Were THE GREAT CLONE WARS Any More Brutal Than THE GALACTIC CIVIL WAR?

Like Seldon and others have said I imagine they were more brutal. It would be shocking to learn that Palpatine had set them up just to gain power. The Civil War was not set up because it was a revolution.

 

I think they done pretty much the same damage to the galaxy.

 

the rebels have to conduct different tactics than the Sepratists in order to survive. THey don't have the rescources to make too many massive campaigns

 

Though the Civil War was responsible for many more "human" deaths, the Clone Wars were infinitely more tragic.

The Clone Wars is not just "Droids vs. Clones". It ravaged many systems in it's blood/circuit shed, and the death of countless civilians thanks to crossfire. It transformed the noble Republic into the xenophobic Empire. It led to Anakin's fall to the dark side. It led to the Jedi Purge.

If it weren't for the Clone Wars, there wouldn't be a Civil War, and thus, all these flesh-and-bone human beings wouldn't have been killed.

 

The Clone Wars Also Signaled the End of Millenia of History. The End of the Jedi Order and the Republic itself after so long an unbroken line is a tragic and sobering piece of galactic history.

 

this is an interesting subject. Both side commited atrocities in the Clone wars but only one side did in the GCW. The clone wars was on a larger scale though. Also do you count things like the Cammasi incident and Vader redering Fallen to glass as part of the war or outside it.

 

The Clone Wars were far more destructive than the Galactic Civil War, in all aspects - personnel, planets, mental/emotional impact...the Clone Wars had much more influence at the time.

That being said, the Civil War probably had greater long-term impacts than the Clone Wars.

 

If you were to go simply by what we see in the movies, the Galactic Civil War would probably win out. A lot of clonetroopers and Jedi died in the Clone Wars, but that doesn't quite equal up to the instantaneous eradication of millions, if not billions, of lives. IIRC, there were only a couple of million clones, if that, and the Jedi only numbered in the hundreds by the end of AOTC.

If you factor the EU into the equation, it becomes a slightly different beast. (Bear in mind that I personally accept the Clone Wars story arc to be more canon than the post-ROTJ novels, due to the fact that it is far more rigidly structured and planned out to minimise continuity errors and complement the movies rather than contradict them.) Books like Shatterpoint and the Medstar duology introduce a far more human element into the Clone Wars, through their descriptions of the war being fought on inhabited planets and with sentient combatants (aside from the clonetroopers). Bear in mind also that, although the clonetroopers are bred purely to wage war, they are still human. They have been documented to have emotions, as well as aspirations. They have no family other than the clones they grew up, trained and fought with, but the books show that clonetroopers have been saddened by the loss of their closer brethren.

If you were to look at this as simply a numbers game, the Civil War would still come out in front, but the Clone Wars had an irreversible impact on a civilisation that had not seen war for a thousand years. The galaxy was caught by surprise by the Clone Wars; by the time the Galactic Civil War started, brutality was a relative term for people who had seen a galaxy-wide government crumble.

 

The clone wars were very limited in scope. The most visible aspect, the clone vs. droid battles across broad landscapes, were often smaller in scope than the individual battles waged between armies of nations of out own planet. Only in certain, very limited cases did they ever spill over to devestate civilian areas, like Jabiim. The more destructive aspects would be the civil wars taking place on worlds which are not just on the fence about whether to go with the Republic or Separatists, but are violently in favor of or opposed to one or the other. Those situations, like Haruun Kaal from Shatterpoint, were also limited in number and spectrum to the fringe worlds on the borders of the mid rim and outer rim, and simply could not be as broad or brutal due to the small number of worlds capable of being involved.

The most destructive elements of the Clone Wars would have been the attempted gassing of the Gunagans and Grevious' campaigns around Duro, but even those were relatively minor and didn't leave any lasting scars on the galaxy.

The Galactic Civil War, while it wasn't a big, superpower vs. superpower war, certainly would have had more casualties and encompassed a much greater scope of battles and a broader number of fronts. The Galactic Civil War was composed mostly of the Empire suppressing rebellions and violently conquering space. Planets like Kashyyyk and Mon Calamari suffered acts of genocide much worse than anything perpetrated by the Republic or Separatists. The sheer number of worlds not devestated, but completely destroyed by the Empire is staggering. Alderaan, Agamar, Camaas, Firerro, Dyspair, Emberlene...the destruction of any one of those worlds has the potential to dwarf the Clone Wars in the total number of casualties alone. Add on to that the loss of life for each of the Death Stars (somewhere in the range of seventy billion crewmembers killed aboard the two battlestations) the number of lives destroyed by slavery or forced separation. Entire worlds placed under martial law and the populations of entire continets tortured and interrogated at a whim, massive WMD tests whenever it suited the Empire...it all makes the Clone Wars rather tame in comparison. If you consider what occurs after Endor to be part of the Galactic Civil War, then the acts of brutality and the death toll continues in an upward spiral, slowing down only when the Empire is reduced to a condition where it is no longer capable of fighting anymore.

Comparing the Clone Wars to the Galactic Civil War is like comparing the Spanish-American War to every World War in history combined.

 

My take on the whole clone wars thing is that it was the first major conflict i.e. galaxy wide that the republic had seen "since the formation of the republic". Now I know that the eu has many battles between the formation and the clone wars, all of witch I like, but the fact that this is coming "strait from the horses mouth" as it were I find no matter how much I like the conflicts in the eu, i.e. Tales of the Jedi, etc. that I have to accept the fact that he is the creator and I'm the fan. So were the Clone Wars more brutal? maybe, maybe not, the point is the galaxy was not ready for it and that is what makes it so great.

 

By and large, and purely from a battlefield perspective (excluding the destruction of Alderaan and similar incidents you mentioned, Hawk) the Civil War was a relatively minor affair in comparison to the Clone Wars.

In the Clone Wars, we saw Napoleonic style warfare: two very big armies marching headlong into each other and firing off their weapons in the general direction of the enemy in a rather uncoordinated way. Very bloody and very messy.

In the Civil War, most of the actual fighting (with the notable exception of the Battle of Endor) was of the marauding, guerrilla style. The rebels would hyper in to a remote Imperial supply depot in the Rim, do as much damage in as quick a time as possible, and when the local garrison turned up, hyper out again. Take, for example, the sort of fighting depicted in the SW video games. To my recollection, the majority of the missions in XWA were guerrilla attacks on Imperial installations or convoys; there weren't very many major starship to starship battles.

I mean, even the attack on the Death Star, was, strategically, pretty minor. It was about two dozen starfighters that leapt out of nowhere and blew apart one of the most destructive cards Palpatine had up his sleeve. Naturally, the results of the Battle of Yavin were nothing short of spectacular, but the fighting wasn't anywhere near the scale of that seen at, say, Endor.

The Battle of Hoth showed us that there weren't going to be too many great ground battles in the Civil War. Blizzard Force and Max Veers pitted against a band of Rebels in trenches. And if that was the most the Alliance army could put up to defend its prime base and command staff, I can't imagine that the land battles over the Rim worlds were terribly heroic or grand in scale.

However, even if they weren't so massive as the Clone Wars battles, it's certain that the sheer number of skirmishes in the Civil War far exceeded the number of battles in the Clone Wars. You can only have so many Napoleonic charges at your foes, but you can carry out your partisan marauding 'till the cows come home.

 

Hehe...That's really funny Zaarin, but you've got it just about completely backwards. The Clone Wars was a minor affair affecting a handful of planets on the border between the two nations. Most of the fighting was done between minor state and guerella groups who were fighting to convince their government to allign with one faction or the other. There were very few major battles (Geonosis, Duro, Coruscant) and even those consisted of far fewer troop and equipment amounts, less destruction wrought, and fewer casualties all around than a typical battle of the Civil War. There just weren't enough core troops on both sides of the Clone Wars for it to come close to the scale of the Civil War.

I was just reminded the other day of the fact that the Clone Wars did not end at Episode III, but continued on for decades after. Even after the death of Dooku and the Commerce Guild's leadership, the planets and organizations continued to fight against the ever-increasing might of the Empire. Up to ANH, it was always a cause of celebration for the Imperials when another stronghold of the Seperatists fell. In additino to the front against the Separatists, the Empire was also violently expansionistic and would on numerous occasions invade entire planets at one time. During the Clone Wars, the Republic could only field a few hundred thousand Clone Soldiers, and the biggest engagements which they could have participated in wouldn't have been equatable to many of the battles of World War II. When the Empire invaded entire planets, they would have been confronting the entire military might that a planet could produce. Many of those worlds were at least as populous or large as Earth, and the armies of this planet dwarf those of the Seperatists and the Republic.

While the Civil War consisted of battles against the Separatists and the independent systems which the Empire wanted to annex, it was also actively engaged in projects of genocide, xenocide, mass enslavement, systematic subjugation, and the testing of chemical and biological weapons on the populations of entire planets. Since the question posed here asks about whether "THE GREAT CLONE WARS (were) Any More Brutal Than THE GALACTIC CIVIL WAR?" I would conclude, based upon observations of human nature and the effects of similar programs of genocide and slavery throughout history, that this aspect of the Civil War alone was more disruptive, destructive, and most importantly, more brutal than the CW.

The Front against the Rebellion, as you have stated, did not come with many the grand, sweeping, Braveheart-ean battles which we are so enfatuated with, but the battles of the Rebellion were each more disruptive and destructive to the Empire than any other single engagement in known lore. While the numbers of Rebels involved in some of these battles were extremely small in comparison to their enemy, that does not make them any less significant or discount them from consideration in any way. The Rebels may have used sneaky, underhanded, and guerella tactics to win, but when they won, they won big. Two Death Stars, a planet-busting superlaser, at least two SSDs, and the largest fleet assembled in galactic history come to mind as examples of what the battles of the Rebel front of the Civil War managed to destroy.

Again, I am discounting all that takes place after Endor, which was even more brutal in many ways than what took place before Palpy's swan dive.

 

the Galactic Civil War was worse

Alderaan was completely destroyed, thats millions, if not billions, of people right there

on the other side, the destruction of both death stars probably resulted into a combined million lives

there were no robots to do your dirty work; you had to fight

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on Geonosis we see 200 jedi dead, at most a couple hundred Geneosians(sp?), and maybe a few hundred clones

in ep3 we might see more deaths but I don't believe it will compare

 

The Clone Wars were much more devastating to the infrastructure of the GFFA. The "Civil War" was not really a war, more of an insurrection. The true Civil War was the Clone Wars.

Civilian death wise I would say the Civil War wins out. In military terms, the Clone Wars would win with local militias and militants doing much of the fighting. Many more planets were affected by the CW than the Civil War. And while more planets may have been outright destroyed by the Empire, it could be argued that these planets were not fighting in support of the rebels rather they were fighting for their own survivial which would not really make them a true participant of the Rebellion.

 

how do you know for sure
if the rebellion starts in ep3 we might not really have the full scope of the Civil War
and its not really an insurrection;it is a civil war
the emp wanted to change the gov and the rebels didn't want that so they fought against him
insurrections happen when your country is being occupied by a foreign force this isn't happening in the civil war

 

The Vong War did more damge then the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil war combined.