Author Topic: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
J_K_DART  5883 posts
Registered: Dec '01
43226_Anakin Solo
Date Posted: 10/21/08 4:50am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
Ironically, there's no way the coralskippers could've done the trench run. The Empire had people with a lot of experience working with biological weaons; unless Nom Anor got some agents into the right place, he'd be unable to understand the Death Star plans enough to work out the possibility of the trench run.

I always wanted it retconned that Nom Anor supported the Rebellion so as to remove the Empire, clearing the way for the Vong.

Still, the last word has to go to Han. "Nostril of Palpatine".

 

-----signature-----
"Victory without risk is like a pizza without pepperoni."
"I like my pizzas without pepperoni."
"Sir master of the long post" - Excellence
Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
DarthUr  1370 posts
Registered: Oct '08
Date Posted: 10/21/08 12:34pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
Tyber_Zahn posted:
Well if you took something like WW2 and scalled up the size of a galaxy, we would have been bombing entire planets populated with civilians into the stone age. The nuclear bomb dropped on Japan would be planet destroying bombs. Not that would have made the Allies any more evil, they're fighting the war the same way just the scale of the war is different.


I don't think Alderaan is comparable to Hiroshima no matter what, but especially in this instance it's still not comparable.

Hiroshima was chosen because it was a big enough city to make an impact while still being small enough that the loss of population would not have a permanently crippling effect on Japanese culture. There's a reason they bombed Hiroshima and not, say, Tokyo or Kyoto.

Blowing up a Core World is more akin to blowing up a capital city than an outlying city, if you still think you can really compare destroying an entire biosphere to destroying one human settlement. And really, given that planets with the population of Alderaan are treated more like nation-states in the Senate than like cities or provinces, what it's most like is blowing up *all of Japan* in order to break the back of the Axis powers.

Would it have been justified for the USA to kill *everyone in Japan* (or Germany, or Italy) in order to stop the war?

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
DarthUr  1370 posts
Registered: Oct '08
Date Posted: 10/21/08 12:36pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
And, of course, the problem with arguing based solely on military doctrine is that it assumes the two opposing sides are just opposing sides like in a chess game, with no political or moral nuance.

Committing atrocities in order to do good and protect people's rights and make people happy is already something I would consider unacceptable. But Tarkin was an evil man in the first place fighting for an evil regime, and he was one of the most evil people in it -- however you think someone like Mara Jade or Admiral Pellaeon may have seen the Empire, Tarkin clearly saw it as a means to wield absolute power over antlike civilians and crush them like a god.

His motives were evil. His actions were evil. The fact that the Empire is the "legitimate government" of the GFFA, from a *moral* as opposed to legal standpoint, means nothing.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
SergeantDante  95 posts
Registered: Sep '08
48584_Jump Trooper (60609)
Date Posted: 10/21/08 1:03pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
Do you have to ask? A squad of supercommandos taking over a Star Destroyer. That just should have been scrapped... tongue

 

-----signature-----
Meesa lovah the admins so mucha. Meesa love all da authors and theysa products!!! meessa lovsa big brother and da mods!!!! 3 million forever!!! woot l33t mandos woot
I love the Malevolence. Thanks to it, the "Noble Three Million" is in Non-canon Hell.
The
Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Monosyllabic  71 posts
Registered: Nov '07
Date Posted: 10/21/08 1:32pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
Making Han shoot second?

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
DarthUr  1370 posts
Registered: Oct '08
Date Posted: 10/21/08 1:47pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
This.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Tyber_Zahn  910 posts
Registered: Sep '08
41993_Tyber Zann
Date Posted: 10/21/08 2:24pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
DarthUr posted:
Tyber_Zahn posted:
Well if you took something like WW2 and scalled up the size of a galaxy, we would have been bombing entire planets populated with civilians into the stone age. The nuclear bomb dropped on Japan would be planet destroying bombs. Not that would have made the Allies any more evil, they're fighting the war the same way just the scale of the war is different.


I don't think Alderaan is comparable to Hiroshima no matter what, but especially in this instance it's still not comparable.

Hiroshima was chosen because it was a big enough city to make an impact while still being small enough that the loss of population would not have a permanently crippling effect on Japanese culture. There's a reason they bombed Hiroshima and not, say, Tokyo or Kyoto.

Blowing up a Core World is more akin to blowing up a capital city than an outlying city, if you still think you can really compare destroying an entire biosphere to destroying one human settlement. And really, given that planets with the population of Alderaan are treated more like nation-states in the Senate than like cities or provinces, what it's most like is blowing up *all of Japan* in order to break the back of the Axis powers.

Would it have been justified for the USA to kill *everyone in Japan* (or Germany, or Italy) in order to stop the war?



In ancient times the number of civilians we intentionally bombed and killed in WW2 would have amounted to an entire nation, because the population back then was significantly smaller than it is now. Wiping out a nation is a lot worse than wiping out a city, depite the fact that the actual numbers of people being killed is exactly the same either way. You often see Coruscant being referred to as the "capitol of galaxy" so it suggests that's the way people in Star Wars see planets in general. And Alderaan was relatively lightly populated for a core world, much of it was still green and blue and not fully urbanised, and it certainly wasn't the hub of any significant industry.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
DarthUr  1370 posts
Registered: Oct '08
Date Posted: 10/21/08 2:58pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars? - Date Edited: 10/21/08 2:59pm (1 edits total) Edited By: DarthUr
I don't think Star Wars culture has actually downgraded a planet to being exactly the same as a city, because after all one sentient still equals one sentient.

Alderaan is depicted as a self-contained culture with a strong distinct "national" identity in a way that is true of a modern-day nation -- if a small nation, like, say, Jamaica -- and is *not* true of a city, even a big city.

If Alderaan were really just a city it wouldn't have its own royal family and nobility, people wouldn't identify being Alderaanian as a sort of ethnicity, etc.

The way the Queen of Naboo -- a smaller and less important planet than Alderaan -- interacts with the Galactic Senate shows that the "Republic" is much more like the UN and individual planets or at least planetary sectors more like nations than the Republic being one country like the USA. (For obvious reasons -- to really identify as a country you have to be one country among many. If people see the galaxy as the "whole world" then they have no reason to be patriotic toward the galaxy the way they are toward their home sectors.)

The Empire seems to have been an attempt to change that, and while multiple generations of Imperial rule might have actually done so, the actual Empire only lasted about one generation.

In any case, it's not like the Allies' policy of strategic bombing of civilians, especially the nuking of Hiroshima, wasn't morally questionable then and still isn't morally questioned now.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Tyber_Zahn  910 posts
Registered: Sep '08
41993_Tyber Zann
Date Posted: 10/21/08 4:52pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
Well ok perhaps SW planets are much more politically and culturally distinct from each other than cities within the same country on Earth. But I just mean in terms of overall scale. If there were only say 500 inhabited planets in SW then a planet would most likely roughly equate to being a country on Earth. But seeing as there are millions of inhabited planets in Star Wars the significance of one planet is scaled down to something more along the lines of say an autonomous city state.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
UltimateMandalore  454 posts
Registered: Sep '06
42103_Thrawn
Date Posted: 10/21/08 4:58pm Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
DarthUr posted:
This.


Definitely.

 

-----signature-----
Mandalorians don't make threats, we make promises.
Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Qui-Gon_Reborn  5538 posts
Title: Qui-Gon's Personal SWC Modsaber
Registered: Dec '08
8038_Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan
Date Posted: 1/13 12:06am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
DarthUr posted:
This.


Oh yeah. laugh

No, I'll have to go with Alderaan, as well. The theft of all those lives...

 

-----signature-----
To be a true poet is to become God. - Dan Simmons
Now bring me that horizon. - Capt. Jack Sparrow
High Priestess in the Holy Order of the Circle-in-the-Sky Worshippers
Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
DarthUr  1370 posts
Registered: Oct '08
Date Posted: 1/13 12:32am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
At least their suffering was shorter than the running time of "The Ewoks and the Magic Sunberries".

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Qui-Gon_Reborn  5538 posts
Title: Qui-Gon's Personal SWC Modsaber
Registered: Dec '08
8038_Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan
Date Posted: 1/13 12:38am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
DarthUr posted:
At least their suffering was shorter than the running time of "The Ewoks and the Magic Sunberries".


And at least they didn't go willingly...

 

-----signature-----
To be a true poet is to become God. - Dan Simmons
Now bring me that horizon. - Capt. Jack Sparrow
High Priestess in the Holy Order of the Circle-in-the-Sky Worshippers
Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Master_Jedi_LS  168 posts
Registered: Jan '09
42008_Luke Skywalker
Date Posted: 1/13 5:29am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
I would have to say the most evil act in star wars is when Kyp destroyed that star with the sun crusher. He pretty much obliterated a whole sector and killed millions. I know he was possessed by a sith lord and all but it was still pretty evil. Actually now that I think of it an act of evil really doesn’t have to come from a large loss of life. It can be something done to only one person and just be such a horrific act that it claims the title for the most evil act. I’m not sure what it is but I’m sure it was done by Darth Sidious.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History
Jmacq1  1728 posts
Registered: May '05
23590_Darth Revan
Date Posted: 1/13 7:33am Subject: RE: What is the most evil act in all of Star Wars?
I'd say Caamas' destruction may well outweigh Alderaan. There's at least enough probable cause that you can make the argument that Alderaan was a political/military target (even if I don't agree with it, and in either case it's a vastly disproportionate response). Caamas was a loyal world, whose people just happened to hold views that Palpatine didn't like, so he had them vaped for it. They weren't in open rebellion or even covert rebellion. They were just unfortunate enough to be a people who embodied everything Palpatine despised, philosophically.

The main reason Caamas might not outweigh Alderaan is that it didn't completely wipe out the entire population, and apparently a few pockets on the planet were still habitable.

Oh yeah, and I'm pretty sure killing them didn't help prepare the Galaxy for the Vong, either. It was an act of pure spite.

 

Locked Topic | Active Topic Notification | Private Message | Post History