I quite agree that you can and should judge all those actions as evil actions and I'm against them in real life, and realize that they are fully villainous things to do in fiction. This post was really a reaction against the kind of fandom antis who feel that having any kind of sympathy for the bad guys makes you bad yourself. The moment you started to speculate on the motives of the bad guys in a way that had nuance and regarded them as complex human beings trying to live in their own society, you tended to come in for criticisms that you were a Nazi sympathizer. And that struck me as ridiculous, since the UK (where I'm from) and the US (where a lot of the rest of the fandom are from) have so often been the evil empire ourselves. The more we put evil at a distance and say we could never have done anyhing like that, the more we fail to understand both it and ourselves.

Which still doesn't make it good! I totally agree with that. I'm fully convinced that the FO is a terrible organization even for the most highly ranking people in it, but that's the kind of thing you say when you know you're having a conversation with some shades of grey :)

Also, yeah, I would have loved to train as a Jedi, and I think that young Hux (for example) is a good example of a child who would have benefitted enormously from being taken from his parent at an early age. So not even that is all black and white.