CT Why Palpatine's Empire hate non human races so much?

The ancient Sith race was long gone, Darth Bane's Sith accept all races, why did his Empire hate non human race that much?

 

I don't think Palpatine himself was inherently racist. However, a large number of his key underlings may have been, certainly enough to cause the virtually overt racism that happened throughout the Empire.

 

Palpatine doesn't believe the rest of us are real enough to deal with silly notions like people looking different if you ask me. We're all just objects to manipulate.

 

Palpatine just needed the dark-side to be as strong as possible, which means he needed hate and oppression flying around. It was everywhere during the war, but when you rule the galaxy there isn't much to do so the Empire needed to turn the hate towards someone. Turns out alien-hate was still rampant and it was an easy path to take.

 

That was more Dooku in the RoTS novel, than Palpatine.

I'm not sure if it was present in Marvel SW, or the West End Games splatbooks- but it was definitely mentioned in Heir to the Empire. And it was always called out as "Palpatine's well known prejudices against aliens". In Outbound Flight, it's "Darth Sidious's hatred of aliens" instead.

 

If you looks at the Imperial army and Navy as a whole, it's pretty much a Humans only club.So it's no Surprise that Thrawn rising to Grand Admiral was a pretty big deal. Other than Thrawn I don't recall ever seeing a non-human serve in Palpatine's Empire. I can only assume it has something to do with the predominantly non-human species that made up the Separatist movement.

 

In the RoTS novel Dooku's very much of the "humans must rule aliens" school of thought. Which is why the Confederacy was mostly powerful alien factions- the goal was that their power be broken by the Clone Wars.

Aliens do serve in the military in the novels- but they tend to be rare- and lower-ranking. There's a Chagrian (same species as Mas Amedda the Senate Speaker (Order! Order!) in the Death Star novel.

 

I'll be ignoring the EU in this one because it's dumb on this subject. Palpatine doesn't see people as objects? Okay then. I'll believe it when...well, never. That's exactly how he treats everyone.

 

It's more that we've never had a novel that explicitly states that Palpatine sees people as "not entirely real"whereas we do for Dooku.

 

Eh, I think it's pretty heavily implied in just how he interacts with people-referring to Luke as a possession in ROTJ, his post-ROTS thoughts in Dark Lord about how Padme was always going to have to die, wanting to take over Leia's son's body in Dark Empire (lol ) and so on. We might be real to him, but if we are, its in the sense that a car is real.

 

I once brainstormed on the "human heavy" universe we get in SW and never once really entertained the thought that Palpatine himself was racist but rather came up with another disturbing hypothesis based on the evidence.

Who are the predominant "non-humans" we see in the films and what is their status?

Chewbacca is the only rebel alien in ANH and he often gets treated like a pet (Han giving him orders that sound less like orders and more like commands you'd give to a dog).
Then we've got Jawas (scavengers that again aren't treated with that much respect), Tuskens that are savage monsters threatening the humans and Mos Eisley where the "alien" nature of the non-human is on spectacle, is the weird, the margins, they exist on the fringes in ANH. Why?

In ESB we still end up with Chewie being the only non-human rebel plus Yoda as again an alien living in the zone of "mystery" in a hidden place on the outskirts of the civilized galaxy, he is a nexus of the impossible, small yet powerful, keeper of secrets and mysterious powers.

It is only really with ROTJ that things start to get more "diverse", you've got Nien Numb, the prune faces, the Mon Calimari. But before this you've still got the seedy, underbelly world of aliens at Jabba's palace playing a somewhat similar role as the cantina did in ANH.

Now, I know most of this was done for effect, to get the human audience to feel a certain way, to use it as a kind of shorthand for excitement, adventure, danger, the unknown etc (not to mention budgetary concerns about costumes and effects!) but when I started to look at it from an in-universe perspective I started to think perhaps in the earlier days of this galaxy, so thousands of years ago, wars raged that were much more openly racist or at least "hostile to foreigners" so you had first contact between species go badly. You had a perhaps united, militaristic human faction that had already grown in their sector and as it spread out and made contact it made war and won many more times than it lost.

It then marginalized many other species thousands of years ago thus shifting the demographics of the galaxy in a big way that, by the time we get to the era the Skywalkers, though this mentality may have faded, replaced by something more peaceful, much less racist but non-human species are still suffering the consequences, having been pushed to the border regions of the galaxy and never fully recovered at least in terms of population numbers. So from this, Palpatine could still be racist, perhaps he even is nostalgic for those ancient times when humans were to spread out and fill the galaxy. But there isn't really anything in what he does or says that would suggest this. It just seems to me the galaxy is already quite human-if-not-white by the time we arrive and since nothing was made of it I went with this other theory. But I don't think I've figured anything out, just having fun!

 

Where do the films mention the Galactic Empire enslaving or wiping out the non-humans in the galaxy? I thought that was just Expanded Universe material.

 

I don't buy Palpatine as being motivated by personal anti-alien prejudice. That would imply that he takes pride in his humanity, and identifies with other humans. As DarthBoba put it, everyone is just an object for him to manipulate on his quest to gain ultimate power. Palpatine's a megalomaniacal sociopath.

I like to think that Palpatine may have used anti-alien hatreds to help solidify his rule. Fascist dictatorships have a tendency of singling out certain groups so that they can unite their people against perceived enemies.

 

In the EU his father was strongly prejudiced against aliens- Palpatine may have absorbed some of these notions.

 

It doesn't make any sense that the Galactic empire was evil, deserved to be overthrown by the rebels, just because they only hired humans in their army.

 

I've come to the conclusion that you're just trolling now. No human being could be this aloof.

 

No, I'm just saying that the EU explains why the empire is evil, and that the info from the films isn't enough.

 

The opening crawl text from a New Hope isn't enough? Or the fact that they build planet destroying space stations? and they destroy a planet full of innocents?

 

Alderaan. If the rebel alliance never started a war against the empire, Alderaan would have still existed. Regardless of that, the empire was still a very evil government in the galaxy and did a terrible evil thing, because most of Alderaan's citizens had nothing to do with the rebel alliance. But it doesn't justify the rebel alliance, which was being formed at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Padme, bail organa, had no idea about that, and not once was it mentioned in ROTS by the characters, only shown at the end. It was part of the story, but when Padme lost the will to live and was upset that Palpatine became emperor and anakin turned to the darkside, she never once mentioned Alderaan or the death star. There were other reasons the empire was evil and the rebel alliance was justified, which the expanded universe explains, such as the empire's treatment of wookies and the mon calamari. That's what I meant.

Also, what does the opening text in a new hope mean?

 

....I see.

 

How did the ancient Sith race go extinct?

 

Why do (some) white people hate black people? Why do (some) Muslims hate Jews? Because discrimination, that's why.

 

Because of the Sith, they used the darkside and did bad things because of it. That's why the non human races were treated badly in the EU.

 

Palpatine wasn't bad, he was just drawn that way.

 

Not the Sith, just Palpatine. Most of the Sith Lords before him weren't even Human. In fact the original Sith race are decidedly non-human. The anti-Alien policy is due to Palpatine's own prejudices.