Lit Does a "moral" Empire still have its place?

The idea that dictatorship is efficient is one of the great popular myths. Stalin, Hitler, Mao - were adept at ruthlessness, terror and staying in power but they were not efficient. Their systems were riven by dysfunction and in-fighting - where do you think the idea of Imperial court intrigues comes from? That the concept of dog-eat-dog competition has been shown not to work only makes its continued survival more amazing, but for all the wrong reasons.

 

We have a winner!

 

Senator Bel Iblis always struck me as a bit of a paranoid fellow. I'm sure the explosion that destroyed the Treitamma Political Center was nothing more than an industrial accident. I'm sure if the Senator had come forth, the Empire would have succored him in his time of need. Instead, that treacherous rogue, Aach persuaded the good Senator to go on the run and interfere with Imperial activities. Fortunately, the DS-1 Orbital Battlestation took care of that scoundrel on Scarif.

 

Not sure of that to be honest. Stalin came to power in an agricultural Russia with little to no industry. By the time he died it was one of the two global superpowers on its way to an atomic powerhouse, had conquered half of Europe and considerable territories in Asia as well. So as ruthless as he was Stalin got "things done" if for a terrible price. Similar things can also be said about Mao.
Of course neither was even vaguely a "benevolent" dictator, but I guess its hard to deny their achievments. They turned Russia and China into the global powers they are to this day.

 

Stalin at one point said something to the effect of "we are a hundred years behind the advanced countries, if we don't industrialize within ten years, they will destroy us"

I have seen some reputable historians argue that stalin's industrialization was what allowed the Soviet Union to prevail against Nazi Germany. As a slower pace of industrialization would not have been fast or thorough enough.

This isn't to say Stalin was a good guy or that the Soviet Union was a desirable place to live. To say so is to insult the memory of the thousands who perished in the purges and millions who died in the famines and population transfers.

All it means is that dictators have more freedom to act without the institutional restraints of parliaments and congresses. An absolute ruler can enact policy by saying "I want this done" and the response is "it will be done". In some ways that is more efficient than democracy.

It doesn't make it better than democracy though.

 

But there are always other checks on that power, they're just no longer democratic. Think of how the Moff Council blocked Roan Fel, and how little power Roan actually had while on the throne. Same thing in real life.

 

Of course dictators have their own constituencies and social bases. Sometimes it's a narrow layer of oligarchs.

Sometimes it's the military brass.

Sometimes it's a minority ethnic or religious group.

Or some othe section of society.

Of course this puts a limit on their freedom of action-some acts might trigger opposition within the military, within the ruling class, the lower classes, a dictator needs to be mindful of alienating those that keep him power etc...

 

TV Tropes had a lot of fun with this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButInefficient

With military resources spread across four completely separate services that had to be actively bullied by Hitler into cooperating (Heer, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, SS), four economic institutions which competed for limited resources, two General Headquarters, two intelligence services (Abwehr, Gestapo) that never shared information and occasionally offed each other's agents, two civil services and two courts (one regular/normal, one political), and five atomic bomb programs that shared no information or resources with each other note , Nazi Germany was actually one of the most inefficient states in history — and that's not even accounting for the gross corruption. [...] In Real Life, the only thing efficient about dictatorships is their total control of the media, which they use to portray themselves as being extremely efficient (and benevolent) despite their crippling factional in-fighting and endemic corruption.

 

Can't say for Stalin, but Mao was the loon who genuinely thought his country could catch up to the British level of industrialization by making steel from wood furnaces in their back yards.

I'm not sure if he was the greatest contributor to China's present level of development.

 

While TV Tropes data should be treated cautiously, it should be said that:

 

It actually depends. In Authoritarian states, you have a dictator reliant on a couple of set of supporters that he gives benefits to, and they prop him up. He doesn't really care what the people think and do, so long as they just obey out of fear. A totalitarian state is where the dictator has total and complete control of society. He doesn't rely on powerful oligarchs or military brass, or even religion, he relies on massive cheering crowds supporting whatever he does. Totalitarian states often have the dictator without any real checks on power. Have an underling that doesn't follow your orders? Easy to eliminate him, the public likely doesn't know who he is anyway. You have to note that assassination attempts on Hitler (a totalitarian dictator, not authoritarian) were mostly done by the likes of military officers and foreign spies (and time travelers, of course), never by anyone from the general population, even though it was pretty easy to get close to him.

The Empire (both first and second)... I'd say is a mixture of everything. It has totalitarianism, authoritarianism and democracy in there. It's good to note though, that totalitarianism and authoritarianism don't mean literally Satan, they're simply definitions that have ironically been made by totalitarians and authoritarians themselves, respectively. Modern day China could still be defined as totalitarian, but you see many Chinese approving of the social credit system they implemented, and its clearly not North Korea levels of repression.

On infighting, there were certainly people like Goering and Himmler jockeying for power in Nazi Germany, but the Soviet Union definitely didn't have any actual in-fighting after Stalin's purges. It was more cohesive and this showed during Operation Barbarossa, where the general population and the government themselves were more unified than ever, even when they were losing more and more ground. This is unlike Nazi Germany, where high-ranking officials even competed for who should sign the surrender agreement, and what kind of authority they could secure post-war.

 

The Empire was decidedly not efficient, at the least, considering we have a Major Motion Picture that has as a significant subplot a pissing war between bureaucrats about who gets credit for a genocide machine.

 

A dictator’s power is always dependent on other people. A cheering crowd doesn’t lead to trained asssassins and soldiers and bureaucrats taking your every order as a command. You also seem to misunderstand totalitarianism, and some historical examples. The system has totalitarian control (or tries to have the appearance of it), not any one person.

 

No, but after a few refusals, you get a lot of purges, and eventually they do. I'm not saying it was moral, but Stalin's Soviet Union was incredibly efficient in what it did. It turned a backwater into a world superpower, even after losing a good chunk of its population on the Eastern Front, essentially doing the bulk of the army-based fighting against Nazi Germany in most of the war.

And the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is that with totalitarianism, the state and society are one and the same. Fascist and Communist states were both examples of that. Authoritarian states are mostly about the reign of a single person and his immediate clique, without any state-driven ideology being promoted. That's why I say the Empire was a bit of both. Palpatine clearly promoted the ideology of the New Order, but there were also Moffs, Admirals, and so forth who were in it for personal power. It was a hybrid-state, which had elements of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and democracy (it should be noted, there's no 'perfect' totalitarian, authoritarian or democratic states, most are hybrids that lean towards one of the three). The Empire wasn't efficient for sure, it was better than the Old Republic post-Ruusan, but that's honestly not saying much.

 

Yeah, but the Old Republic post-Ruusaan a) maintained the peace for a thousand years, efficient or not, and b) zero genocides.

 

The Mandalorian Excision was a thing in both Legends and New Canon.

 

And does the dictator single-handedly conduct these purges? No. What I'm trying to say is that no dictator, not even in a totalitarian state, has absolute power. There are always checks and balances. Just that, with a dictatorship (authoritarian or totalitarian), the checks aren't democratic.

 

Lest we forget the old republic conducted a retaliatory genocide of the sith species in the aftermath of the great hyperspace war.

Also I think long term Palpatine wanted to get rid of any institutional checks-through mastery of the force he could will anything he wished into being done. Automated war fleets, adepts that were less and less persons and more his will given action, and ultimately mastery of all life and the universe itself.

 

Yeah, that was something I always appreciated about the way the EU (and eventually the anthology films) developed the Empire. It's a fairly realistic take on that kind of government. The way Palps constantly encourages the backstabbing between his advisers especially, so that they'll be too busy fighting each other to concentrate on him.

 

Oh I agree with you there completely. Like I said, just like there's no such thing as a perfect democracy, there's no 'perfect' totalitarian state either. Often enough it's going to be a hybrid regime. As an example, while the PRC is pretty much still a one party state, it's loosened up and allowed inner-party elections and elections on a lower, constituent, level.

 

Just had this thought, but what is Soontir Fel's motivation for fighting for the Empire? I haven't actually read the comics where he appears, but just looking over his Wookieepedia page, it seems like he was in it for "maintaining order" and maybe a bit of "benevolent humanocentrism".

Surely Fel has to have heard rumors of the Empire destroying Alderaan with the first Death Star? Okay, so maybe he dismisses that as fake news for a while...but then later on he's stationed at Endor. He can literally look out the window and see a Death Star being built. What's he supposed to make of that?

 

It's fairly consistently "protect the people of the galaxy by keeping threats to them in check". Initially, the threat is pirates. Later, it's Rebels. Once he joins Thrawn, it's the various Terrors Of The Unknown Regions.