Metahive wrote:Simon Jester wrote:I think you're oversimplifying. Social structures do not get remade overnight, nor even in a single year.
The Clone War devastated large swaths of the galaxy and caused plenty of socio-political turmoil, enough tools for Palpatine to mold society in his image. Do you think he only started with it as soon as the war was over?
The war only
lasted a few years. This is simply not enough time to take a general acceptance of the legitimacy of the Republic and turn it into a brute-force military dictatorship.
Rule by force requires institutions, Metahive, it is not something that can work in the absence of those institutions. You
need secret police, you
need propaganda, you
need a hard core of Party loyalists who have to be developed over time.
Historically, this transformation takes many years; even the Nazis spent about ten years* working on the problem to silence critics and create a mechanism for spying on their own citizens effectively. And Germany already had a strong, organized central government before the Nazis took charge, one that they could turn into the nucleus of the state oppression system they needed. Palpatine had no such thing before the war; he had to create his own government from scratch.
So where do you get support for this notion that the day after he was proclaimed Emperor, he simply turned around and started ignoring everyone who had formerly been powerful in the Republic? That there
wasn't an evolutionary process, a gradual purging of members of the pro-republic old guard and promotion of supporters of the New Order, with Palpatine having to keep one eye on popular support and public perception of his rule as legitimate for quite some time, until
finally, nearly twenty years after the end of the Clone Wars, he can afford to cast off the Senate and rule by naked force?
*These ten years began before they took power, because they were able to transform Party organizations like the Brown Shirts into the recruitment ground and basis for the secret police and other institutions they needed to ensure totalitarian rule.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that in his early years as Emperor, Palpatine was far more dependent on the consent of the governed than he would have liked. The fact that politically informed people were still saying things like "the Imperial Senate will not sit still for this" twenty years later should be a tipoff: even at that late date, the Senate's displeasure was still a logical threat to make to an Imperial minion overstepping his boundaries. Yes, by that point Palpatine was confident enough to disband the Senate, but that was after twenty years of cementing his own independent bureaucracy into position.
Nope, those people might as well have been either naive or overly cautious. Admiral Tagge, the guy you're probably speaking about strikes me as the latter.
You'll note that Tagge was the only person to correctly identify the stolen Death Star plans as a credible threat; this does not strike me as a sign that he was naive or cowardly.
Under my interpretation, he is
wisely considering a problem (the Senate) that Imperial agents have had to worry about for a long time: most of his career. The fact that
by Episode IV, when the Empire has ruled the galaxy for nearly twenty years, the Senate's displeasure is no longer relevant, does not mean it became irrelevant the moment the Clone Wars ended.
I am very skeptical of the idea that Palpatine could have turned around and openly defied the Senate a short time after taking office. You invoke the example of Augustus- thing is, I'm not convinced Augustus could have openly crushed the Senate, that keeping it in place was purely a matter of sentiment.
Your incredulity is noted. Augustus left the Senate intact because he wanted to placate the rest of the lingering republican sentiment within the roman public. De facto though it was a mere facade and he called the shots alone from day one of his "coronation". Lip service, nothing more.
What do you think would have happened had he not paid that lip service and placated those sentiments?
I think Augustus was a much smarter political operator than you are, and one who knew something you don't:
the appearance of legitimacy matters. There are things that a man, even a dictator, cannot do if he wishes to retain power. For an ambitious yet patient dictator, this fact is crucial: it forces him to move slowly, to form alliances with useful members of the old guard with the intent of gradually co-opting them and finally making them irrelevant.
Augustus ruled through a very robust combination of popular support, military power,
and satisfying the desire of the patrician class to keep up the appearances of a Roman Republic. Had he discarded the Republic openly rather than "paying lip service," things might have gone ill for him.
I would argue that Palpatine did the same- took the time to build up a power base that could
function as a government before dissolving the Senate. Having the loyalty of the clonetroopers was not, and could not be, enough to run the Empire. He needed the bureaucracy, he needed the general consent of
most of the governed to accept his rule so that he could single out the handful of troublemakers it was worth making examples of.
These things did not spring up overnight, and could not be made to spring up during the Clone Wars while a major military conflict was on.
He needed to create from scratch a secret police force. He needed to replace Clone War naval officers with men he could trust to burn dissidents' worlds at his command: men like Tarkin. He needed to cement the loyalty of this military to himself personally, the nonclones as well as the clones. He needed to construct powerful superweapons that would both give him an ace in the hole in the event of a conflict with the fleet, and that would place the really decisive power in the galaxy under his direct control, rather than being forced to trust his minions.
At the beginning of the Empire anyone below the rank of Admiral was a 100% loyal clone trooper.
Really.
No womb-born officers, no local defense forces, no planets with armed forces in their own right that had served as Republic allies and friends during the Clone Wars. Nothing at all, the
entire war effort was prosecuted exclusively by clones. All clones in the support branches, all clones responsible for maintaining the war machine. All. Clones.
I'm sorry, but this breaks my suspension of disbelief so hard that even if you
can provide suitable canon evidence (which I beg leave to doubt)... all it's going to prove is that the authors of the Star Wars continuity are so blindingly ignorant of human realities that they can't describe a plausible 'galaxy at war' scenario to save their lives.
Because for that to work, you would basically need the entire human population of the Republic to stop being human, for the government to
actively forbid people to fight in its defense, for the Republic to have not merely a shortage of troops to fight the Separatists but
no enforcement branch whatsoever, for every battle on every front to be fought by clones, for Kamino to produce enough men to protect every world in the galaxy...
This is utterly laughable, and you surely know it.
The clones did not hesitate to gun down their formal superiors during Order 66. What could have a dissident Admiral done under such prospects? By the time the clones were phased out in favor of conscripts and volunteers, insurrections where Admirals absconded with their entire fleet in tow became a bigger problem for Palpatine (see Harkov and Zaarin), not a smaller one. This is the complete opposite of what you argue Palpatine was aiming for.
Again, you fail to understand.
Rule by military dictatorship is not just about the heavy metal, or even about having a loyal enforcer corps.
You need intelligence organs to tell you
where to send your crushing military force.
You need secret police to monitor public opinion and make sure you won't be caught off-balance by a general uprising that might overwhelm your crushing military force.
You need a propaganda arm to keep the public pacified and divided, or at least not unified against you.
You need an imperial bureaucracy that can issue orders. It's no good threatening to nuke a planet to a billiard ball for disobeying you if you haven't appointed a governor with a large enough staff and enough local knowledge to run the place; without that, you're not giving them any meaningful orders
to obey.
If you have these things, the loyalty of the military is not your foremost concern; you can use loyal military units to suppress disloyal ones easily enough.
If you
do not have these things, having a loyal army of enforcer-troops who would boil their own grandmothers alive for you isn't going to be enough to run things, even should you be so lucky as to have one. They can eliminate direct threats to your rule, but eliminating domestic opposition is not the same as ruling the state.
The Republic had none of the institutions needed for Palpatine to establish dictatorial rule prior to the Clone Wars, and the time and urgency of the war gave Palpatine no opportunity to do more than lay the groundwork. It is no wonder that he did not shift to openly ruling by naked force immediately after being declared Emperor. That he saw the need to
gradually cow, weaken, and dismantle the Senate, while assembling his own apparatus of state authority and his own superweapons in order to
eventually replace it.