Star Wars: The Acolyte official trailer

[pendell]

There's a lot here that's right, but I'd phrase it slightly differently. The PT is definitely "about institutional decay and failure of the constitutional order in the face of overwhelming evil" but it's about the collapse of the Republic. The Jedi fail to save it, but that's a different failure. And the question is, I think was it an institutional/moral failure, or was it merely defeat?

Interesting question. Perhaps we can use a simile: If the Republic is a body, the Jedi are the body's immune system. The Sith are a virus. You can fully expect an immune system to have trouble with a new virus variant (as I'm sure we already remember from 2020) and sometimes the changes are too far, too fast for the immune system to cope, no matter how good it is.

And there's a potential counterfactual: Flash back to Mace Windu entering the Chancellor's office to arrest Palpatine. Imagine Palpatine genuinely surrenders, is put in restraints, made to do the perf walk in an orange jumpsuit or its equivalent to the Senate for trial, as Mace originally intended: "The Senate will decide your fate."

The odds are pretty good that the Senate finds Palpatine not guilty. Impeachment is a political act, not a legal one, and Palpatine is extraordinarily popular. Not only is he the hero-executive of the war, along the lines of Churchill or Lincoln, but he's also got a network of friends and favors all throughout the Senate. I think the only way you could get a guilty verdict is if the Jedi mass force-persuaded the whole lot, and I'm not sure that's even possible.

Having declared Palpatine not guilty, their next step is to order the arrest of Mace Windu on charges of treason. The Jedi will not accept rule by a Sith, and so we get something very like Order 66 anyway.

This would be a good argument that the Jedi were going to lose whatever they did.

But I think there is still some fault to find. Remember that scene where, after Palpatine resisted, Mace Windu decides to kill him. He tells Anakin "he controls the Senate and the course, he's too dangerous to be left alive!"

In that moment, Mace is both echoing Palpatine's own words to Anakin on the Confederacy flagship and taking the action Palpatine ordered Anakin to do -- to kill a seemingly helpless prisoner without trial.

In that moment, Anakin can't see any moral difference between Palpatine and Mace. Nor can we, the audience. The equivalence has been made as anviliciously obvious as possible.

And I find it telling that Mace notes he "controls the senate and the courts" -- in other words, Mace knows already that the Republic isn't going to convict Palpatine, just as I mentioned in my counterfactual. Which is why he tries to reverse history with an assassination. Which is what it is. For all that Palpatine is a villain, he is absolutely right that the Jedi are trying to kill him and take over -- which is what they will have to do if they are to have a prayer of setting things right. They're acting in accordance with the Dark Side. From the best of motives, yes. And there's still a galaxy level of moral difference between the men who have become grimy in war and are prepared to kill a dictator and the man who would wipe out entire planets on a whim. But the fact is, they're playing Palpatine's game by Palpatine's rules. That's why he's always one step ahead of them. True light, altruism, throwing away the lightsaber as in Episode 6, confuses and perplexes him. He doesn't understand the Light Side at all. But he understands the Dark Side better than anyone else alive.

By the end of Episode III, the Jedi are sufficiently operating on Dark Side parameters that Palpatine can run rings around them while they are as lost , blind, as babes in the woods. It's because, somewhere along the line, they've lost their way. That's why Qui-Gonn didn't fit in with them, and that's why Palpatine is able to defeat them.

And so I believe it was an institutional failure on the parts of both the Republic and the Jedi.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Infernally Clay]

But the fact is, they're playing Palpatine's game by Palpatine's rules. That's why he's always one step ahead of them. True light, altruism, throwing away the lightsaber as in Episode 6, confuses and perplexes him. He doesn't understand the Light Side at all. But he understands the Dark Side better than anyone else alive.

Yeah, I mentioned this before as well. That everyone is playing Palpatine's game by his rules and the only way to win is to not play, just as Luke proved. Some people are resistant to the notion that the Jedi had lost their way, that they had "fallen from the light they held so dear" as Barriss Offee put it, but it's pretty blatant, y'know? Star Wars isn't exactly subtle about it.

It was mentioned before that the more closely you look at the Jedi Council the worse they come off and that's kinda true. Either the Jedi Council knew it was willingly serving corrupt politicians or it was ignorant to the corruption that gripped the Senate and I'm not sure which one is worse.

I think it's possible the Jedi began to compromise on their ideals for the sake of self-preservation, falling back on strict adherence to tradition and dogma so that the Jedi Order would endure. That might explain why Qui-Gon Jinn was considered a renegade and a maverick when only a few centuries prior there were many Jedi like him and they were known as Wayseekers. Indeed, a novel that came out a couple of years ago explicitly says if Wayseekers were still allowed within the Jedi Order then Qui-Gon would have been one.

I feel like it all ties into the overarching notion that the Jedi withdrew. For centuries the Jedi were spread all across the galaxy, but then they abandoned their outposts and temples and operated exclusively out of Coruscant and it blinded them to what was happening beyond the core systems. Wayseekers, who could traditionally go anywhere and do anything because they followed their gut and the will of the Force, stopped being a thing as obeying the Council became more important than obeying the Force.

I don't think it's outlandish to believe the Jedi Order went hardline traditionalist as a way to survive the trouble brewing in the galaxy long before Palpatine entered stage left and, really, the fact that Mace Windu is one of the most ardent traditionalists in the Order (and his voice was usually the most prominent when the Council made A Very Bad Decision) kinda ties it all together.

[ecarden]

But the fact is, they're playing Palpatine's game by Palpatine's rules. That's why he's always one step ahead of them. True light, altruism, throwing away the lightsaber as in Episode 6, confuses and perplexes him. He doesn't understand the Light Side at all. But he understands the Dark Side better than anyone else alive.

I certainly see the parallel and it works rhetorically...but not logically. Vader doesn't turn on Palpatine in Episode 6 because Palpatine is killing someone who is helpless and not resisting. Palpatine has, by this point, killed billions of people who are helpless and not resisting. Vader turns on Palpatine because Palpatine is about to kill his son, which simply isn't true in the Episode 3.

Now, you could also interpret it as Luke showing Vader what a Jedi should be, while Mace fails--but I think that's a stretch. Vader's line after all isn't about how it's wrong to kill Palpatine, but that he, Vader, needs Palpatine. Which is also no longer true by Episode 6.

I guess some people would prefer the simplicity of pointing at Palpatine and blaming him for everything, even if there were cracks in the walls long before he showed up.

I see the Jedi Order as, as I said, a monolithic religion that hasn't had to change or adapt for a thousand years and is so set in its ways that it holds fiercely to its archaic traditions and cares much less about the individual than it does the whole. That the Council believes that as long as the Jedi Order endures, the personal cost to allow it to do so is an acceptable one and everyone sacrifices something.

The thing is, I genuinely consider that to be a fantastic narrative choice. People complain that it's bad writing that the Jedi Order was so deeply flawed but I think it's a great set up for a conflict. As you say, the Sith saw where they went wrong and adapted. The Jedi, however, did something right one time and then decided they'd never do anything different again. That doesn't make the Jedi bad people, just misguided in their overconfidence, which is a compelling way to tell the story of how the Jedi Order fell.

The fact that we can go back and look at the choices the Jedi Council made and identify when their strict adherence to tradition overcame their common sense is actually a good thing, because it provides clarity and context. We can see where they went wrong, and the debate should really be less about what they did wrong and more about what they could have done better.

It shouldn't be a controversial opinion to say that the Jedi Council was wrong to do nothing with the information they were given about the clone army being manufactured by Dooku, for example, but there is obviously some debate to be had regarding what they should have done instead.

Without wishing to be unkind, or impolite, I will say that perhaps there are reasons some members of the audience are uncomfortable attempting to apportion blame to the victims of a genocide for their failure to prevent their own genocide, besides the simplicity of those audience members. To be clear, this is not intended as an accusation, or an insult.

And, 'how do regimes become genocidal' and 'how is genocide justified by its proponents' and 'what makes people willing to commit genocide' and especially 'how do we avoid genocide' are all really interesting and important questions, but by having the genocide carried out by order of one person and by mind controlling an army to carry it out...Star Wars is uniquely badly suited to address that question.

The fall of the Republic however involves no such cop-outs and therefore is more easily discussed in its real world applicability and analysis.

[gbaji]

It would be more accurate to say that we're discussing what the Jedi Order may or may not have done wrong to allow events to play out the way they did, since some people seem pretty adamant that they did nothing wrong at all and were simply outmanoeuvred by Palpatine at every step.

I think there's a middle ground where the Order did make mistakes, but that does not mean that every single thing they did was a mistake.

Or.... flipping it around, if someone disagrees that a specific thing the Jedi did was a mistake (like, for example, the method used to train Anakin by assigning him as padawan to Kenobi), that is not the same as saying "The Jedi never made any mistakes". Some things are legitimate mistakes: I happen to think that choosing to train Anakin at all was a huge one, and the method didn't matter. They were doomed to fail. Others are not. The Jedi choosing to oppose the Separatists was not a mistake. It was the best choice they had out of a set of not good choices available to them. Simlarly, the choice to accept the use of the Clone Army was not a mistake (and frankly, not a choice they made anyway, that was the Senate). We can certainly debate the degree to which they worked directly with the military and clones during the war, but I don't think them being actively involved at all was a mistake (loops back to "they had to help the Republic oppose the Separatists").

It's not about whether we agree/disagree on whether the Jedi made mistakes at all, but on which specific actions/choices were actual mistakes and which were merely the best out of a set of poor choices.

The broader problem is that Star Wars is both uninterested in addressing the political situation with any detail and tends to be really terrible at it when they try. The Coruscant-focused episode in Mandalorian, where Dr. Pershing gets his mind erased by the mole because everyone leaves the room and there's apparently no security record of the procedure, is comically bad in terms of portraying competence by the authorities, and this is hardly an exception.

Yeah, well... the sheer inconsistency in the SW universe when it comes to things like records, video surveillance, etc is kinda stagerring. Basically, whether those things exist seems to depend entirely on what the plot of the current story needs for it to work. There's a scary number of plotlines in Rebels, Resistance, and Clone Wars, that would be nullified with the equivalent of a Ring doorbell.

Also, the biggest mistake people have been pointing out is not sticking to their guns and training Anakin as a Jedi. Their first impressions about him were exactly correct.

This is generally my position. Arguing about the method of training is like arguing about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic.


I'll also kinda respond to a few posts about how Palpatine is presented as this insanely capable master manipulator to make everything work out for him. I mean, he's not terrible, but to be perfectly honest, given the circumstances that are present at the time, he didn't really have to be that masterful to make this work. If you stop and think about it, the parallels to the Fall of the Roman Republic are very strong in the PT, and that fell almost by freaking accident. The right conditions exist, and just about any conflict and anyone pushing in the direction of empire will make it happen.

The political stuff is pretty much already rife for what happened in the PT. The only extra elements (cause it's SW, right?) are the Jedi and the Sith. And that's pretty much handwaved via multiple observations during the PT that the presence of the Sith "clouds" the Jedi vision/judgement. That's likely the only thing "special" that Palpatine needed here. The actual political machinations were pretty straightfoward. But the existence of Jedi who can sense patterns and whatnot and prevent horrible things from happening, means you need to have a Sith at the middle of things to make those horrible things happen.

Ironically, we might even speculate that because the Jedi have been around "guiding" and "protecting" the Republic for so long, said Republic has been weakened all along in terms of its intrinsic stability, and could only stand as long as the Jedi were there, kinda proping it up. Toss one semi-capable and ambitious Sith in there, and the whole thing falls like a house of cards. It's a theory anyway...

[Infernally Clay]

Without wishing to be unkind, or impolite, I will say that perhaps there are reasons some members of the audience are uncomfortable attempting to apportion blame to the victims of a genocide for their failure to prevent their own genocide, besides the simplicity of those audience members. To be clear, this is not intended as an accusation, or an insult.

And, 'how do regimes become genocidal' and 'how is genocide justified by its proponents' and 'what makes people willing to commit genocide' and especially 'how do we avoid genocide' are all really interesting and important questions, but by having the genocide carried out by order of one person and by mind controlling an army to carry it out...Star Wars is uniquely badly suited to address that question.

The fall of the Republic however involves no such cop-outs and therefore is more easily discussed in its real world applicability and analysis.

I really wish you hadn’t gone there, because now the debate has been framed in a way it wasn’t intended to be and hadn’t been up until your post. It was never about genocide or victim blaming or anything like that, but now that it is we can’t obviously continue the discussion any further because of the context that has now been applied to it.

[Keltest]

I really wish you hadn’t gone there, because now the debate has been framed in a way it wasn’t intended to be and hadn’t been up until your post. It was never about genocide or victim blaming or anything like that, but now that it is we can’t obviously continue the discussion any further because of the context that has now been applied to it.

Speaking for nobody but myself, ive had that subtext in mind from the beginning. Accusing people of victim blaming just seemed like something that would not convince anyone of anything.

[ecarden]

Speaking for nobody but myself, ive had that subtext in mind from the beginning.

To be clear, it didn't occur to me until I deleted about half a dozen responses and sat down to figure out why I was getting so hot about an entirely fictional debate. I think subconsciously it's been nagging at me for a while, but I did have to think through what wasn't working for me in that argument to get there and I certainly don't blame anyone else for not viewing it the same way. After all, this is fictional, there are no real victims here, but I kept writing and deleting comments which were way too hot for this forum and topic and believe I've figured out why. So I decided to explain why it was provoking that reaction from me (which I should have been more explicit about, rather than hide behind 'perhaps' and 'some members of the audience'.

[KorvinStarmast]

I certainly see the parallel and it works rhetorically...but not logically. Vader doesn't turn on Palpatine in Episode 6 because Palpatine is killing someone who is helpless and not resisting. Palpatine has, by this point, killed billions of people who are helpless and not resisting. Vader turns on Palpatine because Palpatine is about to kill his son, which simply isn't true in the Episode 3.

Which does dovetail somewhat into Vader/Anakin's original motive for turning to the darkside as regards his beloved, etc. It's personal with him. Very personal.

Without wishing to be unkind, or impolite, I will say that perhaps there are reasons some members of the audience are uncomfortable attempting to apportion blame to the victims of a genocide for their failure to prevent their own genocide, besides the simplicity of those audience members. To be clear, this is not intended as an accusation, or an insult.

And, 'how do regimes become genocidal' and 'how is genocide justified by its proponents' and 'what makes people willing to commit genocide' and especially 'how do we avoid genocide' are all really interesting and important questions, but by having the genocide carried out by order of one person and by mind controlling an army to carry it out...Star Wars is uniquely badly suited to address that question.

I find that, as often as not, someone on the internet uses that term, genocide, it is hyperbole and being used to shut down a discussion. Not always, but with an unfortunate frequency.

That out of the way: the emperor, and his henchmen, and in particular Vader are capable of worse. Yes, worse.

We see in the beginning of Episode 4 them using the Death Star to blowing up an entire populated and civilized planet into atoms - to make a political point.
That strikes me as a substantially worse thing to do than genocide. It is monstrous on a scale, on an order of magnitude, that mere humans on our little planet have not yet reached ... but Episode IV suggests that we may have that level of evil within us, as a species. Not a comfortable thought.

The fall of the Republic however involves no such cop-outs and therefore is more easily discussed in its real world applicability and analysis.

Yes, it's easier to discuss.

[Infernally Clay]

Speaking for nobody but myself, ive had that subtext in mind from the beginning. Accusing people of victim blaming just seemed like something that would not convince anyone of anything.

I mean, the Empire is evil. Cartoonishly so. They have a superweapon that can blow up planets, killing billions of innocent people in an instant, and using that thing was basically just Tuesday for them. The only time the Death Star (a cheesy name if I ever heard one) was used menacingly was in Rogue One, but even that was to set up an epic escape scene. What Palpatine did to the Jedi barely even registers as a blip compared to what else the Empire does and the First Order was arguably worse than the Empire.

People tend to avoid discussing Star Wars using terms with such weight in the real world because it's a pretty harmless space opera and when discussing Star Wars you ideally want to keep the tone similarly light-hearted. The same is true for most fiction, really. Nobody really wants to apply real world ethics to exaggerated villains in a fictional story unless that's what the discussion is implicitly about.

I didn't really sign up for that, though, so I don't feel comfortable continuing the conversation.

[Mechalich]

I find that, as often as not, someone on the internet uses that term, genocide, it is hyperbole and being used to shut down a discussion. Not always, but with an unfortunate frequency.

In this case it's also of dubious accuracy. The Star Wars franchise has always referred to the destruction of the Jedi as a purge - ie. Great Jedi Purge - which is a much more precise descriptive match to the nature of events (it was a very complete purge, since Vader and a handful of others are the only one spared, but that's not unprecedented in history).

I also think that it is very important, to avoid heated emotions, to differentiate between the Jedi Order, the institution, and the Jedi, the people. The Order is a collection of goals, policies, precedents, norms, traditions, and a very small cadre of decision makers (who, in a rare case in fictional, we can name in basically their entirety). The Jedi, the people, are the 99.9% of knights, masters, padawans, initiates, and service corps members who have functionally no voice in any of the institutional operations. So, when I, and I assume most other posters, write something like 'the Jedi Order had flaws X, Y, and Z' this is a reference to the institution, which primarily encompasses a history of choices made by various High Council Members, many of whom are centuries dead. It is not referring to the members at all, because they have no voice.

[Errorname]

The odds are pretty good that the Senate finds Palpatine not guilty. Impeachment is a political act, not a legal one, and Palpatine is extraordinarily popular. Not only is he the hero-executive of the war, along the lines of Churchill or Lincoln, but he's also got a network of friends and favors all throughout the Senate. I think the only way you could get a guilty verdict is if the Jedi mass force-persuaded the whole lot, and I'm not sure that's even possible.

For what it's worth, being the hero-executive who represents a country's participation in a war is not as secure a position as it might seem, it's very easy to imagine public opinion turning wildly south for both of them had things played out differently (and indeed in Churchill's case it did basically the second the war was over)

Now, you could also interpret it as Luke showing Vader what a Jedi should be, while Mace fails--but I think that's a stretch. Vader's line after all isn't about how it's wrong to kill Palpatine, but that he, Vader, needs Palpatine. Which is also no longer true by Episode 6.

Mace is also just obviously objectively correct that Palpatine needs to die. He cannot be contained, he is actively trying to kill everyone, he's a threat to the entire galaxy, there has never been a man in Star Wars who deserved death more and it's not like the Jedi are at all pacifistic.

Without wishing to be unkind, or impolite, I will say that perhaps there are reasons some members of the audience are uncomfortable attempting to apportion blame to the victims of a genocide for their failure to prevent their own genocide, besides the simplicity of those audience members. To be clear, this is not intended as an accusation, or an insult.

The Jedi are such a centralized and militarized institution enmeshed so tightly into the Republic that I always saw them as a wing of the state, and their purge was correspondingly more akin to a totalitarian eliminating their political rivals by wiping out a branch of the military than anything else.

[Dargaron]

The Jedi are such a centralized and militarized institution enmeshed so tightly into the Republic that I always saw them as a wing of the state, and their purge was correspondingly more akin to a totalitarian eliminating their political rivals by wiping out a branch of the military than anything else.

Behold: a branch of the Republic military.

[Mordar]

I mean, the Empire is evil. Cartoonishly so. They have a superweapon that can blow up planets, killing billions of innocent people in an instant, and using that thing was basically just Tuesday for them. The only time the Death Star (a cheesy name if I ever heard one)

Blame Luke Starkiller. It is all his fault.

- M

[Errorname]

Behold: a branch of the Republic military.

Unironically, yes. Literally the entire grand army of the Republic are former or current child soldiers, and a good chunk of the navy is too. That even the Jedi's young cadets are not spared is meant to be deeply evil and the point of no return for Anakin Skywalker, but that the Jedi had recruits that young who had been taken from their families to be trained as warriors does not say good things about them as an institution.

[Infernally Clay]

Behold: a branch of the Republic military.

Mechalich addressed this quite well:

The Jedi, the people, are the 99.9% of knights, masters, padawans, initiates, and service corps members who have functionally no voice in any of the institutional operations. So, when I, and I assume most other posters, write something like 'the Jedi Order had flaws X, Y, and Z' this is a reference to the institution, which primarily encompasses a history of choices made by various High Council Members, many of whom are centuries dead. It is not referring to the members at all, because they have no voice.

Indeed. I may slip up from time to time but I do try to make a point to refer to the Jedi Council itself, not the Jedi as a whole, when discussing choices or mistakes that were made by the Order.

I would imagine a fair few Jedi weren't exactly happy that the Council excommunicated Ahsoka (a hero and exemplar of Jedi values in her own right) for a crime everyone knew she didn't commit just because it was more important to the Council to show the Jedi Order was cooperative than to defend one of their own, but it's not like they had any say in the matter and only Anakin really had the leeway to do something about it. The Jedi Order can't exactly kick out the Chosen One or they would have done it years ago.

[gbaji]

Speaking for nobody but myself, ive had that subtext in mind from the beginning. Accusing people of victim blaming just seemed like something that would not convince anyone of anything.

I also think there's a middle ground between "victim blaming" and "victims are blameless" too. Sometimes, people do suffer consequences as a result of their own choices and actions (more often the case than not, in fact). That does not at all mean that "the Jedi got what they deserved" either though. Not remotely what I'm saying.

I just find it odd to be hesitant to examine the choices and actions of a person or group on the grounds that they were later the victims of something like what happened to the Jedi. To me one has nothing to do with the other. Doubly so when we're talking about a work of fiction.

[ecarden]

I find that, as often as not, someone on the internet uses that term, genocide, it is hyperbole and being used to shut down a discussion. Not always, but with an unfortunate frequency.

In this case it's also of dubious accuracy. The Star Wars franchise has always referred to the destruction of the Jedi as a purge - ie. Great Jedi Purge - which is a much more precise descriptive match to the nature of events (it was a very complete purge, since Vader and a handful of others are the only one spared, but that's not unprecedented in history).

I mean...no? It very explicitly is genocide. They were a religious order, who were targeted for that and murdered for it. They killed a large number of Jedi, the vast majority, with the intent to destroy the entire group. It's a dead classical form of genocide.

The Jedi are such a centralized and militarized institution enmeshed so tightly into the Republic that I always saw them as a wing of the state, and their purge was correspondingly more akin to a totalitarian eliminating their political rivals by wiping out a branch of the military than anything else.

Hard to discuss this without referencing the real world, but any number of governments have had religious components explicitly or implicitly as part of the government. If a new government took over and killed every member of those religious groups (except the small handful who were coerced into renouncing their prior faith and acting as people literally given the title of Inquisitor to hunt down any surviving faithful)...that would still be genocide.

Like, as people have mentioned, Star Wars is not very subtle, as a general matter. What was done to the Jedi is very clearly (and intentionally) genocide, followed up by very deliberate lying about the motivations and attempting to destroy all knowledge of the group that was destroyed.

I also think there's a middle ground between "victim blaming" and "victims are blameless" too. Sometimes, people do suffer consequences as a result of their own choices and actions (more often the case than not, in fact). That does not at all mean that "the Jedi got what they deserved" either though. Not remotely what I'm saying.

Certainly there's a middle ground. But I'd distinguish between the 'consequences as a result of their own choices and actions' and 'events which occurred subsequent to their actions/choices.' (ETA: hey, we could call this but-for and proximate causation, if we wanted to) For it to be a consequence (in any interesting sense) it needs to be related to the nature of the choice and a, at least theoretically predictable result. Like, if I jaywalk and get hit by a car and die, I don't deserve to get hit by a car, but it is still a consequence of my action and I certainly knowingly put myself at risk by jaywalking.

If I jaywalk and get hit by a meteor and die...well, it's still a result of my decision to jaywalk that I'm dead. If I hadn't jaywalked, it would have missed me...but to say that's a consequence of my actions is...odd.

And the mistakes the Jedi make (and they do make them) are so massively disconnected from the results (Palpatine activated Order 66 and murders them all--almost) that I simply don't see the connection. The key action Palpatine has taken is to complete the corruption and downfall of the Republic. As you can tell by the fact that the Jedi fight him, almost to the last child, while the Senate cheers him and agrees to proclaim him emperor.

I just find it odd to be hesitant to examine the choices and actions of a person or group on the grounds that they were later the victims of something like what happened to the Jedi. To me one has nothing to do with the other. Doubly so when we're talking about a work of fiction.

We're walking close to the edge here, but there's definitely something to be said for both viewpoints. To stick to fiction, I do think you can create real problems for yourself (and Superman does this a lot too) where you take a group that's most known in the fiction for being, well, extinct, or essentially so and then decide, 'I know, I'll try to make this faction grey, that will be much more interesting than just a bunch of sainted victims!' Because it can really come across as trying to narratively justify the extinction/genocide the audience already knows is coming. Does that mean they should be left as perfect martyrs? Probably not, but it's a really hard balancing act to do.

And it feels especially bad, to me, in a story which...isn't about them?

Like Krypton isn't about the Kryptonians, it's about what it means to Clark. And similarly, revealing some Kryptonian dirty laundry isn't about 'what did the Kryptonians actually think/feel/believe?' it's about 'what does this revelation mean to Clark?'

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it feels gross to me. The PT does better, because it is about the tragic fall of the Republic and the Jedi Order...which makes all the focus on 'what was really wrong with the Jedi Order' feel sort of beside the point? ETA: And, though I'm sure it is not the intent, feels like it is attempting to undermine the tragedy of that, which is what prompts a lot of the heat in these conversations, I think.

Wow, that was a real rambly response...

[Errorname]

Hard to discuss this without referencing the real world, but any number of governments have had religious components explicitly or implicitly as part of the government. If a new government took over and killed every member of those religious groups (except the small handful who were coerced into renouncing their prior faith and acting as people literally given the title of Inquisitor to hunt down any surviving faithful)...that would still be genocide.

The thing is that Star Wars is utterly uninterested in the Jedi religion as anything other than a philosophy for a warrior monk. It's a religion made up entirely of Paladins, there's no sense of how it functions outside of an insular knightly order or if it even exists outside of it. So their purge doesn't feel like the genocide of an entire religion, it feels like the purging of a branch of the government hostile to the new dictator.

And the mistakes the Jedi make (and they do make them) are so massively disconnected from the results (Palpatine activated Order 66 and murders them all--almost) that I simply don't see the connection. The key action Palpatine has taken is to complete the corruption and downfall of the Republic. As you can tell by the fact that the Jedi fight him, almost to the last child, while the Senate cheers him and agrees to proclaim him emperor.

I think the most significant mistake the Jedi make is accepting the command of the Clone Army, which feels pretty connected. They accept the poisoned gift despite the warning signs, and are inevitably destroyed by it.

[warty goblin]

The thing is that Star Wars is utterly uninterested in the Jedi religion as anything other than a philosophy for a warrior monk. It's a religion made up entirely of Paladins, there's no sense of how it functions outside of an insular knightly order or if it even exists outside of it.

That's basically a side effect of the Force being a tangible thing that for all practical purposes only some people have access to. Yes I know there's stuff about how anybody can subconsciously access the Force and do minor stuff, but the difference in degree is so vast it effectively is a difference in kind. I go to the climbing gym once a week, that doesn't mean I can free solo El Capitan, in a very real sense I'm not doing the same thing as Alex Hunnold even if we both go up tall steep things.

This means that Jedi teachings aren't a religion in the typical sense. They're a philosophy of how to exist ethically with a particular set of powers, and so most of the teaching is oriented around how to develop those powers and shaping their user according to that philosophy. Quite a lot of it simply isn't going to matter for anybody else.

That said, the overall Jedi philosophy of non-attachment and emotional awareness works fine outside of being able to throw things with your mind. It looks a very great deal like a number of IRL philosophies. We don't really need to see how to Jedi for non-Jedi in movies, both because it generally isn't relevant and because we could just read Marcus Aurelius and be like 80% of the way there.

I think the most significant mistake the Jedi make is accepting the command of the Clone Army, which feels pretty connected. They accept the poisoned gift despite the warning signs, and are inevitably destroyed by it.

It's causally connected sure, that doesn't make it a mistake in the sense of being a thing anybody could have reasonably predicted. It's right after the battle of Geonosis, what exactly is a remotely convincing argument against it that doesn't rely on having a copy of the shooting script for Revenge of the Sith? Because I dont think "hey, I'm worried that the chancellor is a secret Sith lord who had the army built and implanted with mind control so he could have them kill us after multiple years of fighting a puppet war against his own apprentice " is exactly a strong case.

[Errorname]

It's causally connected sure, that doesn't make it a mistake in the sense of being a thing anybody could have reasonably predicted. It's right after the battle of Geonosis, what exactly is a remotely convincing argument against it that doesn't rely on having a copy of the shooting script for Revenge of the Sith? Because I dont think "hey, I'm worried that the chancellor is a secret Sith lord who had the army built and implanted with mind control so he could have them kill us after multiple years of fighting a puppet war against his own apprentice " is exactly a strong case.

Yes, there are absolutely no red flags about an army that's been completely bought and paid for by an unknown actor using the name of a dead man that's being gifted to you, for free, at a time when you really desperately need an army. The exact nature of the trap is not clear, that the army is a trap should be blindingly obvious.

That's not even getting into the moral failing of accepting the clone army. The clones are all under ten years old with artificially shortened lifespans, millions of thinking people bred to be utterly disposable grist for the mill and denied the legal protections afforded to a person under republic law. The clone army is a monstrous and horrible thing, and the Jedi are perfectly willing to wield it as a sword against their enemies, so it's karmically appropriate that the army is ultimately the thing that damns them.

[Keltest]

Yes, there are absolutely no red flags about an army that's been completely bought and paid for by an unknown actor using the name of a dead man that's being gifted to you, for free, at a time when you really desperately need an army. The exact nature of the trap is not clear, that the army is a trap should be blindingly obvious.

That's not even getting into the moral failing of accepting the clone army. The clones are all under ten years old with artificially shortened lifespans, millions of thinking people bred to be utterly disposable grist for the mill and denied the legal protections afforded to a person under republic law. The clone army is a monstrous and horrible thing, and the Jedi are perfectly willing to wield it as a sword against their enemies, so it's karmically appropriate that the army is ultimately the thing that damns them.

Of course there are red flags, but its not like they can just ask the army to politely please go away, or magically conjure up a different army to fight the CIS with.

[Errorname]

Of course there are red flags, but its not like they can just ask the army to politely please go away, or magically conjure up a different army to fight the CIS with.

Oh well then that makes it completely okay to lead an army of disposable manufactured ten year old slaves into a war to hold together a failing republic.

If accepting the clone army is the Jedi succumbing to temptation and making the fatal mistake that ultimately dooms them of course there would be seemingly good reasons to do it! It's not much of a temptation if there's no point to doing it. The Clone Army is a perfect easy solution to the Jedi's problems so long as you ignore that it's existence is a monstrous crime and it being offered is an obvious trap.

[Keltest]

Oh well then that makes it completely okay to lead an army of disposable manufactured ten year old slaves into a war to hold together a failing republic.

If accepting the clone army is the Jedi succumbing to temptation and making the fatal mistake that ultimately dooms them of course there would be seemingly good reasons to do it! It's not much of a temptation if there's no point to doing it. The Clone Army is a perfect easy solution to the Jedi's problems so long as you ignore that it's existence is a monstrous crime and it being offered is an obvious trap.

First off, the Jedi did not accept the clones, the Republic did. We were never shown the Jedi's opinion on it. Secondly, just saying "its an obvious trap" means nothing. The army is there, it works for the Republic, it isn't going away. They can't just say "no thanks." Thirdly, the clones are not slaves, or children.

[Mechalich]

Of course there are red flags, but its not like they can just ask the army to politely please go away, or magically conjure up a different army to fight the CIS with.

Sure, the operational space in which the Jedi Order has to operate post-Geonosis is highly constrained, but it's not like they have no options at all.

The most important fact surrounding the Jedi Order's relationship with the Clone Army is that the clones don't need the Jedi to command them. They are perfectly capable of serving under non-clone officers or commanding themselves and in many (most?) cases this is actually a better option than having a Jedi General command them since the Jedi have no command experience or training and aren't better than a generic replacement. Further, a Jedi Knight who is not saddled with the responsibility of command is free to operate as a Force-wielding special operations beast, which will allow them to contribute to the war more effectively.

There are, of course, clone special forces units. In Legends, Etain Tur-Murkan, the Jedi Protagonist of the Republic Commando novels who embeds with groups of clone commandos, is probably Jedi Knight whose contribution to the war effort is most optimized out of the entire order (which is a bit of hilarious irony given Karen Traviss' opinions). It is certainly possible to imagine a slightly altered version of the Clone Wars were only a handful of senior Jedi, such as the High Council members, conduct high command of the GAR while the overwhelming majority of the several thousand Knights, Masters, and Padawans are embedded with commando, ARC trooper, and other special operations units. Palpatine could still trigger Order 66 in this scenario, and he'd still kill a whole lot of Jedi, clone commandos are very dangerous, but the success rate would be much, much lower because the ability of a group of 4-8 clones to pin down a Jedi and prevent their escape is drastically inferior to that of a 10,000 clone legion (this is a major contributor to the survival of Kanan Jarrus in the opening scene of The Bad Batch) and many of these special forces Jedi would be deployed on remote planets or deep in urban slums where the overall military apparatus of the GAR would struggle to close the net around them. A significant number would even be physically isolated from their clone allies in the moment due to operational needs.

In canon Order 66 was >96% successful: there are at best ~200 survivors out of the pool of at least 5,000 knights, masters, and padawans. It doesn't take a huge change in efficacy to make things dramatically different as a result. If in a special-ops-based deployment Order 66 is only 80% successful, then 1,000+ Jedi survive. In that situation, probably enough Masters survive to manage better coordination and a successful assassination of Palpatine and Vader sometime during 19 BBY (I mean really, if one additional master shows up to stand beside Obi-Wan and Yoda in the temple, there's a good chance of Palpatine going down).

This hypothetical change I have proposed is extremely minor, all I've done is rearrange how the Jedi are deployed alongside the GAR. They're still all fighting for the Republic utilizing assets of the clone army. Nor is there any real significant political objection to be raised here, since the Jedi would almost certainly be more effective in this role. Yet even such a small change would potentially be enough to save the Jedi and drastically reduce the impact of Imperial tyranny (even if Palpatine is assassinated in 19 BBY, the Republic is probably in for a generation or two of nasty one-party authoritarian rule, but that's still way better than the unrestrained villainy of the Empire). A slightly larger but still plausible change: creating a 500 Knight independent 'Jedi Unit,' establishing a series of hidden temples, creating experimental units staffed by volunteer soldiers instead of clones (especially non-human ones), etc. all sorts of options would help mitigate the impact of Order 66 enough that the Jedi Order could salvage something afterwards.

At the end of the day, for Order 66 to work in the way Palpatine needs it to work, he needs it to kill upwards of 90% of the Jedi in the field. It really wouldn't take much variation at all to organize the Jedi such that this simply could not occur. The Jedi have every reason to be suspicious that someone is gunning for them. The failure of the High Council to take steps to mitigate any such attack is a massive failure on their part. Now, ultimately, this traces back to poor writing in the PT. What Lucas should have done is had the High Council take the wrong action and play further into Palpatine's hands (military history is full of armies preparing for a strike they correctly identify as coming in the worst possible way). Instead, the PT shows us a Jedi Order with every reason to be suspicious (and TCW adds a heaping pile of reasons on top), but that essentially does nothing about it.

[Lord Raziere]

First off, the Jedi did not accept the clones, the Republic did. We were never shown the Jedi's opinion on it. Secondly, just saying "its an obvious trap" means nothing. The army is there, it works for the Republic, it isn't going away. They can't just say "no thanks." Thirdly, the clones are not slaves, or children.

Are you sure about that?

From Wookiepedia: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Clone_trooper

Before her death at the end of the war, Senator Padmé Amidala had drafted several bills concerning and advocating for clone personhood.

In order to rapidly produce a large army, the clones were subscribed to an accelerated training and aging program. All clones went through painful accelerated growth before reaching maturity, all while enduring nonstop training, simulations, and testing. Letter and number identifications were assigned to the clones to remove any sense of identity, as the cloners and trainers on Kamino viewed them as pieces of a machine, and not people.

Any bouts of anger or rebellion were dealt with by placing clones in retraining pods, essentially isolation tanks. Throughout their time on Kamino, their engineers muttered veiled threats of "disposal" if the clones failed their testing. As the war progressed, the Jedi clamped down on the more egregious attitudes, but the engineers of Kamino maintained their view of the clones as merely a product.

I think this information pretty solidly says they are at the very least slaves, considering Padme was trying to make them be recognized as people and the Kaminoans didn't see them as such.

[Errorname]

First off, the Jedi did not accept the clones, the Republic did. We were never shown the Jedi's opinion on it.

General Yoda leading the army into battle and giving marching orders is in fact a sign that the Jedi accept and are fully willing to use the army, so we are shown pretty clearly what they think of it.

Secondly, just saying "its an obvious trap" means nothing. The army is there, it works for the Republic, it isn't going away. They can't just say "no thanks."

There is no easy way to refuse the Clone Army. This is part of the trap, it is much easier to simply accept the army that you desperately need and which your boss is going to insist on taking.

Again, it is not much of a temptation if it is easy to refuse.

Thirdly, the clones are not slaves

The Clones are legally considered property of the Republic.

[The clones are not] children.

The Clones are made to grow up rapidly so they can fight in a war at an extremely young age. Their biological aging literally being accelerated is a sci-fi twist, but I'm still comfortable calling them child soldiers, like Ahsoka is several years older than Rex.

[ecarden]

There seems to be a notion that its morally superior not to command the clones? Not to fight with them? Isn't that exactly backwards? If you believe (and there's a strong argument for this) that they are engineered child slave soldiers and you know (which the Jedi absolutely do know) they are going to be engaged in combat, which you cannot stop, isn't fighting alongside them and doing your best to ensure they are not needlessly sacrificed, do not needlessly sacrifice themselves, and are protected to the best of your ability a far superior course of action than going 'well, this whole business is very shady, better for me not to be involved'? That strikes me as a massive abdication of moral responsibility, not an example of living up to the moral obligations you might expect of a Jedi.

[Mechalich]

There seems to be a notion that its morally superior not to command the clones? Not to fight with them? Isn't that exactly backwards? If you believe (and there's a strong argument for this) that they are engineered child slave soldiers and you know (which the Jedi absolutely do know) they are going to be engaged in combat, which you cannot stop, isn't fighting alongside them and doing your best to ensure they are not needlessly sacrificed, do not needlessly sacrifice themselves, and are protected to the best of your ability a far superior course of action than going 'well, this whole business is very shady, better for me not to be involved'? That strikes me as a massive abdication of moral responsibility, not an example of living up to the moral obligations you might expect of a Jedi.

It would only be morally superior for the Jedi to command the clones if that choice was the best option for winning the war with a minimum of clone casualties. That proposition is doubtless the one Palpatine intends the Jedi to accept, and they do accept it, but analysis of the evidence suggests that proposition is highly dubious.

If the Jedi make better special forces agents than commanders, then that's a better path. If clone lives can be preserved by raising volunteer forces to fight alongside them and correspondingly reduce clone production, then so is that. Who knows, maybe the best path is for every last Jedi to train as a starfighter pilot and fight that way. There are many possible answers, and reasonable people can disagree as to which would be the best. Ideally, the Jedi should have tried them all starting at the beginning of the war and then gradually dedicated themselves more and more to the best option as evidence came in (personally, I think the evidence strongly supports the 'special forces' approach, with numerous famous Jedi like Anakin, Obi-Wan, and even Mace Windu spending a lot of time in this role rather than commanding large units).

Instead, we see the monolith nature of the Jedi Order doom them. Master Yoda clearly decides, probably before even landing at Geonosis, to take up the command mantle and every other Jedi falls in line with this decision without questioning.

[Lord Raziere]

There seems to be a notion that its morally superior not to command the clones? Not to fight with them? Isn't that exactly backwards? If you believe (and there's a strong argument for this) that they are engineered child slave soldiers and you know (which the Jedi absolutely do know) they are going to be engaged in combat, which you cannot stop, isn't fighting alongside them and doing your best to ensure they are not needlessly sacrificed, do not needlessly sacrifice themselves, and are protected to the best of your ability a far superior course of action than going 'well, this whole business is very shady, better for me not to be involved'? That strikes me as a massive abdication of moral responsibility, not an example of living up to the moral obligations you might expect of a Jedi.

The moral obligations I expect of a Jedi have nothing to do with starting or perpetuating a war for any government, no matter how good that government is. their moral obligations should be to question their authority figures, not to obey them unthinkingly. To make sure that the Senate isn't so corrupt that a Sith can pass as one of them without anyone batting an eye. To make sure that all the worlds on the Outer Rim have no reason to go to war in the first place, to help in need before it gets to the point that it got. To respect life, not to end it. To take the responsibility of standing against these clones being bought or used in combat at all, to protest and do everything in their power so it does not happen, to end slavery not half-heartedly perpetuate it by pretending that they're helping by being kinder owners. Not to fight on the frontlines but to help the refugees fleeing from it, to provide aid and care to those who suffer from the frontlines, to not think with their lightsabers but with their empathy, to be more than stoic protectors that slice down what gets in the Republics way.

Because whether or not they make good warriors who protect people is irrelevant. Any person with a blaster and the training can do that. A Jedi, someone who is supposed to be in tune with a cosmic force that binds all living things together, that senses the disturbances in the Force that indicate life itself being snuffed out or abused, who can foresee events in advance and are supposed to deliberate on the best course of action- the standards for them are higher. Its not they don't do a good job of being a soldier or warrior or protector, but that these the wrong job for what they are supposed to believe and what they are connected to. The Jedi Council are beings who sense the end of lives, who feel it as disturbances in the Force and their decision is to jump head first into it? to cause it? to knowingly perpetuate and inflict the suffering they feel in every living being? That doesn't sound like any life-valuing religious person I've ever heard of. Wheres the Jedi leading peaceful protests? wheres the Jedi refusing to harm a single life for any reason? wheres the Jedi helping struggling communities and raising money for charities?

Imagine if you will, the Jedi instead decided to protest against the clone army at all points, refused to lead them and advocated to do nothing but free them, to give them good lives despite the looming war. Palpatine would either be caught off guard or think the Jedi are being foolish and that they're leaving the Republic vulnerable and open to attack. He'd be thrown off his plan and if they push hard enough, he might have to push back to get the clone army to make sure his plan goes through, and the more he pushes for it, the more he exposes his special interest in the clones until it gets suspicious as to why he is pushing for this plan when you could just....not have a slave army and push harder for peace and having good relationships with the Separatists at all costs, because why should the Jedi care if the Republic is less powerful or has to give in to whatever demands the Separatists want in whatever treaty they work out? its not the Jedi's job to make the Republic powerful or the only polity in the galaxy, there is no indication that Force cares about the Republic specifically, its not special in the Force's eyes. Palpatine would eventually expose himself trying to get his plan to go through or lose power from harping on it so much, pair that with some news media to smear him for advocating for a slave army and his chance to start a war and make his power grow further through the emergency powers would be shot. Palpatine's plan relies on the Clone Wars happening, on the fear of it making people willing to give up more and more power to him over time during it for his propaganda about security so that when he announces his imperial ascension its to applause, stopping the war from happening, no matter what the cost is, stops him.

That, is the moral responsibility I expect of the Jedi.

[Saph]

Yes, there are absolutely no red flags about an army that's been completely bought and paid for by an unknown actor using the name of a dead man that's being gifted to you, for free, at a time when you really desperately need an army. The exact nature of the trap is not clear, that the army is a trap should be blindingly obvious.

I'm curious: can anyone point to a discussion on the Internet between 2002-2004 or so with people saying this?

Because lots of people on this thread have been repeating over and over again that the clone army is an obvious trap, and that the Jedi are all drooling sub-80 IQ morons for not immediately seeing that and backing out of the war immediately. But the thing is, I don't actually remember anyone saying that back in 2002-2004. I remember lots of talk about Anakin, and Padme, and the war, but I don't remember a single person saying "well, obviously the clone army are going to be mind-controlled to massacre the Jedi". Maybe they were out there, but if so, they were lost in the crowd.

It was only well after the prequels came out, and all the Star Wars fans had the benefit of hindsight, that I started seeing people claiming that, well, obviously things were going to turn out that way, anyone could have seen that. So to be honest, this mostly feels to me like Monday morning quarterbacking.

After all, it's quite easily to rewrite Revenge of the Sith to accommodate the Jedi withdrawing from the war. Palpatine just uses their inaction to stir up public opinion against them, waits for them to gather in some convenient location, then orders the clones to massacre them. Everything ends out playing pretty similarly, just with fewer action scenes. And if that happens, I absolutely guarantee you that a whole bunch of people right now would be saying "man, the Jedi were so stupid to withdraw from the war like that, if they'd actually been willing to get their hands dirty and fight alongside the clones they would have been much closer to the action and would have seen what was going on in advance, giving them the opportunity to back out of the war was an obvious trap, they were complete idiots to fall into it".