Lit The Slow process of the Republic/Empire Transformation? (New Canon)

Crisis actors.

 

The Empire's propaganda machine must be seriously effective if it's got the populace seeing the Force as a myth two decades after Force-users were seen as among the Galaxy's greatest heroes. This isn't even a PT-induced plot hole; everything in the OT indicates that the fall of the Republic and the Jedi was well within living memory.

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se."

 

People's beliefs can change dramatically in a short period. Look at the Soviet Union.

 

This sort of thing still goes on today. Witness the Chechen government claiming homosexuality doesn't exist all the while having all the gay people secretly killed.

 

Yes, the thing with Admiral Motti is he thinks he's right and talks all manner of smack about Vader because he "knows' he's a fraud.

He's also very very wrong.

I always wanted a short story where we get his perspective afterward and he's confronted with "Everything I know is wrong."

 

Also look at cigarette smoking. It wasn't long ago that nobody put "bar" and "non-smoker" in the same sentence.

 

Something more like the Darksaber or Legends would have made more sense. The ability to destroy a planet...but escorted by several Star Destroyers. And a much smaller crew so that if something happened you to not lose your best and brightest.

Look at the real world....you really thing troops deployed to a combat zone are going to stop and say "hold on...that's a kid." If that 12 year old is running at you with a bomb vest you take the shot. There is not time to try to give him a candy bar and talk to him about how wrong what he is doing is.

And I am sure the Imperial propagandist would have released a statement to the effect "While attempting to suppress the Jedi insurrection the children they brainwashed attempted to kill trooper in the performance of their duties and the troopers were forced to kill them in self defense."

 

LEGENDS handled it a bit better, IMHO, too.

The holonet news and Republic comics hinted that the Old Republic was not exactly enthusiastic about the Jedi. We had things like Baby Lundi and also anti-Jedi spokesmen as well as Senators. We've also got the episodes in the Clone Wars where it's clear the Jedi have basically become to obsessed with the Big Picture to pay their own cleaning ladies a decent wage or deal with the fact people have become of the mind they're capable of terrorism.

Admiral Mott is probably a COMPNOR teenager back then and even then he grew up under President Palpatine where this attitude was commonplace. There's a generation gap between Tarkin and Motti that I think works well.

Tarkin is in his sixties or so so he's a man who remembers the Jedi long before the rise of Palpatine and thus treats them as people worthy of respect even if he probably has only the barest idea of what a Sith Lord is (or like the people in KOTOR assume they're just a different kind of Jedi). Tarkin knows the Force is real and hasn't drunk the Kool Aid of Compnor but he isn't overly impressed by it either. It's more like if you knew Buddhist monks who were psychic--you'd not see the correlation.

Re: The Death Star

Timothy Zahn said the Grand Admirals were part of Emperor Palpatine's constant restructuring of the Empire in order to bring it more directly under his control. They were a way to bypass the Joint Chiefs and Imperial High Command to create a more direct feudal structure. It's a parallel to the Moffs being used to same way to remove the Senate from power. Palpatine gives orders to his Grand Moffs and Moffs who carry out his will. They're his political appointees and depend entriely on him as well as his Inner Circle for their power.

The Death Star is another way to do that on a direct way. The Death Star is something that will allow Palpatine to dominate the Empire directly. I think Palpatine eventually planned to either move there himself (he has a throne room prepared on the second one) or to have someone he can totally rely on for it.

It's big and a huge target like that because Palpatine can't share power.

 

Legends got way too many superweapons...

 

But they tended to get blown up pretty quickly....

 

I always viewed Motti's statements during that scene as not that he does not believe in the Force necessarily but that he thinks lowly of it. Like "Yeah, sure, [even if] you got the Force, big whoop, if it's so great then why haven't you accomplished more", all the while boasting on how great technology is compared to his "religion".

And regarding the majority of people thinking the Jedi as a myth or whatever, we need to remember that the Jedi are few and far between in a galaxy-scale setting. Most people will never encounter a Jedi and even if they hear about them there's a lot of details that can be missed, misinterpreted, and everything else in between that can muddle the information. People may know of the Jedi but they can easily just be believed to be especially skilled individuals or whathaveyou.

For the Force, all that the Force is to the individual is a belief. And it's either you're born to it, encounter something that makes you believe it, or just want to believe in it. Otherwise, it's just another belief. Emphasis on personal encounter. O'l Joe on Eriadu ain't got no reason to believe in the Force unless he sees someone float a rock a round and he's sure there ain't no technological doodahs happening in the background. So people not believing in the Force or thinking it a myth was always the case and has only exacerbated in the reign of the Empire.

 

Motti's story in FACPOV is great. He says something to the effect of "If you look at the tape, Vader has to walk to within a few feet of me to force choke me. How powerful can the Force be if he can't even choke me across the room?"

 

Darth Bane addressed this nicely in the book when (while still a lowly soldier) he's asked by a Sith Lord if he believes the stories about all the magic they can do and says "I believe many of the stories are greatly exaggerated." Which is said to be a common belief.

 

Because of the HUGE distance and territory, it's pretty hard to hold the power on your hand. It's understandable that Palpatine wanted to have firm control over his empire and galaxy.

While I do like some of the design of these weapons, I think Death Star should be the only one the Empire got, even Death Star II was not well received by the audience that much and often be criticized as a flaw of RotJ.

 

That doodad the First Order had on Crait kinda reminds me of the Darksaber come to think of it.

 

It's a pretty great story, all in all.

 

I always wondered how much or how little Palpatine changed the Republic between TPM and AOTC.

Do you think he already was more powerful than the previous chancellors before he got the emergency powers?

 

Well, he belonged to a secret organization that had slowly influenced and corrupted the Republic for the past 1000 years, by the time he became Senator.

 

I meant, had Palpatine in AOTC more political power and were there already changes in the structure of the Republic before he got the emergency powers compared to when he became chancellor in TMP?

Were there already first signs of the coming dictatorship?

 

Not really more official political power as in changes to the Republic's Constitution....but he is the sort to have been making private side deals to keep key senators on his side and do things as he wanted them done as well as manipulating events and people to go the way he wanted to push them into supporting the cause du jour. So in a sense then I would say that he did have more power in the form of support from people who could move along what he needed moved along.

 

Not to mention by ROTS, we see Mas Amedda being his loyal puppet and even witnessing his Force powers in action without reacting. And this was the man who served Palpatine's predecessor in TPM. How long had he been in Palpatine's pocket? Then there's cronies like Sly Moore that Palpatine installed in between TPM and AOTC.

 

That brings out the question how wealthy Palpatine was before he got into politics.
In Legends he was part of the nobility on Naboo, i dunno if that still counts in canon. Maybe i've forgotten it but i can't remember if Palpatine's background was mentioned in newer material.

 

In Legends, he was installed as Vice Chair as a ploy by the Rim faction to actively undermine Valorum's policies.

 

That's something that so many people miss. Mas knows everything. He even calls Palpatine "Master". Sly Moore is an interesting story though. She seems to have simply vanished in canon after ROTS. We haven't seen her in the Vader comics at all.

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I am quite sure that the Sith Order accumulated quite a bit of wealth over the centuries and ensured that all of it was well laundered to be passed down to the next in line.