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Yes, I think the term "meglomaniac" works very well.

Anakin: That's a generalisation. Chancellor Palpantine doesn't appear to be corrupt.

Obi-Wan: Chancellor Palpatine, I have observed, is very quick to latch on to the popular cries in the senate more than anything else...

You get what I am driving at? Palpatine himself didn't care one way or another, as long as there was him in charge....

Total cop out: Budget restraints. Georger couldn't afford to have 'aliens' that could speak and move freely until Jedi. The myth was then propergated beyond that.

I got the impression that the whole idea of the Emperor being racist was something Zahn came up with to explain why Thrawn, his military supergenius whom no one could ever outthink, was not leading the Imperial forces at Endor, or leading Vader's squadron, where you would expect the Empire's top military mind to be.

Maybe Vader's the racist. He certainly seems to have gotten some ill treatment from aliens when he was a boy... enslaved by one, another tried killing him treacherously in a pod race, another group of aliens brutally killed his mother, another group (the Nemoidians) tried endlessly to assassinate the woman he was in love with, etc.

On the surface at least, there's a lot more circumstantial evidence to support the idea that Vader is a racist than the Emperor.

Maybe he's not xenophobic at all.

The alleged xenophobia of Palpatine is metioned only in the EU. There's no hint of it at all in the movies, with the possible exception of "Wipe them out, all of them" (Although even there it's unclear if he's referring to the Gungans or to Amidala's gang)

Not only did he take a non-human as his Sith Apprentice, but his personal aide in AoTC was one of the blue, long-horned aliens.

The "xenophobia against non-humans" thing seems to me to be an invention of EU writers trying too hard to make Palpatine conform to Hitler. It is known of course that Lucas uses Hitler among others as a model for Palpatine's manouvering and power-grabbing, but these writers are taking that concept and having it run wild. They try to make his character follow that of das Fuhrer too closley, thus attempting in the "Palpatine xenophobia" to match Hitler's hatred of so-called "non-aryans".

Bastard wrote:Maybe he's not xenophobic at all.

The alleged xenophobia of Palpatine is metioned only in the EU. There's no hint of it at all in the movies, with the possible exception of "Wipe them out, all of them" (Although even there it's unclear if he's referring to the Gungans or to Amidala's gang)

Not only did he take a non-human as his Sith Apprentice, but his personal aide in AoTC was one of the blue, long-horned aliens.

The "xenophobia against non-humans" thing seems to me to be an invention of EU writers trying too hard to make Palpatine conform to Hitler. It is known of course that Lucas uses Hitler among others as a model for Palpatine's manouvering and power-grabbing, but these writers are taking that concept and having it run wild. They try to make his character follow that of das Fuhrer too closley, thus attempting in the "Palpatine xenophobia" to match Hitler's hatred of so-called "non-aryans".

I have a fix that's probably the truth anyway. Palpatine is not anti-alien. It's a tool he used to gain popularity among the galactic majority, humans, by favoring them over nonhumans. It was a ploy, like everything Palpatine did. Palpatine is a political genius, he was just using it to further his power. Palpatine's only true bias was against non-Force users, whom he regarded as intriniscally weak...which in a sense they were. Afterall, he did in time intend to replace all governors with Dark Side Adepts to institute a conversion toward his version of what the Sith Empire should be. This is revealed in the notes on Dark Empire by Tom Vietch in the Dark Empire Trade Paperback.