Clone Wars Republic vs Separatists

Sometimes the "good guys" fight like that.

Chi Cho declared Talz non-sentient and tried to wipe them off Orto Plutonia. If he succeeded, this would have been a war crime.

The Republic went into the Geonosians' homes and burned them alive with flamethrowers and then killed their Queen. No doubt many would consider this a war crime.

The Republic dropped a bomb on Malastare that awakened possibly the last of a semi-sentient species and then proceeded to knock it out and transport it to Coruscant to be turned into a military asset only for it to awaken, go on a rampage and be killed.

From some points of view, the Republic is using a slave army to fight the war. Somewhere close to the end of TCW, the Republic will use that slave army to commit cultural genocide and Republic Senators will applaud it.

I'm sure it's been done off screen. TCW doesn't really show shades of gray, which is why we've never seen it. OOU, like you said, there's really nothing to support this within TCW.

The Jedi and Republic caused the Kaleesh to starve to death. The Banking Clan helped them though for Grievous's services as a collections agent.

That being the main reason why Grievous hates the Jedi so much.

That wasn't my point. My point was that just because one side sometimes fights "dirty" doesn't make their cause a bad one. There are lots of instances in our own history when the people we'd almost universally call the "good guys" fought plenty dirty. The Union fought way, way dirtier than the Confederacy in our own Civil War - Sherman and Sheridan both made the mass targeting of civilian property for destruction a matter of policy - but did that make abolishing slavery a bad cause, or maintaining it a good one? Read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for an idea of what the allies did to the civilians of Dresden, whose city had approximately zero military value. But did that make the Nazis the good guys, and the British and Americans the bad guys?

The argument in favor of the Separatists seems to hinge on why the Republic could be regarded as evil, and not why the Separatists are good. The Republic has done morally questionable, or just down right evil things (more in the EU than in TCW). For instance war machines (of the CIS) seem more morally sound to me than a slave army. And I've been in that boat for quite awhile hoping that TCW would touch upon the ethics of using the clones, particularly when characters like Slick and Cut represent elements within the army itself that are conscious enough of the clones' situation to reject their role.

However, the Republic is also shown to be capable of good. Such as providing relief effort to the Twi'leks, or Master Di's sacrifice to allow the Twi'lek families time to escape, or how the Republic respects the neutrality of planets while Dooku will have those that desire neutrality killed or coerced to join the Separatists. The Republic's inability to adequately support Rodia which risked causing Rodia to join the CIS might be an example of inadequate resources or senate corruption, but not outright evil. Meanwhile, Dooku is enslaving planets.

An attempt at a sympathetic story in which Mina's husband is killed by clones wasn't exactly the most compelling story to really shed light on the evils of the Republic in Heroes on Both Sides, and that episode in particular really offered an opportunity to dive into the good that exists within the Separatists, but instead it just turned to pointing at the evil of the Republic, which isn't the best justification. But then later on instead of maintaining that feeling that there are heroes on both sides and that there are both good and evil everywhere, we instead see the Separatists devolve into a clearly evil entity with the death of Mina and attempted execution of her son to silence them. We don't exactly see that with the Republic. EU I'm sure has an exception somewhere, but in TCW itself, we don't exactly see Palpatine assassinating political opponents.

Padme and Mina reached out to each other, and Mina is executed by her government, while Padme is OK.

The Separatists of TCW have really shown no reason as to why it could be regarded as a good entity.

I mean, I marvel at how Grievous and Dooku can do what they do and the galaxy doesn't notice? Vietnam really showed how the horrors of war and war crimes are brought to light through the media. And its held true since then. Civilians at home are not completely oblivious to what's going on in a war far away like they used to be. When Dooku tries to enslave the Mon Cala... that doesn't get out? The fact that the leader of the Separatists is a sac of guts in a droid exoskeleton is considered perfectly acceptable by the Separatist Senate? No red flags there?

Do they even know that Grievous is real? It would hard to believe that they don't, but at least if they thought he was some kind of boogeyman the Republic invented to slander the CIS, that would explain some things. A clone gets called sick for keeping droid fingers, yet Grievous kills Jedi and keeps their lightsabers on his hip? What an upstanding leader.



Now in the sense that the Separatists have been made to look like absolute fools and characters like Grievous have just become embarrassing, I root for the Separatists to redeem themselves. Doesn't seem like Palpatine deserves all this emergency power, when the Jedi have things under control.

Meanwhile the Republic is facing financial crises. Perhaps they shouldn't bother spending the money to equip millions of clones with paper armor. Just watched a show on the History Channel yesterday called Going Medieval. And it was articulated perfectly (though also common sense) that armor is costly and that if it was unable to adequately provide protection against the weapons of the day, then there would be no point in spending vast sums of money to equip an army with it and force the soldiers to deal with the additional weight.

Seems like it needs an upgrade or alternatively the Republic shouldn't even bother.

/tangent

Let's not forget what caused the escalation of the bombing campaigns during WW2. In 1940, the UK originally carried out bombing raids on Germany to destroy its industry, infrastructure and ability to wage war. It was essentially economic warfare with the high potential and outcome of collateral damage. However, the Nazis saw this as a targeted attempt to break their national morale by killing civilians - much like their own threats of airborne destruction to other European countries, actually carried out when they incinerated the Basque city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War - so their retaliatory raids on the UK specifically targeted British civilian populations. The UK was out for revenge after that and they annihilated German civilians with eagerness.

The Nazis fought way dirtier than the Western Allies did, and even the brutal USSR didn't carry out a mass genocide campaign (the Nazis tried to justify the Holocaust death squads with the military rationale that "where the Jew is there is the partisan") as part of their strategy. WW2 was filled with atrocities committed by both sides, but one side takes the prize for the most gratuitous.

There's no escalation of attacks in the Ryloth firebombing seen in TCW. There are no CIS civilians who are specifically targeted by the Republic. No, Genosian combatants don't count. Wat Tambor - in the style of a 19th/20th century European colonial overlord in a conquered territory - sends out the droid bombers to terrorise the civilians with brutal violence in order to keep them in line.

Not really. Before the American Civil War, slaves and the anti-slavery cause were both monumentally screwed over by the U.S. federal government at almost every opportunity. The Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision was a massive handout to the pro-slavery faction. Pro-slavery presidents like James Polk had conducted U.S. foreign policy largely in the interests of the pro-slavery faction. Federal resources were used to hunt down fugitive slaves and keep them in bondage even after they became established citizens in free states. Even Abraham Lincoln was pretty ambivalent about slavery until the Gettysburg Address. If anyone had reason to secede, it was the largely anti-slavery Northeastern states and the slaves of the South, who often tried to follow the example of the Haitian slave rebellion. The slave-owners and -traders were making a killing off of the United States before the American Civil War.

There were plenty of people who backed the Confederate States despite not having much sympathy for the pro-slavery faction. Robert E. Lee owned slaves but didn't particularly care for the institution, and he only fought for the C.S. because he saw himself as a citizen of Virginia. There were many who saw the Confederate States as having a right to secede from the U.S., and even today people like U.S. Congressman Ron Paul agree with the principle of secession. The British government provided covert support to the C.S. (up to the Gettysburg Address, by which point they could not longer feasibly back a pro-slavery faction) but the famous British Guardian newspaper - definitely not a mouthpiece of the government - was both anti-slavery and pro-C.S., decrying perceived excesses of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.

Even today, reformists often team up with various factions dominated by establishment oligarchs. The alliance between reformists, radicals and reactionaries seen in TCW's CIS rings true to real life. If they see Palpatine, the Senate and the Jedi as a big enough collective threat to oppose, then they'll join forces. Likewise the Loyalists, who combine reformists, moderates and establishment figures who obviously see the Separatists as a large enough threat to form a common cause against. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

However, I'd like to see more of the propaganda spewed that motivates Senator Kersh Kuchi (Ric "Captain Obvious" Olie's polar opposite) to say such blatantly untrue things like: "Unlike the Republic, we are not ruled by corporations!"

That doesn't mean the allies didn't fight very dirty. however. They certainly did.

This was even more true in the Pacific, where who fought dirtier is definitely a debatable question.

Not on the scale of the Holocaust perhaps, but they carried out their share of large-scale atrocities.

If you ask me dropping an atom bomb on civilian targets to make your enemy give up is quite dirty!


The USSR government was quite brutal and murderous towards it's own people - civilian and military.
The nazis lost a total of around 7 million military and civilian.
The Soviet Union estimated loss in WWII is around 23 million in military and civilians.
Numbers don't lie.


USSR did carry out many campaigns against minorities...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Repression_in_the_Soviet_Union

There are commonalities between the Death Star and the atomic bombs. The idea being a weapon of massive destructive power that would invoke a strong enough sense of fear to lead to unconditional surrender, and that fear of the weapon would be a more powerful tool than actually having to use the weapon much at all.

Though in Star Wars Palpatine is essentially nuking his own population and not that of a foreign enemy.

Though again these arguments seems to skew into the direction of my side can't be called evil because your side has done evil too! "You can't criticize the Separatists as evil, because the Republic has done evil too." That kind of argument that isn't at all logically sound. In a contest of who has done more good, the Republic would win hands down. It's like in politics when people get frustrated because the candidates spend less time talking about what they're going to do to benefit the country, and more time criticizing their opponent for being a moron.

The real world isn't the best comparison since there is not the black and white sense of good vs. evil like there is in Star Wars or superhero films. Batman has the code about no killing. I'd like to see the armed forces of a country fight with that kind of morality, because your enemy isn't going to fight fair like that. And while there's the notion that just because your enemy does something evil, that it is no excuse to stoop to their level, out of necessity it needs to be. It would be all peaches and cream if wars were conducted under chivalric codes of honor in which you only hurt your enemy to the extent that it takes to make them yield and take them prisoner to be ransomed back. Or that if someone yielded to you in the thick of battle that you would trust them on their honor that they will remain your prisoner and make no attempt to flee in the confusion of battle.

Generally there are no good wars. Civilians will always get killed. Even in the days of two armies meeting out on an open field of battle away from cities, civilians still wound up getting killed, whether it be through the enemy army marauding through the country side for the resources to feed and pay the men, or through sieges when it came time to take a city.

Generally as "good" as a war is going to get is in using the minimal amount of force necessary to get the enemy to surrender so as to spare the greatest number of lives (particularly civilians), and some times that ironically means using a huge display of force/"shock and awe" to demoralize the enemy and end the conflict as quickly as possible to spare a greater loss of life in the long run. There's still some thread of resemblance to that chivalric idea of pulling punches.

A lot of the finer details of WWII are the kinds of things you'll only learn if you study the war as a hobby or take higher level courses. Generally my knowledge of WWII just comes from recreational reading, so I'm no expert, but when it comes to the use of the atomic bomb, it's not black and white like the Death Star and is subject to all kinds of varying moral views.

For instance the projections of what kind of casualties there would be on both sides had the United States invaded, and the belief that dropping the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the long run. Plus, the government of a nation needs to be more concerned about the lives of its own citizens. Had an invasion been more favorable to the number of Japanese civilians but resulted in countless American deaths, I don't think that would fly with the American populace and men get shipped off to the Pacific to die in Japan when it could have been avoided with the atomic bombs. Or the notion that things would have been much worse had Japan not surrendered to the U.S., since the Soviet Union was getting ready to invade from a second front and both the US and Japan itself were very afraid of what that would lead to. Or that the death tolls of the two bombs paled in comparison to other methods like carpet bombing that killed more civilians.

I've read that some Japanese historians insist that the atomic bombs aren't even why Japan surrendered (though I'm sure American historians would disagree - and both views are subject to national pride). The argument being that Japan was going to make an international appeal to denounce the United States' actions and was willing to continue fighting, but that it was only when the Soviets declared war (which just coincidentally was soon after the bombs were dropped) and swept through Manchuria that Japan realized that they had no chance and surrendered to the US, since it would protect Japan from the Soviets. And then there's just the notion that war is hell and that the atomic bomb is an abhorrent creation and anyone that tries to justify its evil is just sick.

Star Wars (or at least TCW) has more in common with the super hero mentality at this point, and so the Republic generally is seen fighting a "just" war (or as good/clean as it can get, which is also convenient in that the bulk of their enemies are droids, and so there is not the moral issue of killing organic-sentients except with the Umbarans and Geonosians. Meanwhile the CIS are the comic book villains that coerce, pillage, and enslave. Which just makes it more awkward when something like the notion of there being "heroes on both sides" is thrown out there, since the CIS isn't exactly depicted as anything less than relentlessly evil.

I voted for the Separatists because I want them to win more on the show, but if the war was real I would not support them.

I don't appreciate Republic victories much on TCW anymore because of how often they win, if the Separatists were to win a lot and if there would be more recurring Separatist villains instead of one off villains, it would be more of a treat for the Republic to win and for a Separatist villains to be defeated (if they were ones to have a lot of on screen victories).

There definitely need to be more Separatist victories.

Go ahead, TCW. Show us the dystopian hypotethetical future Galaxy ruled by the CIS that Rex claims to dread in The Deserter. Show the true heroes on the other side as well, and also show their clear rationale for throwing their lot in with the CIS.

I think the heroes-on-both-sides notion was much more viable before the Onderon arc steamrolled over the idea that Mina Bonteri was something of a "good guy."

Also, this thread needs this song:

I want to see more Republic villains and more CIS heroes. Chairman Cho was a good Republic Villain, it would be nice to see episodes where Republic Military Officer villains would lead Republic Forces against the Separatists instead of Jedi.

I'd love to see Tarkin committing some type of atrocity.

Good choice. More CIS WINS!

I think Rex was told to say that. From what the show does, there is no real threat of that what he speaks in that episode.

And how the CIS look like the victims with innocent lives being destroyed by a Republic officer.

Tarkin is the obvious choice, and I agree I'd like to see more villain/anti-hero actions from him. But Yularen is a less obvious choice that I'd just like to see more of regardless since he's been missing, and on top of that he is a person that ultimately ends up being an admiral seated aboard the Death Star in ANH and one would assume went along with Alderaan's destruction. He's a character I'd like to see get worn down by the war and resorts to morally gray actions that the Jedi wouldn't resort to.

"No, Cut. It's simply what I believe."

The CIS is presented as dystopian throughout TCW, after all, so it's not like his beliefs have no basis.

However, they can theoretically go even more evil (yes, even as the Republic proves that evil is everywhere), and in a more sophisticated way than shown thus far. That would make them a far bigger and more interesting threat than their current portrayal.