They were pushed in a direction they had no choice but to follow: Palpatine created a conflict he knew the republic wasn’t prepared to defend against, and gave them a solution, one they would have little choice but to accept if they were going to save the republic at all.
We’ll never know how the Jedi would have ultimately dealt with the clones after the end of the war, but Rebels had a great storyline about how the clones themselves dealt with the situation of being essentially abandoned weapons after the war, since their accelerated aging meant they rapidly became unsuitable for combat.
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Of course they had a choice. They could have told the Senate that they could not be part of a war effort that involved slavery. Drop an ultimatum: “Offer the clones their freedom or the Jedi are out of here.”
What was so inherently bad about allowing systems to leave the Republic anyway? The whole issue was basically Space Brexit. If those systems wanted independence the Republic could have just said “fine, your loss.”
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And remove the free will inhibitor and half life of subsequent clones.
Better yet, they could have refused to continue in the war effort if the senate requisitioned another 2 million clones. The senate comprised thousands of star systems. These systems couldn’t muster a battalion or two for the war effort? Instead they needed to manufacture an endless parade of half life slaves?
More and more, the Jedi seem to embody the phrase: “all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.”
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In the Plagueis novel it’s explained better than I am here, but essentially the republic relied on exploiting the resources and labor of outlying planets in the mid rim and outer rim of the galaxy. When those planets started to secede it caused major economic problems the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Ruusan Reformation, and which threatedned to collapse confidence in the Republic entirely.
For the Republic senate, maintaining that control was the only way for it to avoid losing all its power and splintering into likely even worse war than the clone wars.
But yes it’s true, the Jedi Order did have a choice.
Up until the clone wars, the Republic had been asking for more and more support and aggressiveaction from the Jedi, and more Jedi had been killed in the 10 years leading up to the clone wars than had died of violence in the previous 50.
There just weren’t that many Jedi to begin with and they knew they couldn’t fight a galactic scale war themselves. They knew they could either accept all the help they could get and not worry about where it came from, or they could be wiped out.
Certainly it’s not right, but I can’t stress enough how screwed the Republic itself was and how badly in need of an army they were.
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Both of your counter-positions are predicated on the idea that the Jedi were not entrusted with the safety and security of the Republic as their overarching concern. If you are the first, last, and only line of defence against incursion, you’re not about to say “Meh, let it burn” when “let it burn” is the one thing everyone is pushing against in the first place.
“These clones exist, we may be responsible for them in some way, lets save the galaxy and then allow the republic to have a choice on how to rectify the remainder of their lives” is a very Jedi thing to do. Remember that they weren’t 100% sure whether or not this was an errant Jedi who started this whole mess in the first place.
By the time Palpatine was abducted by Dooku, and as was pointed out in the Clone Wars series itself, there was a lot more going on than galactic Brexit - the separatists were trying to create a new galactic order, complete with them creating the Death Star on Geonosis.
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Yeah, it’s like the US civil war, except the Secessionists don’t have slaves (unless you count robots) and the Republic actually creates the large-scale institution of slavery in order to prevent that secession. You don’t want to be on the side of the Republic in that situation.
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Ugh, it sounds like the East India Trading Company vs. the Confederate States of America.
A pox on both their houses!
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That’s actually not terribly far off.
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That’s the kind of moral cop-out that a Robert E. Lee apologist would use though.
If your side depends on slavery then it’s not a side worth fighting for.
I still say that the problem isn’t enslaving machines (we do that now on Earth; nobody holds protests for the rights of assembly line robots) but in creating machines that have the intellectual and emotional capacity to mind being enslaved.
That’s why I liked the way they presented IG-11 in The Mandalorian so much. “Welp, my programming says it’s time to self-destruct. So long, sucker!”
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To make it worse, a lot of Jedi didn’t think of clones as people at all. A lot of them essentially considered them to be like fleshy droids.
And only a very few Jedi felt in any way like equals with the clones. Specifically all I can think of are Ahsoka, Anakin and Plo Koon.
Obiwan, Yoda and Mace Windu very much looked down on clones as lesser beings.
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Except giving the clones their freedom and choice to fight to defend the republic is not a decision to let the Republic burn.
I know the Jedi are really Buddhist warrior monks acting as peacekeepers, so they are detached from “human” suffering and attachment. But even Buddhists can agree that slavery is a moral wrong, an impediment to enlightenment, and advocate and agitate for its abolition.
One on the underlying themes of SW, intentional or not, is whether artificial life, be it manufactured or grown, is truly sentient and worthy of “human” rights and dignity.
(edit for grammar and flow)
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You’re trying to apply consistent morals to a space fantasy with gaping plot holes.
Now I agree that the whole “Oh, wow, we have a random clone army out of the blue… we may as well use them, I guess.” is nonsensical. Who? How? Why? Should we trust them? They are supposedly created to be loyal to the Republic - is that true?
My theory is that using clones to fight instead of “real” people was a galactic norm. The clones were engineered to want to serve a singular purpose. Like a droid, in a sense, they lacked true free will. So even if you were like, “You can go start a farm on Farm Planet Alpha, you’re free!” they would still be inherently driven to serve their purpose as clone troopers.
Just like when Order 66 was enacted, they nearly all acted as programmed, killing the Jedi they had served with for years with out a second thought.
Is this whole idea “problematic”? Yes. While the Empire was bad, I guess it would be fair to say the Republic wasn’t perfect either. Maybe the New Republic will be better. Or are all gigantic levels of government doomed to be assholes?
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Alexa, were Jedis bad guys?
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And my theory is that George Lucas didn’t have any particular backstory in mind when he made the offhand reference to “the clone wars” in Episode IV, (it just sounded cool) so decades later when he got to work on the prequels he had to come up with a reason to call them clone wars, and he also was looking for a way to give the maximum possible fan service to all those Boba Fett lovers out there.
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Agree with the latter.
If using clones to fight wars had been commonplace prior to the prequel movies then that particular era never would have been dubbed “The Clone Wars” in the first place. It would be like referring to a conflict as “the gun wars” or “the army wars.”
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Oh I agree he haphazardly came up with the prequel story after a throw away line references them in the original.
In my young mind, I envisioned the Clone Wars were the enemy was using clones of the Jedi to fight them. Like Obi Wan had to fight a clone of himself.
I suppose that is a good point that if clones were the norm, calling the war that would be redundant. But it was also a long time since war in the galaxy was at that scale, and thus maybe still the popular name. I would think the official name would have been The Separatists War, or even Galactic Civil War.
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I assumed so too. I liked a “re-imagining the prequels” pitch I saw once in which the Seperatists used a clone army to attack the Republic instead of using battle droids, and the Republic responded by conscripting more and more recruits into what would eventually become the stormtrooper corps we saw in the original trilogy.
“Oh no, it’s Obi-TWO Kenobi!”
So that’s what the weird spooky cave training was all about!
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I’ve been thinking about this entirely too much.
If I’m charitable, I think Lucas and the writers were thinking of the clones as a conscripted or drafted army. Unfortunately, the clones don’t really work for that metaphor, because they weren’t free before they were created and pressed into service, and there is no expectation that I’ve seen so far that they would be free once service ended. They were made for war, and never expected to “get out alive.”
They’re a problematic slave army, because they are a self aware, thinking, emotional army with no expectation from any quarter of “freedom” once the war is over. They exist solely to fight and literally die for the Republic, whether in battle or once they cease to be needed.
That the Republic and Jedi embraced this slave army is interesting, because it shows the rot of the Empire was already there within the Republic, and only needed a little push to fully emerge.
This idea isn’t unique or insightful – Jar Jar Binks proposing emergency powers for the Chancellor, and the Senate’s nearly unanimous approval was supposed to show this. But I think the clone army shows that the cruel excesses of the Empire were just under the surface as well, and I don’t think Lucas or the Clone Wars’ writers intended for the clones to serve that purpose.
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I think I agree with LDoBe. The ethics we are wrestling with now with emergent technologies in the next couple hundreds of years (AI and Cloning), have already been decided in that Universe. Clones and droids aren’t sentient beings. They are tools built for a purpose. I think that is their excepted world (galaxy) view. I am sure there were people trying to fight for clone and droid rights.
It is messed up if you think about it. But we aren’t meant to think too much about it.
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