Kazuaki Shimazaki wrote:1) Nobody really liked the Jews at the time anyway. Hitler merely went one step further.
I'm not even going to comment on how fucked up that sounds, but I am going to point out that it doesn't apply to the SW universe. Alderaanians weren't looked down upon like the Jews were in Germany. In fact, they were viewed as innocent little pacifist goody two shoes. So the Empire actually committed an even worse crime than Hitler did in the eyes of the galactic citizens by wiping them all out.
2) Alderaan, in terms of Galactic Scale, was a fairly small city. It at worst is a massacre, not genocide.
Why is it a city? It's an entire planet with its own people and culture. I'd parallel it to a nation instead. It was genocide. Besides, even if it
were only equivalent to a city, it still had a unique people and culture which still makes it genocide. A hypothetical scenario would be having a city in a nation heavily populated with a race not found anywhere else in the world. The government for whatever reason bombards the town, wiping out all of its inhabitants. Therefore it would be genocide.
3) The slavery issue is highly arbitrary. Remember that it is only quite recently that human morals don't allow slaves.
So what? You're going to tell me that slavery is okay? It is only recently that women and minorities received the same treatment as white males in the US. Does that mean the previous discrimination was okay? No.
4) The Imperials state that if a Species is not rated Sentient, it may be Domesticated. Sounds OK on the face of it, no one has trouble with Domesticating dogs. The Rebels, of course, say that the Empire is very, uh, liberal in rating other species non-sentient.
And they are right. How can you claim that an alien that has a spoken language and has advanced technology and such isn't sentient? Bunch of bullshit. Just an excuse to carry out xenophobic views.
5) Yet what is sentient? Are droids sentient (and I don't mean that unthinking worker droid, I mean high-level droids with some time to develop sentience like C3PO)? We may see C3PO and rate him to be (most of us), but Shield of Lies suggests they are not considered to be, on very arbitrary grounds which basically ensure a droid would never be rated sentient. If people in the Star Wars galaxy can be that arbitrary in such definitions, well...
What does this prove? That claiming an alien race isn't sentient is the norm?
The point is how these governments tend to get into power because the old government has become ineffectual.
I don't know about you, but the U.S. government itself wasn't ineffective at Pearl Harbor. It was the military's screw-up. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches along with the state and local governments weren't all corrupt, decaying, etc. That anology makes no sense.
You might want to remember that most of what they are fighting is not the leadership, but mere soldiers. For all they know, they might not even be volunteers - but conscripts. And when you kill someone, you have to shoulder responsibility for it. This concept gets through even Luke Skywalker's wall once in a while.
The resistance fighters were inside German territory and the German soldiers responsible for fighting them weren't saints. A lot of them were brutal in putting down revolts. You should watch "The Pianist." It shows how indifferent the Germans were towards atrocities happening to the Warsaw resistance fighters. Besides, The same way you say "how do they know they aren't conscripts," I say, "how do you know they aren't ruthless shitheads that wouldn't bat an eye at the opportunity to gun me down and all of my people with me." And regardless who is wearing the uniform, that person is still out to kill you, so it's a matter of simple survival.
Kazuaki Shimazaki wrote:Funny, it was the Senate who voted to give Palpatine his "Unlimited Emergency Powers" (yeah, sure, Palpatine pulled strings, but which politician does not). The Republic actually kind of morphed into the Empire in a way which even the New Republic people had to admit was "mostly legitimate" (from Shield of Lies)
This, however, does prove that it is the legitimate (a legal concept) government, so one may not argue on legal, but on moral grounds alone (which is also why I brought this section up here, so we can get your other attacks on the Empire's legitimacy outta the way.
I think you got it backwards. One can argue that on legal grounds it is a legitimate government, but
not on moral grounds, simply because it was a shit-ass, oppressive, totalitarian government with a complete disregard for life.
And add to that the fact that Palpatine was controlling the Senate with the Dark Side of the Force and waging war against his own government he was trying to "protect," the legal argument goes straight down the shitter. You aren't going to sit there and tell me that even when he's directly controlling the ENEMY of the Republic, which HE CREATED, into WAGING A GALACTIC WAR on it that he is not somehow violating his powers as SUPREME CHANCELLOR? I nailed you to the
fucking wall on that one. No matter
what the fuck you tell me, Palpatine was flat out wrong in doing that.
As for being a "sneaky fucker who played everyone for fools" - that's just typical politician. Not his fault that the Senate was dumb.
No. Just stop now. Please.
The "typical politician" doesn't have Dark Side Force powers with which to manipulate the entire legislative body into complying with his/her demands, and doesn't directly control the enemy into waging war against his/her own government in order to increase his/her own power in said government. In fact, there was
no previous enemy. The politician would have had to CREATE the enemy to complete the analogy.
In other words, you had never stopped to consider the Imperial POV, only the Rebel POV. Yet the decision to open fire in the end was Imperial, and in analyzing their actions, their POV must be taken into account.
Yes, I have stopped to consider the Imperial POV and favored the Rebel POV.
The Senate approved his actions till he got his ass into being Emperor. As for "betraying" his people, face it, not all politicans serve the people.
Whoop-dee-freaking-doo. As stated before, he MANIPULATED THE SENATE WITH DARK SIDE FORCE POWERS. And he betrayed his people by CREATING AND DIRECTLY CONTROLLING THE ENEMY OF THE GOVERNMENT HE HAS SWORN TO PROTECT. It's not as though he simply made someone a scapegoat and attacked them, he actually went out of his way to create an enemy worthy enough of bringing down the Republic and basically told it to knock its brains out destroying the Republic. That's
not your typical power-grabbing asshole politician!
In sending a Senator and expecting the Imperials to respect their consular status, Alderaan is saying the Empire is legitimate.
No it isn't. It is simply taking advantage of Empire and Leia was pretending to still be a part of the Senate and all that jazz. I still don't see how it really matters whether or not the Empire was legally legitimate anyway, even though it wasn't.
In fact, not only Alderaan, but the very concept of the Rebel Alliance itself is tacitly acknowledging the Empire is legit, and their conflict with it is on moral grounds. If they do not recognize the government, they would call themselves the "Movement to Restore the Republic" or "Republic-Government-in-Exile". Calling yourself the Rebel Alliance in effect concedes the basic legitimacy to your governmental enemy.
The formal title is the "Alliance to Restore the Republic." The "Rebel Alliance" was just a popular name. Thus your entire argument....is shit.
Obey the law.
Obey any laws, no matter how unjust they are, so long as they are laws!
As for "warp", funny, I thought you said he "overthrew" in the same paragraph. Warp means he's slowly altering, implying movements that have to go through some legal process. Overthrow is well, violent.
He slowly warped the government into something so unrecognizable he effectively overthrew the Republic. That is what I meant.
From the Nazi government POV, yes.
And why should I give a fuck about the opinions of a bunch of Nazi thugs called a government? Is their POV
supposed to hold weight?
And one should at least keep that in mind when you hear they razed a village in response.
The resistance fighters weren't responsible for the actions of the government they were fighting against. If the Nazis were brutal, and would kill ten times the amount the resistance fighters did, they couldn't help that. The Nazis would have killed them all sooner or later anyway. Might as well try to stop it.
Remember also that Leia Organa is a government official. In a government that acknowledges the authority of the Empire at least nominally.
Disproven.
It is her duty to respond honestly. She cannot have her cake and eat it too.
Plain stupid. Do I even have to respond to this? Eh, I'll do so anyway.
What fucking moron would expose the secrets of the resistance movement she's a part of? "It's your duty as an Imperial Senator to tell us the location of your rebel base, even though you are a member of this rebel group which is trying to overthrow the Imperial Empire! You surely see the logic in this, do you not?!"
No. That's like a suspected criminal running or raising his gun when he sees a cop.
The Rebels certainly weren't running anywhere and weren't aiming their weapons at the DS. That is completely different.
It is an admission of guilt, of refusal to submit to Imperial authority. From the Imperial POV, of course that is totally unacceptable.
From the Imperial POV, the planet was going to get blown to bits regardless of how the Rebels behaved. And raising shields is simply a manner of self defense. Have you been watching too much TNG, where they lower shields in the hopes that the enemy won't take advantage of it?
What they should be doing (the smart move, as well as the correct move given their legal status) is hailing the DS and offering to roll out the red carpet for the GM Tarkin. a fucking Resistance fighter should have the brains to know when to pretend not to be one don't you think?
The Empire supposedly knew the planet was a Rebel one. The Alderaanians knew full well the capabilities of the DS and of previous Imperial brutality. It is not a stretch to say they put 2 and 2 together and figured out the DS was sent to destroy their planet. I'm quite surprise they didn't scramble their fleet to try to put up a fight, unless of course they didn't have one. I don't know.
See above. No one, not even the Rebellion seriously tries to challenge the legal authority, and you cannot send a Senator and insist that you don't recognize the government that you are sending her to.
If they acknowledge the Empire's authority, yet they are fighting for the Old Republic, they are being traitors, and they know it.
Dealt with it before, won't do so again. You will have to prove to me that Palpatine somehow wasn't breaking any laws in bringing down the Republic before expecting me to buy that the GE was a legitimate government.
In fact, you want a blockade, since a seige would likely cause mass destruction.
In fact, I'm a moron and got "siege" mixed up with "all-out assault." Oops.
That's what my bit about the DS means.
You might know that shields are an energy phenomena and they might vary by as much as 20% in some places (the theory behind the Torpedo Sphere). So they use the DS, but they misestimate (or the DS1 superlaser plain can't make that fine adjustment) the shield strength and an extra 2E32J (which is about a millionth of the power of the SL) makes it to the ground, blowing the planet apart more slowly. IRGCommandoJoe, of course, is not any more pleased.
I actually meant why doesn't the DS destroy the planet if it was being all-out assaulted. But since you thought I meant siege, ok. The DS could have fired its thousands of turbolasers and gradually brought down the shields that way. They weren't limited to its superlaser. And why is it impossible for the Imps not to have designed the superlaser to fire low-powered shots so as to seriously damage the shields, but not enough to bring them down, and then finish the shields off with the thousands of turbolasers on its surface?
Take into account the instant, merciful death versus the long and painful death.
"intact planet...survivors...chance of escape"
No one would know the grade of that network,
Bothans would. Let the information fall into their hands a la DS II plans.
not to mention the sheer expense.
They could spend zillions of credits on ridiculously expensive superweapons like the DS and command ships like the
Executor, but they can't install a planetary shield on an uninhabited planet? Bullshit.
Not to mention that it's somehow better to kill 2 billion people instead of no one?
Everyone knows the network for a Core World.
Again, the Bothans could find out about the planetary shield strength. Besides, isn't the ability to violently explode an Earth-sized planet even without planetary shields damned impressive alone? And I'm somehow unconvinced that no one would be able to calculate how much power went into the planet to make it explode
even more violently than Alderaan, correct?
Again, there's also that Resolve Factor (which played a part in Hiroshima too). Alderaan was a fairly good choice. it was a well-known Core World, thus showing Imperial will and ability to take out Rebellious elements even if they hide on a prestigious world,, but it only had 2 billion on it, and it had a tough shield.
So basically slaughter some of the most prestigious people in the galaxy to show how brutal of a regime you are.
