#but to a person on the separatists side or being fed their propaganda

[short-wooloo]

I had a thought about that line from the opening crawl of Revenge of the Sith

"There are heroes on both sides"

A lot of people took this to mean there are good and bad people on both sides, but the thing is, nothing really supports this

The Republic and those who fight for it are 9 times out of 10 the good guys, and the separatists are invariably horrible monsters (and the ones who aren't are next to useless)

So maybe "there are good and bad people on both sides" was not the meaning there

Perhaps it's more along the lines of "villains is the heroes of another story/heroes are the villains of another story"

From the out of universe perspective, the republic-despite it's issues-is good, and the separatists-despite their claims-are bad, worse than the republic

But in universe who is the hero and who is the villain depends on perspective

To the separatists, Dooku/Grievous/Trench/etc are the "heroes" and the Jedi/Republic heroes are the villains

Even if that's not how it really is

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

World War Z is one of my favorite novels, but every time I reread it I am reminded of how painfully American it is. Very "third-way centrist," very "Democratic Liberal during the Bush years," very "I believe in America, we're the best country on Earth, let us show you the light." it is vehemently anticommunist, and plays the "both sides" card by having a character whose family suffered under Pinochet claim that imperialism and white hegemony are ghosts from a bygone era that developing nations need to get over; "far-left is just as bad as far-right, why can't we all just get along?"

A lot of the stories are interesting, and I want to do an in depth analysis of the timeline of the Great Panic someday, but this is a book that suggests Colin Fucking Powell would have been a great bastion of democracy and freedom, so I can't take any of the politics seriously anymore.

Iran becoming a nuclear nation and going to war with Pakistan

A Chinese civil war splits the PLA and dissolves the PRC, but not a single word is spoken about the multiple separatist movements in the United States after they were abandoned by the federal government for YEARS in zombieland (only that they were "given the option to be readmitted peacefully" when the feds came marching back)

Floridians turning Cuba into a "capitalist utopia" and Fidel Castro taking credit for the subsequent Cuban Evolution

Nelson Mandela personally signing off on an Apartheid-era plan to abandon half the country as human bait

The whole situation between Israel and Palestine (that is a can of worms I am neither qualified nor willing to dissect here)

Hollywood military propaganda gives people the will to live

The British royal family "shielding the soul" of the UK under the burden of their godlike mandate?!? (gag me with a fucking spoon...)

This book would be VERY different if it were written today. Published in 2006, it was obsessed with the Cold War but barely glossed over the War on Terror with one reference to "Gulf War 2" (Iraq) and a handful of references to a low-intensity "brushfire war" (Afghanistan) that ended in American victory by 2008, although a Pyrrhic one. I do not remember nor can I even imagine a time when ANYTHING within this book could be considered plausible outside the deepest fears and/or wettest dreams of the most diehard 'Mericans.

The more I get into it, the worst is sounds. I think I like the idea of the book more than the book itself now.

The prologue ends with a hint at an eventual sequel. The narrator says that a lot of people consider it too early to write a history book about a war that only just ended (and in fact is still being fought in some northern countries), and that it will take a few generations for people to fully process what happened. "Perhaps decades from now, someone will take up the task of recording the recollections of the much older, much wiser survivors." That is a book I would like to read; a retelling of WWZ with far less hero worship and characters who don't all sound like a 30-something American SNL writer.

[frustrationinexcelsis]

My thoughts keep coming back to a Clone Wars army swap au. This is partly because I've started reading through the old Legends books, and the pre-Phantom Menace ones pretty obviously assumed that the Clone Wars were fought against clones.

Setup is simple enough. The Geonosians and Kaminoans are basically the same kind of shady weapons merchants, so here they just close their deals with different sides. Lama Su ends up on the Separatist Council while Poggle buys himself a seat in the Senate. They're flying different flags but are the same sketchy sorts as always.

On the Republic side, the views towards droids are the same as in canon -- nobody really thinks of them as, you know, people. There’s a clear trend in canon of most people treating droids as disposable, replaceable objects when they're pretty obviously self-aware and emotionally complex beings, and this is magnified for the battle models meant to be sent into battle to die in droves.

Anakin is one of the very few people who doesn’t share this attitude and treats droids like sapient beings. This leads to a lot of butting heads with both Republic leadership and other Jedi -- think of his arguments with Obi-Wan over R2 in the arc where R2 goes missing and everyone is like "oh, just get another one", but as a semi-constant dynamic.

The droids respond very positively to him and his assigned division tends to display a lot more intelligence and tactical acumen than normal, and also a bunch more personality quirks. This is in large part because he absolutely refuses to ever reset their memories, which is another major source of arguments.

("Anakin, when was the last you reset the droids' memory banks?" "Why the hell would I want to do that? I might as well just order in a fresh batch of rookies every month." "Anakin, without memory wipes droids develop idiosyncrasies and behavioral glitches, which leads to unreliable performance. You know that." "Oh, sure, because there’s no such thing as Jedi with weird quirks or hangups, huh?")

Occasionally other Jedi have taken temporary command of Anakin's droids, and they do tend to perform a lot better than normal. Although they also tend to do this with a background of sullen muttering of things like "General Skywalker would have asked me how my day was going..."

On the Separatist side, the clones get treated just as badly as the droids do in canon, except that this is absolutely not played for laughs. Their nicknames need to be kept secret, and their leaders all treat them as casually disposable. They’re also fed a steady stream of propaganda about the terrible things that Jedi and Republic forces will do to captured clones, basically painting their alternatives as so bad that even their terrible treatment under the Confederacy is preferable.

As a result, clone forces fight to the death and refuse to surrender out of fear of what will happen if they do. Of course, this also ends up painting an image of them as mindless war machines on the Republic side, which is entirely what the Confederacy was hoping would happen. 

Anyway, some way or another some clones end up captured anyway, probably a good way into the conflict. They're expecting torture or immediate execution by the terrible Jedi that they've heard horror stories about, so imagine their surprise when they're... treated civilly. Oh, they're prisoners of war, in cells, and with their weapons confiscated -- but the cells are clean and roomy, the food is decent and if it's bland it's no blander than what the Jedi's eating.

This is about where clear ideas start to peter out except that eventually this would lead to a clone uprising or defection of some sort. They would still be subject to a very negative perception in the Republic that would only worsen under the Empire, which in this case would likely to continue to use battle droids over drafted soldiers, and most likely would need to go to ground under fake identities or try to find a remote planet to live on. It would be interesting to have some of them side with the Rebellion anyway -- I always felt that the canon could've used a more explicit presence of Confenderacy holdouts and survivors among the Rebels, perhaps even seeing themselves as still fighting on basically the same side as always.

[mis-mcgifsten]

Skeevy Sheevie was in power and actively undermining the functional parts of the democracy he claimed to love for decades of preparatory work. He was insideously creating the empire within the carcass of dead democracy, a democracy he personally killed with the help of the trade federation and other selfish profit mongering factions.

His propaganda against the Republic, against democracy, accountability and justice used the jedi as a scapegoat. A well-fed jedi vs a subsistence farmer? Like the ones the agricorps worked with and for? When the number of politicians, senators and staff in the senate alone probably outweighed the entirety of the jedi order by a significant margin? Because the ones feasting while the subsistence farmer is scraping by is the political elite, not the mystical order communing with the growing plants.

Palpy certainly framed the jedi as elitist, remote, unemotional, detached, and therefore as you mentioned weaponised a great deal of negative sentiment against them. What we see of his verbal manipulation to Anakin and in general reveals his disdain for the jedi. But, like all dark side stuff, it's more lie than truth. He pulled out the jenga blocks and blamed them for the collapse and fall. People suffered and starved under the rule of the sith. Suffering is a main driving force behind the sith.

The jedi were fundamentally good. They were in the forefront of the fight despite being a farcically small minority considering the population of the Republic. But as you say the apathy of the populace coupled with the corruption flowing down from the top office led to the Empire rising to thunderous applause instead of righteous rebellion. Palpatine stole the Republic right out of the hands of the populace, set himself up as emperor, and ruled for 20 years because the populace stood by and let him destroy the "traitors and separatists", because their politicians were bloated with greed and power and didn't care about the little planets, then the jedi too were destroyed, the troopers mind controlled, the mechanism of Empire clamping down for the next few decades. Apathy and a negligent populace killed the Republic. The jedi were victims not villains.

I feel like people who are super pro-Galactic Republic and consider them 100% as the good guys have never really understood just how cruel democracies can be. There is a reason why a lot of the prequels go into the weeds with the Senate. It’s not that the democracy is necessarily in decline, it’s that the systems are so easily hijacked by people who don’t care.

They didn’t care about Naboo.

They didn’t care about their minor planets.

They didn’t care about the outer rim.

The planets that weren’t part of the core were pushed to the back of the line because the Senate didn’t have to care. And when these planets walked away from the unfairness of it all they were called Traitors and Separatists. They were branded as radicals and terrorists to be hunted by the Jedi and be brought to heel. The cruelty of the Galactic Republic wasn’t that there weren’t good people in in with good intentions. The cruelty was that those people were so constrained, there was little they could do.

Good intentions don’t feed starving planets. A well-fed Jedi who has never known poverty, has nothing to say to a subsistence farmer.

In a system that had proven to be bloated with inefficiency and people who cared more for money and power than anything else, was it any wonder that Palpatine could play both factions off each other until people were sick of it? Until the only thing the people saw was the inherent cruelty of their government? Until they grew to resent the Jedi who got the best places, and lived in the highest levels off of their taxes but seemed to only show up when a core world stubbed their toe? Until Palpatine’s declaration of an Empire was welcome with cheers because finally someone was putting the ailing beast down?

Right or wrong, how cruel does a Galactic Republic have to be, that the people would cheer a Sith Empire as their savior?

In the end the Galactic Republic had failed its people long before it failed the Jedi.

[newstfionline]

Twenty years ago, Russians loved the US. Where did it all go wrong?

Fred Weir, CS Monitor, January 10, 2017

MOSCOW--Looking back now, there’s a hefty dose of sour irony in Time magazine’s July 15, 1996, cover.

It depicts Russian President Boris Yeltsin, recently reelected at the time, grinning and clutching an American flag under the headline “Yanks to the Rescue!” The story tells of a group of high-powered US political consultants who were secretly brought to Russia amid the hard-fought presidential elections of 1996, in which a beleaguered Mr. Yeltsin was trying to battle his way back from single-digit public approval ratings to defeat a Communist challenger.

The consultants were kept holed up in a Moscow hotel suite lest any hint of their existence--and apparent American hand in Russian politics--leak out to the electorate. They coached Yeltsin’s people in the tactics and technologies of modern political campaigning, and helped to secure his ultimate victory.

Judging by the tone of the Time story, few in the US at the time seemed to doubt that American involvement in the struggle for Russia’s highest office was basically a good thing. Even Russians didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, a tracking poll regularly conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow reported that a whopping 72 percent of Russians had a “positive” attitude toward the US just a year later, against just 18 percent who viewed it “negatively.”

That 20-year-old episode can’t be directly compared with the present furor over alleged Russian interference in the recent US presidential election. But the two events and their reversal of fortunes--including the two-thirds of Russians who now express a negative view of the US, per Levada--bookend the epic death of Russia’s love affair with the US. Much of it may seem inevitable in hindsight, but some Russians argue that the relationship would be much healthier today if Americans had just not tried to “help” as Russians struggled with the fallout of their own country’s collapse and painful transformation.

In the immediate post-Soviet aftermath, Russian attitudes toward the US were sky high. And even that wasn’t a major change from the Soviet days.

“What struck me in 1952 at the depth of the cold war, was how little actual anti-Americanism there was here,” says Vladimir Posner, a legend of Russian broadcasting, speaking of the year he moved to Moscow from the US. Mr. Posner has lived in Moscow ever since. “Sure, people thought Wall Street and American leaders were to blame for bad things,” as Soviet propaganda suggested, “but nobody thought ill of Americans in general. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve heard Russians say that our two countries are the world’s biggest, and if they could just get together we could solve all the problems.”

“The general idea in Russia at that time is that we would all be winners at the end of the cold war, that we should be partners,” says Nikolai Petrov, a political scientist who worked as an aide in the Russian parliament during the early ‘90s. He says he knew that Moscow was filled with US advisers of various kinds during those years, but he saw it as largely positive cooperation. Even the news that American consultants secretly worked for Yeltsin’s re-election “didn’t seem like such a big deal to me at the time,” he says.

In the US, the Clinton administration appeared to offer unqualified support for Yeltsin--despite growing evidence that millions of Russians were growing disaffected with painful economic reforms that they increasingly equated with Western-style democracy.

And when Russia’s economic and social collapse did finally climax in the late ‘90s, it came to be closely associated with Yeltsin, and what is seen in retrospect as a naive faith in US friendship in general. “The feeling now is that the ‘90s were just a time of losing all our connections to greatness, and that our downfall was aided and abetted by all that US involvement. People think we were cheated,” says Mr. Petrov.

Even the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the cold war and staked everything on a new world order based on cooperation with the West, has grown deeply disillusioned. His long-time personal translator, Pavel Palazhchenko, says that Mr. Gorbachev voluntarily agreed to disband the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance and accepted the reunification of Germany on the understanding that a new European security architecture would include Russia as an equal partner.

Later, although he was already out of power, Gorbachev watched with dismay as the West expanded NATO into the former Soviet sphere and took unilateral action to regulate the break-up of Yugoslavia.

“There was a lot of good will, but it turns out that there were a lot of illusions, too,” says Mr. Palazhchenko, who now works at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow. “Some of it was just silly. People back then thought the US was some kind of paradise, and a force for pure good in the world. The pendulum was bound to swing back....

“But Gorbachev became disillusioned not because some specific promises were broken, but because the spirit of what had been discussed with US leaders was violated. Today we really feel the failure to design a new European security system that would have had strong preventive diplomacy, to deal with issues that have since come up like Georgia and Ukraine,” he says.

While average Russians experienced the 1990s as a time of economic deprivation, including a horrific financial crash in 1998, the Kremlin began to break sharply with US global leadership when NATO launched a 78-day air war against its Yugoslav ally over the Albanian enclave of Kosovo in 1999. Then-Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, on his way to an official visit to the US, turned his plane around in mid-air when the bombing began.

“We had all rejected the Soviet propaganda view that the US was an aggressor state, but now it looked to be true,” says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “What the US believed to be a humanitarian operation was viewed by the Russian public as aggression against brotherly Serbs.”

When Vladimir Putin came to power, championing a stronger and more assertive Russian state, the idea of a Russia-US partnership was already in tatters. Yet even Mr. Putin made an attempt to reach out, phoning George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to propose that Moscow and Washington form an alliance to fight terrorism.

At the time, Russia was in the midst of its own assault on its secessionist republic of Chechnya--whose rebel leaders had embraced extreme Islamism. But many in the US declined to acknowledge any parallel, in part because of the brutality that Russian forces used in Chechnya.

“Russia wanted to have a military partnership with the US, and was ready to cooperate,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Foundation for Effective Policy, who was a close adviser to Putin in those days. “But we didn’t find the right response from the Americans, and the opportunity was lost. Then the Americans invaded Iraq, and all faith was lost in the idea.”

Russia enjoyed a relative economic boom in the first decade of this century, which helped boost Putin’s popularity, which still hovers above 80 percent. But most experts believe it is the Kremlin’s defiance of the US-designed world order, and Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s great power status, that keep his image untarnished among Russians despite a sharp economic downturn in the past three years.

“I don’t think it’s about economics at all,” says Posner. “Russians are a proud people, and for them a leader has to speak for their inner feelings. In Putin they see someone who stands up for Russia, makes the US realize they can’t treat us as some kind of afterthought.”

In more recent years, the US--like other Western countries has expressed deep concern over the Kremlin’s crackdown on Russian civil society, its seizure and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, its backing of rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine, and most recently, its alleged hacking of the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Yet that too has fed into Russian disenchantment with the US.

“Without being insulting, Putin expresses the widespread disappointment Russians now feel for the US and most of what it does, and he asserts Russia’s place in the world,” says Posner. “The love affair was always kind of one-sided, and now it is definitely over.”