None of that is on-brand for Star Wars in any way. Yes, yes, “it’s a setting,” but it’s also a style and a tone. Andor was pushing it a little, but fundamentally it was about finding hope and meaning, and being something better than your darkest temptations want you to be. Or, barring that, about sacrifice. I can handle some nuance, but there is nothing interesting to me about the hows and whys of an awful person’s efforts to do awful things, or just being scared and seeing death for its own sake.
That’s not how this works. If the rebels break the law and the empire punishes Alderaan, that is so-called “collective punishment” - punishing someone who has not committed the crime for someone else’s crime. Under pretty much every body of international law hereabouts, this is forbidden. It’s like if I punched you in the face because someone somewhere jaywalked. Neither fair, nor legal. Now, of course, one could argue that under imperial law, it would be legal, but that would mean to just bend over and believe that every whim of the emperor’s is legal and then the empire could do no harm because it would simply always declare itself blameless and in the right. (Nazi Germany did just that, which is why we have human rights now around here btw.) So if we go by international law or just a general sense of justice, then self defense against the rebellion could potentially be justified, but “self defense” against the children of Alderaan is just bullshit, that’s just not an argument, that is the kind of excuse that every bully ranging from domestic abusers to actual dictators like to use - be it “look at what you made me do, little kid - you made me beat you because you broke some arbitrary rule I just made up, this is all your fault” or bombing civilians under the pretense of defending the own country from some nebulous weapons of mass destruction or other fake flimsy pretenses.
Just like any “punishment” against the civilians of Alderaan for something they did not do is not an argument that will get anybody anywhere. It’s just collective punishment: hardcore war-crimey. No way around that.
A criminal? No, but the rebellion did not blow up the death star as punishment for e.g. Alderaan. The death star was blown up in self defense against a current attack. Would any lesser means have been sufficient to end this attack? I cannot think of anything that would have dissuaded the death star, so the attacking military installation death star had to be destroyed to end this attack. Allowing the argument that nothing any opponents of the empire do can ever be legal because the empire makes the laws would just mean rolling over in front of injustice which is not acceptable in the face of absolute totalitarian arbitrary despotism. If one were to seriously consider that line of reasoning, then any and all military actions against Nazi Germany were crimes. I will not entertain such lines of thought. Unlike Alderaan, the death star had already fired up its planet-killing lasers and just turned out to pull the short straw in this fight its commanders started.
In every war, I keep hearing both sides talk about self defense, sometimes about fighting to seek “peace”, doing “preventive war”… or some other ideal that always moves them to commit murder. One could argue that destroying Rebel bases that could potentially be host of Jedi Masters who train dangerous assassins, or important schematics that could help blow up entire moon-like stations and could end up being the vane of the empire (which is actually what ended up happening) was also self defense…
Mahatma Gandhi would have disagreed with the approach, for example.
Yes, but my issue here is less making the decision which side was rightfully defending themselves here. My issue lies with the existence of an empire that claims to be able to declare even the worst atrocities it commits legal and any resistance illegal. If we give the empire the purview to declare what is legal based on the emperor’s capriciousness, then they can never be the bad guys, because they would only ever be the bad guys if the emperor said “I am the bad guy”, which totalitarian dictators tend to not do. Still, atrocities as seen in the movie which we are shown, must be judged by SOME standard and I refuse it to be exclusively the standard which the totalitarian dictator sets.
I do understand that totalitarian dictators would generally like me to consider their point of view more valid. In this case study, I do not.
I do not like totalitarianism, I’m a democrat. But that’s not the same thing as saying that totalitarianism = evil.
My support for democracy is mainly pragmatic, rather than an absolute belief in the goodness of whatever the majority decides. If a democracy makes decisions I consider evil, then I would criticize it, same as I would criticize a dictatorship that does evil. And yet when it does good, I would praise that, same as I would praise it when it’s a dictatorship the one doing a good deed.
The reason I prefer democracy, is because it gives certain guarantees that there will be a way for people (me & others like me) to voice their dissent in a way that might have some impact. But that doesn’t mean that it’s ok to do evil whenever it’s done in the name of democracy.
The Republic (by whichever governance method it uses… which is not completely clear, at least in the OT) can commit evil acts in the same way as the Empire can. And based on that, they can be the evil ones, just as much as the Empire can.
The difference is that totalitarianism gives evil people the power to commit atrocities unchallenged while democracies tend to implement measures that hold people who commit evil act responsible. So naturally evil tends to gravitate towards the system where they can set the rules while democracy tends to have rule sets that are intended to protect the majority from one-sided evil acts.
So the emperor is balls-to-the-wall unhindered evil and does not allow resistance even to unquestionably evil acts of his, while the republic on the other hand has systems in place that would punish genocides, optimally, but at the very least it could and would raise questions.
It would be great if the movies had shown that.
We are not shown any of those systems the resistance has in place that would “optimally” prevent evil acts, and how are those superior / more efficient to the ones from the Empire. Instead, they present a case for how the Empire can, in fact, be challenged. Whether that challenge ultimally results in an improvement for the galaxy is not shown, we are left guessing.
But the whole point I was making was that all of this is open to interpretation. You don’t have to agree with any one particular interpretation of it. Just as long as we acknowledge that such interpretation would be a valid one.
I’m curious as to what a deterioration from “if this one person I’m currently torturing without any legal repercussions doesn’t tell me what I want, I’ll eradicate the population of an entire planet without any legal repercussions” would be, system-wise. Logically speaking, the only direction left for things getting worse here would be foregoing even the fig-leaf justification and just blowing up a people every week for no reason. Honest,y the rebellion doesn’t give me that vibe, so I can assume that they’d be an improvement over the empire.