From the beginning of Star Wars’ Skywalker Saga, Emperor Palpatine knew that he couldn’t destroy the Jedi Order by himself. Mace Windu came perilously close to killing him in Revenge of the Sith, and the Rebellion against him became a real threat once the Death Star was destroyed in A New Hope. Darth Vader was an asset, but he was only one man, and the bulk of the Empire’s resources were spent on superweapons and an army of increasingly inept Stormtroopers.
In one area, however, the Emperor succeeded over the Rebels more than he could ever dream. Propaganda — the effective use of “fake news” and distortion — secured the Empire the loyalty of the populace and turned the entire galaxy against the Rebels trying to free it. This practice began almost the moment the Empire was declared, but proof of its strength lingered long after its destruction.
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As a character, Palpatine was designed to mirror real-world fascists, and his tactics matched those seen in totalitarian dictatorships. That included the Clone Wars themselves — a crisis he manufactured in order to justify a huge standing army and unprecedented executive power. They also provided him with a perennial enemy to fight — a key factor in any fascist regime — that naturally pivoted from the defeated Separatists and towards the fledgling Rebellion.
All of that relied on propaganda to sell to the masses. The prequel trilogy took such details for granted, but signs of its effectiveness appear in Star Wars: The Bad Batch, as Palpatine tightens his grip on travel and information. With citizens unable to travel off-world without clearance, they must rely on what local authorities tell them about events in the rest of the galaxy. Clone Force 99 notices this in Season 1, Episode 2, “Cut and Run,” as they try to help their friends escape Imperial clutches. That allows the Emperor to direct whatever “truth” he wishes about galactic events, including lies about the Jedi Knights betraying him and the “necessity” of an intergalactic registration. It’s powerful enough in The Bad Batch during the Empire’s first few days, but by the events of the original trilogy, the Empire had 20 years to perfect its fake news. The effects can be subtly felt during the Original Trilogy in the Rebellion’s hiding places on distant Outer Rim worlds like Yavin and Hoth, where there are no major population centers to inform on them.
But the true strength of the Empire’s propaganda machine wasn’t felt until Palpatine himself was destroyed at the end of Return of the Jedi. A pair of ancillary in-canon texts reveal just how deeply the Empire’s fake news influence extends. 2016’s Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Shattered Empire reveals that the Galactic Civil War didn’t actually end with the Battle of Endor. Instead, the Empire remained for another year until the Battle of Jakku when the Rebellion finally brought the conflict to a close. During that time, the Imperial Government decried every Rebel victory as phony information and covered up everything, from the destruction of the second Death Star to the death of the Emperor himself, as desperate lies from a beaten rebellion. As the opening crawl of Shattered Empire #2 states, “While word of the rebel triumph has spread in some quarters, in others there remains only the sanctioned news feeds of the Empire, an unending stream of propaganda and terror that has been a way of life for as long as many can remember.”
Skywalker: A Family at War, released this April, confirms the role that the Empire’s agitprop played in its refusal to collapse. “The Imperial propaganda machine dispatched categorical denials concerning the outcome of the Battle of Endor, claiming that the rebel attack had failed,” it explains. “Rumors of Palpatine’s demise were dismissed or rejected as treasonous. Even holovid footage of the second Death Star’s destruction was met by brazen rejections.”
This all took place when both Vader and the Emperor gone and a significant wing of the Imperial fleet destroyed in the Battle of Endor. The extent to which the Empire could willfully deny reality speaks not only to the emphasis Palpatine placed on fake news but also its tremendous success. He knew how to use these particular tools so well that they all but outlived the entity they were deployed to protect.
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