PT Were the Sith solely responsible for the downfall of the Republic?.

We know Sidious fired the final shot, but did he, and the Sith, take it down alone, or did they play into an already corrupt system?.

 

The films present it as one man's secret plan.

And the Republic never fell. It became an Empire by popular vote.

 

I definitely agree that Palpatine is portrayed as planning and founding the Empire. I'm not sure if previous generations of Sith were subtlety chipping away at the Republic prior to Palpatine's antics. It may be the case that Palpatine's actions were the culmination of a long-standing Sith ambition.

In any event, the Republic didn't make it very hard for Palpatine to get his way. I don't think that the Republic was necessarily corrupt, but it was certainly stagnant and conceited.

 

If we want to go EU wise, I would say the downfall began when the Russan Reformations started. That's when the Jedi began to lose a lot of their governmental authority and were not allowed to guide the Republic via the will of the force, instead they were bound by political chains

 

Taking advantage of the corrupt entities in the Republic was how Palpatine was able to execute his plan. He played the Trade Federation and the others who made up the Separatists.

 

Sidious and the Sith in general are villainous personifications of all the flaws and corruptions that come to exist in a society. They help nudge things along and provide temptations, but they don't create the corruption and they don't force anyone to make the choices that they do.

In terms of the Christian religion, it's like asking if the Devil is solely responsible for the evil that men do.

 

In the prologue to the ANH novelization (written long before the whole idea of a Sith plot was formalized onscreen), the Republic was pretty much on its way out before the Empire came along. It was too big, and required too large and complex a bureaucracy, to continue, as well as its leadership being riddled with corruption. Palpatine (then a Nixonian politician) just took advantage of the flaws already present, got himself put in charge, and ended up as an uncaring monarch surrounded by villainous associates.

From what I saw, the final version of the story presented in the PT isn't too far from that idea. While we have a Palpatine who's far more powerful and malevolent, he still just uses what corruption and mistrust already exists to accomplish his goals.

 

The interesting thing about the Sith is they can use people's faults and imperfections and even sometimes their good qualities to get those other people to harm themselves or at least help them.

 

I feel the corruption was still there, but it was fed and nurtured behind the scenes by the Sith. The way Sidious interacted with the TF is evidence of this. The Sith didn't create their sense of greed and corruption, but rather encouraged it along until it gained enough strength to feed itself. Then when Palpatine became Chancellor, he was able to make more direct contributions that were able to be posed as the right decisions, but secretly he knew they would turn things even worse. Having his apprentice serve as the leader of the Separatists helped quite a bit too, I'm sure!

Then, due mainly to Sidious' actions, in cooperation with Dooku, it got to the point (by the later days of the Clone Wars) where no matter what anyone said or did, things were too far gone at that point. That's why I felt the Jedi destroying Sidious and taking control of the senate wouldn't have really worked. Things had gone too bad at that point to turn back, and the republic was shattered into pieces on the floor-which is why so many were willing to vote in support of turning it into the Galactic Empire; it would be at least SOME sense of security and order, after years of war and uncertain chaos.

So IMO the Sith didn't create the corruption that lead to the Republic's downfall, but definitely took full advantage of it.

 

I agree, I think the Republic was broken on its own, but the Sith helped it along and took advantage of it.

 

The Sith had a lof of allies in the senate and the republic. It wasn't just a 2 man job. The Imperial top brass consisted of a lot of people who plotted the final days of the republic alongside Palpatine. Many of these fled into the Unknown Regions after Palpatine's death and nurtured the organisation the became the 1st Order.

 

It probably would have eventually fallen without Palpatine's plans it just would have taken a lot longer. But it would have fallen to a revolution by the outer rim and the poor and democracy would have died anyways.

It just might have become the Union of Soviet Socialist Systems in a GFFA

USSSGFFA

 

Palpatine definitely sped things up a ton, but sooner or later there would've been a collapse.

 

Pretty much this. Palpatine is as responsible for the "fall" of the Galactic Republic as much as Augustus is responsible for the "fall" of the Roman Republic.

That aside, it sort of depends on how you look at it and how much influence you think the Sith had. Granted that he fabricated the invasion of Naboo to become (albeit democratically elected) Chancellor and then the Clone Wars to cement his power (again, while the situation was manufactured, the republic was more than willing to give him these powers). The biggest question I think is whether a Separatist movement could have existed without the influence of the Sith. Count Dooku was a very charismatic and tactical leader and absolutely had a profound effect on the CIS forming and splitting from the republic, but obviously there was enough hostility there for systems to leave. If you take the sith completely out of the picture, and any sort of separatist movement could of given ANY ambitious politician the platform to seize control.

More generally, however, the Republic had become too large for its own good and bogged down as a bureaucratic nightmare. If anything, an ambitious Palpatine may have saved the republic, if Chancellor Valorum was anything to go by (refused to act to defend a Republic planet from invasion).

 

Valorum had no good choices. Either he did nothing and let the Trade Federation run rampant, or he claimed broad new executive powers for himself and irreversibly made the office of the Chancellor that much closer to an emperorship.

 

The Republic was kind of broken already, mired in bureaucracy and corruption as Palpy himself stated. He took it down pretty efficiently, directing its strengths to take down its own weaknesses.

 

Even being corrupt and inefficient, the Old Republic could have limped on for another thousand years. I mean, how many countries are corrupt and "broken", but continue, same as always? Coruscant seemed to be doing pretty well, business as usual. It was the war (and Darth Sidious) that scared the citizens and Senators to the point that they willingly ended the Republic. Sidious knew that it's easier to get people to give up their freedom than to try and take it from them.

 

I think the term "fell" is being use metaphorically here.

 

Heck no. Palpatine had already established a granite web of galactic fascists, led by Tarkin
Palpatine knew how to manipulate greedy, corrupt, power-hungry or downright evil individuals, specially human

 

Yes, the Republic was broken but the Jedi also became complacent and arrogant. Yes two there would be but they were busy maintaining their traditions and dictating what the order should be

 

I think the point is that when you give away your freedom, don’t expect it to be returned back.

 

The Sith were a major part of the Republic’s downfall. It is likely that it could have lasted another 500 to 1,000 years after it collapsed in the movies. However the Republic was still very much corrupt so it was bound to happen.

 

In some ways the rise of the Empire may have prevented a great deal of suffering for the galaxy.
Granted, the Empire was totalitarian and repressive - However , If the Republic had simply collapsed on its own which I think is very likely to have happened it would have left a huge power vacuum where the centralized government used to exist.
Individual planets and systems, as well as organized crime, would have then had a free hand to move against each other to settle old scores.
IMO - This could have lead to a galactic Dark Ages as resources started to dwindle to critical levels as a result of this infighting and overall splintering of the galaxy.
For all its flaws, the Empire did prevent this scenario.

 

I'd say yes. Whatever the Republic's problems, they almost certainly could have been fixed given some time and effort. Not to mention, all those Separatist leaders like Nute Gunray would never have worked up the nerve to challenge the Jedi and the Republic were it not for Sidious.

 

No. Darth Sidious orchestrated it, but he did so by exploiting existing contradictions in the Republic. The most important one is the hubris of the Jedi High Council, whose own role in governing the Galaxy was ambiguous and unchecked.

TPM contained a lot more twists than it gets credit for. One of them is in the opening sequence, when we learn that the Jedi are running political errands for the chancellor, on behalf of a corrupt Senate (while tolerating an open slave trade in the Outter Rim, we soon learn). It's a far cry from the "Guardians of Peace and Justice" Obi-Wan describes to Luke in ANH. From that point on the prequels demystify the Jedi, who we see berate a terrified 9-year-old for missing his mother and refuse to let him train with the rest of their child soldiers, because they think he's dangerous.

I could go on, but then I'd just be narrating the prequels. Suffice to say I think the fact that Obi-Wan and Anakin are flying prototypical TIE fighters in ROTS says it all.