Saga Were the non-Sith/non-Corporate Separatists the true heroes?

This video summarizes a lot of my previous thoughts on the subject:

 

"There are heroes on both sides."

Think that about sums it up.

 

While they are the sympathetic part of the Separatist Movement, and it's understandable the oppressed systems left because of corruption, I'm not sure if secession was the right move. Especially given how many terrible people the good separatists were involved in. When the face of your movement is corporations, Grievous, terrorists like Doctor Vindi, etc., it really undermines any positive ideal.

I think the Republic Loyalists were the heroes. People like Mon Mothma and Bail Organa. The dissociation from Palpatine's regime, even undermining it, to unite the galaxy under a non-corrupt, fair democracy was a noble cause, even if a bit naive. However, maybe that's for the best, because with two governments/powers operating on their own, peace probably won't last long.

 

On the other hand it's implied that the Republic's negotiations with Separatist factions were doomed even before they began due to hard-line militarists in the government who preferred suppression over any form of concession. It would be hard for the leaders of the Separatist movement to accept that the Republic was operating in good faith with one hand while seemingly arranging for a military solution with its other hand. In that light it seems that the Separatists were pushed out of the Republic more than they left of their own accord.

The core of the Separatist movement certainly isn't evil. Even Padme begins to wonder whether the Separatists might not be the good guys in all this. Remember that the Separatists only turned to the commerce guilds because they felt they needed an army fast and had no other choice--just the same as with the Republic and the Kaminoan army. And while the Separatists boast their fair share of sadistic, amoral military commanders, is the Republic really that much better when it has men like Tarkin serving at the highest levels?

 

Secession from the Republic is a perfectly legitimate decision. There's nothing inherently "heroic" about it. Same with staying in the Republic.

 

Makes you wonder how the Separatist movement would have gone without the corrupting influence of the Sith and the megacorporations and their armies.

If the Separatists had behaved liked the Rebel Alliance, how would we (the audience) feel about each? Which would be a more worthy cause: separating from the Republic or reforming it?

Even more challenging: what if there was never a Palpatine, but there were still rebels trying to reform the government through violence, and separatists trying to declare independence from the Republic through violence. Which side would the audience pick then?

 

It is true that the presence of the Sith, and the influence they had-especially within the Separatist military ranks-really muddies the waters in terms of which side people would choose. Without that kind of evil presence threaded thru the middle of all of it, the whole picture could've looked quite different.

 

Would there even have been any seps if the sith did not exist?

I doubt it. Based on the films, the seps come across as 100% a sith creation and they act like total sith-stooges.
They are not given much if any genuine motivation and all we see of the them are the TF and the like.
And the TF were sith-stooges in TPM.

So remove the Sith and there would likely not be any seps movement.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

I suspect that there were genuine grievances toward the Republic . . . and I mean from those who had no connection to the corporations or the Sith. But I think that a Separatist movement would have taken longer to form without Palpatine's manipulations.

 

There's no reason to believe that is the case. The Sith are shown to take advantage of long-standing fault lines in societies and preexisting character flaws in individuals. Sidious is the devil on the shoulder whispering temptations into the ear. He is not the progenitor of evil, but the cultivator of it. When his will is conscientiously resisted, Sidious is undone. His power is an illusion.

 

There is reason.
In TPM, there not a hint of a seps movement.
Nor has there apparently been such a thing in the past thousand years.

If other systems have wanted to leave the republic in the past, either they have been allowed to do so. Which would mean that the current seps movement could just leave as that has not been a problem in the past.
Or they have forcibly been stopped from doing that.
But that would mean that the Jedi have taken part in actions that kept systems in the republic by force.
In either case, there is not much to negotiate about. If a clear precedent exists for how a system can leave the Republic, then they just need to follow that. Or the republic does not allow systems to leave, which again leaves nothing to talk about and would mean violence is the only way for the seps to get what they want.

OR, no system has even wanted to leave the Republic until now.
If that is the case then for at least 1000 years, no system has ever been unhappy about the republic and wanted to leave.
But now a whole lot of systems do want to leave. And those systems are led by a Sith.
I think the connection here is pretty clear.
We are not even told what the demands of the seps even is. They have no motivation, they are just sith puppets.

Or take the TF in TPM, people comment that the invasion is an odd play for the TF so I think the film makes it clear that the TF wouldn't have dared to act this way unless the Sith had encouraged and aided them.
They say that the TF are cowards and yet they not only do the invasion, they also try to kill two jedi ambassadors.

I think the PT paints a clear picture that if Palpatine did not exist, very little if anything of what happened would actually occur.
There would be no TF/Naboo conflict, Dooku would not have turned, there would be no clone wars, Anakin would not have turned. He would likely not have been a Jedi as Qui-Gon would not have found him if the Naboo issue never happened.

Take the Empire, with Vader and Palpatine dead, the empire crumbles pretty quickly.
That was what Yoda and Obi-Wan had planned, to take out Vader and Palpatine and then the rest takes care of itself.

And that seems why Anakin even exist, to kill Palpatine as that would apparently set the galaxy right and balance the Force.

Bye.
Old Stoneface

 

I dont know if you can say the seperatists are heroes, but you can say for sure the republic are not.
The republic was corrupt before Palpatine came into power.
Also most planets which stayed in the republic have supported everything Palpatine did and supported the war.
They put Palpatine in power and they gave him even more power, they are guilty, too.
He just used the weakminded and it seems there were many of them in the republic and won.

 

Nothing you said contradicts what I said.

 

I personally dislike clickbait titles like this video's. The question of who is "good" in the Clone Wars requires a bit more nuance than a sweeping claim that one side or the other are "really the good guys".

Palpatine is first elected chancellor on a platform of curtailing the power of corporations like the Trade Federation. He promises to restore peace and prosperity to the Republic, and it's undeniable that the status quo seen in TPM deserves a great deal of reform.

By the time of AOTC, it's obvious that he hasn't delivered on this. We can surmise that he's stalling, or the Republic chancellor is not legally capable of making these reforms, and he isn't using his considerable influence as a Sith Lord to allow any real reforms to be made, because he wants to build resentment and force a crisis and civil war.

We see in AOTC two separate attitudes which lead to support for the Separatists: the first is that Palpatine isn't reformist enough; the second is that Palpatine might be too reformist. The former is held (publicly) by Dooku and the people who support him. The latter is held by Nute Gunray and the other oligarchs. It's actually not uncommon for disparate factions like these to unite behind a singular goal, in this case exiting the Galactic Republic.

It's just as legitimate for someone to support Chancellor Palpatine because of his centralisation of power. He goes too far, of course, but the Republic we see in TPM is in dire need of change. It's legitimate for someone to see the Separatists as a grave threat to any necessary reforms, in part because they can see that the CIS is controlled by the very people who made the pre-Palpatine Republic a terrible place for so many people to live in.

From the perspective of people with this pro-Republic view, the likes of Nute Gunray kept the Republic central government weak and corrupt, unable to help people in need, and then attempted a coup after Palpatine was elected to oppose them. From their perspective, the "good" Separatists might be perceived as misguided at best, privileged and callously indifferent at worst. Can they really separate these "good" Separatists from Gunray and Grievous? Padme does, but Anakin (for example) doesn't.

The YouTube channel's choice of video thumbnail is bit strange. It depicts a Gran with a Trade Federation tattoo. He's obviously a sentient being with rationality, hopes and loves, but it's undeniable that he works for a company that uses corruption and violence to immiserate millions of other rational sentient beings with their own hopes and loves. Someone like that might have legitimate material reasons for supporting the Trade Federation's actions on Naboo, and for supporting the CIS. Similarly, someone else in the setting might have just as legitimate a material reason to find his politics repellent. Would they have much sympathy for a Separatist railing against "Inner Core elites" if they're a working-class person on Coruscant who can see that the Banking Clan are more responsible for their community's problems than a good-intentioned Republic politician like Bail Organa? The latter person could then be accused by someone else of being small-minded and incapable of imagining a better Galactic order than a stagnant old Republic with an emergent authoritarianism that could (as we know actually happens) develop into a militarised autocracy. They would each prioritise issues differently.

It's hard to say much more on this without bringing up real-world politics: how the Clone Wars-era Republic, coloured red, could be interpreted (at a stretch) to represent the more interventionist state that's associated with social democracy, while the CIS, coloured blue, is almost a stand-in for neoliberalism, which has its own populist tendency (much less of a stretch considering the origin of the names Nute Gunray and Invisible Hand); and how the CIS strangely foreshadowed the rise of Euroscepticism, probably without Lucas taking direct inspiration from the nascent Eurosceptic movements that existed in the 1990s and early 2000s, because these ideas of secession, centralisation and the role of the state have been hotly debated for centuries.

What's clear is that the ideological gulf between the Republic and CIS is small compared to that between the Empire's government and the Rebel Alliance. Reasonable people in the setting could support either side of Clone Wars, with the tragedy being that they're killing each other with vast armies of battle droids and clone troopers rather than finding a resolution with electoral politics or some other peaceful means.

 

Your argument is that the Sith take advantage of preexisting flaws or faults.
We never see the TF prior to them working for the Sith nor do we see the seps before them working for the Sith.
So no preexisting flaws or fault lines have been established.
Thus the seps can be a total sith invention, that they would never have done what they did if not for the Sith.
Same with the TF, they existed before yes but their actions are totally guided by the Sith.

In short, both parties have little if any independent motivation and are presented as little more than Sith goons that do what they do because the Sith tell them to.

Bye.
Old Stoneface

 

Everything in tie-in materials, both Legends and New EU, as well as the themes of the movies and common sense, say otherwise.

Killing 1-2 "bad guys" doesn't rid the universe of evil. The Force is within everyone. Everyone has a dark side, that they can choose to accept and reject, accept and embrace, or deny and succumb. The existing fault lines in the galaxy, and in "human" nature, are what the Sith take advantage of and manipulate. There was long a gap between the Core worlds and the Rim, as well as between humans and non-humans. We observe the seeds of the Clone Wars in Episode 1... there are probably thousands of worlds that went neglected like Naboo, where things didn't turn out in their favor. There are thousands of worlds like Tatooine, where Republic law doesn't even reach. In a deleted scene for AOTC, Dooku tries to convince Padme to join the Separatists, because Naboo is just one of the many worlds which saw injustice due to the Republic. The issue is that Count Dooku, the public face of the Separatists, made secret deals with megacorporations, as well as secretly being a Sith. You know the point TLJ was trying to make, with how the military-industrial complex serves and grows from both sides? The Sith are basically a simplification, a metaphor, for this larger military-industrial complex and how they feed conflict and take advantage of both sides for their own personal gains. Now, speaking in-universe, if the Sith never existed, it might have taken them longer to organize without Dooku to unite them and Palpatine to intentionally but sneakily antagonize them. But the gap between the Core and the Rim would still exist, the gap between the Humans and the Non-humans would still exist, the gap between the Rich and the Poor would still exist. Perhaps when things boiled over, it would be more organic conflicts, and a mix of Reformers and Revolutionaries and Separatists, and the Jedi might have a better chance to help the diplomats in forging compromises. But the system was clearly broken, the Sith (and the military-industrial complex) just knew how to take advantage of that. Though even without the Sith, it would just take a few others intelligent in politics or the corporate world to similarly try to gain personal power due to the conflict, even if it meant fanning the flames of war.

 

Well according to the prophecy, killing one or two bad guys would bring balance to the Force.
And that was apparently what Anakin was created to do, kill a couple of bad guys.
Nothing about trying to promote greater understanding between people, or trying to promote the idea to solve differences peacefully.

Just "Kill the bad guys and all is well."

What gap between humans and non-humans?
Was there some prejudice towards non-humans in the old republic?
The TF were rich and powerful and they were made up of non-humans.

The empire seemed to have a policy against non-humans as all or most of all the imperial officers were humans, white humans at that.

What gap between rim and core? Naboo is some distance from Coruscant but it seemed quite well off.
If you mean those worlds outside of the Republic. What is the Republic supposed to do about those?
Conquer them to make them more "civilized"?

"Probably thousands of worlds"? Deleted scenes?
Not really IN the films so it does not matter.
Naboo suffered an injustice at the hands of the TF. Who is now a part of the seps.
So how are the seps more interested in justice?
The senate was corrupt in part due to the actions of the TF. Who are again now part of the seps.
So why would they be any less corrupt?
The senate proved quite ineffective in dealing with the TF but the TF did the deed, the senate was just unable to act.

Was Dooku's deal a secret from the other seps? That is not established and based on what he says, their movement would have 10 000 more systems joining with the support of the TF and CA.
The people he is talking to are called the separatists leaders in RotS so they are the leaders of the seps and thus they are representative of what the seps are. Greedy merchants.

Also, the old republic has stood for a 1000 years or over a 1000 generations. That is a very long time in either case.
Then it fell over a matter a couple of decades. And who was responsible for that? The Sith.

So no, remove the Sith and much of what happens in the PT and OT would not happen.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

I still really hope we get the tale of a true Separatist hero, their own "Luke Skywalker," ANH-version.

Imagine a new spin-off series or trilogy on a decent normal person, kind and optimistic, living their life, who is then wronged by the corruption in the Republic and is pursued by Jedi who unquestioningly obey the Republic's orders to track this person down. After successfully evading the Jedi and the Republic, with us actually cheering this person on, we see this hero be rescued by a very charming and sympathetic Separatist military officer and recruits our "hero" to the Separatist cause. Who then goes on to defy means-justify-the-ends Republic military villains like Tarkin, all while fighting humanely and inspiring hope, unaware of the atrocities of Dooku or Grievous or other Separatist leaders.

 

That whole “heroes on both sides” thing always came across as pretty damn hollow to me, at least in presented in the films. Can evil robots be called heroes?

 

That’s not who the actual Separatists were (also, the droids weren’t evil, just following orders). I agree the Separatist hero angle hasn’t really been followed-up on besides implications about Cassian and the New Republic’s reforms.

 

I was referring to General Grievous, actually.

 

Grievous isn’t a droid, though he is evil.

 

I always thought Grievous was some weird robot lizard.

 

In fact, Grievous is probably one of the most evil characters in the saga next to Palpatine.

 

You just said it yourself, he’s not a droid, he’s a cyborg like Vader.