Lit Would the GFFA be better off without Jedi?

Why?

 

Well in a literal sense: No Jedi means no Clone Army and therefor a Seperatist victory is almost assured. True Dooku wouldn't have been around to jump-start the whole thing, but from the state of the Republic and the hundreds of worlds with governmental issues (examples of these can be seen in numerous Jedi Apprentice/Jedi Quest books as well as in the Republic comics) I feel that the Republic would've become corrupted anyways.

It is a very hard thing to judge what the universe owuld be like if the Jedi had never existed ever, since they had such a presence thorughout the years. If magically every force-user in the universe dissappeared about three hundred-five hundred years before the fall of the Republic, I still think it would've fallen. Maybe it doesn't get replaced by an Empire, but it definately spplinters off into different groups.

 

Splitting up would be much better than an evil Empire.

 

I am of a different opinion; I believe that without the jedi the Republic would never have lasted as long or become as big as it did.

 

Agreed. Even if we assume that there are no force users at all and not just no jedi, the Republic probably would have been sacked by the Mandolorians and gone the way of the Western Roman Empire, or fallen apart because of the tensions that arouse from the Pias Dia Crusades, or been conquered by one of the many ancient empires back when it was still small.

Not to mention that the primary job of the Jedi was diplomacy. I know it is easy to forget that when the authors of Star Wars material tend to forget it themselves, but the jedi's force guided wisdom and empathy, and their reputation for impartiality are their greatest strengths. I imagine that jedi diplomacy, while not as flashy as lightsaber fights, was every bit as important when it came to the survival of the Republic, given the difficulties of getting so many species and cultures to cooperate together in a democratic way.

 

Yes, we use Jedi for their Wisdom " Mind Tricks" and their empathy "Mind Reading" combined they persuade everyone that they work with that they are impartial.

 

Short answer? No.

Long answer? The Jedi Knights do an immense amount of good for the galaxy but the scary question is not why so many Jedi fall to the Dark Side but why so many Darksiders find millions of sentients eager to follow them.

The Jedi are not nearly as good and pure as they are acredited with being and they try. To do away with them is like asking to do away with cops or a military. Some nations get along fine without the latter but it's easy to see what happens when they don't and need one.

 

While initially against it, I liked what they said in Jedi vs. Sith.

I wish I had the actual thing but it was something like the greatness of the Jedi is not what they are but what they strive to be.

 

Charlemagne19

Man, Torr Snapit was one of the best Jedi characters we ever had.

I'm not a Jedi because I like the hum of the lightsaber in my hand...And i'm not a Jedi because I like being a Jedi! I'm a Jedi because the galaxy needs Jedi.

There's no telling who will end up on the Dark Side. Not everyone serving the Dark Lords is a monster. Not everyone on our side is a hero.


I think the entire Jedi vs Sith comic was great and filled one of the best, more realistic interpretations of the Jedi we ever received, tearing away the heroics and the glamour, and exposing the gritty harshness underneath. Lord Hoth was good as well.

I had a dream. I dreamnt that I would single-handedly defeat the Dark Side, that I would make the difference, change the galaxy...The galaxy however has changed me.

 

Yeah, admire not the Jedi for their godlike discipline and wisdom--they don't have it.

Admire the Jedi, instead, for their decision to devote themselves to helping others and trying to make the right choices.

It's not a "special" thing in the universe as anyone can try to do that.

But the Jedi DO and in that, we can all be Jedi.

 

Do we have any evidence for this though? Are there specific things the Jedi did that prolonged the existence of the Republic? I'm assuming of course that without the Jedi there would also be no Sith.

 

The Sith preexisted the Jedi.

20,000 years of peacekeeping efforts. Specifically, though, Revan and company beat the Mandalorians.

 

Close to 25,000, actually. After the Force Wars, the very first Jedi settled on Ossus and other worlds on the border of the Tion Hegemony, keeping watch over the Tionese and the Hutts. Without the Jedi, it's possible the early Republic would have had far less warning of the Tionese attempt to storm the Perlemian Trade Route and seize the Core Worlds. Or, for that matter, the Hutts could have beaten the already-weakened Tionese to Coruscant and really subjugated the galaxy (or held it hostage and altered history as the EU tells it).

To be fair, the First Great Schism took place 500 years before the Tionese War. But Xendor's Legions of Lettow are portrayed in the Essential Guide to Warfare to have seen themselves as religious dissidents, instead of the blanket dark-siders that Jedi historians painted them as. And the Schism hammered a wide array of Republic worlds, as would later similar crises (the Hundred Years' Darkness that led to the Sith as we know them, including the Sith Empires of KOTOR and TOR, the Vultar Cataclysm of 4250 BBY, etc).

When Jedi are Jedi - or even try to do good - they're generally a beneficial force (small f, no pun intended).

When they go off the rails ... that's when Force-users can mess things up in staggeringly mammoth ways.

 

How exactly did the Mandalorians or basically anyone else give the Republic a run for their money anyways?

Personally, I suspect the answer is regulations,distrust of the military, and budget cuts. For the Republic's size it's fleet is tiny which hints to budget cuts and distrust and the lack of large planetary defense fleets hints to regulations.

 

It wouldn't be better or worse off without the Jedi, it'd just be different. I don't think the fault lies with the Jedi themselves, but rather the leaders of the galaxy. Them being the Republic/Imperial/Alliance Senates and the various Jedi Councils. All of them failed to set up proper checks and balances on each other. The Jedi should've either been completely under government control, NOT with Jedi exercising control over the government, or sanctioned vigilantes that work in specific areas that governments give over to them.

Now I don't know much of the pre Episode 1 EU outside of KOTOR/KOTOR2/SWTOR since I'm mostly a Post Episode 6 fan, but giving a brief look and the Galaxy hardly looked stable under the Jedi and Republic's million year reign. Every decade you had some kind of war regardless, be it Mandlaorians, Sith etc, all caused by the Republic failing to govern properly. If the Jedi Council and Republic Senate acted adequetely during the Mandalorian Wars, you wouldn't have had a Revan/Malak appear at all.

 

I think my point is that the Jedi by and large became a very part of the broken system that is was The Old Republic. Onderon1 makes some good points about instances in which the Jedi saved the galaxy but there many other instances in which the Jedi caused horrible things to happen in the galaxy. Starting with the Empire and the first Galactic Civil War, and going through all the various Dark Jedi/Jedi related crises of the New Republic, through the Second Galactic Civil War, the whole Abeloth thing, and Legacy there comes a point where I wonder if (and this may be stretching the topic a bit) not only would the Galaxy be better off without the Jedi, would they be better off without the Skywalker family? The number of catastrophes caused or indirectly caused by that family alone, I bet they've created more casualties than any other family in Galaxy history.

 

Darth Droid - Thanks.

I would say the Skywalkers are ... difficult. FACPOV, it would have benefitted the Jedi to leave Anakin on Tatooine - but who'd toss Palpatine into the reactor?

Depending on what IU evidence you accept, either l'il Ani was the result of Plagueis's heinous experiments with midichlorians and spontaneous generation (the Book of Sith mercifully glosses over the details, but it's still shudder-inducing what's implied ), or the Force acting to restore the balance Plagueis disrupted.

In either case, you've got an absurdly OTT Force-sensitive up for grabs. Qui-Gon himself points out that in the Republic, the Jedi would likely have gotten to Anakin first, which might well have mitigated the resentment canon!Anakin felt toward the Order for leaving Shmi on Tatooine. Instead, the Chosen One was an emotional disaster waiting to happen, and the Order's mishandling of his situation only drove the shoto deeper when Palps made his devil's deal to Anakin.

Now, none of this is meant to absolve Vaderkin of his crimes. He made his choices, and regardless of how much the dark side clouds everything (and it does - it's been shown time and again, both in the EU and canon, how dark-side energies are basically a drug with really bad side effects), he kept on keeping on after Mustafar. Keeping Honoghr ecologically hostage, ordering Callos' destruction, the Sith apprenticeship of Galen Marek ... I could go on, but you get it.

Does chucking a Sith Master down a reactor shaft really balance out 23-plus years of Sithdom? Wiser minds than I have argued both sides of that debate. But the best of the PT and Dark Times tie-ins paint Vader as more complex as either the bad-shebs from Ep. 4 or the whiny narcissist-traitor of AOTC-ROTS.

Luke? We tend to forget he killed upwards of 1 million sentients aboard the DS 1, not all of whom were necessarily Imperial loyalists. History is written by the victors, and the Death Star needed to be wiped out, but there were quite a few Imperial families who had reason to resent Farmboy.

Ben was one of the most badly-served characters of LOTF. It's easy to say "he could've said no" regarding the mission to take out Dur Gejjen, but Ben was a young teenager. And who let him go back to Jacen after the events of Tempest? Plus, nobody's mentally in a good place after losing their mother, especially a Force-sensitive who felt her wink out.

Kashyyyk was horrible, but Ben was under nigh-unfathomable stress and grief. Adults would go mad in such a pressure cooker - why not a 14-year-old? It's a wonder he pulled himself together at all, much less reached out compassionately to Tahiri at the end of Invincible. He needed counseling and community service.

Jacen ... urgh. He's many things - insecure, alternatively neglected then pampered or yelled at, overly Force-focused, failing at the action-hero thing, then scrabbling at a teenaged attempt to redefine himself as a Jedi Consular, finally achieving a degree of insight in Traitor and TUF.

Unfortunately, he didn't make enough of an attempt, IMHO, to save Onimi, who wasn't exactly compos mentis after self-inflicted brain salad surgery. Jacen was too busy having a Force-high, which in turn sent him on a 5-year hunt to score another high, resulting only in some new toys for his arsenal.

And then we get DNT, LOTF, and FOTJ, including five or six attempted explanations for Jacen's Sithliness. It all rolls up into some vague martyrdom excuse floated about with "White Eyes" Luke in late LOTF and the "Dark Man" of LOTF and FOTJ.

Dark!Jacen was unconvincing. And untold millions-plus paid the price for it, including Jacen himself.

Cade ... hrmm. He's no saint, to be sure, but without knowing the depths to which he did or didn't sink as part of Rav's pirate crew (a time period when he was a grieving teenager, so I'm prone to giving him some benefit of the doubt), all we have to go on is his "on-screen" antics.

And those aren't great, admittedly. Jedi hunting is no light-side resume' builder, but Cade's real kark-up is how he treats Azlyn at the height of the Muur Talisman storyline. Keeping your first love alive against her will - painfully - only to get her stuck in life support armor, and to lie to your family about it, is pretty kriffing dark.

OTOH, he pulls out a major win at Utapau, saves his mother despite her shenanigans, and tells Krayt, "long walk, short pier." So, Cade pulled himself up, IMHO.

AFA actual bodycount, though, Artoo takes the cake. By ramming Eclipse II into the Galaxy Gun in Dark Empire II, the little twerp caused the Galaxy Gun to misfire, wiping out the Deep Core world of Byss - 19.7 billion sentients, many of whom were enslaved as Force-batteries for Palpatine's experiments.

So ... yeah. Skywalkers. When you need 'em, they're mighty useful. But they need to be managed carefully.