PT Corruption in the Senate - fact or fiction?

I don't know. The fact that Palpatine had such close relationship with the Trade Federation (he could call up their Viceroy at any time) hints at a wider active role that the Sith were taking in building up alliances, bogging down the Senate, subverting the public interest etc.
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so you're saying every senator would be sat around in their pods with halos on their heads and if it wasn't for the Sith, everyone in the Republic would be in a state celestial peace?

sorry if I'm wrong but that's what it sounds like you're suggesting

 

No. That's an oversimplification of what I was trying to get at. The Sith were manipulating but not controlling and that is the crucial difference.

Imagine the corruption in the Senate is like a Chess game. The Sith aren't in the hotseat, playing the game, controlling the pieces directly. They're more like chief advisers to both players, constantly whispering in their ears. The game could go either way with or without the presence of the Sith but the Sith will sure as hell increase the chances of the game going their way.

Sorry if this explanation isn't great. I'm quite tired and it's the best I can come up with right now.

And by the way, there's no need for the snark.

 

didn't mean to be Snarky, sorry if you read it that way

your reply started with "I don't know the fact...." which seemed to suggest you disagreed with Mikeximus well reasoned post that "greed didn't just show up because of a Sith lord did" which imo is quite true, the alternative to that view was my response which genuinely had me thinking you thought senators were all saintly or something,

 

I believe that the Senate was corrupt but even Rune Haako(sp?) thought that the Senate might vote in favor of Naboo when Amidala was done speaking to Gunray, Personally I think that the Sith in the Senate was new. I believe that before they had stayed away from Coruscant and pulled strings from the shadows. Sidious did promise that he would bog the Senate down with procedures. If Mas Amedda was on Palpatine's side then that would explain a lot because he was the one that interrupted Valorum to remind him of something or other.

Also it was implied somewhere, a guide or sourcebook, that on Naboo they brainwash the children going into politics because they don't want corrupt adults. They have a maximum age when a child can enter the program, ten or so, and then tell them that the Republic is all powerful and all they have to do is if someone is being mean to Naboo is to go crying to the Senate and the Senate will set things right. You can see this in Padme when she learns that Anakin and his mother are slaves and what happens if any slave tries to escape. She says that the Republic has laws against slavery and gets cut off before she can continue. I will bet my CD collection that Palpatine had started out like her and had learned the sad truth.

 

I think you misunderstood me, If we are talking about the base corruption in the Senate, then no I do not think that the Sith had everything to do with that base corruption. They used it to their advantage, they didn't create it. With that said, and as I said in my first post, the Sith more than likely did build more corruption, but the foundation was already put down.

Remember this is my original post on this topic:

In my post much of this corruption is not relative to the Sith, itis a base corruption within the system itself, for example allowing a Big Business to have a vote in a senate, and special interest bureaucrats being used to manipulate legislation. None of that is Sith based, that is very much how the government was heading at the time. The Sith used it to their advantage. Just as Qui Gonn used Watto's greed (hence corruption) against him and to Qui Gonn's advantage. Qui Gonn didn't put the corruption there.

 

Saints? No. But I find it hard to believe that corruption would have developed beyond what we might call safe or background levels without the Sith's involvement. The Republic seems to do fine for 24000 years and then in its final millennium is said to decline rapidly which neatly coincides with the increase in power and influence of the Sith. Highly significant I think.

But how do we know that? For all we know, the TF Senator entirely owed his seat to Senator Palpatine, either directly or indirectly. Who started the Naboo crisis anyway? Senator Palpatine.

 

understand your point

all it takes is one senator though to break away from the Republic, and of course money talks in political situations, just like here on Earth and we don't have Sith lords

 

Because that is what happens to government at any stage. The tendency for politicians to be swayed by money is a corrupting factor throughout any government that we have seen. There is no need for any underlying evil to push them to that stage. Greed is not exclusive to the Sith being present. Greedy politicians do not need Sith influence to find ways to prop themselves up within a government.

 

Perfectly true. And lets not forget, the Sith were hardly without money. I accept that there was background corruption. Of course I do. But for it to have progressed the way it did at the speed it did I stand by my view that the Sith exacerbated the situation to such an extent that they could almost be considered the cause.

Again, perfectly true. But I'd say that a galactic government that's been functioning reasonably smoothly for 24000 years needs quite a kick for the wheels to fall of the wagon in the way they did. Without the Sith, what reason is there to expect corruption higher than the background level to not be headed off before it develops into something truly serious?

 

Well, it happens in RL all the time. There are places which are nearly lawless because politicians and the bureaucracy are so corrupt that the law doesn't count for much; only money and power get things done.

edit: grammar.

 

I would still say the problem was far more than a background problem. I would agree that the presence of the Sith did make the corruption worse. To make a metaphor out of it, the base corruption in the Senate was like a house on fire, the Sith were equal to throwing gasoline on the fire. The fire was already there and burning, the Sith just made the fire worse.

There's nothing in the movie to suggest that the Corruption only came along as a matter of Sith influence. It's much more reasonable to believe that the Corruption was already there, and the Sith took advantage of it, thus making it worse. Remember, Lucas was very much influenced by the Nixon era, even calling the Republic in one of his early drafts of A New Hope, Nixonian.

 

That's an interesting point about Rune Haako.

And yeah, even the first time I saw TPM (when I was hardly older than Anakin was in that scene), Padmé's shocked reaction at the slavery thing struck me as really naive.

 

And that's fine and dandy but the Republic was not nearly lawless, not unless you were a very long way from Coruscant. I would say the the Republic government is largely equivalent to a western democracy like the UK. Both the Republic and the UK are well established democracies with the rule of law and background corruption. Levels of corruption ebb and flow in both states. The Republic falls due to the Sith. The UK is still standing and whilst there are no Sith Lords in the UK (or anywhere else for that matter) it would probably take something as extreme as the intervention of a Sith Lord for the UK to fall like the Republic does.

Ah but would you say there was more than a background problem before the intervention of the Sith?

 

I would. I think people give Sith both too much credit and too much blame.

 

Yes I would. I would say that the corruption was a very big problem in the Senate. The Sith used it to their advantage, and thus they compounded the problem.

The perfect example is the events of TPM. The Trade Fed is already a powerful Corporation, they have already built themselves up as ths powerful entity. They have influence in the Senate, however, it takes a Sith Lord to use their greed and convince them to go over the top and blockade Naboo. Something that the Trade Fed would never do by themselves. So again, there is corruption there, and it is problematic because the corruption has lead to a Monopoly in the form of the Trade Fed, the Sith used the already established corruption to further their plans.

 

Cushing's Admirer & mikeximus Then we have more or less reached a point where further discussion is meaningless. I think corruption remained at background levels until Sith intervention. Clearly you two do not. I don't think we can ever know definitively but I do have an open mind and would be willing to reconsider in light of new arguments/evidence. It's been fun discussing this but I am tired so I'm going to leave it here today. Bye all.

 

I understand your point. But I was replying to your rhetorical question which implied that, if not for the Sith, "corruption higher than the background level" would "be headed off before it develops into something truly serious".

I didn't express my point very clearly maybe, but what I was trying to say was that a society can descend from being ruled by law to into a morass of corruption (ruled by money) --- without Sith influence. Not just that there are lawless places without the Sith. The Philippines and Indonesia are two examples off the top of my head (there are countless more).

To be clear, when I said "lawless" I didn't mean chaos, fighting in the streets, rampant crime and looting etc. I was referring to the inability of ordinary people being oppressed to rely on the law alone to vindicate their interests, because the of the influence of the money of the oppressors.

What do you mean by "fall like the Republic does"? If you mean turning into an Empire --- probably yeah, I agree. But the Empire is just an exxagerated picture of dystopia. But what I mean by "lawless" could include the Republic we see in TPM (if the Naboo crisis is representative of how the Senate works), which is 13 years before the Empire. I think that level is corruption is already "something truly serious", as you say. And I think it is possible for a western democracy to fall that far without Sith influence. In fact some would argue that they have done so.

edit: Lord Chazza just saw your post above, thanks for clarifying. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about how bad the corruption evinced by TPM was. Thanks for the thought-provoking discussion

 

Chazza: To each their own. You want to lay it all at the Siths' feet go right ahead. I'm not gonna argue with you. I'm simply not of the same view.

 

Here maybe this will help:



Here we have Lucas saying that Palpatine used the corruption of the Trade Fed and others to move his plan forward. This points at the corruption already being present, and Palpatine comes and takes advantage of it after the fact.

 

The amount of corruption in the Senate is obvious if you just think of the vast scale of the galaxy. There were millions of inhabited planets in the Republic, but only ~1200 seats in the Senate building. Although each Senate seat roughly represented one sector's worth of planets, that still meant that only a small fraction of planets were actually represented in the Senate. This led to the "unseated" planets tending to buy votes/influence at an alarming rate. And good luck to any Outer Rim planet attempting to finagle its way into coercing a Core world into doing anything it didn't want to do.

 

Awww no! This is a discussion thread after all - views need to be challenged! And yes. The Sith are very much the supervillains of the franchise, they're highly manipulative (to the point where they can pull a war out of the hat) and Emperor Palpatine in ROTS and ROTJ more or less looks like evil personified so I would very much like to lay the blame at their door.

Cael-Fenton I think I understand what you're getting at. Perhaps Greece could be an example here. No offence intended to the Greeks but to the best of my knowledge nothing gets done in Greece without a bribe.

Now you say that corruption was indeed truly serious in TPM. I'd certainly agree that the situation wasn't good and wasn't heading in the right direction - the fact that the Trade Federation have their own Senate seat being a big indicator. But what we shouldn't forget that the TF weren't particularly successful in their attempts at obstructing proceedings. Chancellor Valorum acquiesces to the TF's demands in response to which the Senate swiftly and almost unanimously agree to ditch Valorum in favour of somebody who will take a tougher stance. The TF had probably been hoping to buy themselves weeks, maybe months of extra time. They barely wind up with an extra day. So I don't think it was all bad in the Senate!

Glad you're enjoying the discussion btw

mikeximus Thanks for the link. There's no doubt then that Palpatine was an opportunist, building on the foundations that already existed. So perhaps the question is this: is it solely the Senate's fault that those foundations of corruption existed or was Palpatine building on foundations that had been laid by Sith Lords before him? A thought that occurred to me that's never occurred to me before is that perhaps the Sith are merely a manifestation of the corruption that's within us all. I guess that doesn't really fit with the prophecy though which would suggest that the Sith can be destroyed and balance achieved but I still like the idea anyhow.

timmoishere I'm not going to accept that argument I'm afraid. It's just another manifestation of the scale argument. Yes of course Lucas couldn't show us chamber with one million delegates and their aides. It's simply not feasible. Lucas wasn't trying to show us a photograph of a galactic government. It was more like an abstract painting. Not accurate in detail but it still conveys the essence of the subject. I believe Lucas was successful in this - his Senate scene certainly conveyed the feeling and aura of a galaxy spanning Republic to me.

So again, no scale arguments please. 1.2 million clones in the GAR? .5 past lightspeed? We all know those numbers don't work. Star Wars needs to be analysed for what it is, a space opera, not a history or a physics lesson.

 

The scale of the galaxy was indirectly stated in the films, though. In AOTC, Dooku expressed confidence that there would be ten thousand more star systems that would join his cause. And while this doesn't directly state what the size of the Republic was, simple logic dictates that the Republic would still have plenty of systems left over after those ten thousand left.

 

timmoishere Sure, the scale can be talked about. But actually showing it is something else. A big Football stadium (or Soccer stadium to Americans) can hold about 100k people. Canonically the Republic has 1m inhabited systems each represented by a Senator. Then there are the Senators' aides (In TPM there seemed to be two aides per Senator). And then there are corporations like the Trade Federation which have seats as well. Lets not forget there are also droids, news reporters and visitors etc who also will need to be accommodated in the chamber. So I think we could comfortably say that this chamber would need to be holding 3 to 3.5 million individuals, meaning the chamber needs to be the size of 30-35 large football stadiums. You simply can't show that in a film. It probably wouldn't even work as a chamber - just imagine how loud the microphones would have to be for everyone to hear each other and how can 1 million Senators possibly engage in meaningful debate anyway?

In a truly authentic galactic government I think you would have to have regional Senate chambers. But that would be overly-complicated to show in a movie and would dilute the story. So instead Lucas shows us a chamber of 1200 individuals to give us a flavour of galactic government.

So it boils down to this. The fact that there are so few Senators is not evidence of corruption in the Republic. It is simply due to the fact that showing the viewer a chamber with millions of individuals is unworkable.

 

Corruption is entitlement, which all living beings have, pursued to lengths that the majority consider unnatural. There may be mythical saints who start contentiously and resist the lure of seedy bedfellows, but to a first order approximation, those who start down a road of representation are impelled by the entitlement, or corruption, of their constituency. The United States has the strange notion that all men are born with inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These are entitlements. They can form the basis of corruption. They can be arrogated into handy bombastic jingo that whips up the populus. A specimen of that populus who can be whipped up on specious promise or assurance that cleverly coincides with their entitlement is corrupt. Lots of corruption to go around, and it escalates exponentially with rank. "I have a pen, and I'm going to use it."

 

I would still believe that the corruption was the base corruption with no Sith influence. However, have any other Sith tried before Sdious to manipulate the Senate? While there is no 100% definitive proof of either a yes or no answer, I guess there is a possibility that it has happened. I still don't think they had a hand in the systemic corruption we see in TPM though.