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.
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.