losing the last of his Vulcan control. Spock reinstates Kirk as his first officer, resigns from the captaincy and Starfleet and makes Kirk acting captain. But Spock’s dad tells him to get it together and help Kirk even if Spock is technically no longer part of Starfleet. Kirk essentially reinstates Spock as his acting first officer and they save the day and rescue Pike with the help of Prime Spock.

                  Does it make sense that Kirk is then officially appointed to be captain of the Enterprise with a crew still mainly made of cadets? No, it does not. But he did show that he was able to handle the job and the whole crew effectively over multiple circumstances. Spock is persuaded to rejoin Starfleet and made Kirk’s first officer, which also doesn’t make a great deal of sense. But Spock did show that he could, despite deep trauma, rebound and effectively operate and lead. (Plus he’s the Vulcan ambassador’s son, so let’s be real.)

                  The cadets being the main crew of the Enterprise in the first place was an experiment, one which saved planet Earth. And Kirk, who is no longer a cadet but was made first officer by Pike in the field and then appointed by Spock as acting captain, is also an experiment by Starfleet as official captain, one that they believe will pay off as it already paid off to have a ship full of cadets and Kirk as acting captain. In essence, Starfleet goes against what would be normal military protocol and tradition to elevate their younger generation faster as a scientific gamble and investment in future development of Starfleet.

                  So that’s not really fascistic. Kirk is elevated as a gifted, chariasmatic leader and risk-taking rule breaker, whether or not he really deserves it, but he is not seen as a gifted leader because he is a human from Earth, innately superior to other species, or a white man or an American, etc. He’s not seen as a return to the heroes of old, though he does get a bit of a boost from who his dad was. Starfleet upends their military hierarchy, rather than reinforces it or deploying it more forcefully on the civilians. They lost ships and people and the important resource of Vulcan, so they’re compensating in extraordinary circumstances.

                  In contrast, active and institutional white supremacy in America is fascistic (which makes sense as it inspired European fascism.) It presents white Americans as innately (and divinely) superior, as the ones who should naturally rule over others, as America the glorious superior nation that should rule over all, as the greatness of America having diminished and degenerated due to increased equality (wokeness) for BIPOC Americans — what they believe to be the betrayal of race traitors — and invokes believing in military and violent solutions for making America great (white supremacy ruled) again.

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            • The old FASA Star Trek TTRPG had a lot of discussion about the chain of command and who is eligible to take over when a senior officer is out of action. I don’t remember the details, but I’m fairly sure it didn’t go “Captain>First Officer>cadet on academic suspension who isn’t even supposed to be on the ship anyway.”

              I think this might tie in to the question of why Starfleet has a military style command system and uniforms – in an emergency situation (and starships do have a habit of getting into those) you need to have people doing the right jobs at the right time, and the (quasi) military discipline is intended to make sure that happens.

              An interesting parallel occurs to me, now, with Space:1999, where the moonbase has uniforms but a much more fluid organization: there are different departments, identified by the colour-coded left sleeves (I assume colour-blind people don’t want to go to the moon), and there’s a base commander over everything, but it’s much more like a civilian organisation than anything military. It’s still got the uniforms, to demonstrate a common purpose, and the colour-coding lets you know what job everyone does.

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  7. I read this yesterday, then kept the tab open to check later for replies. But in the meantime I watched the final episode of Andor. I’d already been trying to figure out why some people seem super excited about how “leftist” Andor is. This post complemented my thoughts about that. So this is sorta tangential…

    I think the Star Trek stories take place in a similar space as the Culture stories – on the edge of the Federation/Culture. The Federation itself is a post-scarcity society, but the interesting stories take place on the fringes, just as with the Culture stories.

    Star Wars, OTOH, seems to be a story about the battle between two different authoritarian forces, one based on Nazis and one kind of like space monarchists with democratic trappings. Or maybe just Nazis (Empire) and Fascists (Republic). It seems like, under either regime, the majority of people live in primitive villages barely getting by or enslaved by corporate powers. Even the “revolutionaries” in the SW universe have no class analysis or goals beyond “freedom” (which vaguely defined term is cited as an ideal among ideologies ranging from pacifist anarchists to genocidal fascists).

    Don’t take anything here as authoritative or attempting to be so – everything I know about ST and SW comes from watching the shows and/or movies, but I’m nothing even close to a scholar on either subjects.

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    • The Republic is more like the UN. It’s not one nation or system. It’s an alliance of planets and colonies, similar to the Federation of Planets in Star Trek. Not every planet belongs to the Republic, especially out on the outer rims (the edges.) And planets that do belong have considerable leeway — their political systems are not dictated by the Federation so some of them have constitutional monarchies and some have other forms of democracy or partial democracy. There are planets that don’t belong to the Republic who deal in slavery and gang cartels (Tatoonie in its early years.) The Republic doesn’t necessarily try to wipe those planets out or end slavery in non-Republic planets, as it doesn’t have the resources or political will to do so, a source of some contention in the Republic.

      Each planet or colony in the Republic, like with the UN or NATO, commits a certain amount of money and troops to keep the Republic going and help its members. The Jedi are employed to lead some of these joint forces and to conduct recon and intelligence missions for the Republic. Employing the Jedi allows the planets of the Republic to commit less troops and resources. The creation of the clone soldiers also is well received by the planets of the Republic because then they don’t have to commit as many troops to the joint forces, although some leaders of planets are then nervous because it gives the Republic a fighting force not beholden or loyal to any of the planet members. The Jedi are considered bound by their honor and oaths (they’re the knights with chivalric code) but given their powers and position in the Republic, the concern externally and internally within the Jedi that they may be corrupted or getting too powerful becomes more widespread.

      The to-be Emperor exploits all those concerns and after creating a fake war that makes the Republic further dependent on the clone soldiers, he uses a fascist narrative to condemn the Jedi as having weakened and corrupted the Republic from its glorious past, justifying their slaughter by the clones, that the system needs to be purged of enemies within, to become more authoritarian under him as leader, etc.

      Ferrix, where Andor grew up, is in the Free Trade sector. The planet was not a member of the Republic. It’s used by gang cabals doing smuggling as a trade center, much like Tatooine, and has mainly mining operations and some manufacturing (Ferrix — ferrous — iron.) It is ruled over by a corporate entity, the Preox-Morlana, which has its own security forces, but which mostly left Ferrix alone. When the Empire arises, the Preox-Morlana essentially makes an alliance with the Empire, allowing it to operate independently, but also cooperating with the Empire, hiring out its security forces to the Empire, etc. A joint Preox-Morlana and Empire crack-down killed Andor’s adopted father and further impoverished the planet.

      When Andor kills two Preox-Morlana security guards, the investigation is expanded by a Preox-Morlana cop, Syril Karn. His failed attempt to apprehend Andor on Ferrix allows the Empire to declare Preox-Morlana disbanded as an independent entity and the Free Trade Sector systems are declared part of the Empire. Imperial agents are sent to capture Andor and control the planet/sector. And that’s what the Ferrix citizens are rebelling against. So it’s not really a nebulous idea of freedom. They’re supposed to be kind of like the Irish.

      But I do agree that Andor the series is not particularly leftist. A main focus of the series is that ideas of democracy and nobility have to be set aside in order to unite rebels and defeat the Empire — the politics of the resistance and spycraft rather than larger political ideals. But the rebellions at the prison and in Ferrix’s capital are rebellions based on the idea of the dignity of all human beings, which is something that fascism is very much against.

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      • Oh wow, thank you for the clarification. Some of this I knew, but almost none of the bigger picture, which puts everything into much better perspective now.

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        • It can get a bit confusing, especially as Lucas changed things randomly in the three prequel movies, including the whole timeline of the empire itself, which invalidated about a third of the tie-in books before the prequels. And then the new films basically threw out the rest of the old tie-in books as a now alternate timeline. What they’ve been trying to do with the series like The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch and Andor, and with some of the up-coming Star Wars film projects, is resolve a lot of the discrepancies in the timeline of Star Wars by linking up or partially using material and characters from the old, alternate timeline tie-in novels, particularly the Timothy Zahn books, the old comic books produced by Marvel, the animated series that were created after the prequel movies, the older movies and the new, more recent movies. For instance, the whole idea of Mandalorians and Boba Fett as one came from one of the comic books back in the 1980’s.

          Of course, one thing they can’t resolve or work with is that in the original movies, Padme was alive and raised Leia, but in the prequels, Lucas had her die in childbirth, refrigerating her and invalidating her previous sacrifice to give up Luke to protect him. (For which I do not forgive.)

          Both Star Trek and Star Wars do share themes of a cooperative, peaceful, democratic alliance of worlds developing, with characters aware that such a system can be corrupted and subverted into autocracy. In Star Trek, that danger is touched on but characters and worlds work to keep the alliance going. In Star Wars, it started with the alliance having collapsed into autocratic empire. But in both series there are planets that have chosen not to join the allied group, especially if they are far distant from the central cluster of member planets — a frontier. Both paint that frontier as essentially a U.S. western, because Lucas and Roddenberry grew up with westerns and Roddenberry wrote for several western t.v. series. And westerns themselves often drew from British/European creations like King Arthur and Camelot and Robin Hood. So you can certainly find imperialistic and even fascistic aspects in the democratic alliances in some areas of the franchise. But it was the main opposition to those alliances that was usually presented as fascistic, and the model has usually been World War II/Nazis for them because again, their creators lived through WW II or had parents who served in it.

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