Lit Fascism in Star Wars

Yep! RACISM!

Approved by Lucas!

It was all about the racism against nonhuman Jedi!

 

I mean.....is the Confederacy Fascist or just Dooku (i mean the CIS did some messed up stuff...So did the Republic too mind you)....Because in the ROTS novelization Dooku very anti-alien and talks about a humanoid Empire with him and Anakin.

 

The Confederacy seems to be a libertarian government and a corporate-based oligarchy with a weak democratic Senate, the opposite of how fascism generally works. There's a public democratic government in the CIS according to the Clone Wars but the real movers and shakers are the arms dealers ala Canto Bight who are underwriting the Confederate cause.

The thing is, these are all suckers who assume Palpatine will reward them but they're all going to die because they only exist to make a enemy for Palpatine to crush and look awesome doing so.

One of the things I like about the Sith in THE OLD REPUBLIC is the fact that we have a good sense of Sith ideology:

* Survival of the Fittest
* Freedom for those who have the drive to take it
* War and strife makes you strong
* Constant self improvement
* Testing yourself through struggle

However, when we actually meet the Sith, the majority of them are pampered nobles born into power and they have their bloodlines of humans/True Blooded Sith having all the privileges their rank can provide. They are also pretty cowardly, throwing their troops and ships at their enemies while rarely choosing to engage in battle themselves.

It's a nice way of how many societies can pay lip service to a religion without actually bothering to pay any attention to its tenants. It's actually a running theme in The Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor campaigns with them being among the few people actually "worthy" of being Sith.

While it doesn't endorse the Baneite view of the Sith, the vast majority of Sith we meet are spoiled children who abuse slaves as well as those weaker than themselves (particularly nonhumans) while barely giving lip service to the cause of fighting their enemies.

 

Thank you! When people call the Seppies fascist it tends to get on my nerves. I feel as a culture we tend to just use the term as a boogeyman, without actually being educated on what fascism actually is. If we call all evil fascist, then we become less capable of identifying the signs of fascism.

 

Ironically, the fact its a weak government allows its military to do whatever the hell it wants.

Which served Grevious' cause.

The Confederate of Independent Systems is weak with its Congress acting as advisors to Count Dooku and he's able to justify virtually everything General Grevious does in the name of the Separatists armies. I basically imagine them as all being toadies like Mas Amedda or idealists like the Onderon senator.

 

The Star Wars Blog gave Amedda a surprisingly sad backstory toward the end of Legends. Was a bit disappointed the new canon chucked that in favor of him just being a bootlicker.

 

I think it runs a bit of a risk to confuse explanation with justification. Grevious being a terrorist who only became a revolutionary because the Jedi made a deal which resulted in their planet starving kind of makes it so it's less awesome when Obi-Wan finally kills him for all the Jedi he's murdered and to bring an end to his atrocities.

Thrawn doing it all because of an unknown threat also undermines that he's just a politically fascist groupie.

 

I'm always sorta suprised that canon made Amedda the new Grand Vizer ....I mean Sate Pestage was before the Prequels so then they'd have to fit Amedda in there by the end and then have both working for PALPATINE in the early days so I can see why they cut the middle man and just stick with Ameeda considering he has the most screen time in terms of George Canon (TCW and Prequels).

Plus his power stems from how much PALPATINE lets him run the day to day of the Empire until he becomes Rax's puppet

 

I dont necessarily think the Unknown Regions thing ruins Thrawn's inherent ideology...on the contrary I think it makes him a more frightening villain. There's nothing more frightening than a driven man who believes himself to be utterly on the righteous path, and his motivations feed into his fascist ideology and ruthless pragmatism fairly well.

Even in Zahn's later Legends books when he fell a little too in love with the character he still had Thrawn voice strong, anti-democratic sentiment. The Unknown Regions threat was just the motivating factor that pushed him from Anti-Republic to Pro-Empire.

 

Which again is really annoying that we never see the Hand of Thrawn in the NJO. It's not even acknowledged existing.

I wonder who decided that.

 

Yeah I'm inclined to believe there was something going on there BTS at the time and afterwards Zahn's tried to marry the concepts together. Admittedly to varying results.

 

My guess...The fact NJO was the start of the Del-Ray era.

 

Issues fascism occurs to me about what's a GOOD story about fascism in the EU versus a bad one in terms of "Imperial defectors."

1. I felt like Tycho's defection in Legends was a lot more interesting than people gave credit to. Yes, he's an Alderaanian who saw his girlfriend get obliterated in front of him by the Death Star. However, I always felt it was interesting that he joined the Empire in the first place. Tycho was a warrior and a killer on a planet of pacifists and until his planet was destroyed, he didn't have any objection using that for the Empire. He's also someone who had to deal with huge amounts of distrust for his entire career. The Imperial didn't just rub off of him and people were always suspicious of him because of it.

2. Iden Versio's problem is the fact there's the fact she's portrayed as a person perfectly alright with the destruction of Alderaan, ruthless, and utterly devoted to her fellow Imperials. However, once she makes the switch, she never actually shows any regret about having to go against her fellow Imperials.

3. It's something I had a problem with regarding Finn because the movie opens up with him blowing away dozens of FO soldiers despite the fact he was one until very recently. Also, his friend dying was one of the reasons why he's deserting.

4. I felt like it was a good set up for Jahan Cross to defect because he's amoral but he's not IMMORAL the way other Imperials are. He's bad enough to be able to go along with the Empire but he knows it's for a good cause...or so he thinks.

5. I think General Madine is a story which is interesting because he did defect because he was given orders to perform a genocide. However, I never was sure if it was because he did it or he defected before it happened and his men carried it out in his absence.

 

I got the impression that he did it then defected:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Crix_Madine/Legends

"I formed the storm commandos and led them in their early missions. It was those successes that put us in a position to unleash a biological weapon, the Candorian plague, on Dentaal. We were just following orders. That was the last order I took from the Empire. I defected to the Alliance, but I'll be paying my debt to Dentaal until the day I die."



However, it was the order to release the Candorian plague on Dentaal that convinced Madine it was time to leave for good.[4]

Wracked with guilt over his role in the death of the entire Dentaalian population, Madine left his unit while performing a training mission about eleven months after the Battle of Yavin. Madine erased himself from Imperial records, although his disappearance was covered by some HoloNet news channels. He did not even tell his fiancée where he was going, not wanting to place her in a dangerous situation.[4]

 

It's a weird claim given they wanted to break from what they perceived as a failing and increasingly fascist "Republic."

At the same time, both sides were being ruled and manipulated by the same, fascist head of state.

Sent from my Moto X-Wing

 

I wouldn't call it a Lucasfilm "compromise". As early as "The Mandalore Plot" it was clear that Lucas and Filoni were giving the Mandalorians a character arc that would depict their backslide into warrior culture and factionalism.

 

Another interesting wrinkle to the redemption question... if he had lived, would Anakin have had to face trial? Or would Luke try to get him off light?

 

I imagine Darth Vader would give up all information he had, ordered what Imperials to surrender he could, and submit to punishment.

Luke being angry the Rebellion executed him and going off to do his own thing.

Tragic but understandable.

 

Weren't the Rebels against the death penalty? Only in Bloodline was it being re-legalized again on a few worlds.

 

They executed Teshik in Legends. This despite the fact he was apparently one of the few Imperials not guilty of any war crimes.

No word on canon but the Grand Moff of Kashkyyk probably deserved it.

I suspect the Rebellion/NR is probably like Europe. Against the death penalty in general practice but an exception is made for crimes against sapience.

 

Or cue a guy in a cheap, jury-rigged life support suit settling down in a off-the-charts world deep in Wild Space...

 

Re: Dooku

I think of Count Dooku as an odd character because he's a fascist who is heading up a non-fascist regime. The Confederacy of canon (and by technicality, Legends) appears to have been a publicly democratic state which just so happened to have an out-of-control military and an incredibly powerful Military-Industrial Complex.

We'll never get to know what the CIS would be like outside of war but the war allowed Dooku a free hand to carry out numerous atrocities as well as actions on the basis of winning the war. He was also a Sith Lord with a penchant for lying, subterfuge, assassination, and terrorism.

However, Dooku never intended to rule the Confederacy according to ROTS. They were nothing more than a means to an end. His goal was to eventually become part of Palpatine's regime and the head of a Dark SIde version of the Jedi Order. In this respect, he should have seen that was never practical even if he was cultivating a sense of Robert E. Lee-esque mystique from the other side (and it should be noted Congress hated Robert E. Lee for the whole "treason" thing and built a graveyard on his family home for spite).

Dooku believed in the Empire not the CIS but headed the latter to keep it under control. So he's a fascist who just was leading a independence-based oligarchy.​

 

I never saw Dooku as a fascist. Not even after I read the ROTS novelization. Dooku is an old school aristocrat and monarchist. He wants the galaxy to transform into an absolutist monarchy with much more powerful and ruthless "Jedi" Order as its enforcers. From what's written in the ROTS novelization, I got the impression that Dooku's vision of the Empire is very different from Palpatine's. As the Jedi said, Dooku in the end is a political idealist who has an image of an "ideal" society where the strong aristocracy rules the weak in the style of 17th century Europe. Which is probably what Palpatine used to recruit him. Dooku's vision of the Empire is something similar to the Sith Empire in TOR in my opinion. Dooku reminds me of some people in 1920's and 1930's Europe, who nostalgically missed the pre-WW1 days, when there was "order and hierarchy" in the old monarchies.

I think Dooku in the beginning genuinely wanted the galaxy to be a better place. After all, he was a Jedi Master, Yoda's apprentice and most importantly Qui-Gon's master. He saw all the corruption and inefficiency in the Republic and wanted to do something about it. He didn't like that the Jedi kept serving the Senate even though they knew that its corrupt. Palpatine played on this idealism and on Dooku's considerable ego, and slowly corrupted him. Dooku's tragedy is not in his fall though, but in his naive believe that he was part of the future. Only in his very last moment did Dooku realize that he was just a tool for Palpatine the entire time.

Also, I'm against a too broad definition of fascism, where we use the word to label anything perceived as non-democratic. Not every non-democratic form of government is automatically fascism. For example, the way Alderaan is described in nuCanon, its basically an absolutist monarchy, which is an extremely undemocratic form of government. Does that make the Organa family fascist? There is also no unified definition of fascism in academia as well (common occurrence in political science).

Yeah, this bothered me with Iden as well in the game. In the Inferno Squad novel, she's okay with the destruction of Alderaan and all the other stuff the Empire is doing, and she hates when the Dreamers torture the captured stormtrooper. Yet in the game she suddenly grows consciousness because of Operation Cinder and is then totally okay with slaughtering hundreds of Imperial personnel? Its obvious its for the gameplay sake, but still makes for a convoluted story.

It wasn't clear to me. When we first saw the new Mandalorions as bunch of Scandinavian looking pacifists living in a giant glass box, I had no idea they're going to backslide into warrior culture just few seasons later. And I'm not sure Lucas and Filoni saw that either. I still think the Mandalorian backslide into warrior culture happened because most Mando fans (me included) disliked what they did to them. Also from business point of view, action figures of Mando warriors in armour sell better.

I was always under the impression that the Rebellion is against capital punishment. Even in the Marvel SW comic, the Rebellion has a secret prison for Imperials, instead of just executing them. And Luke would certainly not allow them to kill his father. Not only for personal feelings, but also because the Jedi Order is certainly against the death sentence. Unless you're Sith, then they have no issues with murdering you in cold blood

And there are no exceptions for capital punishment in Europe, no matter how serious the crime. Even people convicted of genocide are given life sentence max.

 

Well I'm going from the Rebellion for Europe after WW2.

The modern New Republic might be nicer to the First Order's survivors.