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Gah. The whole clone thing in The Clone Wars is SO FUCKED UP. These are supposed to be the good guys and what they’ve done is the same thing that the First Order is doing to stormtroopers, essentially.
In the episode I’m watching now, Rex says they took an oath, but like, how did they possibly have a choice to take any oath?
Am I missing something, or is the Republic just that fucked up?
The Republic is sort of that fucked up, but I don’t think they got there by themselves. Look who’s in charge! Really, keep an eye on Palpatine, especially the speeches he gives. Every time he gives a speech, your stomach should curdle because something really bad is about to happen, and it’s going to happen because he’s about to emotionally engage people to be terrible sentient beings. A significant portion of how bad the Republic gets–not all of it, but a meaningful chunk–is ol’ Darth Sidious basically fucking with everybody’s minds. Not in a Dark Side way, but in a worse way. He wedged the Republic into this rock and a hard place with this war he created, and then he says to them, “Isn’t making clone soldiers better than sending our own people out to die?”
“And you know what,” he then says to them, “let’s put the Jedi in charge! Because they’re MERCIFUL. Because they’re HONORABLE. Because THEY, you can be sure, will not abuse people or engage in violence beyond what’s necessary or throw lives away needlessly or commit all those horrors you inevitably see in war.”
And everybody up to and including the Jedi nod, because doesn’t that seem wise and compassionate?
And then he points to devastated colonies as horror stories about what happens each time they fail, and lets them scare themselves into justifying everything. He lets the war itself convince them that they HAVE to win, by any means necessary. He just sits back and lets the Republic, even the Jedi, learn how to dehumanize–depersonify–their enemies (when it’s robots and clones you see doing most of the shooing, it’s so easy to forget that actual people are dying, isn’t it? Even for the audience). All he has to do is stand up and give an occasional speech, and let them all get swept away in the “us versus them” and “whatever it takes.”
And so they all convince themselves that the right thing to do is have the Caminoans breed clones for them to train up and send off to die in a war the poor guys never asked for. As the series goes on, the clones and everyones’ reactions to them are really kind of the living breadcrumb trail of how far the Republic is falling as things go on. Palpatine effectively turns the entire galaxy to the Dark Side. And he doesn’t even have to actually use the Dark Side to do it. Dude earns his Sith name.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1SUCIbL