Obi-Wan

By Joshua Gondo

Gah. The whole clone thing in The Clone Wars is SO FUCKED UP. These are supposed to be the good guys and what they’ve done is the same thing that the First Order is doing to stormtroopers, essentially.

In the episode I’m watching now, Rex says they took an oath, but like, how did they possibly have a choice to take any oath?

Am I missing something, or is the Republic just that fucked up?

The Republic is sort of that fucked up, but I don’t think they got there by themselves.  Look who’s in charge!  Really, keep an eye on Palpatine, especially the speeches he gives.  Every time he gives a speech, your stomach should curdle because something really bad is about to happen, and it’s going to happen because he’s about to emotionally engage people to be terrible sentient beings.  A significant portion of how bad the Republic gets–not all of it, but a meaningful chunk–is ol’ Darth Sidious basically fucking with everybody’s minds.  Not in a Dark Side way, but in a worse way.  He wedged the Republic into this rock and a hard place with this war he created, and then he says to them, “Isn’t making clone soldiers better than sending our own people out to die?”

“And you know what,” he then says to them, “let’s put the Jedi in charge!  Because they’re MERCIFUL.  Because they’re HONORABLE.  Because THEY, you can be sure, will not abuse people or engage in violence beyond what’s necessary or throw lives away needlessly or commit all those horrors you inevitably see in war.”

And everybody up to and including the Jedi nod, because doesn’t that seem wise and compassionate?

And then he points to devastated colonies as horror stories about what happens each time they fail, and lets them scare themselves into justifying everything.  He lets the war itself convince them that they HAVE to win, by any means necessary.  He just sits back and lets the Republic, even the Jedi, learn how to dehumanize–depersonify–their enemies (when it’s robots and clones you see doing most of the shooing, it’s so easy to forget that actual people are dying, isn’t it? Even for the audience).  All he has to do is stand up and give an occasional speech, and let them all get swept away in the “us versus them” and “whatever it takes.”

And so they all convince themselves that the right thing to do is have the Kaminoans breed clones for them to train up and send off to die in a war the poor guys never asked for.  As the series goes on, the clones and everyones’ reactions to them are really kind of the living breadcrumb trail of how far the Republic is falling as things go on.  Palpatine effectively turns the entire galaxy to the Dark Side.  And he doesn’t even have to actually use the Dark Side to do it.  Dude earns his Sith name.

DAAAAAMN.

And everybody up to and including the Jedi nod, because doesn’t that seem wise and compassionate?

Dude, the Jedi couldn’t even SAY NO to Palpatine or the Senate. The Jedi were there to protect and defend the Republic and the Republic WAS the Senate since the Senate was the voice of all the planets in the Republic.

I mean, look at Sheev, talking to Mace in Anakin and Obi-Wan #1

“Well, I’m the Chancellor, so you guys have to do what I say!!!!” 

Now, let’s say the Jedi did say no to the Clone Wars. A lot of people say the Jedi went back on their teachings and should have declined to fight, but they couldn’t. If they did, then most likely they would be branded as traitors to the Republic. “The Jedi will not fight for the Republic they claim to defend and love! The Jedi would rather see Coruscant in ashes than fight!” And the Jedi Order gets shunned out of the Republic, leaving Palpatine free to take over. His whole goal for the Clone Wars was to destroy the Jedi so he can take over the Galaxy, right? If the Jedi are banished, they won’t be able to touch him. What are 10,000 Jedi going to do against my Clone Army and all these people in the Republic who love me? Or maybe he’d just let the CIS win and rule through a puppet leader like Dooku. 

So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win. 

Putting the Jedi in charge was a great idea because it made people start associating the Jedi with war. Despite the fact that for AT LEAST a thousand years, the Jedi were known as peacekeepers who most likely just did diplomatic missions and helped out people, all that seems to fall away when they are shown on the HoloNet News leading armies. 

Palpatine drags that war out so long that people are now thinking the Jedi are in charge of it all. They are the ones leading it all. So the public opinion of the Jedi becomes tainted. 

So when Palpatine claims the Jedi are traitors and tried to kill him, people actually believe him. He was able to make a religious group of space wizards who were known for at least a thousand years as ‘the good good GOOD guys’ into the bad guys. He was able to corrupt the Jedi Order in the minds of the galaxy without the Jedi Order being corrupt. 

@fandumbandflummery

Annnnnnd don’t forget the whole amorality of the existence of the clones themselves.

They are manufactured and perceived by many (not all) to just be wetware battle droids, expendable and replaceable, to spend their whole brief lifespan fighting for the safety and freedom of Republic citizens, while never knowing safety or freedom for themselves or their brothers.

And you can see them start to doubt their purpose - Cut deserting, Slick’s betrayal, Fives desperately trying to reveal the truth to someone who can help - and it hurts. A lot.

“So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win.”

Literally most important note ever. For all the terrible things the Jedi were accomplices to, it’s all because Palpatine rigged the game from the start. If they had refused to fight under the moral ground that using the clones is unethical, Palpatine would have just labeled them traitors a decade earlier, fabricated some evidence that they were scheming with the Separatists all long, and the clones would have just marched right into the Temple. 

Another note on how the Jedi had to fight or be labeled as traitors: in the kotor series that was exactly what happened. When the mandelorians were attacking outer rim planets in an attempt to convince the Jedi to fight them (because mandelorians are like that) the Jedi council said no. Simple as that. They said “we will not fight because it’ll just lead to more fighting”

What did this cause? This caused the outer rim planets who were dying to hate the council. It caused the Jedi who so desperately wanted to help but couldn’t because the council said no to hate the council. It caused the republic who was sending relief efforts that we’re eventually attacked and destroyed by mandelorians to hate the council.

And you know what happened next? Revan. Revan happened next. Revan went against the council and convinced hundreds of Jedi to do the same and they went and fought the mandelorians. They won, but at a great cost, and from there Revan and Malak fell to the dark side and in time crippled the Republic further and led to the destruction of the Jedi.

In short the Jedi HAD to fight in the clone wars because last time they tried being pacifists they all died and nearly went extinct and Palpatine knew this, and he used this.

“So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win.”

Still the most salient point. Darth Sidious engineered the war from the beginning, he and his master were the ones who created the clone army to begin with and locked them into the involuntary drafted soldier status…at the point where the Jedi even had the knowledge and ability to begin to make choices, it was already too late. The clone troopers were going to be sent out to fight and die and given no choice in the matter REGARDLESS of any decision the Jedi could have made. The troopers were soldiers of the Republic, not the Jedi’s personal army, which means it was the Senate and the Chancellor deciding their ultimate fate. The only choices the individual Jedi or the Order leadership could have made at that point would be to stay and fight alongside them as ordered by the Chancellor or to walk away from the Republic entirely and leave the troopers to die without them on the battlefield. Double jeopardy of course, because if they just walk away they are also betraying their oath to defend the citizens of the galaxy, leaving the helpless bystanders to die in the atrocities and war crimes the CIS forces were perpetuating. 

Darth Sidious deliberately and meticulously built up the perfect catch-22 for the Jedi, and it would be naive to not acknowledge it.

There was no path available to them which would have allowed them to free the clone troopers from Republic control, they had no control over the course of the war, they only had the option to choose between two evils, and I understand why they chose to agree to stand and fight when the Chancellor ordered it. Even if it can be seen as implicitly supporting a great injustice. In my opinion, abandoning the clone troopers to die in even greater numbers without them, and abandoning their duty to defend the helpless in the face of the CIS atrocities (see: carpet bombing/use of human shields in Ryloth, etc), would have been the greater evil.

obi wan: im a jedi knight and i love the republic!
ahsoka: im a jedi knight and i love the republic!
anakin: im a hmmmm and i love the uhhhh
count dooku: i’m a sith lord!! the republic is very bad and i am powerful!
hondo ohnaka trouncing everyone effortlessly: im a pirate and i fucking smoke weed