Illustration by Audrey Estok (@AudreyEstok)
“For over a thousand generations the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” — Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope
A key question haunts the Star Wars universe from the end of Revenge of the Sith to the start of A New Hope: how could such a powerful political and religious order like the Jedi Knights vanish from public memory in only about twenty years? While this may seem like a stretch of fiction, or a plot-hole created through the increased visibility of the Jedi in the prequel films, the forgetting of the Jedi is far more supported by our own global history than a viewer might initially suspect.1
“Public memory” refers to the informal records of past events that are circulated among a community. The term covers what a community remembers, how it frames that memory, and, importantly, what is forgotten.2 Public forgetting is just as much a part of how societies and governments shape the past and understand it through processes like memorialization. While historians and activists can work to preserve awareness of atrocities, the opposite can also occur—public memory can be actively suppressed.
Writing about the Armenian genocide, scholar Fatma Muge Göçek described historical “forgetting” as a phenomenon created and encouraged by governments in order to preserve their own power. This process “normalizes and contains difficult pasts, leaving generations of citizens either total ignorant or barely aware of past collective violence.”3 Göçek’s work investigates the reasons behind the Turkish government’s long-standing denial of the genocide perpetrated during the First World War. She argued that the memory of genocide was actively suppressed by the new Turkish government after the war, as some of the perpetrators became key supporters of the new independent government.4 After the Armenian genocide, the Young Turks and new republican government destroyed churches and changed street names to remove evidence of Armenians from public space.5
Similar moments of active government forgetting have occurred in other places and times, and to different degrees. In 2011, the British government admitted it had concealed thousands of Foreign Office documents relating to British colonial rule, secretly removing them from former British colonies and territories like Kenya and the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean).6 The documents were evidence in a court case brought by four eldery Kenyans who claimed the British government tortured them during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. Prior to the release of these documents, the public and historical narrative of the British exit from Kenya that circulated in Britain and the western world was one which largely sanitized and denied this violence.7
In another case, after the Second World War, the governments of France and Italy pushed narratives that ignored collaboration and antisemitism in their own wartime governments. They instead crafted histories in which their citizens were “good people” who had largely supported resistance. This, in turn, papered over their own governments’ culpability in Nazi laws and war crimes, including the Holocaust.8
We see the phenomenon of government-encouraged active forgetting play out in the Star Wars films. In Rogue One, even the rebels visiting Jedha seem unaware of the past purpose of the Kyber Temple and the Guardians of the Whills—they’re dismissed as relics making trouble, even though the destruction of the Temple is, for some of the characters, in living memory. In A New Hope, Han Solo refers to the Jedi as a “hokey religion” and a lightsaber as an “ancient weapon” only twenty years after the execution of Order 66.9 But his perspective is presented as common public opinion. It is easy to imagine the Galactic Empire destroying records in the Jedi Temple, suppressing speech about the Force, and forbidding discussion of Jedi lore to such an extent that no one questions Han’s lack of knowledge. Public forgetting, like public memorialization, can have a swift and easy outcome if the forces intent on causing the loss of memory have enough power and put enough effort into the project.
Editor’s note: you can find all of the pieces in our December 2019 Star Wars issue here.
- See Brendan Nystedt on how George Lucas has shaped public memory of the franchise itself.
- Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Philips, “Public Memory,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Jan. 25, 2017.
- Fatma Muge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against Armenians, 1789–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 51.
- For more discussion of the forgotten memories of the Armenian genocide, see: Erik Jan Zürcher, “Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide,” in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 306–17.
- Göçek, Denial of Violence, 51.
- Holly Wallis, “British colonial files released following legal challenge,” BBC News, April 18, 2012; Owen Bowcott, “Mau Mau victims seek compensation from UK for alleged torture,” The Guardian, April 7, 2011.
- One important exception to this trend which used oral history to uncover a forgotten past is: Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005).
- Rebecca Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6, 183. See also Caroline Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory: France and Germany since 1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
- The top-secret order, given by Chancellor Palpatine and carried out by the Republic Army’s clone troopers, labeling the Jedi Knights as traitors to the Republic and subject to immediate execution.
