Andor and the Banality of Totalitarianism

The psychologies of complicity and resistance -- a parable for our times.

At this point, Andor is practically a documentary.

Yes, the new Star Wars series takes place long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. Yes, there are TIE fighters, land speeders, and imperial cruisers. But, like its first season, the first three episodes of Andor S2 are about how people act in the shadow of totalitarianism — not only how rebellion forms (although chiefly that) but also how middling bureaucrats, bullies, wimps, and crooks all thrive, contorting themselves to the new order, finding the resources within themselves to be evil.

Like a said, a documentary.

It’s interesting to wonder what Andor would feel like had Trump not won the election, but as it stands, it’s like looking in a mirror under harsh LED lighting: brilliant, but often hard to take. (This essay will have spoilers for the first three episodes of season two, but not much has really happened yet plot-wise, so I wouldn’t worry about it.)

What’s perhaps most brilliant about the series is how it is the obverse of the main Star Wars story. That tale is a mythic one of larger-than-life figures, of mystical martial artists who wield the Force. Andor is realpolitik. There are no Jedis in sight, the Emperor is offscreen, and what’s left are all the normal people (even the titular hero starts out as an ordinary joe) with their diverse responses to totalitarianism, from enthusiastic complicity to uneasy accommodation to resentment and rebellion. We watch Andor evolve, as the grinding humiliation and violence of the empire wears him down until he finally has nothing left to lose and understands that this oppression is evil. And, boldly, the series also takes us into the offices of the empire itself, as people with diverse motives — actual belief in fascism, careerism, personal inadequacy — join together in a vast operation.

All the magical stuff of the main saga is irrelevant here. If you didn’t know the emperor was actually a Sith lord, it wouldn’t matter; he could just as easily be Stalin, or Trump, or You Know Who. But of course, that’s the point. From the totalitarian perspective, evil looks like security, or stability, or order. Evil is the spirit of totalitarianism, not its physical manifestation.

The manifestation is what Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil. It’s the petty humiliations: the first sequence in Andor S1 focuses on two low-level security guards who have a tiny bit of power and use it to taunt, humiliate, and threaten. They’re not Sith lords; they’re just thugs, lowlifes who were all too happy with the empire since it gives them license to beat people up.

The banality goes all the way up. S2 introduces us to Orson Krennic, the scheming military official who will later appear in Rogue One as one of the designers of the Death Star. (For the uninitiated, Andor is an extended prequel to Rogue One, which apart from the original Star Wars film might be the best in the entire series.) We know from Rogue One that Krennic is a snivelling careerist with petty ambition and a thirst for power. But here, he presides over a Wannsee Conference to plot the genocide of an entire planet in order to obtain a mineral needed to build the Death Star. Krennic is both a fool and an arch-villain; a vain, insecure man and one who will later kill millions, maybe billions, of people.

And perhaps like Wannsee itself, Krennic’s conference is at once theatrical and bureaucratic; moral evil is not discussed — only executed. Most of the attendees are nobodies.

Could this meeting have been an email?

Throughout, Andor gives us variations on a theme, as characters navigate their relationships to fascism. There’s an overbearing mother who just wants her son to make something of himself. There’s the insecure son desperate to gain her approval — reminding me of another recent parable of fascism, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. There’s a brilliant tactician who, so far at least, doesn’t question the aims of the empire but knows she can effectuate them better than her incompetent colleagues. There are amoral publicists, hatching propaganda plans to justify genocide. There’s the rapist who takes advantage of his position.

And there are the elites: resistance hero Senator Mon Mothma, trapped in a web of lies and asked to make shocking sacrifices; oligarchs who support the empire because they have a lot to gain from it; and a lot of assholes who just want to get rich or live their decadent lives while not paying attention to the horror.

Even the rebels are, to various extents, compromised by the fight against totalitarianism. Some squabble. Some are “righteous gentiles” who shield the vulnerable (in a gesture to our moment, three of the series’ heroes are living incognito as “undocumented” agricultural workers, until the empire comes around inspecting papers). And then there’s the conflicted, brooding rebel mastermind Luthen Rael, who knows he must compromise his own morality for the cause, and seems barely to be able to live with himself. No one is free from the effects of this.

Here's a quote by fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie that my friend

Don Shewey

recently posted on his Substack:

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering emperors with world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

This is what I kept coming back to, watching these new episodes: how great power elevates truly mediocre, petty people to become miniature totalitarians; how the worst people rise to the top of the pile of shit, as better ones steer clear of the stink.

I thought of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, busy spewing lies about the New York subway system and working hard to end a smart, successful congestion pricing plan because that will please suburbanites who vote for Republicans. And of the sole lawyer who called out his bullshit in a memo leaked (or mistakenly sent, somehow) to a judge.

I thought of Attorney General Pam Bondi, contorting the constitution to justify abject tyranny, while still finding the time to persecute transgender people and deride forty years of scientific consensus as “junk science.” And of Alina Habba, her lackey in New Jersey, directly threatening to prosecute political enemies.

I thought of Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, who throws her borrowed weight around with no decorum or professionalism, denigrating journalists from AP and Reuters. Of “Secretary of Education” Linda McMahon, an ignoramus whose job is to disassemble her department. And of “EPA Administrator” Lee Zeldin, doing the same thing.

I thought of the know-nothing barbarians sacking the great educational and scientific institutions of this country on the thinnest of pretexts, while the goals of their masters are to destroy the pillars of liberal society.

And I thought of a million petty Trumps, animated by his machismo, aping his gestures, his punctuation, his braggadocio.

None of these people are named Trump, Musk, Hegseth, Vance, or Miller. They, like Andor’s petty villains, don’t make many headlines. But they are where the rubber of totalitarianism meets the road of actual human lives.

Great histories (and tragedies) focus on the “Great Men” who, for good or ill, shape human history. But for every Stalin, there are a thousand apparatchiks, petty officials who sense an opportunity to advance, as long as they tow the line of the most powerful. This is where the banality of evil takes place: not in the Emperor’s Chambers, but in the wheatfields of Mina-Rau, where under the shadow of vast silos, power is distributed to the ambitious and the pathetic, and violence is visited upon the good.

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I hope you’re doing alright. I find I’m up and down these days, as I’ve written about before.

Some good stuff I’ve read this week:

• Al Gore gave an amazing speech recently.

  Robert Reich
  reprinted it in his newsletter.

• Anya Kamenetz
  is in peak form in this meditation on how to talk, and how we’re not allowed to talk, about climate/extreme weather/collapse.

• Jules Evans
  hits the big time, talking about right-wing psychedelia and safety concerns in the New York Times.

• In case you know anyone who thinks Musk/DOGE did a basically good job, here are the receipts. They did not — at least not according to their stated objectives. Bookmark this one for later.

• How about that time Kabbalists put death curses on Hitler.

• And of course, the Michele Goldberg piece that I’ve written my own versions of many times: “I can’t believe anyone thinks Trump actually cares about antisemitism.”

If you’re in NYC, I’ll be doing a live taping of David Ingber’s new podcast on Sunday, May 4 at 7pm, at the 92nd Street Y. Here are the details. I’ve had to cut back some of my teaching for family reasons so here’s a chance to hang out.

Get outside — it’s springtime.