Like, yes, pulling Maus from the curriculum of a school and the stated reasoning behind it was really, really stupid, but they didn’t actually ban it. They just pulled it from the curriculum. And now the media’s acting like no one in the county is allowed to read it, which is not what’s happening? I’m not saying don’t go after this, just go after what actually happened.
Anyway, Waitangi Day is coming up! Tomorrow, in fact! It’s a very important day.
I thought about this idea from watching The Mandalorian these past couple of weeks.
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Authoritarianism in Fiction
Towards the end of the first season of The Mandalorian, there’s a scene in which an Imperial character known only as “The Client” claims he doesn’t understand why anyone opposes the Empire. Because after all, everywhere the Empire goes, quality of life improves, crime goes down, stability is reached, and everything is just better. Now to be clear, I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to believe this guy. And that’s a good thing too, because he’s dead wrong.
We see throughout the Star Wars canon that the Empire didn’t actually make anything more stable. It ended the Clone Wars, sure, and some of the material like the games make it seem as if life on the Core Worlds got pretty cushy. But elsewhere? Crime syndicates are thriving, the Empire straight-up enslaves entire populations like Kashykk, and strip-mining entire planets for resources to fuel their war machines, like on Lothal.
And they’re not even good at it! If the Empire had backed Thrawn’s TIE Fighter program they’d have a better fleet to go fight the Rebellion, but instead they placed all their money in a giant superweapon, and put most of their big brass on it, and then when it sploded they had to figure out how to build back their resources. And then they just built another one. Also their officers are constantly trying to one-up and backstab each other for status, Inquisitors can hijack ships and operations whenever they want, and Vader keeps executing officers when he’s annoyed. This is not a well-run government or military! It’s falling apart on every level!
And from what I understand, that’s kind of how real-life authoritarian governments go. There’s this misconception that authoritarian governments like fascism are at least good at making things run smoothly. “The trains run on time,” goes the expression. But they don’t! They’re really bad at holding things together. Nazi Germany thought it’d be great for productivity if there was this ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset going on, and so you had plenty of redundant departments and projects competing instead of working together, and they’d sabotage each other to try to get ahead.
Also they were genociding large chunks of the population, which isn’t a good thing for development, despite what genociders would tell you!
So one of my frustrations with the Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars is that the fascist regime, the First Order, is apparently a subversion in this regard. Because yes, it’s evil, but it apparently works. The First Order has seemingly unlimited resources, ships, and manpower and can power through what would be major setbacks to the Empire. The Death Star gets destroyed, and the Empire is reeling. When Starkiller Base (which is an actual planet and their home base) gets destroyed, the First Order proceeds to steamroll the Resistance, take over the galaxy’s major hyperspace lanes, and pull an even bigger ship out of their armpit, a ship big enough to make its own baby ships. This is the most efficient authoritarian regime in fictional history, because no matter what happens they always have more ships, men, technology, and firepower.
[I did not start writing this Note thinking I was going to trash the Sequel Trilogy.]
Authoritarian regimes are not this efficient. That doesn’t mean they’re not plenty dangerous, but they’re not the kind of entities that can regularly take beatings like that and walk back from it without a scratch.
And something that didn’t sit well with me in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is the idea of Nilfgaard. Nilfgaard is an authoritarian superpower; it’s steamrolling its way across the Continent and conquering everyone in its path. You can’t talk badly about the emperor or you’ll be in deep trouble. The army regularly commits war crimes. The emperor constantly reneges on promises he made. And yet they’re the alternative to Radovid’s reign, which is racist, genocidal, and would lead to a new wave of constant oppression should he win. And I get that yes, The Witcher is a world in which everyone sucks, but Nilfgaard is sometimes presented as being the good ones by virtue of not being the other, and very often their malevolence is downplayed, because yeah, they’re harsh, but at least they’re fair and efficient. And I’m not really down with that! They’re an authoritarian empire on a war of conquest with no point other than nationalistic pride! That’s not okay!
Compare this to another video game series, like Assassin’s Creed. The Templars are authoritarian–that’s their schtick, that most people cannot be trusted to control their own destinies, so the Templars should run the world for the greater good. And not all of them are bad people! Some of them genuinely want to do a lot of good, and go out of their way to try to make people’s lives better. But for the most part they’re douchebags! Because an organization based on the notion of taking power attracts plenty of people who want it for its own sake. As Ezio points out, they’re all very happy to talk about the greater good, but the second there comes a chance to give up power they tend to immediately get defensive and refuse. And because they’re so after power, they’re often screwed by their own ambitions. It’s pointed out several times that if they weren’t such douchebags out for themselves, they actually could have instituted the changes they wanted and fixed things like inequality and slavery.
And that strikes me as more realistic. Like yes, in theory an authoritarian government could work as a powerful entity that can address the problems of society, but in practice it never will because it’s handing power to a group of corruptible human beings that are going to try to put themselves into that system for the power they can gain and end up sabotaging the whole thing to get ahead themselves. I like this idea with the Empire in Star Wars and the Templars in Assassin’s Creed because it’s a really good illustration of how a corrupt regime works (I say, as someone who isn’t a historian or political science scholar, so take that how you will).
They don’t make the trains run on time. They do their darndest to convince you that they do, but they’re really not good at making a solid country. And given that we’re seeing a bewildering amount of support of authoritarian regimes in the world today, I don’t much like it when fiction depicts it as “Well, it’s harsh, but it gets the job done.” No! No it doesn’t! It just wants you to think that.
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