What the hell is going on over there
It doesn’t seem like op is necessarily promoting the position that this absolves Vader of crimes, and given that Star Wars as a whole is generally more idealistic in its plot it’s not that outlandish of a question, at least to me.
The real reactionary is in the comments. They’ll be in there, pointing out in the expanded universe story “Chewbacca’s Day Off” that a throwaway line in chapter 14 implies that the Jawa massacre on Doofulfus LXIX was actually a good thing because it made sure the hypertrains ran on time.
Just the title is a weird but sort of ok question. The body however makes it some sort of “good deeds of fascism” to me. Why would you expect anything good from a cartoonish villain that you describe as a “ruthless enforcer for the empire”?
mainstream political discourse in america is almost entirely based on vibes. every once in a while reality will intrude to make everyone talk about something that matters in somewhat reasonable terms, but that is always short lived. once you abstract that kind of ungrounded discussion through fiction and try to discuss that fiction at if it actually happened, it becomes no better than noise. this is a prime example of that.
the only way to discuss art in a meaningful way, especially politically, is to talk about what it is says (or is trying to say) about the real world that we live in. i think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that the interpretation that star wars invites you to make in the text is that the old republic is essentially a liberal democracy that gets overthrown by fascists. it’s a very liberal take on how that happens (through lies and treachery rather than openly calling for it), but that’s to be expected from art made by a liberal society.
I would say that while the movies focus on the lies and treachery aspect of it, the fact that the emperor simply proclaims the empire and everyone cheers for it seems very realistic these days.
The problem is they made Vader cool as fuck. That’s the problem of fiction in general, to portray something is inevitably to make it endearing. It’s the same thing with Starship Troopers, the satire is that the humans are fascists and we see the movie through the eyes of that society, but then Verhoeven makes money off the spin-off products like toys and funko pops that you are meant to play killing bugs with.
edit: and it’s the same problem I have with portrayals of the nazis even from purportedly anti-nazi movies. to show something is to make it endearing. History treats Hitler as some kind of anomaly of human history or humanity, as if there could not be a Hitler after Hitler. But to treat him as some kind of outsider is to remove the human component from him and in the process inevitably deify him. Even in purportedly anti-nazi movies you see this kind of deification process applied to the nazis. What happened after the war? Most nazis lost the uniform and that was it. They still live.
