bird

The leaders of the british military get a reasonable amount of flack for not opposing Hitler more in the 1930s. I get that. Britain at times (e.g. with Neville Chamberlain) seemed incredibly reluctant to get involved in a war with Germany.

Then I asked myself why.

So I began looking at the military careers of the 4 men who served as head of the British Army in the 1930s. All high ranking Generals or Field Marshalls in the 30s. I asked myself "what rank would they have been 20 years before?"

Probably company commander level. Captains or the like.

So I looked them up and each of the 4 men (George Milne, Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, Cyril Deverell and John Vereker) served in field command at least during the early stages of WW1. On the front lines of the western front during Trench Warfare at its worst. Some of them were wounded in battle. One earned a VC.

So I went digging and as expected many if not most of the Generals and Colonels during the 1930s had served in junior officer positions on the front lines of WW1.

The Great War.

A war that killed almost 900,000 british soldiers. About 1/8 soldiers died. That is maybe 10% of ALL the men from 18-40 in Britain.

And these men served in the mud, and the trenches during the worst of it.

I am not surprised they were reluctant to start another war. In 1939 when we declared war it had been only 21 years since the last one ended. 21 years. Young men who left the trenches now had sons who were equally young men and eager to sign up once again. JRR Tolkien served in thsoe trenches in WW1. His son Christopher went to war in 1943 with the RAF and whilst he never saw front line action he certainly could have. Another son (Michael) volunteered but was turned down.

What father, having served in the first war, would be eager for his son to sign up for the second? What general would not do everything in his power to avoid sending millions of young men to risk death again?

Sure we "won" WW1 but it was truly traumatic for Britain. Every town, every village, has a monument to the dead from WW1. Every single one lists the eager young men who left for war and never returned. A lot of these Cenotaphs were built shortly after WW1 ended - the one in the town I live in was dedicated in 1921 and lists over 360 names.

Were we as a nation reluctant to enter a second major war with Germany? Yes we were. Incredibly so. That let Hitler get further along the road than he should have.

But WW2 was not just within living memory, it was the formative memory of many of the men now in power. It was the event that defined their early 20s. They ALL had friends who didn't make it. ALL of them.

The people complaining about the evils of capitalism and how they are suffering in Trump's economy still have a standard of living the average German would have killed for 100 years ago. The unemployment was so much worse. The treaty killed so many jobs. The economic sanctions were bleeding them dry after the war already effectively bankrupted them. To try and relieve the strain they printed up a ton of money backed by nothing which lead to hyperinflation. It's infamously known that you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. I heard stories of workers getting paid twice a day and needing their wives to hurry and pay the bills because the next day that money would lose a lot of its value.

Second, only mentioning the economic devastation is leaving too much out. It's not just that people were poor or starving. They were living through a level of subjugation that economics alone can't describe. Foreign soldiers would show up to rape and steal long after the war. People were being killed in the street out of a desire for revenge on the concept of a German. Trench wars of attrition did not make gracious victors.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.

Obviously intentional benches are preferable, but I'll take what I can get.