The best thing about the whole deal was seeing the preview for the first (hopefully of seven!) Narnia movies.

“Do good or Do not do good, there is no choice!”

The Taoists have an interesting concept of karma. “The more good you do, the more good you want to do. The more evil you do, the more evil you want to do.” That is, its not that bad things happen to bad people, as much has doing bad thing…

It is, of course, the same problem that always bedevils moral relativism, namely the inability to make non-hypocritical or non-irrelevantly emotive moral criticisms. You know what I’m talking about, “There are no such things as moral absolutes, and only irredeemably evil Bushhitler lovers believe in them.”

OK, -I’m- convinced!

As has been posted elsewhere, the original trilogy succeeded precisely BECAUSE it was a non-nuanced “good vs. evil” struggle which contrasted heavily with the post-Watergate world view. In addition to the too spiffy setup and the cardboard actors, the second trilogy suffers from Lucas’s cod-New Age Easterisms about the impossibilty of making distinctions between good and evil. So, who cares?

The fact is that the Empire is indeed evil, not just because it holds the power to destroy the individual but because it gladly exercises it. BTW, the notion that Fascist, Nazi and Marxist (i.e. all totalitarian collectivist governments) regimes are more “efficient” is idiotic. The only “efficiency” they show is in mass murder. In all important civil and scientific matters, they are parasitic (i.e. they can only progress by allowing to scientists the freedom of inquiry that contradicts their ideology) and inefficient (“divide and conquer” was Hitler and Stalin’s motto) to the Nth degree.

After that? Alea iacta est — oh, and the
rebellion would be as much dust at the Death Star II

Or something akin to enlightenment.

Not that it justifies the Empire, but I think the Empire woke enough people up to how bad stuff was in general.

Luke always impressed us a whiny and annoying. Anakin isn’t much better. Anakin is all about him.

Most importantly, logic is a bad thing for those guys= “Luke, empty your mind of all thought” is pretty much a leftist mantra.

A synonym for a mind emptied of all thought is thoughtless stupidity.

The American Revolutionaries were fighting _for_ a a new and truly revolutionary form of government, and for principles expounded upon at great length by political writers like Madison, Hamilton etc.

The Star Wars Rebels seem to be fighting _against_ the Empire because, well, Empires are bad. They are strong, they wear black and their leaders are scary looking. In the early films (iv-vi) they seem to be fighting to restore the Republic, but they never really articulate any political principles. At any rate, the prequels expose the Republic as a dysfunctional UN-like body rife with corruption and incapable of protecting its own members from agression (one of the principal duties of any government).

The results of defeating an Empire depend greatly upon the political nature of the opposition. In in U.S., revolutionaries defeated the British Empire and established a nation that rose to be one of the strongest and most liberal in history. In much of Africa by contrast, the British Empire was driven out by rebels and you ended up with places like Zimbabwe, which would probably be in much better shape had it remained a colony for at least a few more decades.

“I’m afraid I only got as far as “Palpatine is a dictator–but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet.” I’m afraid it rather left the humour zone for me at that point. More than 1000 people “disappeared” under Pinochet’s regime.”

Richard, the key word is “relatively”. Considering the records of communists despots of the time he was a piker (and at the time, Pinochet was considered the only alternative to communist despotism). 1,000 deaths is about 2 and a half days work for Pol Pot and his gang, for example.

And I don’t see Palpatine as being quite that benign; Pinochet, after all, not only left his country in very good economic shape, he also relenquished power and re-established democracy in time. I don’t think Palpatine was headed down that path.