I am a princess. All girls are.

Inspired by this post, I wanted to a separate post about the destruction of the Jedi Order. Their destruction wasn’t an event, it was a process. A long process that started generations before Anakin was even born. Yes, Anakin made his terrible life choices (no one is denying that) but he’s not the one thing that went wrong with Order or why they fell apart. So I made a list of terrible things the Jedi Order did that are not Anakin Skywalker’s fault:

#another for fucking real#I’m absolutely sure it was teach Anakin something#like letting go of his feelings about slavery#because the jedi seem to be as into the technique of flooding as fucking cesar milan is#for those of you who don’t know:#flooding is as pleasant (and effective pfft) as it sounds#it’s not just exposing a person or animal to a phobia/trigger/negative experience that frightens or angers or otherwise severely affects#but throwing them into it and forcing them to stay in it/experience it/deal with it until they stop fighting it and reacting to it#usually the victim of this extremely harmful and denounced psychological technique stops not because they’ve seen that the thing cannot#harm them anymore but because they’ve psychologically cracked and submitted entirely to the fear/disgust/pain etc#they’re now too damaged to even react to the stimuli and/or situation and/or memory not healed or cured or better in any fucking way.#But they won’t react negatively anymore!#Until they do.#And it’s nasty and violent every time.#So yes totally a Jedi technique I’m sure.(via) 

I’m still wondering if making Anakin part of the Jabba mission wasn’t the biggest dick move of the two. Yes the mission to Zigerria was more traumatic, but at least the purpose of the mission is ostensibly to do what Anakin became a Jedi for, to free slaves. 

With Jabba they’re making him complicit in an alliance with slavers, with the same slavers that held him and his people in bondage. I can’t imagine how much that would have fucked him up.  

Good point, especially since Anakin actually says that exact same thing during the mission.

Honestly, the whole movie is basically a test to see how compliant Anakin can be in the face of things he finds objectionable. Anakin doesn’t want a padawan. Let’s see if we can force him into taking one against his will. Anakin doesn’t think we should ally with hutts and slavers. Let’s make him personally cement the alliance by telling him it’s for the Greater Good. The last, I suspect, was arranged by Sheev to see how far he could bend Anakin’s moral compass and also set up the whole ‘the Jedi are evil’ mentality, but the first was pure Yoda.

Crap I can’t remember exactly what happened. I distinctly remember Palpatine pushing for the alliance when others (can’t remember f it was the Jedi, senators or both) were reluctant, and I can’t remember if he was the one who suggested to send Obi-Wan and Anakin on that mission. 

But in any case, the Council did agree he was a good choice because I remember one of them saying something along the line of his prior experience with the Hutts could be useful (which made me swear at my screen).

And it is totally part of where the Jedi walked right in Palpatine’s hand. They spent 13 years teaching Anakin he should obey order over listening to his own moral compass because it was “for the greater good”. I guess it never occurred to them it might be turned against them one day.

Setting aside moral qualms in favor of the Greater Good of people in power is pretty much the Jedi way.  It’s not just Anakin who does it. In fact, Anakin is one of the few who occasionally manages to do the right thing in defiance of orders. See the Malevolence arc and the Geonosis arc for details. He just get increasingly brow-beaten into compliance over the course of the series until he fully submits himself to Palpatine’s authority in RotS.

Every single one of the Jedi makes moral compromise after moral compromise during the course of the war and it ultimately gets them all killed. It starts with Mace and the Council going along with Yoda’s plan hide that they didn’t know about the Clone Army from the Senate and just picks up steam from there. Depa overrides her objection to commanding an army. The entire council and Anakin agree to conceal what they know about the Clone Army. And it kills them. By not coming clean or really even investigating, they set themselves up to be killed in Order 66. And that’s not even getting into the small compromises, the times they looked the other way from injustice, or made an unsavory alliance, or any of the other things they did that helped the average citizen feel their deaths were justified.

Yup, ultimately, the Jedi Order fell not because Anakin turned but because they tied their own noose around their own neck. The Republic fell pretty much the same way, And the people at the top of both only realized the noose was a noose when it started strangling them.

Palpatine was very good at that, I bet he did the same thing to the Separatists. 

This doesn’t at all absolve anakin for what he did cuz he did a lotta shit but it really paints him as a pawn in the schemes of the Jedi and palpatine. Even though all the choices he made were set up he still chose to do them.

No one is denying Anakin made mistakes or that he is responsible for his actions. The point here is that even if Anakin hadn’t acted as he did, they were still doomed. Anakin was the weapon used to destroy the Jedi not the reason they were destroyed. The downfall of the Jedi started long before Anakin was even born. Palpatine had been manipulating the galaxy since he was young man. And he only succeeded because the Order was already broken due its own internal issues. He didn’t corrupt the Jedi Order. He used their corruption against them.

The failings of the Jedi Order are part of the reason Anakin fell. But Anakin is not the main reason why the Jedi were destroyed. As long as Palpatine was alive and in charge, the Jedi were doomed. If Anakin hadn’t been there, Palpatine would have used someone else to do his dirty work.

Reasons the Jedi should end 4/?

To me, the greatest moral failing in the PT was the treatment of Shmi Skywalker. She gave up her only child to people who didn’t care enough about her to save her. She hoped that they would protect and care for him even as they refused to protect and care for her. Qui-Gon and Padme were on a time-sensitive mission to save an entire planet full of people and decided that Shmi’s sacrifice was an acceptable cost. 

At no point after the blockade of Naboo was ended did Obi-Wan make an attempt to free the woman whose sacrifice gave the Jedi their Chosen One. He was okay training Anakin, but not okay making sure that the woman who loved him was safe. Even if the Jedi insisted on denying her any communication with Anakin per their code, they still could have freed her and set her up somewhere else. Or if the Council wouldn’t help, Obi-Wan could have gone rogue and freed her himself. 

Or Padme could have freed her. Naboo was a rich and prosperous planet; even with the costs of rebuilding, there would have been enough money to free one slave. Padme could had said to her people “the reason we are alive is because of this young boy and his mother. Will you help me raise enough credits to secure her freedom? I can’t save all the slaves, but I can save her and use my political power to advocate for the freedom of slaves on a galactic scale.” Or Padme could have used her family’s money or her salary as Queen to personally pay for Shmi’s freedom. Or Jar-Jar (who also met Shmi) could have asked the Gungans for help raising money. 

Anakin never held enough power to free his own mother. He was so scared of being rejected by the Council that he didn’t dare ask them for a favor. And so he too was failed by the responsible people who surrounded him, who were supposed to look out for his best interests. There was no reason why his mother had to be left in slavery just so Anakin could be free from all personal attachments. 

Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand suffering on a grand scale when they are so far removed from it. But Padme and Obi-Wan saw Shmi and young Anakin’s pain up-close and took no action to fix it. If Padme and Obi-Wan and the Jedi could fail Shmi so painfully and completely, then of course they would fail others who live under shackles. Of course they would see no problem using clone troopers to fight their war. For characters that are noted for their compassion, where was the compassion for Shmi?

In the 2008 Clone Wars movie, Anakin is forced to go back to Tatooine on a mission which, you can tell, tears him apart. He is forced to return Jabba the Hutt’s kidnapped son to him.

On an ethical level, perhaps, that is not problematic, but when we think about it more, it is awful. A person who was once owned by the Hutts, the people who put a bomb in his head, was being forced to assist them, and to do so in such a way as to perpetuate and reinforce thier hold on power.

He was doing it because the Republic wanted the Hutt’s assistance to fend off pirates.

In other words, the Republic WAS prepared to intervene when it suited them. They were prepared to make deals with the Hutts to protect the people of the Republic. Of course, this came at the expense of the countless slaves on Tatooine.

This really is the inevitable consequence of counting some lives as being more valuable than others. Rebublic lives were more important that the lives of people from the Outer Rim. Republic lives, indeed were so important that they could not be risked on the battlefield and so millions of disposable humans were created for the purpose of fighting.

Millions of humans expected to fight for a Republic which did not grant them the rights of full citizens, and held them to be mere “property”. The Clone Wars did not save lives, it just put some lives before others. It created lives who were intended to be disposable, and had no value so that Republic citizens did not have to risk themselves.