I feel like partisan politics should be where the line is drawn, sure, but regardless of conservative, liberal, leftist, anarchist, etc. we are an imperial core as The West (if that’s where you are), comfortably watching a Disney+ show and having time to bullshit on the internet about Star Wars. It’s not like the previous administration in America isn’t just as complicit in war crimes and more. Andor is political, but not as a pseudo-campaign piece for a specific political party. What’s left of Maya Pei’s group are depicted as idiots, and they’re basically infighting radicals. No one but the structure of “Empire” is being singled out here as the galaxy’s evil. And no one is a clean-handed paragon of virtue.

To equate the stuff in Andor to one president or to “belief systems” or specific modern analogy is missing the point. It’s like Gilroy says, he’s writing from history, but we don’t learn history as trivia. There are mechanics, theory, cyclical patterns that we’re supposed to be able to recognize - and as a society, ideally work to avoid happening again. Recognizing fascism means recognizing all of its forms, and pretending that doesn’t exist intentionally inside of a work would be to miss out on half of what makes the show so good.

To an earlier point and hopefully this brings us back on track, is The Empire supposed to be one nation/country? @Vladius

In Andor alone, there’s Corporate Zones (PreMor) and Ghorman having their own autonomy, but we also know there are places like Hutt Space, like Bespin before ESB. It feels like the set up here is something sort of like the European Union. It’s not a perfect analogy because again, that’s not the point, but it does have valences in how cultural hegemony can often be understood as an iteration on imperialism. It’s how you can have all the ways the Empire is the Nazis - but also tackle the nuanced ways a modern western power slips into fascism all the same. The Empire is parabolic composite of all empire