First, there's this not-quite-impartial gag posted at Ace, starring Billy Dee Williams. (And MAN, is he getting old.)
That, of course, put me in the mood to root for the Empire. Which makes this post at National Review even sweeter.
Several things have to be agreed upon before you root for the Empire. (Which, I know, sounds like heresy, but if you hear out Jonathan Last and take some creative assumptions, it really does work.) First, you have to assume that while you're continuing to suspend disbelief in the rest of the movies, you don't suspend it for political sub-text as well. The Rebel Alliance is a bunch of (small-d) democrats because we want them to be. If you toss that out and assume nothing is assumed, then Last's premise begins to hold water.
Following on with that, you have to remember that despite Lucas's preamble, this galaxy really isn't that far from the laws of right and wrong. Meaning, that very little in this universe is pure evil and pure good. If you accept the premise that there are good liberals and bad conservatives (or, for our friends on the left, corrupt Democrats and "compassionate" Republicans), that the greatest form of government the world has ever known is (as Churchill so famously put it) merely the best of those ever tried, and that the burden of moronic bureaucracy and vote-selling graft is at least as bad as our democratic virtues are good, then you have to realize that the movies we're watching are not quite so black-and-white as Lucas tries to make them.
If the Rebels aren't necessarily all that great, can the Empire really be all that bad?
(Come to think of it, maybe my son has a good reason to be playing an Imperial in Star Wars Galaxies....)
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