Lit What’s your view on Operation Cinder?

I had been wondering, here and there, as to what your opinion of Disney's depiction of the Empire and First Order as irredeemably evil would be. I recall our discussions back in the day about the Imperial Remnant and how they weren't all that bad. The new canon has taken that and thrown it mostly out the window. We have Operation: Cinder, the Starkiller, and numerous other atrocities perpetrated by the Empire and their successors. This portrayal spits in the face of some Legends ideas, specifically that the Emperor was the main thing that was wrong with the Empire. With him gone, a sane, reasonable leader who believed that a firmer approach to government was justified, could have redeemed the whole institution. But Cinder puts the lie to this.

The Emperor never intended his Empire to survive his death. His spite went so deep that he had a very thorough contingency plan in place that would burn the entire Empire to the ground if he ever did perish. Vader would have nothing to rule. Thrawn would have nothing to reform. Every last Imperial citizen, officer and stormtrooper would perish for failing to protect and serve their Empire.

It is a very bold move by Disney, but I can't say I disapprove from a fictional perspective. This sort of action is completely believable for Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith.

The thing that fans of the Empire don't like to acknowledge is that the Empire only existed because of the Emperor. At the end, it was only created to satisfy his dark desires for domination and nothing else.

 

I find the First Order a great deal more sympathetic than I ever found the Empire. I don't see why anyone else has a different opinion. The First Order is a bunch of brainwashed children who sincerely believe they're doing the right thing. The Empire is a kleptocracy of people who voluntarily joined to murder aliens and steal their stuff.

I think the Disney canon is going to build up the fact the Empire was inherently unstable and was building up to a collapse from ANH onwards. With the destruction of the Senate, the destruction of the Death Star, and the destruction of Alderaan--I think the Empire was on thin ice and *HAD* to build the Second Death Star rapidly because they'd permanently undermined themselves.

The EU was built on the idea the Empire had a lot of institutional loyalty and endless armies of cannon fodder to throw at the Rebellion to the point they could fight for decades after. The canon universe implies the galaxy as a whole vastly outnumbered the Empire and there was very little loyalty to the Empire by ROTJ even before the Death Star went up.

The Rebellion didn't have to conquer the galaxy. The galaxy rose up against the Empire en masse the moment the Empire was shown to have no one at the helm.

 

Oh, for crying out loud. This posted by accident. Editing into two replies so I can get things coherent without such a long edit-break...

Which "history" are you thinking of? The command issued by Himmler to level what was left of Warsaw after the Uprising in order to strengthen Festung Warschau, which was admittedly a flimsy cover for continuing the covert policy of cultural genocide against the Poles, but which was given a practical justification by the military situation, which was carried out as an SS project without directly informing anyone else, and which several Wehrmacht generals - although their perceptions were certainly skewed by their fear of defeat - tried to countermand and hinder once they realised what was happening?

On a more general level, von Choltitz simply ignored the order to destroy Paris (whether he could have accomplished much is a moot question), while in Italy, Kesselring (who seems to me an example of a good man on the bad side) was busy protecting art treasures from looters, and trying to protect the centres of population (while at the same time fighting a better defense than anyone on the other two fronts)...

Does this make my point clearer? While the simplified narrative may flatter the idea that they're different from us, the reality was far more complex, and the effect far less absolute... that is not to underplay the wrongs that were done, but to warn against various dangers - ignoring the excesses committed by our own side, denying that those we regard as "Other" actually include many people rather like us, and... on a lesser level, nodding along at dualistic plotting in space fantasy.

You claimed that people who object to the plausibility of the plot-device are overestimating the universality of their "western" moral stance, and by implication that non-"western" people behave differently. I was asking you (and the other people who picked up the term one way or another) to think about what you were saying there...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Tagge himself asked how the Emperor was going to maintain control without the bureaucracy of the Senate. He recognized the danger, which the Rebellion only added to.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by either of these points - but no, I'm not being a moral relativist, if that's what you're asking; I'm objecting to moral dualism, which seems to me to be immoral.

See above. And my answer to your second point is already given - Kenobi is in large part constructed from non-western figures, and while this is certainly filtered through a western lens, both the subtextual acknowledgement of the virtues and validity of non-western cultures, and the sincere attempt to divorce the narrative from specifically western frames of reference, form part of the key values of the STAR WARS mythos...

Also, the Ewoks are a metaphor for the Viet Cong.

Yes, but Sidious and the Empire are not the same thing - the pattern of disobedience that is most clearly represented by the Rebellion ripples right the way into the system, and culminates in the redemption of Darth Vader; the same is true of the First Order, or should be - to my way of thinking, this is a basic part of both human nature and the established texture of STAR WARS storytelling, and I think anyone who for some weird reason likes the idea of a state that runs like this (if only because that flatters their moral dualism) wants to think very hard about their assumptions...

I am not strictly a "fan of the Empire", incidentally. I'm also a fan of the Nick Rostu school of blowing Sith up, for instance, and the Ral'rai Muvunc approach to procurement, and of well-written Jedi Knights, and Obi-snark, and Han, and Chewie, and Luke Skywalker. I'm a fan of people. And, you know, hope and redemption.

I'm a fan of kriffing STAR WARS, right?

I disagree with both of you. The Empire existed because ordinary and often well-meaning people joined up and did what they thought was right, or tried to (and in point of fact, the Empire relied on their competence and heroism to function - without the Tagges and the Thrawns, the Tarkins and the Pryces would not be able to run things). To deny this seems to me to be both a denial of basic character-psychology and a very odd reading of the original STAR WARS movies.

See above. I think you're simplifying too much - muddling the unarguable villainy/stupidity of Tarkin, Motti, Palpatine, and the wider body of people involved. One of those people who wants to voluntarily join the Empire and shoot things is Luke Skywalker, who is caught between the part of him that "hates the Empire", and the part of him that wants to do something heroic in a smart uniform...

Oh, and when we're speaking of the Empire - we know, both from the REBELS material and the ANH cutscenes, that there are a lot of Academy cadets who are mentally double-coding in one way or another. Some of them become Wedge and Biggs and the characters in Lost Stars. Some of them become or Thrawn or Eli Vanto or Vult Skerris. Denying the second of those points is outright bad interpretation. The pre-reboot material gave us characters like Phennir and Tank, who seem to represent a line of unresolved realism that could be tapped effectively in the reboot as well (okay, in WARFARE I implied in that Phennir is doing his own brand of doublecoding, but his cryptoseppie sympathies aren't quite the same as the usual moral qualms).

Two things here - firstly, I think the idea that the problem lies with a minority of moral untermenschen who "we" in our pure superiority can get rid of and that everyone will then fall in line under our leadership is the essence of badguyism (look at what "we" did in Iraq); and secondly, I don't think this reading of the Empire is supported by the OT, or REBELS, or even the reboot novels...

This is a bit like Tolkien's attempts to explain the Orcs, and his eventual (deliberate, pointed) retconning of the idea that they were soulless nothings as prejudice and propaganda creeping in among the good guys. Eventually, your realise that casual Othering of entire cultures is wrong.

Nice point. You, sir, get a Golden Ewok™ No-Prize!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I think its prettt stupid.

The idea of self destructing a massive fleet and destroying worlds in intentional blunders it's beyond dumb.

Not all imps where stupid, some admiral would of stepped in like the old EU and decided enough was enough.

Ending the war in one year was terrible from a book point of view.
We could of got lots of cool stories like the old EU but now we don't due to this contrived happy ever after.

The old EU had it right with a grinding 10 year struggle.

 

As we all are. But some of the themes you're referencing are purely from Legends. Disney has moved away from those ideas with the new canon. Yes, the Imperial officers we see in the OT are human beings, just like Luke. But at no point do they attempt to join the right side. They continue to serve the same Empire that destroys inhabited planets, right up to the day they die. Vader's redemption is a miracle. A one-time return from darkness that isn't exactly common. Most of the time, evil beings don't believe what they're doing is evil. They remain unrepentant and unchanged right up to the end.

Admiral Piett is a popular Imperial officer. Even I liked him. But at the end of the day, he's defending a Death Star. A battlestation that exists to destroy planets. How do officers like that justify their allegiance to the Empire after Alderaan?

I was once a fan of the Empire, but no longer. Recent content has shown us just how horrible life was under their rule. Redemption and hope are for the Imperials that realize that they're on the wrong side. The Imperials that I find interesting and sympathetic are people like Iden Versio and Del Meeko. Loyal Imperial officers who serve with honor and bravery, but begin to question what they're fighting for as the Empire's true colors become more and more visible, and then, when the moment comes, abandon the institution that has no honor and isn't worth serving.

I agree that there were smart, brave and even honorable beings serving the Empire. But that isn't why it existed. It only came into existence because of the machinations and desires of the Dark Lord of the Sith. Without Sidious, there's still a Republic, with ten thousand Jedi Knights to keep it in check, morally. The Sith manipulated these honorable beings and deceived them into serving evil.

Thrawn, Yularen, Kallus.

Yet, only one of those men managed to open his eyes enough to realize that the Empire didn't deserve his loyalty. That it had come to embody the very evil that it claimed to fight. Yularen is a particularly tragic figure. We know he was a good man. Honorable and brave. He fought beside the heroes in the Clone Wars, but at the end, he bought into the Emperor's propaganda. He actually believed that the Jedi would betray the Republic. He went on to serve the Empire for decades, and at the end, perished aboard a weapon of mass destruction. That he had no issues serving upon, as far as we know.

The same Yularen who risked his own life on a mercy mission to aid civilians was aboard the Death Star when it obliterated a planet.

There's no heroism in what Yularen does for the Empire. No honor in what Kallus did on Lasan. Thrawn likes to think he has honor, and maybe in a twisted way, he does. But he still serves Palpatine faithfully. All the while knowing that the Death Star is being completed in secret.

Canon Thrawn attempted to bombard a city full of innocent civilians. For all his high-minded talk about honor, he has no issue with killing loyal citizens of the Empire. Which makes him no better than Tarkin, really. The only difference between their evil deeds is a matter of scale.

 

And Legends Thrawn was even more willing to serve the Empire, even after Alderaan. At least canon Thrawn would probably try to make the excuse that the Death Star hasn't been used yet before his disappearance in Rebels (don't know what his final canon fate is yet). His Legends counterpart has no such leg to stand on.

 

I actually like the idea of Operation: Cinder. From a story standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Like what someone else on this thread pointed out, Palpatine was the main antagonist of the OT, so having his death directly impact the whole galaxy is actually a very clever thing to do. It also fits with what we know about Palpatine in the new canon, that while he doesn't want to rule over a galaxy of the dead, he also doesn't exactly want anyone else to rule in his place (aside from Vader/Luke), so he wants it burnt to the ground. The other part, that being the Contingency also makes sense, he would want his best and most loyal men and women following his new heir into the outer reaches of the galaxy that he himself wanted to explore but couldn't due to his death, and make a new empire that was way more loyal to the Dark Side, which again, makes perfect sense for him. He was all about the Dark Side and wanted to spread as much fear as he could, while also controlling the galaxy. Sure, it didn't plan out exactly as he had hoped, but it still made for an awesome storytelling device and is the main reason that I liked Aftermath: Empire's End.

 

Alderaan would not really bother me from a cold mathematical stand point.

The clone wars killed trillions.

The point of the death star was to kill a few billion to save trillions of life's.


It's the same principle as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Blow up two city's and kill hundreds of thousands to save millions.


In a galaxy of trillions a planet would be the same as a city.


Now I am not saying it's morally right BUT from thrawn who looks at things mathematically and trys go with the option of few deaths if possible, I can see how the idea of preventing a war by blowing a planet up can be seen as a "good" option.

 

Strictly speaking, I referenced a couple of pre-reboot characters who I happened to think of entirely unselfconsciously, as good illustrations of the wide range of STAR WARS lifestyle choices I can get behind... the themes, I'd argue, are fundamental to the OT...

I'd say that this is something far bigger - something thematic, and vital to understanding what STAR WARS means - even Vader is capable of redemption, and his inner conflict closely mirrors Luke's...

There's more I could say here - but this is not necessarily something that everyone in the audience is going to articulate intellectually (heck, even Luke doesn't), but we recognise unconsciously and emotionally and psychologically...

And why is that only a danger for the Empire? What if the struggle to do the right thing is something that unites Luke and Vader?

I don't know. But as @crazyewok said, real-world examples of mass-killing against civilians have been committed in the name of western governments without prompting mass defections or morally-outraged coups - and not just historically. I already mentioned Iraq, for instance. Vietnam was very much in GL's mind when he made ANH. I saw today that the French government has been accused of collusion in the Rwandan genocide.

You realise that's the intended metaphor, right?

You don't even have to adopt the cold mathematical justification that @crazyewok outlined. There's a whole range of POVs where people can recognize the wrong and then decide that the best place to oppose this is within the system...

Yes, and Palpatine's ability to manipulate the Jedi and the Loyalist politicians is a clear sign that Palpatine can build an army and an empire composed primarily of people who think of themselves as good and are still trying to do the right thing... there's no magical switch at Order 66 which changes that and makes the Imperials all "bad people", and I'm not sure if Palpatine's actually needed to get rid of them, or that his decision to do so was actually about them representing a credible threat...

More generally, I'm not persuaded that the crisis which the Republic faces in the Clone Wars is primarily due to Palpatine's actions - I'd argue that his aim is actually to preserve the power structures of the Republic, and to exploit the underlying crisis to gain power...

You think Thrawn's running failure to solve the problem of the Rebels who are disrupting the supply of doonium to a certain big round technological terror is accidental...?

Note the way that a certain Kalikori is left in front of the window that a certain Twi'lek prisoner will have to climb past on her escape attempt, too. That's a message - to the viewer, if not to the Rebel cell themselves....

And you think Ar'alani is just going to watch Eli tracking the logistical shipping movements of the supplies, rather than, you know, passing this information on in the form of hints and tips to the Rebel Alliance and any interested pirates?

Thrawn's a character with blind-spots and a capacity for error, yes (and he can be a difficult character, too). But I think he's trying his best....

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I don't think it's accidental. More like tactical ineptitude on Thrawn's part. He is trying to destroy the Rebels, just as Palpatine has ordered him. He's just not that good at it.

I didn't see any messages like that in the episode. Thrawn only makes a quick appearance in that episode and doesn't interact with the Kalikori at all. I can't see him returning that to Hera. He personally removed it from her home and added it to his collection.

Yes. We never see any evidence of a relationship between the Chiss and Rebellion. This is all speculation.

Well, I'm reminded of the attempted orbital bombardment of Lothal by the Seventh Fleet. If the Rebels were a few seconds slower, Thrawn would have killed a city full of innocent civilians.

I know you're a fan of the character, but Thrawn isn't a hero by any stretch. If he were really trying his best, he'd take all his knowledge of the Empire and his tactical skill and go join the Rebels.

 

Except, it wasn't. It was to terrify people into obedience.

 

Yep. Tarkin himself said what the reason for the Death Star. "Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station."

 

Have you read the Thrawn novel? That makes pretty clear that his disapproval is existential, and not just a matter of a tactical preference for fast fighters... certainly, Palpatine thinks that by tasking him to secure the doonium supply, he's testing him and bringing him onto his side, and that is a risk that Thrawn has to take (as is the fact that Ezra will, you know, be Ezra)...

Yes, but rather than actually taking the Kalikori back to the Chimaera with him, Thrawn put the Kalikori on a shelf in the window in the unoccupied room above Pryce's office, and the only possible reason for him to do that is to let her recover the thing as she climbs past while escaping... ergo, Thrawn knew she was going to escape, and he made sure she got her Kalikori back in the process.

Well, if I'm right, this is possibly a spoiler for upcoming material, so I don't want to go into any particular depth here - as I said, did you read the novel?

Thrawn's most... uncomfortable characteristic is his willingness to risk and sacrifice the lives of others. What does that mean? Perhaps he has a ruthless, utilitarian streak, as @crazyewok suggested. Perhaps, as you believe, this crosses lines. But some commanders (Napoleon and Patton both come to mind) have regarded this as a military necessity which they hated, and hid that fact from everyone except their spouses...

In this case, he's given a very good excuse to disrupt the doonium-procurement process, which is completely deniable. Is this what I'd do? No, but that doesn't mean this is what you think...

And invite Imperial reprisals against the Chiss? No, much better to let Palpatine think that he's in control of the situation... nor is there any parallel to Palpatine's enthusiasm for pets like Vader, and his desire for intelligence on the Unknown Regions, to gain a way in at the highest level... and his style is hardly suitable for their tactics, either.... And quite apart from all that, I think Thrawn's attitude to the Rebels is much the same facepalming you're doing this wrong as Han's, myself.

Is there a risk there? An ambiguity? Rounded characterization? Flaws? Yes, all of the above. Is he a hero? I don't know.

But ultimately, this is about the question of whether the reboot's characterization of the Empire as an Other which performs pointlessly inhuman actions is plausible, desirable, or even stands up to scrutiny within the reboot.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

It's kind of weird logic there. "The Death Star had to be built in order to keep more people from being killed. Which it will do by killing more people at a time than has ever been possible in the history of the galaxy."

It's really the, "Stop hitting yourself by refusing to be enslaved" logic.

Mind you, I really did like that Ciena Ree used this logic in LOST STARS only to have it completely break down when she discovered the entire galaxy now hated the Empire because of the Death Star and they not only intended to use it as a "one time horrible act" but intended to use it as a regular weapon of war against any planet that rebelled against them.

Canon's take on the subject seems to be, "The best way to bring peace to the galaxy is to eliminate the Empire and make sure its zealots are found before they rebuild it."

 

Yes, we know.

What we're saying is that we feel this argument can be a path to the dark side...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I'm curious if opinions on Operation Cinder have changed, now that the Alphabet Squadron trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, and to a lesser extent, The Mandalorian have given new context to it.

The fact that Palpatine survived post-Endor means that there was much more to Cinder than spite, and that there was presumably a strategy behind it - in-universe, at least.

 

I know for myself and a few of my friend it has. Makes it seem like there was a point to it in the grand scheme of it

 

Thing is Cinder can be strategic, sickeningly twisted and petty all at once. It is the perfect reflection of its creator.

 

I don't like the idea of Palpatine as an all-powerful Force god who foresees everything. Certainly he claims to be such, but I don't think it should actually be true. If he did have some contingency involving essence transfer and clone bodies, then sure, but that should have been his Plan D. I don't think he planned on dying anytime soon, or that he would've had his incredibly elaborate plot to devastate the galaxy in the event of his death.

 

...you know, bringing up how Palpatine isn't actually all knowing might have helped solve one of the weirdest things about operation Cinder to me.

Like, the idea that Cinder target loyal imperial worlds like Vardos always struck me as very strange, especially if he had plans to come back, since such worlds could be very useful in securing his return to power. Before, the only real explanation I could think of was maybe the destruction could be used as a cover to move populations to Exogol without being noticed, but that was kind of strech.

But yeah, Palpatine doesn't see all ends, and is arrogant in general and looks down on the Rebel Alliance in particular...so what if his contingency plans weren't aimed at the rebel alliance? Perhaps he thought the most likely cause of his death would be a coup orchestrated by darth vader - if so, targeting worlds important to the empire could an attempt to undermine the stability of Vader's new regime.

 

I sorta see it as "I'm a spiteful human being who would rather be Emperor of ashes then not rule at all" its less cold logic and more emotional vindictiveness