There’s enough evidence for me that it was intentional, Lucas is fascinated by the fall of Rome and what happens to societies preceding their collapse.
So this guy’s fascinated enough by the fall of the Roman Republic to base a trilogy off of it, but not enough to know that Caesar actually did come at the head of a conquering army? The Senate gave him dictatorial powers after he conquered Rome, and it was an attempt to limit his power, not to give him power.
I don’t recall George ever saying the prequels were a Roman biopic. It’s possible to take some ideas and inspiration from an event without directly mirroring it.
George Lucas: “All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea…”
This is the quote I’m referring to.
Caesar actually did take power through a coup (which is why this quote is so ironic), and the general population of Germany never supported Hitler during his rise to power, he was appointed by the previous Chancellor. The highest he ever got in the popular vote was 33%.
I don’t know much about Napoleon’s rise to power to be honest, but I doubt he fits Lucas’s idea of history either. Because he’d be, like, the one exception. This sort of misanthropic view of authoritarianism is ahistorical and just inaccurate.
I remember touching on this point myself before, maybe in the Ahsoka Tano thread. I think it is a big problem that this Jedi doctrine of no attachments allowed (which is really quite inhuman, and a mistaken decision only made out of fear, I think) has been repeatedly ‘proved’ in Star Wars content.
This is why, for better or worse, I do believe the prequel-era Jedi being bad is an EU invention. Everything in the movies, plus Mando, seems to vindicate them on these kinds of issues. If the Jedi being wrong was ever Lucas’s intention, it’s so muddied that it doesn’t really matter what his intention was.
The only real thing they aren’t later justified for is when Yoda, Mace Windu, and Obi-Wan call the Jedi arrogant, but they throw that word around a lot in the prequels without ever actually showing us arrogance. It’s so meaningless in the story the prequels end up telling that I kinda tune it out, which is why I forgot about it until rereading this thread. It just sounds like standard dumb prequel dialog.
It may be evidence that the story the prequels were trying to tell was about how the Jedi were bad/corrupt/flawed/whatever, but with how often the Jedi’s behavior is justified, I’d chock this up to the prequels being the prequels.