It’s interesting to look at the media we have between Episodes III and IV and see what the Rebellion was up to. For a long time, it seemed to be about hiding and protecting what Jedi still lived after the Order 66 purge. Then you had the various stories of pushback by the likes of the Specter cell or Saw Gerrera’s partisans. And clearly, Luther Rael and Kleya Marki’s organization – aka Axis – was working to build the framework for something larger to fight back against the Empire.
The question was…what was the endgame? How did they think they were going to vanquish the Empire even before the ability to destroy a planet appeared? For all the drilling in the jungles of Yavin, boots on the ground were never going to be enough to hold off the Empire. And it was going to be very difficult to outgun the Imperial Fleet at any point. It forces the question: was the Death Star the Empire’s biggest mistake? Without that – with all those resources turned toward more Star Destroyers, more TIE fighters, more stormtroopers – would it not have become nearly impossible for the Rebellion to ever have enough resources to carve out even a piece of the Outer Rim outside Imperial influence?
Most of the activity in Rebels is about either rallying what Jedi exist, building the Rebel fleet, or sabotaging the Empire at a high level. All of which is viable and good work, but by comparison to, say, the IRA in Northern Ireland – the idea that you can make it so untenable that the Empire will withdraw and give up becomes problematic when you have a single authoritarian Emperor and the resources of a galaxy backing him. So at some level, it feels in retrospect as if the Rebellion’s ultimate goal was just to prevent the Empire’s grip getting any tighter while waiting for some sort of opportunity to come along.
And it’s clear the leadership of the Rebellion was divided on where and how to fight. It certainly felt as if some elements were willing to keep their powder dry in perpetuity, which makes me wonder whether there would have ever been a counterattack in the absence of the Death Star. What’s evident from all of this is that the Emperor himself was the author of his own destruction, both by betting the house on the Death Star (twice) and betting that he could lure the Rebels into one place to be wiped out.
But you have to wonder what the original victory conditions were, and if they acknowledged just how hard it was going to be to return to how things were – or build something new.
One sympathizes.