Lit The Morality of Empire in Legends

There is that real world debate about the level of Rommel’s guilt that, I think kind of weirdly mirrors the fan reaction to Thrawn. So in that sense I get the comparison.

 

I've always wanted him back, but that was because I specifically wanted him writing Rostek and Hal Horn's story as CorSec detectives by day, Jedi Underground Railroaders by night. Which would actually be topical as hell right now, given all the arguments going on about the role of the police, and the fear of various undesirables getting snatched up and locked away by the government, as well as the general "rise of fascism" thing.

 

I mean, I don't know how you justify this Thrawn's pretty brutal here

 

Bare in mind, even in that episode where Thrawn is very much an antagonist, they still made the point of having him specifically say that the destruction of Lothal wasn’t what he personally wanted and implied that he was operating under the direct command of Palpatine.

That doesn’t justify his actions, but it shows that even the writers of Rebels want to leave the suggestion that there’s more going on with Thrawn than just typical Tarkin-esq villainy.

 

Fair enough, granted I do still like the way Rebels handles it more or less.

You know, considering Rebels is sorta NuCanon Thrawn trilogy ...as a homage...if per say Filoni got to continue his story in a Post Jedi thing, I think it be cool if we did a NuCanon equivalent of Hand of Thrawn (Minus stuff like Thrawn clone) and have Thrawn try to justify his doings with the whole "Alien Invasion" thing but then Ezra or Sabine or whoever the Protagonist of the story call Thrawn out on his you know what and say even with a alien invasion it still isn't justifiable.

 

I don’t think there’s much point to that, because it’s already been done in canon. Nightswan and Ezra both tried to call him out on his philosophy, but Thrawn didn’t care. Nightswan specifically pointed out that using authoritarianism to combat the coming threat was ultimately flawed because tyranny just breeds rebellion. He wasn’t chastised at all really, and seemed fully committed to the idea that whatever is in the Unknown Regions was much worse than anything the Empire had done at the time.

And Rebels, I think, is weirder with it’s morality than you give it credit for. I mean, consider Rukh, for instance. With how that character was presented, doesn’t seem like Dave Filoni and crew seemed especially moved by the plight of the Noghri in those original novels when they presented the only named one in canon as a monster without any kind of redeeming traits. I don’t think they’re as anti-Thrawn as you’d like.

 

I disagree on this. The Legends Empire fit more with the Old Republic, especially as it was portrayed in the Prequels and the comics related to it (such as Ranulph's militarist movement). TOR's Old Republic I reckon also fits heavily with the Empire as we know of Legends. Its important to note that the OR in Legends is an aristocratic colonizing power, which was initially about spreading humanity as far and wide as possible, rather than a utopian democracy. All Palpatine did was turn the clock back to Pius Dea and Chancellor Saresh and add himself on-top as Emperor of the Galaxy.

Yes, but the Legends Empire has things like Pius Dea to go off on in the expanded material. As you said, the Legends Empire is an outgrowth of the Old Republic. Palpatine took the worst parts of it and made them the frontline for his new Empire, built upon the Old Republic's government structure. Meanwhile, NuCanon treats the Empire as some sort of aberration with no staying power. Makes you wonder where all of its bureaucracy and supporters even came from. Its a recognizably different portrayal.

I'm not sure Coruscant's elite being diverse discredits the Legends Empire much though. We only really see the upper levels of Coruscant society, and they still include plenty of humans. Not really a crazy idea for Human High Culture to have also excluded said non-human parts of the aristocracy that we see.

We still have yet to see how New Canon will treat the Old Republic though, whether it'll be more like a proto-Empire as it was in Legends, or whether it'll be more of how the New Republic in NuCanon is. We'll probably get a good grasp on things with this High Republic series.

 

For everyone saying the Fel Empire was nicer and friendlier than Palpatine's Empire, note that according to Wookieepedia they were still using Palpatine's "Book of Anger" to create lightsabers: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Book_of_Anger .

Palpatine's books and the Sith Code show his thinking on how he feels the Empire is moral. In his "Weakness of Inferiors" book, he says:
All power comes from outside the weak.
The weak fear the face of authority.
The weak follow the law of fear.
The weak do not understand the Force
So Palpatine, like a social Darwinist, thinks he's doing the "weak" a favor by ruling them. He probably also feels the Sith Code is an honest alternative to the Jedi ones, which just makes a bunch of false denials (i.e. "there is no this, there is that" etc. Palpatine would point out that just claiming there is no chaos/passion etc. doesn't automatically make it so).

 

There's actually very little of Social Darwinism, or Sith thought, in the Empire. The Sith and the Empire are very different entities and ideas, which Palpatine planned on eventually merging in both canon versions of himself.

And yes, the Fel Empire isn't meant to be super good guys. There's good and bad aspects to them, like any government/nation. They just happen to be on the side of the good guys in Legacy, but in its prelude, they waged war on the GA alongside the One Sith. If they were some sort of utopian government, they would be pretty boring, for much of the same reasons why the FO is boring for being cartoon villains with little nuance.

 

I mean it is true we honestly don't know what the Old Republic was like in the NuCanon only that the Sith took Coruscant, (Apparently Twice) and if it had the whole Core World supremacy thing going on.

 

The Legends retcon I would say was including things like a more militaristic Republic in TOR (despite how weird it is to see ancient Sith ALSO look like the Republic/proto-Empire which they're fighting) and the Pius Dea. The NuCanon retcon was making it so the Empire is more of an intolerable aberration, with the Galactic Civil War looking more even-sided than it was in Legends. That said, we still don't know how New Canon will be handling the Old Republic.

 

Considering some people think Covid-19 is a myth despite happening, uh, right now, suddenly this idea of Jedi being a myth by fundamentalist hardliners doesn't seem so strange anymore.

 

Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991 that was 21 years ago, and yet to me as a young person the Soviet Union seems like something ancient and beyond me time.

Heck even something as small as internet dial-up seems like from another lifetime.

 

I'm sorry to ask, but are you familiar with any of the actual policies or programs of the Nazi government beyond the holocaust?

Like their social policy, ideological foundations, or romantic nationalism, or anything?

The atrocities you list are things literally any government can and has done.

The empire didn't conceive of itself as being in a cosmic racial war, or have a policy of lebensraum in the unknown regions or Hutt Space. It didn't promote stay at home kitchen and children-the ideal of motherhood, or the vertical labor relations. There was no Imperial Generalplan Ost.

If you want to compare the empire to Nazi Germany, that's fair, but please be aware of the actual differences which are quite substantive. The similarities are quite simply aesthetic in nature, intentionally so.

Historical literacy is probably one of the most important things to have, and hyperbolic comparisons which belie a lack of historical knowledge and understanding are neither helpful nor productive.

 

I never got WHY people thought the Empire was 'old' in Legends. Obi Wan, talks about Anakin as Lukes father before the Empire and the jedi being 'before' the Empire. To me this said the Empire was about as old as Luke. Or at most a generation.

Though I DON'T LIKE the Empire in general, so maybe I just never cared.

 

Its from some of the lines, Obi Wan's tone could give the impression it was long before, and Tarkin says the "last remnant of the old republic."

ANH is kind of interesting in that it could have taken things a variety of directions-but with ESB and ROTJ, its clear the empire is at most a generation or so old.

If you just go by ANH-you can at most argue the empire is maybe...50 years old? Given how old Obi Wan appears(subjectively anyway). And Tarkin's lines.

With ESB and ROTJ-and Luke being around 20, its clear then the empire is about a generation or so old-fitting the Prequel timeframe rather nicely.

 

The ANH novelization is to blame I think. It showed Palpatine declaring himself Emperor in the prologue, but then Obi-Wan in the novel mentions later corrupt Emperors, meaning there were Emperors after Palpatine. Although this was corrected by the ROTJ novelization (where the Emperor is clearly identified as Palpatine and there's a scene where he thinks about being a Senator and then becoming Emperor), the idea of an "old" Empire stuck.

 

If we actually got Space Nazis in the full definition of it, it could be actually interesting to see how it plays out, with the First Order colonizing the Unknown Regions, a more radical version of the High HuMan Culture taken to its natural conclusion. Protagonists that are local denizens of the Unknown Regions resisting and acting as partisans against the First Order colonization. You could even drive a point home by showing it as similar to the colonization of North America (after all, Manifest Destiny is what inspired Hitler's Lebensraum). We don't really get that though, we get some generic cartoon villain interpretation of the Nazis, which are boiled down to their most simplistic of views.

 

As I said, the later OT films by themselves indicate fairly well the empire is at most a generation old.

 

Who'd play the role of the Jews though? In Nazism the Jew is more than just the simplistic bogeyman or scapegoat, but an eternal enemy of the Aryan race. Two races locked in struggle from time immemorial for the fate of the world.

There is no alien species in either canon that could fit such a schema.

Imperial colonization of the Unknown Regions/Hutt Space isn't a thing in either canon-with the FO its the Nazis in Argentina/Antarctica trope(poorly handled as that was).

The empire is fairly standard in that it has a metropole-the core, and the peripheries. A feature of every imperial system in history. Both the European empires, the Roman empire, The Mexica, and Mauryan empires.

That's just empire. Not Nazism.