One day, the Jedi Order had about ten thousand
members scattered across the galaxy, leading the Grand Army of the Republic in the Clone Wars. By
the time the next day dawned, the Jedi’s numbers had fallen below two hundred, and the Order
had been criminalized and formally disbanded. This absolutely devastating decline was
the result of the execution of Order 66, which called on the Republic’s clone
troopers to kill their Jedi Generals. But while Order 66 was astoundingly effective,
it was actually only the tip of the iceberg. The extermination of the Jedi didn’t begin
when Palpatine issued that fateful order; it had begun three years prior on the desert
plains of Geonosis. Order 66 was only the culmination of a long, calculated campaign
to wipe out the Jedi. Without three years of brutal warfare, it never would’ve worked -
and in this video, we’re going to explain why. If you’ve been watching this channel for a while, you probably know that we can’t talk about
something related to Revenge of the Sith without pulling a passage from the
novelization, so, without further ado… “What is happening right now is why the
Clone Wars were fought in the first place. It is their reason for existence.
The Clone Wars have always been, in and of themselves, from their very
inception, the revenge of the Sith. They were irresistible bait. They
took place in remote locations, on planets that belonged,
primarily, to ‘somebody else.’ They were fought by expendable proxies. And
they were constructed as a win-win scenario. The Clone Wars were the perfect Jedi
trap. By fighting at all, the Jedi lost. With the Jedi Order overextended, spread
thin across the galaxy, each Jedi is alone, surrounded only by whatever clone troops [they]
command. War itself pours darkness into the Force, deepening the cloud that limits Jedi perception.
And the clones have no malice, no hatred, not the slightest ill intent that might give
warning. They are only following orders. The Clone Wars occured purely
to set the stage for Order 66. Part of this was logistical. The scale of the
conflict meant that, as the prior passage stated, Jedi were scattered all over the galaxy, alone,
and therefore more vulnerable. The Clone Wars spread the Jedi out and surrounded
them with their future executioners, the clones of the GAR. All of that is
somewhat obvious - but it goes much deeper. The Jedi Order was outplayed by the Sith, plain
and simple. Darth Sidious and his predecessors carefully crafted a situation in which there
was literally no good move for the Jedi to make. The Sith made sure that the Jedi wouldn’t be able
to prevent the Clone Wars until it was too late, which meant that the Jedi would have to get
involved. If the Order tried to sit out the Clone Wars, the galaxy would have turned against
them, and Palpatine would’ve been able to brand them all as traitors to the Republic much
earlier. This left the Jedi with two options: fight for the Republic or
fight for the Separatists. Either option would’ve ended the same
way - with a whole lot of dead Jedi. With that said, the Sith did goad the
Jedi into fighting for the Republic, and they had a pretty easy time of it,
too. As Yoda realized much too late, ever since the defeat of the Sith a thousand years
before, the Jedi had been preparing for a rematch, for a second round of the New
Sith Wars. The Sith were not. While the Jedi were playing checkers, the
Sith were playing 4D chess. The Clone Wars were engineered to look like the New Sith Wars,
however, to make the wars better Jedi-bait, and the Jedi fell for it hard. Once they learned
that Count Dooku was a Sith Lord, they immediately saw the CIS as a new Sith Empire pretending to be
a Separatist confederacy. The Jedi believed that, yet again, the battle was between the Republic and
the Sith, as it had been many times before - so, naturally, they fought for the Republic. As we
all know, that didn’t work out too well for them. But the true trap of the Clone Wars wasn’t
logistical. If Order 66 had been issued a month after the First Battle of Geonosis,
it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well, even with the Jedi spread thin, surrounded
by clones, and left in a no-win situation. It was very important to the Sith
Grand Plan that the Clone Wars didn’t just lure the Jedi into a trap, but also
that the wars were long and intensely bloody. The passage we cited before hints at why -
“war itself pours darkness on the Force.” This was something that the Jedi only
really observed for the first time during the Mandalorian Wars. That conflict
was also long and bloody, perhaps even more so than the Clone Wars. As the war went on, the
Jedi Generals leading the Republic troops began to suffer from a hitherto-rare phenomenon -
a decay in their connections to the Force. The more battles these Jedi fought, the more
friends and comrades they lost in that bitter fight against the Mandalorians, the more
deaf they became to the Force. Many of these Jedi slowly fell to the Dark Side, which
was strengthened by battle instead of weakened, while one Jedi General, Meetra Surik,
lost her connection to the Force entirely. As for why this happens, the answer
lies in how the Force worked. Anyone who’s seen the Original Trilogy knows that
the Force surrounded and bound all life-forms together, creating a sort of universal harmony,
the Balance of the Force. Followers of the Light Side drew strength from this harmony, acting
in accordance with the Will of the Force, while followers of the Dark Side destabilized this
balance by imposing their own wills on the Force, furthering their own power at
the cost of all life around them. No matter what the era was, the Jedi drew their
strength from life around them. As Lightsiders, they acted as instruments of the Will of the
Force, and were more powerful when the Balance of the Force was maintained. Jedi established bonds
with living things around them and essentially pooled their strength with these beings. It was
a win-win arrangement. Connection to other living things allowed Jedi to be stronger in spirit and
in the Force, which allowed them to strengthen living beings around them, helping them persevere
through hardship or heal quickly from injuries. This is why Light Side nexuses
tended to be lush and full of life, while Dark Side nexuses were usually desolate;
the Light Side was at its peak when life thrived. War is the opposite of life thriving. War is the
mass destruction of life; it’s suffering, terror, and death on an unimaginably vast scale. Now, the
Clone Wars and the Mandalorian Wars before them were awful for all involved, but they were so
much worse for the Jedi than for everyone else. Because the Jedi were so attuned and connected
to the living beings around them, especially to their comrades, simply being on the battlefield
quite literally drained them. To a Jedi, fighting in a war was feeling a part of you die every time
someone under your command got wounded or killed. There’s more to it than that, though. War
didn’t just kill; it corrupted life. Mass death created wounds in the Force, which
had a noticeable effect on living beings. During times of prolonged, bloody warfare on a
massive scale, the attitudes and behaviors of living things, sentient and nonsentient, changed.
There’s actual evidence from the time of the Old Sith Wars of animal species on war-torn worlds
changing their hunting patterns and becoming more aggressive, often spreading beyond their usual
habitats to kill more prey than they needed. Sentients experienced a more subtle effect.
They became more depressed, more irritable, and more prone to greed, infighting, and the like.
This corruption was due to the emergence of the Dark Side on these worlds; as the natural balance
was destroyed, the Dark Side grew stronger. The Clone Wars destroyed the Jedi, both
in terms of Force power and willpower. For three grueling years, the Jedi felt the
deaths of thousands of men under their command, many of whom they had bonded with
and had come to rely on for strength. As it had during the Mandalorian Wars, this
deafened them to the Force, making them weaker and easier to kill. It also destroyed their
willpower. The spirits of many Jedi were crushed under the weight of all the men they had lost,
destroying them on a most fundamental level. By the time Palpatine issued Order 66, most Jedi
were already dead in a very real sense; the clones just finished the job. These Jedi Generals were
shadows of their former selves, broken and beaten, though most outsiders weren’t able to tell.
Many had become completely reliant on their clone troopers, the only living beings around
them, the only sources of strength they had. After three years of war, most Jedi
trusted their clones completely, in part because they had to - without
the clones, they had no one left. Then those clones received a priority message from
Coruscant, a transmission of three simple words: “execute Order Sixty-Six.” And,
to again quote the novelization: “Hold-out blasters appear in clone hands.
ARC-170s drop back onto the tails of Jedi starfighters. AT-STs swivel their guns.
Turrets on hovertanks swing silently. Clones open fire, and Jedi die. All across the galaxy. All at once. Jedi die.” So, that’s the dark truth behind
the Clone Wars and Order 66. But what do you think? Would you like to see
a longer video explaining how the Sith trapped the Jedi in a no-win situation? Feel free
to post your thoughts in the comments below.
