Lit Alderaan, Chandrila and Corellia in the Empire

A few questions and things that I have had some difficulty wrapping my head around for some time.

Many EU sources say that Alderaan and Chandrila were openly hostile to the Empire for most of its history, especially Chandrila. While Organa at least feigned tacit support for the Emperor, Mon Mothma is often cited as demonstrating fierce opposition to Palpatine in the Senate. Even after she is finally targeted for arrest by the ISB, her replacement in the Senate (Canna Omonda) is also just as hostile to the Empire as Mothma was.

My question is how?

How and why would Palpatine and the Imperial security apparatuses permit this kind of vocal opposition? How was it that Alderaan and Chandrila were able to voice such fierce opposition to the Empire in the Senate? I understand that the Core Worlds had more pull politically, but given the authoritarian nature of the Empire, allowing for any kind of public dissent on two of its most influential worlds whose senators are equally as influential and well-respected just doesn't make any sense to me. You would think that silencing and controlling the narratives coming out of two major founders of the former Republic would be of paramount importance, if you are trying to bolster widespread public support for the new regime. Was COMPNOR even active on these worlds?

Regarding Corellia, the Corellian Diktat was loyal to the Emperor, and CorSec was basically an instrument of Imperial law enforcement. But Senator Garm Bel Iblis was also a vocal opponent of Palpatine? How and why would the Diktat, who is (at least nominally) loyal to the Empire have his representative in the Imperial Senate be such a fierce critic of the regime?

As someone who finds the political nature of real-world historical authoritarian regimes of great interest, these phenomena baffle me. One of the first and most important steps is to either co-opt the influential and wealthy power bases, or eliminate them entirely.

Or maybe Mothma, Organa and Bel Iblis and their planets were not as vocal in their opposition to the Empire as I think they were?

Where was Destab on Chandrila? Why wasn't the SAGroup actively recruiting Alderaanian youth? Wasn't Redesign's entire purpose to conduct "state changes" on worlds like these?

Would appreciate any insight.

 

Are you talking only about Legends?

Even if so, “most openly hostile” is open to interpretation; and might not be that “openly hostile” at all, just not as fawning as some others.

But I distinctly remember an old Legends comic where Bail Organs had to welcome Emperor Palpatine, and didn’t really teach Leia anything about him, he just let them meet and then very subtly confirmed to Leia what she felt. We also know Alderaan was supposedly pacifist enough Leia hoped her line in ANH would carry come merit.

Chandrila I always took as a metaphor of old American New England towns just before the colonies declared independence… full of free thinkers and a lovely local democracy. But not necessarily stirring any more trouble out in the open than the equivalent of dumping tea. I doubt Mon Mothma’s opposition was anything more than what we’ve see. In New EU’s Andor, until the breaking point comes.

Corellia in Legends is the closest I can see to how Lothal, independent of the Rebellion for most of its struggle, did openly fight, with Garm being most similar to Saw.

 

I think it took quite a while for the Empire to become "the Empire," so to speak. Even after Palpatine was proclaimed Emperor and given supreme authority, the Imperial apparatus probably didn't immediately start locking up or executing everybody - they treaded a little more carefully especially when it came to human-populated Core Worlds and high-profile politicians. (Same reason they kept the Senate around for eighteen years before finally dissolving it). So there would be room for certain people to continue expressing certain amounts of dissent.

Of course, over time, the Empire's grip got tighter and tighter, their crackdowns on open opposition got more and more blatant, and increasingly even the people who'd benefited from some privilege in the past became fair game. Which at some point became bad enough that Mon Mothma went from being a political opponent in the Senate to being an insurgent leader openly at war with Palpatine.

 

That's certainly the way Legends portrayed it. In the Han Solo trilogy, at least from Han's perspective, the Empire was changing for the worse during his time as a cadet and soldier:

Han swallowed, and it hurt. When he'd entered the Academy he'd had such dreams, such hopes for a bright and shining future. He'd wanted to leave the old life of crime behind him, to become respectable. All his life he'd nurtured secret dreams of himself as an Imperial officer, esteemed and admired by all. Han knew he was smart, and he'd worked hard to make good grades, to fill in the gaps in his education. He'd had visions of himself one day in the uniform of an Imperial admiral, commanding a fleet, or, if he'd transferred to commanding a wing of TIE fighters, a general.
General Solo ... Han sighed. It had a nice ring, but it was time to wake up and face facts. His chance at respectability was gone, ended when he'd refused to let Chewbacca be blasted in cold blood. He didn't regret his choice, either. During his years in the Academy and in the Imperial forces, he'd seen close-up and firsthand the growing callousness, the cruelty of the Imperial officers and those who served under them.
Nonhumans were their favorite target, but the atrocities were spreading to include humans, these days. The Emperor seemed to be moving from being a relatively benign dictator to becoming a ruthless tyrant, determined to crush the worlds he ruled into complete subservience.

 

The Empire, like some real-world authoritarian regimes, dealt with this kind of internal dissent by traditional elites and traditional power structures not through direct repression but through the creation and strengthening of alternate power structures.

There really isn't anything in the real world exactly like the Senate as both Legends and Canon show it, but to make any sense it would have to represent an unthinkable concentration of resources and a nexus for networks of power and information and governance extending throughout the Galaxy. What both Legends and Canon seem to show is that to actually replace this effective institution with his own power, Palpatine wisely rarely if ever directly fought or cracked down on the Senate, or even prominent dissenters and opponents within it, but rather worked to gradually coopt people within it, take over its resources and networks, and sideline the institution overall.

This process was theoretically complete already in RotS, where at least per deleted scenes Palpatine has not only already replaced the Senate's legislative role with government by executive decree, but also already created an alternative military governership system to replace the Senate's Galactic governance role. It's realistic to assume that to actually have this system totally replace the Senate in practice would take a lot of time and a lot of cooption of Senators into the Imperial government and transfer of resources from Senator's and local governments to the new Imperial military-industrial complex. And this is more or less confirmed by most of what we see in Legends and Canon; or really, it's all-but-confirmed already in ANH.

In ANH, Vader is afraid enough of the Senate to hide Leia's capture from them and Leia too seems to think that if the Senate found out it Vader and the Emperor would be in some real trouble. And it's also only in ANH that Palpatine seems to think the Senate is weak enough and the parallel systems strong enough to actually dissolve the Senate, and even then other high Imperial officers don't seem to have in any way anticipated this move and are shocked and express disbelief that the Galaxy can be governed without it.

And I mean, given that the Empire collapses within a few years of the dissolution of the Senate they probably weren't wrong. Totally new revolutionary centralized military-industrial systems are often very brittle, and not up to the task of governance (as opposed to warfare) on a mass scale.

IMO the Imperial Senate rarely gets the respect it deserves for how important it actually seems to have been. It's treated as a mere hollow shell and joke, and while that may be true compared to the Senate under the Republic, everything we see is that it was still a very formidable and critical for the Empire's rise and successes and eventual fall.

 

People forget one of the biggest inspirations Lucas originally credited for Star Wars, which was Nixon and Watergate... you know, the era Star Wars originally came out in.

Watergate and Nixon are just the tip of the iceberg; between the Church Committee hearings, the Pentagon papers, various other investigations by both Congress and the media, all kinds of shady programs were being exposed and people were slowly realizing that there was an entire universe of government programs out there that had been going on with zero accountability to Congress (and questionable accountability even to the White House). It's what fueled all that paranoia and all those conspiracy thrillers that were coming out in the seventies.

When you look at that, the state of the Empire at the start of ANH suddenly looks a lot more familiar. There is a legislature, but it's essentially toothless, and there's an entire Imperial state machinery (embodied in Vader and Tarkin) that's already been operating with total impunity for years.

(And then the Emperor dissolves the Senate, doing away with even the pretense of a legislature).

How well the analogy works in real life is up for debate, obviously. But it's very recognizably speaking to the fears that were in the air at the time.

 

I have to admit I often wonder how these worlds are often depicted as having anti-imperial protests and art and the like when elsewhere it is show that the ISB and similar groups crack down on that pretty heavily. Alderaan and Chandrila are still part of the empire, so it seems unlikely that they would have no presence.

Best I can figure that on most worlds the local authorities are either imperial supporters or intimidated by imperial bureaus, but on these worlds they play interference and limit such activities, possibly combined with groups like the ISB limiting their own activities on those worlds to prevent a confrontation that might be too high profile to spin or cover up and make them look bad, at least until after the destruction of Alderaan removed all pretenses.

 

I would say the Death Star is the culmination of the military/technocratic machine he'd been building up for the previous couple of decades, which itself allowed him to rule more and more without caring about the Senate. But the Death Star definitely kicked it up to the next level.

Yeah, it's really no wonder the second Death Star was completed only a few years after the first. Palpatine ripped the mask off of the Imperial government with the one-two of dissolving the Senate and (a bit more literally) dissolving Alderaan, and then almost immediately lost the new gadget that was supposed to make the mask unnecessary in the first place. The "oh crap" must have been loud enough to break windows all around Coruscant. Of course the follow-up to that would be to immediately pour all the resources it took into rebuilding the gadget as quickly as humanly possible.

 

My interpretation in part is that said worlds, being founding members of the Old Republic and with a long history at the center of galactic politics, have significant political weight behind them which offers them some (limited) shielding from the worst of the Empires abuses. Basically, all the old aristocratic houses stick together more and less, and Palpatine is wary of antagonizing them too much because while they may not necessarily have the influence to tear down the Empire, they certainly have the power to shake it to the core, and he'd rather not take that chance.

Plus, as others have said, in the early years the Empire makes a bit of a show of being a continuation of the Republic and it's in their interest to have at least a pretense of political opposition (If only mildly so). Take Senator Chuchi in The Bad Batch for example. Obstructing the Emperors goals without necessarily attacking him, or the institution he represents. How you frame your opposition matters, especially in the early years. Tellingly (In Canon) Mon Mothma only needs to go into hiding after she basically flips Palpatine the bird after the Ghorman massacre. She was speaking out against his policies for years, but the moment she starts goes past that and condemns old wrinkly face in front of the whole galaxy, she's become a liability.

 

A lot of what I learned in my college courses on democratic erosion feels relevant here.

Andor shows us that Mon Mothma has cultivated a public image as “loyal opposition” to the regime. She criticizes some of their policies and campaigns on behalf of their victims, but in a way that is absolutely non-threatening to the regime. She doesn’t publicly oppose the legitimacy of the regime itself, and her public opposition activities are mostly relegated to fruitless speeches on the Senate floor or humanitarian relief.

This is not uncommon in real life “hybrid regimes”, that is, those undergoing a transition from democracy to authoritarianism. Some contemporary examples would be Venezuela and Turkey. In countries with long traditions of representative government, actually banning opposition overnight would create too much public resistance.

So instead, aspiring authoritarians tolerate the existence of an opposition, but increasingly build a box around it:

• The regime reduces separation of powers, consolidating authority in the office of the executive (in Star Wars’s case, the Chancellor and later the Emperor), and institutions under the executive’s control.
• They censor the press and/or consolidate ownership of the press under the government or pro-government oligarchs (so that it doesn’t need to be censored).
• The electoral system is modified to give pro-regime politicians an unfair advantage over the opposition. The opposition can still participate in elections, but they are structured in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to win a majority.
• The regime conducts surveillance of opposition figures and parties, and politicizes the courts to legally harass them.

These conditions render the opposition increasingly toothless and politically irrelevant. Eventually, this allows the regime to sweep away the remnants of representative government, because the public no longer sees them as being meaningful.

In Star Wars, the Republic has existed for thousands of years. That’s longer than any real life government. Transitioning instantly from that to a totalitarian Empire would be impossible. So it makes sense that the Senate would still exist over a decade after the Empire’s inauguration, and that some democratic stragglers like Mon Mothma would be allowed to publicly and fruitlessly complain about the erosion of their freedoms.

In reality, it would take far longer than 19 years to erase an ancient institution like the Senate. And that’s probably why Palpatine and the Moffs were relying on the Death Star to accelerate the authoritarian transition. The destruction of the Death Star, of course, would throw a wrench in those plans.

 

Why were they allowed to protest? Likely because they weren't seen as much of a threat, not worth the backlash of killing human core world humans, which would be seen differently to killing aliens or outer rim people. It is why Russia allowed some protests but arrested opposition leaders. Let people think they have a say but don't let them organise.

Palpatine says as much in Dark Lord Rise of Darth Vader; "Better to have them rant and rave in the open than plot behind closed doors".

 

Yeah I mean I 100% agree but as @Ackbar's Fishsticks said, the Death Star is itself the culmination of the process of building up these parallel institutions over the course of twenty years. It's a massive concentration of resources (either transferred from the Republic/Senatorial resources and/or gathered by new Imperial taxation systems and/or straight-up plundered by the new Imperial military) built by the new Imperial military-industrial complex using (as Rogue One shows) an extensive new secret scientific-research base and (as Andor shows) new forms of technologized prison labor from the Empire's new mass-incarceration security infrastructure and successfully kept secret from the Senate and the media and the general public. That would be simply impossible without a long period of transferring resources from the Republican and local institutions and building up military and industrial and security and intelligence and taxation and plunder systems as a parallel government directly under Palpatine's control and separate enough from all Senatorial power structures that they never even hear about what it's doing.

That's why in ANH we see a bunch of ISB and Imperial military people sitting around a table on the Death Star, overseen by the first Grand Moff and the Emperor's personal Sith apprentice, looking just pleased as punch with themselves. In their eyes, they've pulled it off, and the Death Star is their baby. (Which I mean, ties into the idea, present in ANH implicitly I think, of at least the possibility of a Tarkinist coup against the Emperor by these new parallel-government figures now that they have the Death Star).

As @Ackbar's Fishsticks says (which is a great point that I hadn't fully considered), this absolutely makes sense as a reference to contemporary 1970s fears about the rise of government bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex and the CIA and the idea that all these people and systems were out of control and killing people and causing coups and developing new weapons and technology in secret without proper democratic oversight. It's like Nixon suddenly unveiling a super-nuke constructed by the CIA and the Army that Congress knew nothing about.

Yes, exactly. Everything that happens in ANH is just monumentally important. It's more or less the most important week or whatever in Galactic history. It's hard to think of a more catastrophic and de-legitimizing series of events for a Galactic government than revealing a giant terror-superweapon that you've developed in secret to terrify everyone into submission, dissolving the traditional legitimizing governmental institution, blowing up an ancient Core World, and then losing that superweapon in a tiny engagement with the Rebellion.

Arguably, everything that happens after that in the OT is just sort of the logical consequences of those events, the Imperial government reduced a naked military-industrial-security apparatus trying to impose control on an entire Galaxy of rebellion that inevitably overpowers it (because no one can actually govern solely by force, which is why, as @Jozgar says, real-world authoritarian regimes pour so much energy into controlling media and public perception and manipulating existing institutions and electoral systems of legitimacy).

Before ANH, the Empire is simply the Galactic government, and the Rebellion is a scattered alliance of dissidents and terrorists; after ANH, there kind of is no Galactic government, and the Rebellion is one legitimate (and arguably the more legitimate because more broadly representative and connected to traditional local and Republican institutions and less grounded solely in force) side in a Galactic Civil War.

 

I think it did take longer than 19 years, but a lot of the work was done by the Senate itself before Palps came around. At the start of the prequels we can already see how paralyzed and dysfunctional the government's become, and judging by how cynical people are about it, it's been this way for some time. Nobody expects much out of it.

And as near as I can tell, it's not just ordinary people who've given up on the Senate but senators themselves. Most of them were perfectly happy when Revenge of the Sith turned them into useless socialites, royal court of Versailles style, because that's already all they were long before the Empire, even if they theoretically had job descriptions with extensive powers. They just switched patronage from the Trade Federation and Commerce Guild to Palpatine.

The Senate spent decades, probably a couple centuries, slowly erasing itself in fact if not in name, so most people didn't miss it when it was shuffled offstage.

 

The week of the Battle of Yavin must have been absolutely insane.

On Monday morning, you get up and go to work in a galaxy that's plodding along pretty much the same as it's been for the last twenty years. The Empire's rule is unchallenged, the same guy is still running it, the Senate is still around even if it's mostly just decorative. The galaxy's generally at peace, sure, there are a few rebel bands making trouble here and there, but they amount to like three paragraphs on page 12 every other month or so (and blend in with piracy and other general background criminality that any society's going to have). Same stool droppings, different day.

By Friday evening, Alderaan is gone. It isn't even completely clear who destroyed it. The universe now has something in it that can vaporize entire planets, except even more confusingly, that's gone now too. A lot of important people whose name you'd gotten used to hearing on the Star Wars version of CNN are gone, they died along with their creation. The Senate's gone too. Martial law's been declared. And the Empire's now in a state of war against something you've never heard of called the Rebel Alliance.

People talk about how everything changed on 9/11. Take that basic idea and scale it way, way, waaay up...

 

Chandrila: The Utopian Society...way up it's own ***. The Empire let it be because it was elite, over-privileged, mostly wealthy lay-abouts who talked much, but did little. At one time, Mon Mothma was seen as emblematic of her people. Further EU, and now subsquently Andor, have shown her to be somewhat an exception. So while Chandrila may have been a platform for anti-Imperial debate, it was mostly in political rhetoric and philosophic study. The Empire wasn't worried about such banter. In fact, they probably used it as PR to say "See, people can have contrasting opinions inside the Empire."

Alderaan: The Quiet Troublemakers: A planet of seeming harmony, right down to the eco-friendly cities and the overt declaration of pacifism. Alderaan was probably like a twin for Chandrila, only Alderaan had a darkside. Many of her citizens were doing not so nice things off-world, even if they were formally resplendent while at home. My theory goes, with hands in the jar all over the galaxy, Alderaanians were probably well known to the Empire as an irritant, just not a focal point of dissent. And people on Alderaan, like Bail, knowing what was at stake, took great lengths to make the activities of it's people seem disorganized and random, not a concerted effort to counter Imperial intrusion. Leia being caught passing DS plans on the Tantive IV just as Tarkin got his toy was the moment it became the perfect demonstration choice.

Corellia: The Delinquents: Corellians are dirtbags. That is a gross generalization, but to the Empire, that is how they worked. Corellians were notorious before the Empire and after for being stubborn, self-interested, uncooperative, and contrarian. Pragmatists and Capitalists, they worked to exploit whatever regime or situation came along to earn profit and better themselves. Solo took this even further, and made Corellia herself (or at least Coronet) somewhat dystopian, grim, industry blasted, and hopeless. Personally, I always saw Corellia as the "Earth" analog in the GFFA, where the broad strokes of life and humanity was on display...wealth and poverty, industrial and pastoral, educated and ignorant, CORSEC and criminality, it covered all the bases. But it was also fiercely independent. The Empire put up with it because...they needed ships. The wealth and resources of Corellia (and the rest of the system in EU) was too much of an asset to any galactic governance to simply ostracize or suppress Corellia. But at the same time, there was perhaps no other system outside of Coruscant with a more day to day involvement with Imperial operations then Corellia. It may have not been a police state, but the Empire was everywhere on Corellia. So while the anti-establishment Corellians may have wanted to beat the crud out of ISB patrolmen on the corner, they knew they couldn't take down the whole squad, or worse if they did.

 

its both not a real threat and that empire cenorshiped stuff so they never really talked about the rebels

 

I wonder if we can gain an 'insight' into how they Empire would treat the rebels with how Russian State Media is treating the war in Ukraine (down to not calling it a war).

 

Well the Empire could just call them Bandits, even 'rebels' might be a full acknowledgement of a war, could just be a 'police action' like the Republic claimed the war against the Brotherhood of Darkness was.

 

Don't underestimate propaganda.