Dean ☦️🇺🇸

The Empire were the good guys. At minimum, the Jedi were the bad ones, and it isn't close. The original trilogy runs on Saturday-morning-cartoon morality: space wizards good, planet-killer bad. Then Lucas came back as an older man to explain why the most gifted Jedi alive would walk away. In doing so he accidentally made three movies of evidence for the defense. Exhibit A: the Republic. Its Senate was too paralyzed to stop a trade blockade of one of its own worlds, and nothing passed until every faction got its cut. The Jedi spent those years running errands for it like galactic rent-a-cops. Meanwhile a Sith Lord climbed to the top of the government they were supposed to be guarding. No wonder Anakin, told his politics sounded like a dictatorship, shrugged: "Well, if it works." Exhibit B: how they treated him. He was a boy conceived by the Force, the Chosen One of their own prophecy, and the Council didn't want him, mostly because he scared them. Qui-Gon won him in a bet and left his mother in slavery. In ten years the Order never went back for her. They forbade him to marry, under a code that treats love as a character flaw. They gave him a Council seat, denied him the rank of Master in the same breath, then asked him to spy on the Chancellor. When he came to Yoda terrified of losing someone, the advice was to let go of everything he feared to lose. He came back from Tatooine having done something unspeakable, and his teachers never even noticed. Exhibit C: the Code. It was sacred every time it cost Anakin something. The moment it protected Palpatine (disarmed, beaten, owed a trial), Mace Windu decided he was too dangerous to live. This was the same Mace who had floated the idea of the Council taking control of the Senate. They threw the Code out the window the second it suited them, which is how Mace ended up out the window himself. Exhibit D: everything else. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is an absolute. They took babies from their parents. They were peacekeepers who led a cloned army they never ordered and never questioned. They revered the prophecy until it got inconvenient, then decided it had been misread. Their plan to finish the Sith was to send a son to kill his father. Luke refused, and what actually saved the galaxy was the attachment the Jedi spent generations forbidding. Even Luke ended up calling their legacy failure and hypocrisy. Anakin wanted what a lot of young men want: a wife, a family, a chance to be a hero and fix what was broken. The Republic offered him celibacy, suspicion, and errands. Palpatine offered a way to save the woman he loved. That's why this story hits so hard for so many young guys. The tragedy isn't that Anakin got corrupted. It's that he chased the things they want too, and lost everything anyway. Not that anyone wins. Vader becomes a cyborg and Palpatine a cryptkeeper. Obi-Wan spends nearly twenty years in a desert hut, and Luke follows the Jedi path to an island where he drinks green milk from a sea monster. The New Republic inherits every problem the old one had.