The Empire doesn’t just destroy, it rewrites history.
That is the quiet terror at the heart of Andor, the recently concluded Star Wars series that has attracted widespread acclaim for its grounded depiction of political repression, colonial extraction and the complex psychology of resistance.
Unlike typical science fiction, Andor takes seriously the stakes of organising and rebelling.
In a world facing climate collapse, state surveillance and rising authoritarianism, the series challenges viewers to rethink how power operates and the role of popular culture in reinforcing or disrupting dominant ideologies.
“We often talk about a text, in this case Andor, as being pedagogical,” says cultural theorist James Hall.
“They’re always teaching something, always normalising a certain form of behaviour. I think something that normalises resistance to authoritarianism is always going to be a good thing.”
Set during the rise of the Rebel Alliance, Andor follows Cassian Andor as he becomes radicalised following the loss of his home planet to mining and systemic injustice.
The show doesn’t offer easy victories. Resistance, as student activist Sampson McCrackan notes, is shown as slow, painful and often demoralising.
“I think the point of the show is to be very honest about the reality of resistance. Often you lose and you lose and you lose until you’re ready to win.”
He points to Andor’s portrayal of the Empire as reflecting the tactics of modern state powers that manufacture legitimacy for violence while concealing their resource ambitions.
“In the second season, there is a large massacre on a planet called Ghor. It happens as the end result of a mass disinformation campaign to destroy the credibility of the entire planet completely and lay the groundwork for mining its natural resources,” he says.
The show reveals that the Empire itself helped arm and fund the rebel factions it would later label as terrorists, fuelling internal division and manufacturing a justification for its violent intervention.
This fictional tactic mirrors real-world strategies that some analysts argue have been used to shape political dynamics in the Middle East.
For instance, Israel’s past tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Gaza has been viewed by some as an attempt to counterbalance the influence of secular Palestinian groups.
Critics suggest this approach contributed to the rise of Hamas, a group now at the centre of the conflict Israel cites to legitimise its ongoing military bombardment of Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected claims that his government enabled Hamas’s growth through indirect funding channels, including Qatari aid, calling the allegations “ridiculous.”
As in Andor, where political narratives obscure resource ambitions, observers note that the region around Palestine is not only a site of long-standing geopolitical conflict but also holds substantial reserves of gas, oil and minerals.
Yet public discourse rarely acknowledges these material interests; instead, mainstream narratives focus on moral binaries that obscure the realities of extraction, profit, and power.
Andor exposes how empires use violence and disinformation to pave the way for economic exploitation, relying on public distraction and short attention spans to escape accountability.
As the young rebel Nemik explains to our protagonist, “The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.”
His words reflect the series’ central warning that systemic injustice thrives through both force and the confusion of overwhelming noise that numbs response.
“TV shows, films are driven through conflict, it’s quite easy for a writer these days to say ‘what’s happening in this part of the world? Well, let’s impose a parallel on our fantasy structure within the Star Wars universe’,” says Hall.
He warns that even when viewers recognise these parallels, there is a risk of reducing resistance to symbolic engagement.
“Is there a case of people watching and connecting that it’s what Israel is doing to Palestine, and then moving on to the next thing to identify? Or does it actually lead to some form of action?”
Hall is not alone in expressing concern that recognition does not always translate into action.
As McCrackan explains, “Sometimes I worry that if people are just happy enough to watch, the show validates how they feel and then they don’t actually do anything about it.”
This phenomenon, the consumption of political narratives as entertainment without subsequent engagement, is increasingly common.
The irony is that while Andor depicts community, discipline and sacrifice, its reception is shaped by a media landscape that prizes attention over action.
As Hall notes, “Today we’re at a point where our political engagement is creating content that is used to generate profits and advertising revenue with.”
In this context, even expressions of dissent on social media are being absorbed by the same capitalist systems they intend to challenge.
The series also forces viewers to confront the hidden machinery of empire.
Nowhere is this more visceral than in the episode One Way Out, where the audience learns that the Empire operates secret offshore detention facilities beyond the knowledge or consent of its citizens.
The prisoners are held indefinitely, stripped of personhood, and used as disposable labour.
They are disappeared not just physically, but politically, their suffering is rendered invisible to maintain the illusion of order.
This narrative is not just science fiction.
“What America is doing in El Salvador is very similar to what we’ve done with Manus Island and Nauru and all these other places,” says McCrackan.
“We’re a lot closer to America than I think a lot of us are actually comfortable with.”
Australia and the United States both rely on offshore detention regimes to insulate the violence of border enforcement from public scrutiny.
These facilities are framed as necessary for national security or humanitarian management, yet their actual function is deterrence through dehumanisation.
The secrecy surrounding the prison in Andor reflects the same logic – out of sight, out of mind.
“I do think there is this sort of internal rot in society, maybe on the surface, someone on the outside might think that we’re still very wealthy, but there is something that’s increasingly going wrong and you can feel it,” McCrackan says.
In both Andor’s galaxy and our own, the empire depends on us forgetting.
Forgetting who is suffering, where things are made and who pays the price.
What Andor does so effectively is invite its viewers to remember and, perhaps, to act, the haunting chants of “One way out” are not just the cry of fictional prisoners, they are a reminder that complicity is quiet, and that resistance begins when silence breaks.
In this period of history, fascist aesthetics are no longer condemned but embraced, often by the very people they were originally designed to critique.
This irony is most apparent in the online right’s adoption of imagery from Star Wars, a franchise built on anti-fascist themes.
The official White House X account posted an AI-generated image of Donald Trump wielding a red lightsabre, the caption spoke to the ‘radical left’ denouncing them “you are not the rebellion you are the empire”
McCrackan says the absurdity reveals a deeper collapse in media literacy.
“First of all, they’re using AI, which is part of this idea of stupefaction.”
“And secondly it shows how far media literacy has degenerated because with the red lightsabre they’re implying that they’re the Empire, which are the bad guys! Do they think regular people are so stupid that it looks cool?”
This is the great irony of our media age.
The online right has absorbed the aesthetics of rebellion while aligning with systems of control.
Fascist symbols have been repackaged as edgy branding, while the political imagination behind them is discarded.
In Andor, the Empire crushes resistance with spectacle, in our world, spectacle has been so decontextualised that some cheer for the villains without realising they’ve joined them.
Andor reminds us that resistance is not glamorous. It is difficult, often demoralising work. But it is also necessary.
“We probably all deserve a good world,” says Hall.
“Like all eight billion people, and anything that inches us closer towards that has got to be a good thing.”
That inching requires effort, and it asks more of us than just watching or posting.
So my question to you, reader, is this:
What stories are you consuming, and what are you doing with them? Can fiction awaken empathy, deepen analysis and catalyse action? Or will it remain, as Hall puts it, just another symbolic gesture within the digital economy?
There are no simple answers, but as Andor shows us, the fight is never just out there, it is here, in our institutions, our media, and our choices, the time to act is now.
