Yeah, I mean, whenever someone talks about Star Wars being “WW2 in space”, it’s generally accompanied by clips of X-Wings banking like a WW2 fighter plane, or gunners manning a huge laser canon and firing out the window into space like on a WW2 battleship, etc. The “WW2 in space” thing mostly refers to aesthetic/stylistic choices manifested in the groundbreaking visual effects. The story itself is more closely analogous to an asymmetric conflict between insurgents and an oppressive technocratic dictatorship. But perhaps it has more in common with a fantasy where an evil Kingdom is defeated by an unlikely hero than anything rooted in real world politics.

I remember, at least anecdotally, people used to draw parallels with the American revolution, drawing on superficial things like the Imperials all having British accents. (It’s likely the Imperials all have British accents because it was convenient to find British extras at Elstree Studios in the UK where a lot of Star Wars 1977 was filmed.) But I find it very unlikely George Lucas had that in mind. He obviously felt some affinity with the 1960s/1970s counter-culture and the anti-war movement at the time. This probably influenced some things in Star Wars in some minor way, but I think most of it was influenced simply by pulp-sci-fi tropes and Flash Gordon, which often featured evil tyrannical Empires as the bad guys.

Honestly, most of the “political messaging” in Star Wars, (if it even exists), always feels tacked on as an afterthought by Lucas as an attempt to elevate the material. Tying in the Bush Administration and the War on Terror with Palpatine’s story in the Prequels always seemed like a really desperate stretch, not because it wasn’t at least partially a valid analogy necessarily, but because I just don’t really believe George Lucas when he claims to have thought much about these things while writing the script.