: To be fair to Lucas, as soon as they decided to make Darth Vader Luke's son,
: it created a host of story problems that were going to be tough for even a
: much better storyteller to resolve, especially the whole "everyone's
: forgotten the Jedi and the Old Republic even though it can't have been
: more than 20 years ago" bit.
The Empire is, well, an evil empire. I chalked that up to Ministry of Truth-style historical revisionism.