No, but she says civilians deserve to be murdered by cops… again: brainwashing is brainwashing. Anyone can be radicalised.
Anyone can be the victim of propaganda, sure. Do I view my parents as victims of their propagandistic media diet? Yes. But they also haven’t picked up arms and joined a terrorist organization bent on ruling the world. At a certain point there’s a choice with an adult, brainwashing or not.
I’m just saying that if we want to feel better about stormtroopers in Star Wars being people, stunners is the way to go. Trying to find reasons to excuse murders just feels wrong. Stormtroopers being abducted as children or conscripting as adults doesn’t really matter. They are adults now with the ability to go against those orders (as Finn, Jannah, and several others have) or not. I don’t think we need to create an age limit for when someone joined they deserve to die or not.
Of course it matters if they joined as adults…that means that the choice Finn consciously made in TFA to defect was available to every one of them before they even joined and they all joined anyway. When Finn tells Rey he made a choice…well that’s actually his second choice. His first was to join in the first place, and his defection is him merely atoning for that choice like Vader atoning for his decision to follow Sidious. Before this atonement Han was right to shoot at Vader on Cloud City in an attempt to kill, even though you could argue that Vader was definitely brainwashed by Sidious to be evil over the course of Anakin’s entire childhood. There was still a choice that Anakin made, the same choice that Finn would have made were he conscripted as an adult.
If empathy is the goal, looking for excuses why some people deserve to die and others don’t, especially separated from their own actions (as no one is changing what the First Order is doing, we’re not talking about cutting out the violence stormtroopers inflict here), just doesn’t feel like the path to it.
If people being killed bothers you, stunners solve that problem. A new backstory that’s barely different doesn’t really change the fact that people who used to be in the same position as Finn and Jannah are now being killed by them.
Actually, stunners solve basically nothing since almost all of the First Order troopers die in starship crashes. Millions died before our eyes in the final minutes of TROS. If they were willing recruits, that’s entirely different than if they were kidnapped as children and programmed to be soldiers. We don’t cry out at the destruction of the Death Stars. Why? Because we view those inside as willing and complicit soldiers fighting for an evil empire, not as victims who were raised in isolation to kill.