If the rebels from star wars are like the Vietcong, then Bernard Cornwell based Uhtred of Bebbanburgh on Bishop Fulton Sheen.
I wonder what Lucas was smoking when he got that idea!
Apparently, he decided to revisit themes he explored with the movie Apocalypse Now back when he was working on it before the studio forced him to give it to Francis Ford Coppola when he made Star Wars. This is from pages 7 and 8 of the book:
“’I was in debt,’ Lucas says. ‘I needed a job very badly, and I didn’t know what was going to happen with [American] Graffiti, so I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue with Apocalypse Now. I had worked on Apocalypse Now for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. I wanted to do it, but could not get it off the ground. Columbia had just turned it down. It had started at Warner and then it went to Paramount, and it had been just about everywhere in town. Everybody had that script at least once, and the main studios had had it twice. I think everybody was just afraid of the Vietnam War and they were afraid that it was going to cost more than what we thought it was going to cost, and nobody wanted to go near it. So I figured what the heck, I’ve got to do something, I’ll start developing Star Wars.’
“Throughout his life up to that point, Lucas had had a number of key interests, apart from cinema and art: anthropology-the interaction of politics, history, and people; mythology, as a representation of cultural conditioning; traditional adventure stores; and . . . speed. From hot rods to rocket ships. All three interests are present in THX 1138, which contains an ambiguous government, robot police, a judicial system ruled by a computer, and people who are persecuted for not taking drugs prescribed by the state; it opens with a clip from a Buck Rogers serial and ends with an ultra-high speed car and motorcycle chase. Graffiti also ends with a high-speed vehicular climax and a coda that mentions the Vietnam War-in fact, the whole film takes place within the shadow of that conflict and the impending social upheaval of the 1960s. But with Apocalypse Now on the sidelines, many of its particular political conceits were transferred to the front lines of Lucas’s space fantasy film.
“’A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star War,’ Lucas say. ‘I figured that I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d essentially have a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings.’”
I think you’re familiar with what Apocalypse Now was like, and how anti-American it was.