return2ozmaThe truth...
WarlordSdocyOne reason for this is these shows don’t tend to show the morally questionable things a resistance has to do to be able to win. So it’s a lot easier to side with the resistance in Star Wars when they’re just fighting conventionally against the empire. I think a much better depiction of resistance can be seen in Star Trek Deep Space Nine with the Bajorans. They fought the Cardasians in a guerilla war which often led to civilians on both sides being killed. It’s a lot more murky but the Bajorans are still unequivocally viewed as the good guys since it was the only way to resist and get rid of the Cardasians and stop them from killing their people.
They blew up the death star! That was full of people. Thousands and thousands of soldiers and engineers, pilots etc. We all cheered. Id say it was pretty morally questionable.
Isn’t the death star specifically a military spaceship? You can’t just choose not to fire at a battleship just because there are engineers who won’t personally shoot at you in it.
I’ve had this argument with people before. It was a military installation so a viable target by the rules of war, you don’t need to be a combatant to be in the military. Even when they upgraded to an entire planet as a weapon they still only ever show military personnel being located there. Meanwhile the empire demonstrably killed civilians when they blew up entire planets.
Of course it’s all a bit arbitrary because people have just decided for themselves that it wasn’t purely a military installation, and that it had civilians and children onboard, even though they never showed that.
I think you can blame Star Trek for that view. TNG often showed families about the Enterprise whereas the original TV show was strictly ‘military’ in function. I’m old enough to have seen the OG Star Wars in theater, the Death Star was purely military. Anyone that died on it was a soldier.
A slight older conflict real world conflict that people are forgetting was the Irish Republican Army vs the British Army. Lots of bombings that killed civilians by the IRA. The Brits tried to not kill civilians, and they mostly succeeded. But they were still often viewed as the baddies.
Revolutionaries are very often a morally dark group. They are often willing to go above and beyond to justify killing to achieve their goals. But historically sometimes, it appears to a necessary thing to do so.