Full Series Why didn't anyone else try to change Ahsoka's mind? (S 5 finale)

Actually, I wasn't the one who came up with that in relation to Kennedy/LBJ's "Brain Trust" and how they got us into Vietnam.

No, he just threw an innocent padawan under the bus in order to keep a crooked politician and an r-trilling fascist in a proto-Nazi uniform happy.

 

We're also not galaxy-renowned problem solvers with years of training in covert operations, enormous resources, and supernatural powers at our disposal. They didn't figure out what was going on, but the very point of what happened with Barriss and Ahsoka is that the Jedi Council could have figured it out if they didn't have self-imposed blinders on.

I've said it before, but the problem with the Jedi is that they forgot that their mission is not to serve the Republic or democracy, but to serve the Force. They blindly served the Republic instead, and it turned out badly.

 

Yes, they served the Republic and democracy by using the Force. But did they serve the will of the Force by fighting for the Republic?

Ah, so you take the Sith view of the Force.

 

Okay. But seriously, what you said might as well have come straight out of the mouth of Darth Bane.

So did the clones. Does that make Order 66 okay?

 

The ultimate flaw of dedicating themselves to the Republic is that they blind themselves to the classic problems of any form of government; corruption, vetos, etc.

The Jedi inevitably got caught up in the dirty game of politics and got themselves tangled in so many messes because of how messy the government was. If they really wanted to serve the Will of the Force, they should've done with all those other Force sects did and remove themselves from the larger galaxy.

 

"I was only following orders" doesn't even work as an excuse in our world, much less in the GFFA among people who are supposed to be supernaturally-enlightened warrior-monks. If the Republic asked the Jedi to fight a morally-questionable war, or to do anything else that violated their moral code, they should have said no. Again, tens of thousands of ordinary college kids in our own country had the brains and the nerve to do that during Vietnam - my mom tells me stories of seeing people burning draft cards in the streets and shouting "Hell no, we won't go". If they could do it, so could the Jedi.

Come now, there's no need for that. I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why liberals are evil and insane.

Why is water wet? Because it's water.

 

If this goes on I will be bringing out the hose instead of the hot dogs and marshmallows.

At one point the Jedi Order felt that the best way to serve the Will of the Force was to serve the Republic.

Funny thing is that in the novelization of RotS Obi-Wan tells Padme that the Jedi know as much about the Will of the Force as a society that lives without gravity knows that it is the will of the river to flow to the sea/ocean. He says this when she asks "don't the Jedi follow the Will of the Force?" Or something like that.


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"The Starman and Moon Goddess."

 

It seems like regular Joes and Janes in the GFFA could see the Jedi's own corruption. The Jedi whether by will of the force or not were the protectors and peace keepers of the Republic. They took the role of leading the GAR in a civil war with the Separatists because I thought they thought they were the only ones qualified to do it which would seem kinda arrogant. This is part of the reason Palpatine has to 'dispelled' rumors that the Jedi are the ones prolonging the war to gain power.

Its hard for folks like Letta to separate the Jedi from their old role of peacekeepers and high profile human weapons leading an army of clones like the only way to keep things together is with bloody violence and all out war. That may well be but the longer it dragged on the more people just wanted it to end and started looking to the Jedi to just be the peace keepers of legend and just end the war. Folks just wanted their magical fix switch and Palpatine played on that to turn the public against the Jedi while playing both sides.

I think all Barriss did was figure out the same thing regular people watching the screens and listening to Palpatine's speech in "Lightsaber Lost" thought they figured out. She just happened to have the power to do something atleast in her mind. The Jedi are corrupt and no longer doing their job. I don't believe Palpatine had any direct influence on Barriss but perhaps he did indirectly with some speeches like that even if she also considered the Republic corrupt by extension. Being a healer and seeing the worst war injuries simply drove her past the edge so she eventually decided to make a statement and bomb the Jedi Temple to help people realize what she was seeing. It was the wrong way. Barriss was in "Brain Invaders" a Jedi quick to quote Jedi doctrine from Mace Windu himself but just as quick to get violent in the same episode.

Early in the Fugitive arc Barriss questioned Ahsoka's own thoughts on the Jedi's views on attachment just to hear how sound they were. She knew Ahsoka was brash enough to play the part of a fugitive murderer by her own stupidity and she knew she could easily boss Ahsoka around. Nothing Barriss figured out is genius material. Anybody could figure that out about Ahsoka after 5 minutes talking to her or 15 hours stuck in a damn tank. Anybody could twist 'the Jedi are corrupt!" from the war. Letta was able to be convinced to blow up her husband.

The Jedi Council has plenty of reason to believe Ahsoka was the killer, there was way more circumstantial evidence against her than their ever was against even Casey Anthony. The fact is the Jedi never bothered to investigate Letta's murder on their own. They just went along with what Tarkin wanted to do and when they caught Ahsoka handed her over. Whatever happened, happened. Just watching the trial and Padme get talked down to as Ahsoka's lawyer made it pretty apparent Ahsoka didn't have a prayer and if it weren't for Anakin she'd have been jailed at best and more likely executed.

Just the sight of a Jedi, a keeper of the peace, a symbol of good. something like a superhero to the people even standing on trial for murder was something that spoke to the peoples ill-trust. That their temple was bombed. That one of their own was a traitor, got up and ranted to the GFFA equiv of live TV was just a PR disaster. Its almost what Barriss was going for. This would be after the incident where Krell was basically wasting buttloads of those expensive clones that caused folks on Coruscant to not be able to read in the dark and take hot showers. Things people take for granted and get real angry about when the convenience is gone. I'm sure the regular Joes and Janes heard of that in some form or another.

It really does seem like the Jedi should have taken a few more looks at themselves in the mirror. The Jedi Council almost surely cracked the mirror in the finale. That's why Ahsoka walked out and declined knighthood. Not because she had some omnipresence where she just knew the Republic was corrupt and Palpatine was a Sith Lord. It was because she glimpsed the true ugliness infront of her and didn't want to be part of it at that time. She felt hurt, alone, and betrayed. She's only like 16? There probably was some teenage attitude mixed in there. So, she walked away.

It is probably the simple act of her walking away from him that hurt Anakin the most. He felt helpless and like he'd failed to protect her although he did about everything within his power. Next time he'll want to go beyond his power. That pain will further fuel Anakin's dislike of the council, who have caused him to feel the pain of loss which he dreads twice. The first time was with faking Obi-wan's death. Obi-wan felt that as well. He wanted to go after Ahsoka and Anakin but Plo held him back. I'll never be sure what Plo felt there. The Jedi Council's apology felt hollow. They didn't care. Barriss is a traitor which is an easy way to come back and say, "we're still the guardians of the republic" without looking into anything further. The rest of the Jedi Council probably did forget about Padawan Tano the next day but Anakin didn't.

 

Excellent points, Seerow. I do feel this discussion has been argued extensively two months ago in The Wrong Jedi episode thread and the two Barriss threads, but you managed to sum up all of the cogent ideas very nicely.

I'd like to add that if we factor in the Clone Wars EU, there were numerous other Jedi who went dark during this period as the war dragged on and the cloud of the Dark Side only strengthened as a result of the ongoing conflict: Depa Billaba, Sora Bulq, Tol Skorr, Nikkos Tyris, and even Quinlan Vos for a time. Add Pong Krell and Barriss Offee to this list and suddenly it looks like the Jedi Order had a much bigger problem on their hands that they insisted on trying to hide from the public as much as possible, but often could not avoid. First and foremost, Dooku, leader of the CIS, was himself a former Jedi who became a Sith Lord and led countless droid armies against the Republic. Add to that rumors of potential Jedi like Bulq and Krell turning dark, and you have a problem on your hands that should have been more actively addressed by the Jedi. This certainly contributed to the declining public opinion of the Order during the war, and perhaps even some of the GAR clones (like the 501st Legion in the Krell arc) began to have doubts about their commanders after witnessing these Dark Jedi like Krell defect, turning against the Republic itself.

Then there were Jedi like K'Kruhk who did not want to partake in the war due to the high cost of lives (he was dismayed at the numerous casualties his clone forces incurred from initial battles) and their own personal, pacifistic beliefs. Had the entire Order shared these beliefs, they might have been able to avoid falling so readily into Sidious' schemes to discredit them, but once the war began on Geonosis, the Jedi were essentially forced into the forefront of the conflict.

 

I generally agree with you, but here I'll disagree slightly. Even after Geonosis, they could have still said no. They should have.

 

Perhaps so, but hindsight is 20/20. After Dooku revealed himself to be a Sith Lord, the Jedi realized that he had to be stopped. If that meant being dragged into a potentially long and terrible conflict, then so be it. At the beginning of the Clone Wars they had little idea that the entire war itself was engineered by the Sith as a means to destroy the Jedi Order. Only in RotS did Mace Windu and others begin to suspect this, but by then the war was already three years in and public opinion of the Order was at an all-time low.

And even if they had flat-out refused to fight for the Republic, I suspect Palpatine would have found a way to force them into it anyhow. He had plans upon plans. Plus, the methods that Dooku, Grievous, and their minions used to enslave and torch numerous worlds would have forced the Jedi to intervene at some point, especially if the clone forces weren't enough to slow or halt the Separatist advance.

 

Do I detect a subtle sadistic streak here?

 

I'm with him, I already made a huge complaint about it before. The Jedi Council was inexplicably incompetent in those episodes. Also, I feel like we should all remind ourselves: Ahsoka is like 15, right? And she's spent her entire life dedicated to these people, the concept of these people, who have taught her all her life, turning against her will cause inconceivable trauma and stress. So I'll actually be surprised if she doesn't off herself at some point in the future.

As for the concept of Palpatine looking to off Ahsoka, I doubt it. Like the only person I can imagine having any form of a grudge against her specifically is Ventress. Without Anakin having her as a padawan, Palpy doesn't need to do a thing.

 

Now then, I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but could someone here please explain this to me?

"Jedi in war is bad" makes no sense whatsoever. There was absolutely no option to remain neutral. General Grievous, the Supreme Commander of the Separatist Army is quite public about the fact that his one and only motivation for being in the war is to kill Jedi. If the Republic loses, they'd be massacred by the victorious droids. The Jedi have always been portrayed as the first to negotiate, and the last to resort to violence. They only attacked the Separatists when two of their members and a Republic Senator were facing viciously inhumane execution in a barbaric gladiatorial arena.

And furthermore, how in the blazes does it destroy their reputation to be in war? The clones seem to have a dandy reputation. Palpatine's reputation is sky-high (80+% approval rating!).

Another thing, where the hell does anyone here get the idea that Jedi leading a war is bad or unusual or against their philosophy? The Jedi have been fighting wars with the dark side and it's agents from the get-go:

Dark Jedi split from the order and attacked the Republic and Jedi, the Jedi defended themselves and the Republic.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hundred-Year_Darkness

Sith attacked the Republic/Jedi for the first time. The Jedi didn't sit on their collective asses and let Coruscant burn.....they FOUGHT BACK.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Hyperspace_War

Sith attack again

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Sith_War

and again...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_Civil_War

and again...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Galactic_War

My Force senses are picking up a pattern...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Great_Galactic_War

But what could It be...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/New_Sith_Wars

So what do people expect the Jedi to do, when they find out the CIS is controlled by a Sith, and said Sith wants to wipe out the Jedi/Republic? Let that happen? As history shows, that's not the Jedi way.

 

Nobody said "Jedi in war is bad". What I said was "This war was bad, and the Jedi shouldn't have participated in it." Big difference.

Your past examples don't make sense. That the Jedi may have fought for good and necessary causes in the past doesn't mean that the present cause is one that they had to fight for. To use an example from our world, one could believe that the US Army fighting against Hitler during World War II was good and necessary, and yet still believe that it fighting in Vietnam was neither of those things.

Sorry, but your attitude here reminds me of those awful neocons who have sold us a series of dismal quagmires in the Middle East by telling us that every tinhorn dictator they wanted to topple was "the new Hitler" and that this was "1938 all over again". Because of this, they argued, diplomacy was useless, and everyone who tried it was just an "appeaser" in the mold of Neville Chamberlain at best, and a borderline traitor at worst.

If there's anything that the last ten years should have taught all of us, it's not to listen to people like that. Diplomacy is always an option. Dooku and Grievous weren't fighting - couldn't have fought - the war alone, and this series went out of its way to show us that there were people who could have been reasoned with in the Separatist camp. The longer the war went on, though, the harder that was going to get, which is why by the time someone finally had the sense to put out feelers in the middle of Season 3, it was too late.

What if the Jedi had said: "We will offer our full protection to anyone from either side who offers good-faith peace negotiations" at the start of the war? What if they had offered heir own peace plan and appealed for public support from both sides? Maybe it would have worked and maybe it wouldn't - wasn't it at least worth trying? What if they'd asked some more questions about the people on their own side - who they were and what their motivations might have been?

You say: "If the Republic loses, they'd be massacred by the victorious droids". Obviously, that didn't happen. Instead they were massacred by the victorious clones. A little more question-asking would likely have avoided disaster here. Instead, they took basically everything that Palpatine told them at face value. Oops.

And this is the point. You talk about the Sith armies. What made Palpatine's plan a work of truly insidious genius is that in the Clone Wars, the Jedi became the Sith army. They're the ones who led the clones - you know, the same clones that morphed into the Stormtroopers - until they'd eliminated or brought to heel anyone who could have posed a serious threat to Palpatine's imperial tyranny. Then, once the Jedi had dutifully eliminated anyone who had the power or resources to seriously challenge Palpatine, he had them eliminated too. Masterful - sheer brilliance. And the Jedi did their job so well that it would be twenty years before anyone could cobble together even a minuscule group of ill-equipped, rag-tag fighters to challenge the Emperor.

 

And, pray tell, how could they have avoided it? It began, not when planets began to secede from the Republic, but when Obi Wan discovered a high-level meeting of Separatists who were planning on attacking the Republic with a massive droid army anyway. The Jedi initially attacked because two of their own and a Republic Senator were being subjected to barbaric execution in a gladiatorial arena.

I don't particularly care for your real-world political analogies, but if we're going there then perhaps you should note that the CIS was vastly more powerful compared to the Republic than Vietnam and Iraq and Libya were compared to the United States and co. None of those states had access to the necessary conventional or unconventional force to seriously threaten to topple the United States government. The CIS did.

And they didn't fight it alone. They had the backing of countless sponsors, from corporate/industrial giants like the Trade Federation and Techno Union to individual systems like Geonosis and Umbara, all of whom were convinced that the CIS better represented their interests. Furthermore, they had an utterly loyal mechanical army to do the dirty work, and also to soak up the casualties and destruction, meaning the war would be considerably less personally painful to CIS citizens.

And yes, the show showed us Separatists who could be reasoned with. You seem to be forgetting that it also showed us what happened to said Separatists - Dooku and Palpatine, the two heads of state, had them murdered. The twin leaders were actively working to prevent such a thing from happening. When such a peace negotiation started, Dooku had Grievous and some droids carry out an attack on Coruscant to scare the Senators, followed by the murder of Mina Bonteri, possibly by Republic forces, on the order of Palpatine, or possibly by CIS forces on order of Dooku. It doesn't really matter who did it.

The war started when the Separatists attempted to inhumanely execute two Jedi and a Senator, and the Jedi refused to take it lying down.

Yes, because the clones won. The droids had no intention of doing any differently.

Have you missed the tiny detail that Count Dooku, the CIS founder and head of state, was a Sith Lord? Darth Tyranus was his name. The Jedi confirmed that. Furthermore, he employed quite the array of former Jedi, Sith cultists, and other dark-siders to do his bidding. As far as the Jedi had reason to believe, the CIS was a Sith Army. And, in actuality, it was. It just had a different role to play than they (or even Dooku) imagined.

Finally, you seem to be forgetting that, both in real life and in Star Wars, there are people who simply cannot be negotiated with, because what they want is so utterly antithetical to the opposing side. The Sith want nothing less than the eradication of the Jedi and domination of the galaxy. Dooku wanted nothing less. And the CIS, as we saw, ultimately answers to him, all other pretensions aside.

 

*waves hose back and forth*

There truly are people that can't be reasoned with and at the moment I will use my iPod Touch in my bedroom, lying on my bed doing whatever I please until I am too sleepy to do anything even though I am not supposed to be on it in the house after eight p.m. but I don't care; I am having fun.

Seriously if I get caught I might lose the iPod for a bit.

If you are fighting a war for the right reasons then there shouldn't be a problem. Wars should be fought to protect: your families, your freedom (religious and physical) and a few others.


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"The Starman and Moon Goddess."

 

I already listed multiple alternatives.

I already addressed that, too.

I'm very unconvinced. Taking over the Republic would nullify the whole idea of being "separatists". Separatists want to be separate, not to unify by force. That's why they call them "Separatists".

Two Jedi and a Republic Senator who were, it must be noted, actually guilty of espionage - a crime that carries the Federal death penalty in the United States. Besides, you don't start a war that will kill billions over three people.

As opposed to the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, who totally wasn't?

Again, Palps played the Jedi masterfully. All he had to do was to have Dooku wave a red lightsaber off somewhere, and the Jedi would unquestioningly run off on a ruinous quest to get the Sith, no matter how much harm the war caused to the galaxy, the Republic, and themselves. Again, a real-world analogy - this is exactly what Osama bin Laden had in mind when he said:

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations."

That's pretty much what the Jedi did with Count Dooku.

That awful feeling when you realize that Yoda isn't actually any smarter or wiser that George W. Bush...

First, droids have no intention of doing anything. They're machines - they don't have intentions.

Secondly, again, if two teenage padawans could figure out that the war was a big setup that would result in a moral, military, and political disaster, Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson could have. The reason they didn't is because they had self-imposed blinders on.

If the GFFA had an opening for its very own Rush Limbaugh, you'd be the perfect man for the job.

 

No, you didn't. Besides, presumably, allowing the execution of 3 high-ranking Republic representatives without even the barest of legal proceedings.

No, you didn't. Nor why anyone with real power in the CIS (the megacorps who supplied the droid armies, the darksiders, Grievous) would be interested in such.

Nonetheless, that was exactly what they were planning to do. Of course, that was in accordance with Sidious' plot, but the Jedi had no way of knowing that.,

And who received no legal proceedings or anything else. Furthermore, the Republic, per TCW, doesn't recognize the CIS state as legitimate, and so declaring them spies means nothing.

And they would know that - how? They knew that Dooku was.

Except that was a little thing called propaganda. The actual goal, per documents recovered from his compound, was to cause enough casualties to cause America to withdraw from the Islamic world, not draw it in. Because, believe it or not, they had a good thing going in Afghanistan not too long ago, and weren't very happy about losing it. Even in Iraq, their wild disregard for civilian casualties and repeated attempts to trigger sectarian civil war resulted in the Anbar Awakening against them.

Gratuitous Bush-bashing is gratuitous.

*sigh* The leadership of the droid army had the same intentions. Also, R2, 3PO, HK-47, and many other droids would disagree about their lack of will or intentions. Sapient AI is a fact in the SW universe.

They didn't figure that out. Barriss felt that violence was wrong and decided that the most rational response was framing her best friend for murder. Ahsoka was hurt by the council giving her up to the Republic for trial so easily to save face. Nobody realized it was a setup.

The true response of a deluded ideologue if there ever was one. Ironic really.

Let me put this in simple terms for you: sometimes two parties have a mutually acceptable solution, because what both want are to some degree compatible. Sometimes there is no such solution, because the parties want diametrically opposing things. Hitler, for example, wanted the Jews in Germany and wider Europe wiped out. The Jews wanted to live. There is no negotiable solution - either Hitler gets his way or the Jews do.

Those who insist that diplomacy is always the answer and everyone always wants to negotiate are as thoroughly deluded as those who think it is never the answer and force solves everything. Sometimes, people won't negotiate simply because they don't want to. Believe it or not, not everyone's priorities are the same as yours.

Dooku was a Sith. He wanted the Jedi eradicated. As long as the CIS remained in his hands, which it did throughout the war, peace was simply not possible. In order for any negotiation to have a chance of succeeding, a figure or group of figures with the combined power to remove Dooku, Grievous, Gunray, Tambor, and all their ilk from the steering wheel of the CIS who also desire a peaceful end to the war would have to exist. No such figure existed within the halls of the CIS government. Dooku not only ran the state, he founded it, meaning that he deliberately stuffed the ranks with those who would go along with the plan.

Hell, let's assume the Jedi pulled off a miracle during the war and found, outed, and killed Sidious. Does the CIS stop wanting war? No - Dooku, Grievous, and all the rest are still out there. Dooku's probably smiling that the Jedi did all his work for him. After all, he had his own plans to get rid of his boss. He still runs the CIS. To have a chance of ending the war, the CIS needs new leadership. Dooku, Grievous, and the rest still need to be brought to heel. The Jedi made constant attempts to kill or capture them during the war, and they would still need to do so. The war would go on.