Are Jedi younglings, 'non combatants?'

I think there's a bit of confusion, here, with regard to terminology: as I understand it, teenagers are not younglings.

 

generally speaking, Children are always considered non-combatants.

If the children were actively trying to oppose Vader, then they are combatants.


But they weren't. So The younglings were NCs.

 

Ah. I forgot that the youngling Jedi only have training sabers. Heh.

Oh well, I bet they were overly cheeky, anyway.

 

I have nothing to add to this conversation, because TalonCard already expressed my thoughts far better than I could have. That's truly one of the best posts I've read in my time on the JC. My hat's off to you, sir.

 

Thanks Gabri!

I think that is a pretty silly overgeneralization. Do you mean in general, or in the specific instance that you would be invading their home without explanation, with a gun, with lethal intent? If the former, I doubt that you would be asking for death if you encountered a Mandalorian seven year old and complemented them on their Fenn Shysa action figure. ("Thanks mister! We got the comic book two-pack, but my sister fought me to a standstill for the Princess Leia figure.")

If the latter, are we really comparing how one would go about attacking defenseless children verses attacking children who can fight back? Something is deeply wrong if we're setting out to attack any kind of children, in my opinion.

That doesn't sound likely. We've only very, very rarely seen young people with that kind of ability. In general, Jedi have to work long and hard to lift a rock in the air, and they're trained to do that. In general, Force power has to be focused through training and deliberate concentration to have noticeable effects. When Luke loses control, he drops stuff; it doesn't explode. Even Starkiller, who is one of the most destructive Force users we've ever seen, was only able to grab Vader's lightsaber instinctively--he didn't explode the trooper's heads or do anything besides stand there in shock. The most a weaponless youngling as small as the ones in the council chamber could probably manage would be to knock a clone upside the head with a DUPLO.

Most of the time it takes training and discipline for a Jedi to bring Force powers out, not to keep them in.

This is not supported by what we have seen. Obi-Wan leaves Luke and Leia, who are have arguably more potential than any Jedi babies in the Temple, to be looked after by people with no Force training whatsoever. There were certainly plenty of young men and women who lived lethal Force-tantrum free lives before joining Luke's Jedi Order.

The Force as presented in Star Wars is not an unnatural phenomena, though it can be subverted and twisted. The Force comes from all living things and is a part of the universe. Some people have the potential to "use" the Force; others do not, but everything is part of the Force.

And where does this grim scenario come from? It's certainly not a common one, and not one that I've seen in any Star Wars story I'm aware of. When we see Force users affect internal organs destructively, they have mostly been Dark Side masters like Vader and Gethzerion, who did so deliberately and after much training.

And if the three-year-old can kill her mother because the child is angry because the child is hungry, wouldn't the child be just as, if not more likely to steal food using the force? I work at a grocery store; most kids will take something when they want or need it, and only throw a tantrum after their parent t

 

I find it difficult to believe that some have no sympathy for the Jedi children, whatever age they are. Cut down in their home by a force bent on their total destruction. Nevermind how I feel about the Jedi Order and their recruitment techniques, Order 66 was a complete act of evil. There is no way to shift blame and say that the kids were soldiers too, that they were fair game because they were in the line of fire.

In the ROTS novel Palpatine plays in his cunning way when he says "Is being a Sith a crime?"

I think a nice addition to this discussion would be to ask "Is being a Jedi is a crime?"

Say someone from the FBI trys to kill the president, does that then mean the entire FBI deserves to be slaughtered? I think not.

And yes the Clones are victems as well, victems of Palpatine, not the Jedi.

 

Star Wars is, of course, a poem about the absolute necessity of insurgency against a legitimate government when that government turns to tyranny. Legally, you could make an argument Palpatine certainly deserves to be arrested. Morally, even if he has legal immunity, the sheer grossness of his crimes means that any attempt to protect him is grounds for being removed from office yourself.

Starting the Clone Wars, High Treason, and murdering literally billions of your own citizens (possibly trillions counting Humbarine) warrants extraordinary measures. You can certainly make an offer that the Stormtroopers have no way of knowing this. On the other hand, they are ordered to kill all of the Jedi and know it's all of the Jedi.

 

When they said "Too many of them" they may not have necessarily meant too many of them to take on personally but just too many for the Jedi left in the Temple to handle. The younger kids will have only had training lightsabers so they couldn't have put up much of a fight. It's possible that Anakin didn't actually kill the "younglings" in that scene though but captured them to be turned to the dark side and trained as Inquistors, the younglings Yoda and Obi-Wan found with lightsaber cuts being older "younglings" who put up a fight.

 

It seems to me as if the original post was about legal semantics and stuff like that. I don't think that this kind of discussion would lead to much - even if you could prove one side to be "correct", what would come of it?

And on all the rest, like TalonCard said.

 

A noncombatant is a noncombatant even if he defends himself and has martial arts training. Resisting arrest doesn't mean you've signed up to the opposing army.

 

A noncombatant by definition is anyone who is unable to engage in combat, a youngling Jedi would be classed as a combatant if they could put up any kind of resistance.

 

So if a Stormtrooper shows up to kill you in your home and you resist then your a combatant? Yet if you allow them to kill you your not......right Owen and Beru were likely combatants as well then

 

There's also the point that some people seem to be missing, that with the execution of the majority of the Jedi Masters throughout the galaxy there are few people left with sufficient experience or knowledge in the Jedi Arts to train the Younglings to the status of Jedi Knight except Anakin/Vader or Palpatine.

 

I do agree with you, TalonCard, it is wrong & unethical to kill children in any capacity for any reason. I was just trying to make a point that someone born with the force is never unarmed & thus are not non-combatants.
Yeah alot of the scenarios I made up about psycho Jedi kids exploding heads & what not are just a bunch of "what-if" scenarios, but then again there is some truth in it too with Kajin from CN III: Patterns of Force. Undisciplined/untrained force users can be a scary thing sometimes, when force snatching Vader's lightsaber out of his hand or exploding an Inquisorious agent down to atoms.

I'm sure that if Count Dooku was allowed to live, he could've convinced Palpatine to let him take the Jedi younglings for his Sith Army, but it wasn't meant to be so Palpatine made no provisions for capturing live younglings & that was an evil, evil act. Parents must of banged on the doors of the Jedi Temple & the Senate for years to come after hearing about the Jedi Purge, wondering where their kids that were too young to actually be involved in a revolution against the Republic are. Even as much as I dislike the Jedi, I cannot attempt to make up any excuses on the Emperor's behalf to explain to the rest of the galaxy at large, what he did or why he did it to all of those Jedi children. I tried, making up stories about head-explodey & tantrums, but all of it sounded rediculous, even to me while I was cracking up as I typed them up! How many people did he have to get killed so that people would publicly stop calling him a child murderer?

 

If Owen and Beru began shooting at the stormtroopers with blasters they would be combatants, they're still civilians though.

 

I never said I didn't have sympathy towards the Jedi being betrayed and killed. I explicitly made that point in my first post.

I take issue with the idea of young warrior Janissaries being treated like civilians. I personally don't think that's accurate.

Yes it's sad, but you're saying the Jedi bear no responsibility for putting laser swords, evening training ones, in the hands of children?

"I do agree with you, TalonCard, it is wrong & unethical to kill children in any capacity for any reason."

Have you *read* or *seen* what child soldiers in Africa do? Especially the ones trained by anti-government rebels? They specifically train them from age six or so on to murder their former friends and family members precisely *because* most people find it so difficult to fight children. If you've seen Blood Diamond, that's just the tip of the iceburg as far as what those kids actually do to people.

I have nothing but sympathy for those poor kids, but government soldiers are often faced with killing these children because if they are not STOPPED they will literally burn, rape, torture and pillage whole villages. It's a vicious cycle, but one cannot let such actions go unopposed. It's like stopping a mad dog abused by its owner, its not the dog's fault, but are you just going to stand by and let it destroy your family because you don't have the heart to stop it? It's a horrible situation all around, but if the government did nothing to fight these child soldiers, it would essentially be signing the death warrants of their people.

Not that I'm implying that many of these governments are any better than the rebels they fight often times, but it's often better than total anarchy.

 

The Jedi don't regard lightsabers as being weapons though, they're just tools/extensions of their own body that can be used for defense. Training a child to use a lightsaber is just the same as teaching a child a martial arts discipline it's not like giving them a gun and telling to shoot someone.

 

Masterskywalker:
Are you comparing the Jedi Children to these child soldiers in Africa though? I don't exactly think we'd see the Jedi teens and younglings going on a murdering, raping rampage against the common citizens of Coruscant.

In fact the Jedi younglings we have seen were simply trying to escape, not going on chaotic rampages and destroying the lives of the innocent.

 

Exactly as advertised.

 

I'm simply saying it's a fallacy to *assume* that children are always harmless and good.

And for the lightsaber argument, I don't think you'd be able very well to a soldier that lazer thingy a Jedi is waving around is, "Just a training tool and an extension of the body... which just so happens can slice you in half if you turn the power up on it."

A weapon is a weapon. It doesn't matter if you're an Olympic shooter, if you draw that weapon, it's on.

And Order 66 was a terrible deed, I just don't think it was for the reasons most assume it was.

 

Yes but they're taught to never kill someone with a lightsaber, unless they really have to and never out of anger.

 

I do believe that it's wrong to kill children, but I make an exception for force using Jedi kids. They are born & bred warriors, like your Blood Diamond kids, except they are the good guys in this story. Yoda took younglings with to Vjun, the kids fought for their lives & survived. Anakin took a little kid padawan into battle at the Teth Monastary, she fought Assaj Ventress to a standstill. Baby Starkiller guy yanked Vader's lightsaber from him in anger at the death of his parents. Untrained force user Kajin obliterated an Inquisitor in a fit of force rage. The Solo kids time & time again fought & survived assasination attempts on their lives before reaching the age of 10.

Those younglings in the Jedi Council chamber had the training & the power to defend themselves. The only differences between them & the examples listed above, is the outcome of the attack. The kids above lived, these younglings presumeably died. They died unfairly. Dying unfairly doesn't relegate the younglings to non-combatant status. The only non-combatants I could see here would be the nosy Coruscant citizens hanging around outside the Jedi Temple wondering what was going on, while being kept back by a squad of 501st Clonetroopers points deeces at them.

 

could they have disobeyed the order?
i thought it was some hardwire in their cloning that they were forced in some way to follow the order

which makes them pretty much just tragic, as we see them being friends to the jedi during the movies and tv series
but are brainwashed in a way that just throws all that out the window with a flip of a switch

i wouldnt call them evil
just un-witting tools of Palpatine

 

The training methods of the Jedi don't enter into this particular discussion. We're talking about a scenario in which those trainees, some of whom wouldn't have seen actual combat for half a decade, were killed by their allies in a brutal retaliation for the actions of a few of their superiors.

If one army was allied with another, and troops from the first army inexplicably marched into a boot camp of the second army and proceeded to kill every soldier in the camp, it would be absurdly callous to state "Ah, but since that second army were soldiers and knew how to use weapons, they bear some responsibility for what happened" or "Well, it's not really as sad as it looks, because they were only soldiers, after all."

TC

 

She did?