Every time I watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars I sure walk away thinking it is. Or at least, a very dark shade of grey. Man, they must love that whole setup in China, given the political undertones of the SWU.
Separatists = Evil.
Cloned soldiers fighting the war, not treated as Humans, no Human rights.
Slavery legal, for that matter.
Criminal Empires essentially legal too.
Yes, it’s evil. It’s the Empire in all but name, don’t forget.
Assuming you mean the government of the Old Republic, I’d call them severely morally compromised and entirely clueless. And they lose much of their claim to legitimate authority when they use [del]slave[/del] Clone Troopers. Of course, since the whole of what we know of them (from the prequels & tv series, I mean) occurs while Palpatine is in power and is manipulating the situation to make himself Emperor, it’s debatable how much one should blame the Senate and Jedi for the evil.
They are of course culpable for their stupidity. The freaking SuperFriends wouldn’t have fallen for Palpatine’s plots.
You should check out this book
it is a series of essays by sci-fi authors (both for and against) any number of subject in the star wars universe. I believe that something like what you discuss is dealt with.
So … um … do you yourself have an opinion?
The Hutt worlds were not under Republic control; they were the ones with slavery and criminal empires. At most, the Republic threw up it’s hands and said there was nothing it could do about it.
The Republic was faced with an unprecedented military crisis- the Trade Federation had bypassed the safeguards against creating private armies by developing battle droids, and the Republic wasn’t geared to fighting a full-scale open war. Faced with the dissolution or even conquest of the Republic, the Senate didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth when a totally unexpected army of loyal clones showed up. Maybe this was a betrayal of the principles of the Republic, but people have bent the rules in the face of overwhelming need before.
Palpatine and Count Dooku made sure that both sides of the struggle were in the wrong, simply in equal and opposite ways.
My vote: Evil? No. Morally decayed and as ineffectual as Weimar Germany? Yes.
I thought the moral ambiguity was about the only thing that was decent in the prequels. The way the republic was happy to compromise its principals in the name of security was fairly allegorical of the time it was released too (when things like the patriot act were floating around), which I think good sci-fi is supposed to be.
Shame that just about everything else sucked though.
The Republic was the more evil of the two.
They had Jar-Jar on their side.
Not counting Palpatine’s machinations in preparation for Empire, I’d call the Old Republic complacent and made stupid and weak by comfort and corruption, but not evil.
You’re blaming a confessed goofball from a repressed native sentient species for the entire moral failings of the Old Republic? You’re braver than I thought.
Not Evil, at least not at first. It was bloated, complacent, top heavy and corrupt and an evil person took advantage of that to push it over the edge. Generally that is how Democracies end. They don’t get destroyed from without, they get destroyed from within and turn into something else.
Any meaningful assessment of the Republic would require a lot of background the movies do not provide (and if it’s not in the movies it is not canon, fuck Lucas, amen). How did the Republic come into existence? By conquest, or voluntary federation of states, or what? Why is an interstellar government of any kind deemed necessary in this galaxy? Would there still be an interstellar, trans-species civilization/culture without an interstellar government? What functions is the Republic expected to perform and what does it leave to the planetary or sub-planetary governments?
The Republic in the movies certainly seems feckless and bloated, but beyond that it’s hard to say what it is at all. It’s sort of a government but sort of not; it seems to want to enforce membership, yet doesn’t have an army, and lots of planets are alreayd outside its jurisdiction.
The Republic’s claim to moral supremacy is simply that it operates along democratic lines; how that works is never explained in detail but it seems to be one planet one vote. The thing is, to George Lucas, **that is enough to prove it’s good. ** To Lucas there’s no subtlety at all about it; the Republic is good because it’s a democracy. Palpatine and his minions are bad, and so they oppose that. When they talk about “brining balance to the Force” Lucas has been very specific in saying this does not mean a balance between the light and dark side, it means getting rid of the dark side.
Lucas did, at least, in the prequel-trilogy, give us a glimpse of how a state can be corrupted by the ambitions of cynics such as Palpatine and the impatience of idealists such as Anakin. But it should not be surprising that the treatment fails to do justice to the theme. Space opera/heroic fantasy is really no place for exploring the subtleties of political science or moral-values dissonance. Straightforward Good vs. Evil is the only appropriate moral compass.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Don’t forget the thunderous applause. Democracy can’t die without thunderous applause.