BENN GLECK: On Speciesism.

HNN Senior Outer Rim Analyst Benn Gleck refutes the accusation that the Empire is speciesist.

Senior Outer Rim Analyst Benn Gleck

Dear HNN readers,

The galactic malcontents are at it again: trying to tear down the accomplishments of our beloved Empire. Their 'cause' this time? The fabricated notion that the Empire is speciesist.

You know who are the real speciesists in this galaxy? The ones who accuse others of being speciesists!

The malcontents - by which I not only mean the insurgents, terrorists, and rebels who are trying to tear the fabric of galactic society apart, but also the politically-correct "intelligentsia", who want to give aliens a privileged status in this galaxy because of some imagined injustice that happened millennia ago.

Because these ideas have been poisoning people's brains for so long, I need to deconstruct the argument, which I will do below the fold. However, let me first give you a particular example:

You know about Senator "Princess" Leia Organa, that so-called do-gooder from Alderaan, who supposedly champions the rights of aliens? What you don't know is that when the HoloCams aren't on her, she's not quite as politically correct towards the aliens. She's even been overheard to call her consort's Wookiee slave a "walking carpet".

In the meantime, what do the politically-correct "intelligentsia" base their accusations of Imperial speciesism on? The fact that one time a detention bay guard once called that same Wookiee a "thing."

I'm sorry, politically-correct "intelligentsia", maybe we should send detention-bay guards to "sensitivity training".

But I've got more. Click 'read more' to get my full analysis of what rebel speciesism is all about and how they practice the soft bigotry of low expectations.

What they want you to believe is that the aliens have been discriminated against, and that they were the victims of human colonization from the core which supposedly exploited them and put them at a permanent disadvantage compared to humans. Then they want you to believe that the Republic (and the aliens for which it stood) gave these aliens the redistribution that they deserved because of their victim-ness.

The truth is the reverse.

When humanity explored and discovered the alien worlds, we brought with us advanced technology, advanced civilization, and our superior work ethic. If it wasn't for humanity, the aliens would still be stuck living in the stone-age conditions we found them in.

The sad problem is that the work ethic didn't take. I'm no xeno-biologist or cultural alienopologist, so I don't know if they are biologically or just culturally incapable of working for their own advancement. But, as humans, we really pulled them up by our bootstraps and gave them everything. With the advantages that we gave them, they really should have been able to make something of themselves if they had the gumption to do so.

You can't blame the Empire that they didn't have the ability to do so. You can blame the Republic for not giving them the incentive to do so. The aliens were given a hammock, and they took advantage of it.

The only thing the Empire is guilty of is trying to level the playing field again. To give our human children the same chances at life's success that the aliens were given by the redistributionist system of the Republic. After all, we humans worked for it for all the millennia. Shouldn't our children have the same shot at it as those aliens?

But that's not what the alien apologists of the rebellion or the politically-correct "intelligentsia" want you to believe. They want to go back and restore the Republic. The republic that bent and broke under the deficits that the alien welfare policies cost the human economic base; the Republic that failed to meet the alien and droid separatism of the Clone War; and the Republic that was itself speciesist in not giving humanity its due, but gave the hammock of undeserved civilization to the shiftless aliens that benefited from our largesse.

So, the next time that anyone calls the Empire speciesist, you tell them that they are in fact the only speciesists in the room, both against aliens as well as humanity.