Why in Star Wars is the Empire always framed as the “bad guys”? You go to a basketball game and the music that comes on while the away team’s lineup gets announced is the Imperial March by John Williams. So it seems that the canon movies and shows guide viewers’ consciousness to see the Imperials as villains. Are they so villainous? Are they the only ones, or do their counterpart “good guys” share some similar attributes?
In the show The Mandalorian, the Imperial warlord, known only as “The Client”, sheds light on the Imperial perspective. He comments on how “The Empire improves every system it touches” by the metrics of trade, opportunity, prosperity, peace and safety, and how much in disarray the galaxy was after the fall of the Galactic Empire. He eludes that post-revolution, there is nothing but violence and chaos in the streets without Imperial rule. The philosophy of the Empire was as follows: Stability, comfortable uniformity, strength in numbers, and expansion. Are these such evil tenets? Are these philosophies not exercised by our current world super powers?
Besides the facts that the Empire was run by the Sith, centralized all power from the Republic, destroyed an entire planet, used slave labor, utilized biowarfare, reserved the right to random searches, instilled fear and anger via propaganda, occupied planets to steal their resources, was xenophobic, and had little regard for civilians, is the Empire any different compared to any of today’s first-world countries? Come to think of it, everything listed above can be verified as real world happenings carried out by our first-world governments, not including blowing up a planet (and the verdict’s still out on an ancient malevolent order secretly ruling the world).
The Empire does have evident parallels to Nazism and totalitarianism, but it also has more depth to it than that. Can one not see the Galactic Empire’s direct resemblance to the mighty Roman Empire, the historically-revered British Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, or how about the American Empire? We study these empires in history class as examples of “how great a nation can be,” and are told that these were some of the imperial world’s “greatest leaders” in fact.
Rebel Alliance Crimes
The obvious one is blowing up both Death Stars. Think of the contractors, the medical staff, the diplomats, the ambassadors, the prisoners, the tech and maintenance personnel, the cooks, the garbagemen and so forth. There was a healthy chunk of civilians on both Death Stars that got blown up in space by the Rebels. In the canon novel, Inferno Squad, the leader of Saw Gerrera’s extreme rebels, advocated and planned a bombing on an Imperial factory that was welcoming hundreds of Imperial students for a field trip that day. The leader of that pack of rebels argued that those students had been robbed of their innocence because they were children of the Empire.
Or how about in Rogue One, A Star Wars Story, how the Rebel Alliance intelligence officer, Cassian Andor, straight up murdered his informant after the informant gave him that vital information on the Death Star when the Stormtroopers started coming? One cannot deny that a Rebel officer killing an unarmed disabled Rebel Alliance asset to be labeled murder. The movie additionally showed Cassian receiving orders from Rebel high command to assassinate Jyn’s father, Galen Erso, just for being a (forced-by-the-barrel-of-a-gun) engineer of the Death Star. Ironically, it was Galen who put the achilles heel in the Death Star and sent a message to the Rebels about it. Rogue One also shows Saw Gerrera’s rebels attack Imperials in broad daylight in the crowed town on Jedha using explosives that killed innocents, black bagged the captured, and used a cruel and unusual torture method for extracting information from the Imperial turncoat. The heavy civilian casualties and collateral damage resulting from Rebels often alienated local populations and justified the Empire’s actions.
Moving into the world of Star Wars comics, the Rebel Alliance held a secret prison space station for Imperial moffs and spies, mercenaries and various criminals, known as Sunspot Prison. It was so secretive in fact that most leaders in Rebel high command didn’t even know of its existence. The warden’s philosophy was to shoot first and ask questions later. A former Rebel spy (who had learned of the true Sith nature of Palpatine, emperor of the Empire) broke into the prison with a crew and started shooting at the Imperial prisoners through their prison cells, an act of zealous brutality. The Rebels were fighting an ideological battle vying for the hearts and minds of “the people;” it was only through the popular rejection of the occupying forces of the Empire that the Rebels could actually win the Galactic Civil War.
One can say that the Rebel Alliance’s greatest flaw was disunity. While the Empire was neatly organized and run by one source, the Rebels were fractured into separate operating cells/sects (up until the Battle of Yavin in Episode IV, A New Hope). The individual sects had trouble trusting one another and had very different ideas on how the war should be fought. This lead to extremist groups operating under the name of the Rebellion carrying out hardcore war crimes. Depictions such as these just go to show how little control the Rebellion had of its agents operating under its umbrella and how such acts were perpetrated in the name of the Rebel Alliance.
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