The Empire!

[The Infidel]

A rather nice video about the galactic empire.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

It's not working. Was it posed by SWFT?

[The Infidel]

It's not working. Was it posed by SWFT?

Working fine here. Yes, by SWFT.

[bilateralrope]

It's not working. Was it posed by SWFT?

Are you viewing this board through http or https ?

Because youtube embedding only works for people using http.

[The Infidel]

It's not working. Was it posed by SWFT?

Are you viewing this board through http or https ?

Because youtube embedding only works for people using http.

I use http all the way, both forum and link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxtvvRmZFWU

[bilateralrope]

It's not working. Was it posed by SWFT?

Are you viewing this board through http or https ?

Because youtube embedding only works for people using http.

I use http all the way, both forum and link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxtvvRmZFWU

Which is why it works for you. But will not work for someone who is viewing this forum through https. At least, not in Chrome. It doesn't like mixing encrypted and unencrypted content on a page.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

That's probably the reason. Thanks for the link.

The show pulls together the various threads behind how the Empire actually worked. What it did, what people thought of it, what it thought of itself, and how it got people to accept or not notice what was going on.

It's like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (and their imitators) in terms of overt power and presence. If you live on an Imperial world, it's hard to miss the fact. Flags everywhere, architecture designed to make you feel small and weak, people in uniforms with weapons, etc.

Where it gets a little different, a little more modern, is the information control aspect. The Soviet Union simply denied anything was wrong. Soviet planes do not crash, there are no gulags because Comrade Stalin abolished them, there are no famines because famine does not happen in the worker's paradise. Anyone who says otherwise disappears. There are two purposes to this; to allow people to convince themselves that all is well, and also to force its will on reality itself. Trumpism is a variation on this, but coming from another direction. The demagogue provides the alternative reality, and the followers cling to it as an act of collective defiance.

The Empire does this, but doesn't rely on it. It brutalises the galaxy, and dares the survivors to do something about it; aka the Tarkin Doctrine. Andor adds the use of information overload (very modern) to render people apathetic. If there's just too much going on to process, then you switch off; or you just tell yourself that the authorities are telling the truth, and everything's fine.

[Lord Revan]

I suspect big reason Soviet Union did things the way it did was that modern Mass Media wasn't really a thing in the 1930s or 1940s. The Nazi were first to really use it in any shape and form for propaganda purposes and even then it was quite limited.

While the Empire is very much in the computer age so it has the means to enact the information overload via personal datapads, information terminals or holonet terminals people might have.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Indeed. The Empire was originally a product of the Vietnam era, so of course it was going to resemble old-style totalitarianism. The Andor version is updated for the IT age, while keeping the broad style of the original.

So what we've got is a big, complicated, messy institution; as anything that size was bound to be. Different branches operate according to their own rules and priorities; and those priorities may conflict. The Tarkin Doctrine seems to have been a military thing, while the ISB preferred an intelligence-based, nip-it-in-the-bud approach.

[Lord Revan]

Indeed. The Empire was originally a product of the Vietnam era, so of course it was going to resemble old-style totalitarianism. The Andor version is updated for the IT age, while keeping the broad style of the original.

So what we've got is a big, complicated, messy institution; as anything that size was bound to be. Different branches operate according to their own rules and priorities; and those priorities may conflict. The Tarkin Doctrine seems to have been a military thing, while the ISB preferred an intelligence-based, nip-it-in-the-bud approach.

From what I've gathered the Empire also has the old Nazi style "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing because they're too busy plotting against the right foot" infighting too, where agencies are encouraged to fight for dominance and their duties intentionally overlap to foster conflict in form of social Darwinism.

This would explain why the Empire collapsed so rapidly after Endor, only the Loyalty to Emperor (and we can bet Palpatine insisted personal loyalty instead of loyalty to government) was holding the thing together and a lot of the Imperial Hierarchy didn't trust each other at all, thus when Palpatine was taken out of the picture Rebels (and later the New Republic) just had to push on those fracture lines a bit and massive rifts appeared with the imperial forces.