Work Text:
Professor Golon Wag
Galactic University of Coruscant
Coruscant
New Republic
The Galactic Empire Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Third Centenary of the Battle of Endor
304 ABY
"First Assembly of the Perlemanian Pan-Revolutionary Congress (1 BBY)" – New Republic Archives
Introduction:
Emperor Palpatine’s “Galactic Empire” held undisputed sway over the Galaxy for only twenty-two years, and yet even today, we live in its shadow. In the same way that the Old Republic of the Ruusan Reformation was shaped indelibly by its ordeals in the New Sith Wars (c. 2000-1000 BBY), the New Republic that rules today cannot be understood except in the context of the Clone Wars (22-19 BBY) and Galactic Civil War (2 BBY—19 ABY) that destroyed its predecessors. Despite this, our understanding of the man who is perhaps more central to this era than anybody else remains fragmentary and confused, influenced almost entirely by propaganda, mythology, and populist narratives ungrounded in firm truth. Palpatine saw his “New Order” as one of rationality, reason, and materialism, one that would sweep away the inefficiency and superstitions of the Old Republic and the Old Jedi Order, and yet he is remembered today almost entirely through the mythologizing of those very institutions and their successors.
Perhaps that is for the best; that the self-serving justifications of the worst tyrant in recorded history be forgotten and ignored, but from the perspective of those seeking to understand our history and learn from it, the substitution of one set of myths by another cannot be easily countenanced.
It is time, and long past time, for a critical reexamination of Palpatine’s rise to power, specifically in regards to some of the most popular and sensationalist beliefs that persist about the Clone Wars and the coup d’etat of 19 BBY. In short, let us ask the following questions: Was Palpatine really a Sith Lord? Were the Clone Wars really the result of a secret Sith plot? Did Darth Sidious, as we must call him, really rule both Republic and Confederacy simultaneously? And what does it mean for our understanding of the Interregnum if none of this is true?
The Revenge of the Sith: Traditional Interpretations of the Late Republican Crisis
Let us begin with a brief overview of the undisputed facts. Sheev Palpatine was born on the Mid Rim world of Naboo, in 82 BBY, to a well-regarded and aristocratic family. In 52 BBY he stood for election to the Galactic Senate, following the death of Senator Vidar Kim in an airspeeder accident. On Coruscant, he gained a reputation as an ambitious but principled politician, one who spoke for the planets of the Outer and Mid Rim against Core World domination and decadence, and who combined his idealistic platitudes with an ironclad commitment to reform. In 32 BBY, when the Naboo Crisis erupted, the government of Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum fell to a No Confidence Vote, and Palpatine was elected his successor, campaigning to restore central authority and put an end to the endemic corruption.
Despite this, Palpatine’s term of office would see the Republic begin to shatter, as unrest spread throughout the Outer Rim and to crystalize into the embryonic “Separatist Movement”. In 24 BBY, the Senate would agree to an indefinite extension of Palpatine’s term, due to the emergency, which would prove prescient. In 22 BBY, as the Republic debated establishing a Federal Military for the first time in a thousand years, the Separatists struck first, launching the Clone Wars.
For three years, the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Galactic Republic were locked in mortal combat, each deploying billions of soldiers and thousands of ships across hundreds of thousands of planets. After a series of initial victories, the CIS began to bend under the weight of Core World industry, and from 20 BBY onward, the Separatists were pushed back. Simultaneously with this, Chancellor Palpatine consolidated more and more power, as the Senate authorized sweeping emergency regulations for the duration of the crisis. In 19 BBY, with the death of Count Dooku and most of the Confederate High Council, the CIS collapsed, and Republican victory was assured. However, Palpatine proved unwilling to surrender the unprecedented concentration of power he had accumulated. Accusing the Jedi Order of rebellion against the Republic, and acting with the support of the newly-empowered military and political bureaucracy, Palpatine crushed the Order with the cloned soldiers of the Grand Army, and pressured the Senate into declaring him Galactic Emperor.
None of the above is contested, and yet if asked, most ordinary people—and more than a few historians—will tell you that it is only the surface of the true story. In this narrative, Palpatine was not simply an unscrupulous and ambitious politician, he was a secret “Lord of the Sith”, member of a cult of evil force-users who’d spent the previous millennium undermining the Republic from the shadows. Count Dooku, it is claimed, was simply Palpatine’s (or “Darth Sidious’”, to use his purported true name) apprentice, and the entire Separatist Movement an artificial concoction, specifically designed to help justify Palpatine’s assumption of emergency powers and the creation of a clone army that could enforce them at blaster-point. The Clone Wars were, in essence then, a “false flag” operation on a truly grand scale, designed to entrap the entire Galaxy, and the entire Galactic Empire yet another front in the endless struggle between the Jedi and Sith over Galactic predominance.
Palpatine’s death—assassinated by his own apprentice while attempting to convert the young rebel operative Luke Skywalker “to the dark side”, as he would have said—has only added credence to this interpretation. And it must be admitted, there is a tempting logic to it. But let us dive into the details of what our sources say, and what the evidence presented for this has been.
The Histography of the Darth Sidious Connection:
Despite some early skepticism, it now indisputable that during, and immediately prior to, the Clone Wars, the Jedi Council had come to believe that a Sith Lord was manipulating events from behind the scenes. Data-archeology on Coruscant, following the Liberation in 7 ABY and on Ossus during the Reclamation of the Temple, from 25-36 ABY, has unearthed numerous records proving that this was a widespread topic concern among the highest levels of the Jedi Order. The first reference is from 32 BBY, as Jedi Knight Obi-wan Kenobi claimed that he and his Master, Qui-Gon Jin, encountered a masked and robed Sith on Naboo. Later reports from the Clone Wars would see it taken for granted that Count Dooku was also a Sith lord, based on his use of a red lightsaber and forbidden force powers during the Battle of Geonosis.
Analysis of these records can often be difficult—for example, multiple Jedi leaders seem to have taken it for granted, based entirely on traditional lore, that Count Dooku could not have been working alone, and their tendency to interpret events through a prophetic lens can often be disconcerting. Still, they provide a valuable insight into contemporary understanding of the Clone Wars.
When exactly Chancellor Palpatine came to be identified as a Sith himself is a matter of some controversy. A report from General Kenobi filed after the Battle of Geonosis said that Count Dooku had verbally informed him that “a Sith Lord controlled the Senate”, and claimed that he was attempting to oppose him. This would seem to lend credence to Palpatine’s identity, though oddly enough, the Jedi Council seem to have taken it as proof that Dooku and the mysterious Sith Lord were collaborators. Several sources continue to maintain that the “assassination attempt” cited by the New Order as pretext for the Jedi Purge in 19 BBY was actually an attempt by the Jedi Council to place the Chancellor under arrest. (See Keskins, Lor, et al, Thunderous Applause: The Downfall of the Old Republic, 118 ABY). Given how much evidence there is suggesting that relations between the Council and Chancellery had become fraught, this is plausible. What we know for certain, however, is that by the beginning of the Galactic Civil War, Palpatine’s identity as a force-user was an open secret. Though never discussed in official communiques or on the HoloNet, we have first-hand accounts from over two dozen court, civil, and military officials who discuss his obsession with “occult matters” casually, and described his mastery of telekinetic powers.
Even more blatant was Anakin Skywalker, the traitorous Jedi who had aided Palpatine’s coup. His mastery of the force was wielded quite openly, and from 19 BBY onward he used the title “Darth Vader”, a Sith epithet, in all public records and appearances.
When exactly this association came to be defined as the modern narrative—that Palpatine was secretly manipulating both sides of the Clone Wars—is surprisingly hard to identify, given its ubiquity. Unlike Palpatine or Darth Vader, Count Dooku never referred to himself as a Sith Lord, or took a traditional epithet. (For a discussion of the claim that he was known as “Darth Tyrannus”, please see Buldan’se’por’taka’s The Dark Side of Dooku, 209 ABY, which finds no evidence that the title was ever used in his lifetime). Certainty, the Jedi seem to have been convinced that Dooku was the pawn of a Sith Lord, and thus, the revelation that Palpatine was a Sith Lord would have been proof of collaboration to them. The close association between a number of the founding members of the Rebel Alliance—most notably Bail Organa—with the defunct Jedi Order suggests a possible path of intellectual contagion.
What is clear is that the allegation begins appearing in anti-Imperial agitprop from as early as 15 BBY, often in the form of caricatures or denunciations of “Palpatine the Puppetmaster”. Interestingly, the Emperor’s purported Sith title and powers are rarely mentioned here, or if they are, they serve only as rhetorical flourishes to demonstrate his hypocrisy and malice. In 12 BBY, the Imperial Security Bureau specifically mentioned the narrative as a point of concern in their General Security Report, and by the time of Palpatine’s death in 4 ABY, it seems to have become quite prevalent.
Following the collapse of the Galactic Empire and the liberalization of publishing and free expression laws under the New Republic, this historical narrative firmly took root. In its modern form, it first appears in detail in Hodor Al’s The Restoration of the Republic (11 ABY), a comprehensive examination of the Galactic Civil War. It is discussed here as a “common belief” among both rebels and Imperial citizens, and includes extremely useful oral histories of how contemporary bystanders interpreted these events. Jedi Master Streen’s Following Their Footsteps: Lessons from the Failure of the Jedi (17 ABY) was even more explicit, presenting the collaboration between Palpatine and Dooku as an established fact, and linking it to “The Grand Plan”, the thousand-year Sith plot to destroy the Republic.
While influential, Following Their Footsteps remains a controversial source, given how much of it is based off of force visions and physic meditations that are difficult to substantiate. However, it helped to lay the groundwork for A Short History of the Force (119 ABY), which continues to be one of the defining historical textbooks of the postwar era. A Short History of the Force recontextualized the Galactic Civil War as simply yet another chapter in the endless struggle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force for dominance, and has shaped much of the popular understanding of the Interregnum ever since. It itself drew primarily on The Secret History of the Galactic Empire (73 ABY), written by Irina Antilles, the granddaughter of New Republic Intelligence agent Iella Wessiri and General Wedge Antilles. Supposedly, this book included information from The Book of Sith (c. 18 BBY), a secret manifesto and history of the Sith Order, written by Darth Sidious himself, and including primary sources from both the Jedi and Sith archives. It is claimed that a copy was found in 24 ABY by Grand Master Luke Skywalker during the excavation of Mount Tantiss on Wayland, but that he kept it secret, due to the “dangerous knowledge” contained within. While several books have since been published that purport to draw from it, the lack of provenance for the original source renders them hard to evaluate.
Despite some attempts at revisionism (most notably the Kuati School, c. 150-190 ABY), the historical consensus has remained stubbornly wedded to this narrative, bolstered in large part by the archeological excavations on Wayland and Byss that have proven Palpatine’s Sith connection beyond a doubt, contra the claims of Imperialist sympathizers.
Despite this, however, the entire thesis continues to rest on a rather thin reed.
“It’s Not a Story the Jedi Would Tell You”: The Intersection of History and Mythology
The logic underpinning the thesis of Darth Sidious as universal puppetmaster behind the Clone Wars is perfectly sound. Unfortunately, it’s also perfectly circular. We know that Palpatine was a Sith. We know the Sith were responsible for the Separatists. Ergo, we must conclude that Palpatine was responsible for the Separatists. But how do we know any of this? The Jedi believed that the entire Separatist Crisis was the result of a Sith plot, and then took Dooku’s involvement as proof of this, which in turn was used as proof that he and Palpatine were working together. But we have no real evidence that Dooku ever saw himself as a Sith, and while we can safely say that Palpatine did, we have no evidence that they worked together except the claim that they were both Sith!
The entire thesis rests on the initial assumption that a Sith mastermind was manipulating events from behind the scenes, which numerous members of the Jedi Council seem to have adopted wholeheartedly from the Naboo Crisis onward. But it is important here to emphasize the gaps between the Jedi narrative of history, and the state of the historical evidence.
For the Jedi, and those historians who write in their tradition, the history of the Galaxy is the history of the struggle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, as exemplified by the dual Orders of the Jedi and Sith. The Sith first appear as a recognizable entity in the form of the “Sith Empire”, founded on Korriban c. 6900 BBY. (Claims that these sorcerer-kings took their name from a separate species native to that planet continue to be debated, but are generally not accepted. See Torat-Ken, The Korriban Controversy, 77 BBY). For the next several thousand years, conflict between the Jedi Order and the Republic on one hand, and various movements and governments claiming the imprimatur of the Sith, on the other, would become endemic. The Great Hyperspace War (5000 BBY), the Great Sith War (3996 BBY), the Dark Wars (3955-3951 BBY), the First Galactic War (3681-3653 BBY), the Second Galactic War (3641-3636 BBY), the Third Galactic War (3638-3522 BBY), the Fourth Great Schism (c. 2000 BBY), and the New Sith Wars (c. 2000-1000 BBY), to name only the most notable. A full examination of the history of the Sith lies far outside the scope of this paper, but let it suffice to say this: While the existence of many movements, groups, clans, empires, and organizations claiming to be “the Sith” are well-attested, evidence of organizational continuity is slim to none.
Even Jedi records concede this, acknowledging that there is no evidence of any “Lord of the Sith” between the collapse of Sith Empire and the Jedi Master Phanius taking the title of “Darth Ruin” in c. 2000 BBY. In fact, virtually everything we know of the Sith as a “modern” entity date back only to the New Sith Wars. Claims of ancient inspiration and secret teachings abound, but we have little reason to believe them. Likewise, the conviction that a secret society of Sith remained hidden for a millennium following the Seventh Battle of Ruusan before being revealed in the Clone Wars is a supposition in search of evidence.
Certainty, Sheev Palpatine was a force-user of some renown, with an interest in and aptitude for the techniques of the “dark side”. Likewise, he undoubtedly saw himself following in the legacy of the legendary Sith Lords of the past, men like Exar Kun and Darth Ruin, and clearly made use of the rituals and cultic rites of the Ancient Sith in an effort to garner legitimacy for his own sect. But there is no reason to assume that demonstrated the existence of a long line of “masters and apprentices, lurking in the darkness”.
The fact that the Confederacy of Independent Systems had the allegiance of dark-side force users of its own tells us nothing either; for all the focus on the Jedi and Sith, modern scholars are well aware of the vast diversity of Force practices prevalent in the Galaxy. We need no explanation for where Count Dooku learned his techniques, he was a former Jedi, and he later took at least one apprentice of his own, Asajj Ventress. Similarly, Palpatine would later train the legendary Mara Jade as his “Emperor’s Hand”. In 193 BBY the so-called “Bpfassh Chapter” of Dark Jedi attempted to rebel against the Order, before being crushed in a campaign that lasted several years. (Attempts to distinguish “true” Sith from mere Dark Jedi have been made countless time, but are rarely convincing. See Master Cilghal, “Cataloging the Enemies of Light”, 38 ABY). The Aing-Tii Monks of the Kathol Rift, the Fallanassi of the White Current, the Witches of Dathomir, the Shapers of Kro Var—history is resplendent with examples of those who make use of the Force, often in ways profoundly alien to the Jedi tradition.
In the Jedi narrative of history, the eternal struggle between the two Orders of the Light and Dark is central to everything. But we should be wary of adopting this view unreservedly. Thousands of years of history cannot so easily be compressed into a simple narrative, and doing so can be dangerous. The Jedi of the Late Republic’s obsessive search for the secret mastermind behind all that ailed them can be seen here as symptomatic of their structural inability to grapple with the modern Galaxy. Surviving accounts of the Jedi from the Clone Wars emphasize continually how uncomfortable many were with their role as soldiers and generals, and how eager they were for a simple solution. Perhaps this explains why otherwise-capable and intelligent men like Masters Yoda and Mace Windu grew so obsessed with ancient prophecies and lore in the last years of the Republic.
For an order of warrior-monks, it had proved impossible to solve the problems of economic stratification, regional enmity, and political scoliosis that were poisoning the Republic—but a single manifestation of the Old Enemy could be confronted, and mastered.
The Clone Wars Reconsidered: A Materialist Perspective
It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative. Palpatine benefited from the Clone Wars, in that he took advantage of the turmoil of the era to establish himself as the ultimate power in the Galaxy. But if one widens one’s historical perspective from beyond Jedi mythology and tragic opera, it becomes very hard to see any kind of secret manipulation as necessary to explain the Separatist Crisis of 24-19 BBY. As historians, it behooves us to be parsimonious.
The underlying causes of conflict that led to the Clone Wars and the schism between the Outer Rim and the Core are not hard to find. In fact, the Republic Judicial Department first warned of accelerating separatist sentiment in response to perceived economic disparities in a report published in 177 BBY, nearly a century before Palpatine’s birth. The successive decades would see these trends accelerate, as the powers of the Mid and Outer Rim increasingly turned to interstellar conglomerates such as the Trade Federation, Techno Union, InterGalactic Banking Clan, and the Corporate Alliance to represent their economic interests against might of the Core Worlds and their Human-dominated interest groups and lobbies that held a traditional stranglehold on power and commerce. The Stark Hyperspace War of 44 BBY proved an early warning sign, as Republic Judicial Forces and Jedi came into open conflict with the Star Commercial Combine over the bacta monopoly.
The passage of Proposition 31-814D in 32 BBY proved to be the first spark in the conflagration, legalizing the taxation of Outer Rim trade routes and abolishing the Free Enterprise Zones, which the Valorum Chancellery hoped would break the power of the conglomerates and strengthen the central government. The ensuing Naboo Crisis would see Valorum’s government brought down, the Trade Federation humiliated, and Palpatine elevated to the Chancellorship—but his involvement in the crisis continued to be incidental. Palpatine was part of the ‘Reform Platform’ that had supported strengthening the central government, and his bloc included many who would become his opponents—including Bail Organa of Alderaan and Onaconda Farr of Rodia. His initial government was a coalition that included a number of independent and nonaligned senators, and it would not be until 25 BBY that Palpatine would secure a strong majority of the Senate.
Meanwhile, despite ongoing efforts by the Palpatine Chancellery to strengthen the Republic’s government, unrest in the Outer Rim continued to build. A series of high-profile failures by Coruscant during these years undermine any claim of a concerted plan by Palpatine, as the Senate voted down attempts to expand the power of the Judicial Forces in 29 and 27 BBY, and the disastrous botched intervention on Antar 4 in 23 BBY came close to triggering a No Confidence Vote. The Palpatine Chancellery during these years pursued a policy of centralization and rationalization that can easily be seen in continuity with the policies of the New Order and Galactic Empire, but uncomfortably, also overlapped considerably with the agenda of Reformist politicians who would later come to oppose it. Leading figures of the Opposition, including many members of the Delegation of 2000, were often even more militantly anti-Separatist than Palpatine. The Supreme Chancellor’s office of direct peace talks with Count Dooku in 23 BBY were denounced by Garm Bel Iblis of Corellia, and both Bail Organa and Padmé Amidala were original members of the ‘Loyalty Committee’ that sought to purge corruption and treason from the Senate.
Following Count Dooku’s Address on Raxus in 24 BBY, over six thousand worlds voted to separate from the Galactic Republic and associate themselves under the banner of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. But while it’s easy to credit this to Dooku’s oratory and skills as a demagogue, even a cursory examination of the actual details of the Separatist Crisis will show what a shallow reading of the facts this is. Worlds like Neimoidia, Ando, Geonosis, Muunilinst, Sluis Van, Sullust, Saleucami, and Yag'Dhul broke from Coruscant for a variety of reasons, often involving grievances going back decades or centuries. Dac, which fell into a civil war between the Mon Calamari-dominated government and the Quarren Isolation League, could trace the roots of its inter-species conflict back nearly two thousand years. Haruun Kal joined the CIS so it could gain support in the ‘Summertime Wars’ against the native Korunnai, which had been flaring up intermittently since 51 BBY. The Trade Federation had been founded in 350 BBY by an alliance of planets and species that felt “locked out” of the primary markets of the Core, long before Count Dooku or Sheev Palpatine were even born.
Meanwhile, a rival coalition of powers and planets were emerging, consisting of the ancient and powerful worlds of the Core and their daughter colonies in the Expansion Region. Corellia, Coruscant, Empress Teta, Anaxes, Alsakan, Duro, Kuat, Bilbringi, Carida, Fondor, Chandrila, and Corulag—these predominantly, though not exclusively Human worlds, had benefited greatly from the Republic’s unquestioned domination of the Galaxy, and sought to maintain it by whatever means necessary. It was from these influential blocs of Senators that the Palpatine Chancellery found itself with the support to create the unified military-security apparatus of the Late Republic that would so easily be transformed into the Empire. If anything, Palpatine seems to have been their puppet—or at least a willing tool of the entrenched powers of the Galaxy.
It is dangerous to talk about inevitability in history, but it seems quite clear that a conflict between the Core Worlds of the Republic and the newly-empowered and enriched planets of the Mid Rim had been brewing for centuries by the time Palpatine gained any influence over the process. Efforts to explain otherwise are forced to fall back on theoretical predecessors and their invisible, ubiquitous influence on Galactic affairs, which in turn can only be “proven” by their effects, all of which seem quite explicable by the normal drift of politics and economics. Centrifugal force had torn the Galaxy apart more than once before, and it was not unusual for ambitious and ruthless man and women to take advantage of those times of chaos to grasp for power themselves. In the words of the famous Alsakan epic The Romance of the Three Planets (12,843 BBY): “The Galaxy, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus, it has ever been”.
“Rebellions are Built on Hope”: Mythmaking as an Act of Reconciliation:
Given all this, what explains the enduring popularity of what we might call “the Darth Sidious Myth”? While the renewed influence and prominence of the Jedi Order since the Fall of the Galactic Empire likely played an impact, we have seen already that this theory was widespread long before Skywalker resurrected the Jedi from the trash compactor of history. To understand why so many people on so many planets seem to have adopted this view, we must understand the incentives and structural forces underlying the information environment of the Rebel Alliance and its predecessor organizations.
Resistance against the Galactic Empire began almost immediately, but was from the start ideologically diverse and disunified. Remaining elements of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, Republican diehards, regional or local autonomist groups; many of these early factions were swiftly crushed by the power of the Imperial Navy and Stormtrooper Corps. By 8-5 BBY, surviving resistance cells had learned patience, ruthlessness, and strategy, and were beginning to form networks and mutual-aid societies across traditional barriers. This, however, was easier said than done.
Records from the Imperial Security Bureau and the Rebel Alliance both emphasize the sheer complexity of the potential coalition that was in the process of mobilization. The Neo-Separatist Coalition, the Ghorman Front, the Kudon Freedom Fighters, the Partisan Alliance, the Galactic Partitionists, the Neo-Republican Front, the Grand Army of the Republic, the Spectres, the Hydian Liberation Alliance, the Perlemanian Pan-Revolutionary Congress, Free Ryloth, the Liberal Reform Working Group, the Outer Rim Defense Legion, the Renaissance Association, the Sectorial Autonomy Leagues, the Ord Mantell Commune—every one with its own unique cause, leadership, and ideological obsessions.
Opposition to Imperial tyranny could bring people to the table, but without a cohesive ideological platform, strategic and political planning were impossible. Anti-Imperial groups found themselves paralyzed by a profound split, between former Separatists and Republicans. The leadership of the nascent Rebel Alliance was overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans, primarily the old Republican Senatorial elite. Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila, Viceroy Bail Organa of Alderaan and his daughter, Senator Leia Organa, and former Senator Garm Bel Iblis of Corellia. These were Core World humans, and worse, Bail Organa and Garm Bel Iblis had been Loyalists, part of Palpatine’s initial coalition. Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that nearly two-thirds of the actual manpower and assets available to these organizations in these early years came from former Separatist affiliates. To them, a simple “restoration” of the Republic was not what they sought, and in the reformist ambitions of the Coruscanti elites, they saw no solution to their own grievances, which often recognized little difference between Republican and Imperial presence in the Outer and Mid Rim.
There would be innumerable compromises in the negotiations that led up the Corellian Treaty of 2 BBY and the official formation of the Alliance to Restore the Republic. The government of the New Republic established after victory would reflect this, with a very different system of administration and structure than the Old Republic that had fallen, much of it reflecting elements of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. But mass movements are not built on compromises and contracts, they are built on ideals and mentalities. And few ideas did more to reconcile the two wings of the rebel movement than the highly-successful propaganda effort to reframe the entire war as the personal fault of Palpatine.
It is impossible to say, at this late juncture, whether this was a deliberate strategy employed by some rebel leader, or simply the osmotic intellectual drift of any mass movement. Whatever the case, it soon became a mainstay, both of rebel agitprop, and of counter-culture discourse writ large. There were, it would seem, substantial benefits to this narrative. By recontextualizing the Clone Wars as a scheme by one exceptionally evil individual, it allowed former Separatists and Republicans to put aside their differences instead of litigating the past. If the Clone Wars were not a liberatory struggle by the Outer Rim against the oppressive rule of Coruscant or a cynical attack on Galactic unity by megacorporations and oligarchs, but rather a “false flag” attempt, than everyone together was equally its victims. The complicity of men like Bail Organa, who had participated in the infamous Orn Free Taa Commission of 26 BBY and voted for the Emergency Powers Act of 22 BBY could be put aside, as could questions of Coruscanti economic and political dominance. Likewise, Republicans were now able to work with those they had deemed “terrorists” or “insurrectionists” not too long ago, in the face of a mutual enemy that rendered those distinctions moot.
The Clone Wars, as we have seen, were the result of several centuries of structural divergence between the Core and the Rim, undergirded by humancentric policies and monopolistic competition over markets. None of these factors simply ceased to exist in 19 BBY with the Declaration of the New Order, and Palpatine’s new security and propaganda apparatuses took great advantage of them to keep the opposition divided. (See Zoban Shak, The Methods and Tactics of Imperial Information, 152 ABY). The narrative of “Palpatine the Puppetmaster” turned this strength against him and his regime, rendering it a liability. That Emperor Palpatine had benefited from the Clone Wars was impossible to deny, and the argument that it was his use of these petty rivalries that had brought down both the Republic and the Confederacy—a mainstay of Rebel propaganda from c. 10 BBY onward—made it increasingly difficult for him to point to his successes as a unifier and a peacekeeper.
Palpatine’s greatest popularity came from the perception that he had brought peace to a fractured, broken Galaxy. The Reconquest of the Rim (19-17 BBY) marked the apex of the New Order’s popular approval. Claims that he was behind the chaos and the disorder to begin with undermined his strongest argument, and paved the way for reconciliation. It is no coincidence that Mon Mothma’s Declaration of Rebellion in 2 BBY echoed many of the rhetorical points made by Count Dooku in his Raxus Prime Address of 24 BBY, and though it would eschew specific condemnations, the commitments made in the Corellian Treaty to “oppose and put an end to the domineering authority of Coruscant over the free people and systems of the Outer Rim” and “oppose anti-alien bias and humancentric policymaking in all forms” were clear invocations of the Confederate Charter.
The Alliance to Restore the Republic was a coalition, and an exceedingly-loose one to begin with, composed of dozens of distinct chapters and organizations with their own agenda. This would change, especially following the Battle of Yavin (0 BBY), and the Fifth General Congress (1 ABY), where Mon Mothma’s United Center faction secured an absolute majority in the Alliance Secretariat. But even so, as an illegal and underground partnership, it never ceased to depend on individual motivation and morale to maintain cohesion. In these circumstances, myths were invaluable, serving as a way to spiritually connect people to the cause, and to provide narratives justifying the sacrifices demanded. For Republicans still uneasy at raising arms against Coruscant, and for Separatists leery of joining in a movement to restore the government they had sought to overthrow, the idea of Palpatine as the ultimate mastermind behind every problem the Galaxy faced was simply too tempting to ignore.
Palpatine Unmasked: An Ordinary Man?
What we can see here is that the modern vision of Palpatine owes much of its existence to two historical narratives that dovetailed neatly together in the post-Imperial period to influence the historiographical records. The Jedi and their sympathizers were predisposed to believe not only that a Sith Lord was evil, but that he was the root of all evil, and the common cause behind the catastrophe of the Jedi Purge. In adopting the view of Sidious as merely the latest in a long line of sinister Sith masterminds, the scholars of the New Jedi Order were able to excuse the failures of their predecessors, fitting the confusion and chaos of the Late Republican Era into a neat morality play. Anakin Skywalker’s fall and Luke Skywalker’s rise became bookends of the Empire in this reading, and the annihilation of the Jedi Order and the destruction of the Republic simply part of the eternal cycle of the Force.
This view, adopted by the New Jedi Order, built on the preoccupations and obsessions of the Old, who spent the waning years of their era searching in vain for the Sith Lord who they believed ruled the Confederacy. That the Sith Lord was on their side, and shared their goal of extending Coruscant’s remit back to the outer limits of the Galaxy, does not seem to have ever occurred to them.
Meanwhile, independently of this, anti-Imperial propagandists and chroniclers increasingly found it convenient to pin the entirety of the blame for the Clone Wars and the Separatist Crisis on Palpatine. The propaganda of the New Order presented the Emperor as a larger-than-life figure, and it was only natural for his enemies to take advantage of this perception. For a Galaxy still fractured from the Clone Wars, and the unresolved tension between Core and Rim, this was a convenient myth, one that safely elided the numerous points of disagreement between the various revolutionary factions, and provided a unifying story of betrayal in which everyone was equally victimized. Questions, for example, of the continuity between the Republic and the Empire, or on the other hand, the role played by the Confederacy in accelerating the Republic’s descent into authoritarianism, could be ignored or sidelined, and the focus put on the unique discontinuity of Palpatine himself.
Strip away these two myths, and examine the historical record, and what we find is that Palpatine appears as an ambitious, ruthless, and powerful man, but nothing more. His senatorial career showed a willingness to follow the winds of popularity that trumped ideology—he spent 50-43 BBY as a committed reconciliationist, firmly allied with the Trade Federation and the Outer Rim before defecting to Valorum’s centralist bloc, and then orchestrating his own rise to power by outmaneuvering Valorum as insufficiently committed to the cause. As Chancellor, he pursued centralizing policies aimed at strengthening the power of Coruscant and the Core, with a mixed record of success until the Separatist Crisis. In this, he did not act alone, but in alliance with a longstanding bloc of Human politicians and worlds that had long sought to consolidate their own power in the Republic at the expense the Mid Rim and the Expansion Region. As the Separatist Crisis intensified, so too did the demands and paranoia of the Core Bloc, who increasingly supported anti-democratic measures and the creation of a military-bureaucratic apparatus to maintain their privileges—and Palpatine was more than happy to comply.
We can see then the Declaration of a New Order in 19 BBY and the abolition of the Republic not as the bespoke plot of a singularly evil individual, but the dialectical conclusion of decades—if not centuries—of ideological and economic struggle. Palpatine was lucky, in that he was born in the right era to take advantage of this culminating crisis, and he was clearly an exceptionally skilled politician, able to manipulate events and people so as to guarantee his dominance. Without his involvement, it is impossible to know for sure what the result of the Late Republican Crisis would have been—the secession of the Outer Rim, oligarchic consolidation by the Core Bloc, or the establishment of a dictatorship by a different member of the Senatorial elite. But we can surely see that it would not have been nothing.
Was Palpatine a Sith Lord? Certainty he called himself that, and we have no reason to dispute it. In his ability to tap into the power of the Force, this made him no different than hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of sentient individuals in the Galaxy. Undoubtedly, it aided in his rise to power, but to understand this totally in the context of a secret and endless war between Jedi and Sith is to adopt merely one view of history, one that cannot encompass the complexity of Galactic society and history. Numerous other individuals, factions, and ideologies clashed for dominance in those final decades of Republican rule; from Dooku’s Separatist Coalition to Mas Amedda’s Conservative Alliance, Orn Free Taa’s Rim Faction to Satine Kryze’s Council of Neutral Systems, the rogue Jedi Sora Bulq and the Yallow Fellowship. Many of the alliances made during these years do not align with the political divides that emerged from the Galactic Civil War, as Jedi heroes fought against regional revolutionaries and activists who would help found the Rebel Alliance a generation later, and Palpatine worked with Coruscanti reformists to rein in the megacorruptions of the Outer Rim. As historians, we must be way of the lure of easy narratives and simple morality plays. History is not predetermined, and often the gravest crimes are committed by those with the flimsiest of motives, or on the thinnest of justifications.
Conclusion:
Seeing Palpatine as he most likely was—an ambitious human being who clawed his way into tyranny by taking advantage of the chaos of his era—should not perturb us. We in the New Republic are perhaps too used to history as the narrative of great men and women, bestriding the Galaxy like titans. (See Ma-Peng, The Skywalker Tragedy, 97 ABY). In the aftermath of the Galactic Civil War and the Clone Wars, rebuilding the concept of interstellar democracy after a profound collapse, this may have been inevitable. It is hard to die for an idea, easy to die for a hero, and figures like Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa Solo served as a figureheads around which to unite the Galaxy together again. Conversely, Palpatine came more and more to symbolize unique evil, a sort of maliciousness that was not dependent on trade negotiations and economic-political disparities to arise, but that functioned as an exogenous force, preying on Galactic society.
During the Galactic Civil War, this proved to be a potent weapon in reunifying the various elements of resistance to Imperial rule, and to provide justification for putting aside past grievances. Following the establishment of the New Republic, it served the same purpose with reconciliation and reincorporation of former Imperial collaborators and agents into mainstream Galactic society, giving officers and officials a way to “save face” by shifting the blame onto a long-dead dictator. (For how this process played out in the Imperial Remnant, see Osori Han, The Myth of the Clean Imperial Navy, 256 ABY). But while myths and legends can play an important role in political narrativization and sentient psychology, it is our role as historians to rise above them, and to bear witness to their limitations.
The Jedi believed that they had “defeated” the Sith in 2522 BBY, and then again in 1000 BBY, and then again in 4 ABY. (And then perhaps again in 11 ABY. For more, see Chambamakk, The Emperor Reborn? A Critical Reexamination of the Byss Regime, 64 ABY). Their repeated failure was not do to Sith cunning or the dualistic will of the Force, but rather the simple inevitably of events to repeat in a Galaxy as large and diverse as ours, and the impossibility of ever achieving mastery over the innate imperfection of sentient life. The New Republic has now stood for three centuries, a mighty achievement, and yet the Old Republic lasted for nearly 25,000 years before falling.
It is disquieting to face this, which is why so many choose not to, instead attempting to pin the blame for everything on conspiracies and secrets in the shadows. It is an alluring thought—if only we could find the evil mastermind and kill them, everything would be set right. But we must reject it. Palpatine took advantage of the corruption and decadence of the Old Republic to destroy it, and in their obsessive search for the Sith, the Jedi allowed those very trends to proceed unimpeded. If we want to ensure that our New Republic rivals the Old, we must not allow ourselves to make the same mistakes. We must face the truth squarely and forthrightly, that the failure of a democratic system is the fault of its citizens, and thus our responsibility to repair it.
The Galactic Empire could not have lasted so long as it did if so many people did not support it for their own reasons. When, inevitably, this Free Galaxy of ours faces the same test, I only hope that we can collectively rise to meet it.
- With Special Thanks to the Jedi Librarians at the Ossus Academy Archives, who proved invaluable and unflagging in assisting my research, despite their disagreement with many of my conclusions.
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