Nerdy Deep Dive: Order 66

[LittleRaven]

Today's (utterly silly) topic of pedantic discussion: Was Order 66 a genocide?

Before we start, some ground rules. For the purposes of this discussion, we will defer to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, effective 1951.

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[5]

As to what we consider canon - while the movies always take priority, we will allow relevant EU sources.

At first glance, it seems like a no-brainer. Order 66 explicitly about liquidating the Jedi en masse - going so far as to massacre the younglings. And while the Jedi are not a national, ethnic or racial group...they are a religious order. So at the very least we meet condition A, and possibly a great deal of C happened as well, given then everyone seemed to have largely forgotten the Jedi just a few decades later.

But on deeper reflection, I'm not so sure. It's a massacre, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's a genocide. A couple of things stand out to me.

Are the Jedi really a religion?

Well, they're monastic, certainly, and we tend to associate that with religion, but on closer inspection they don't really look like any religion Westerners are familiar with. The Jedi don't really worship anything, nor do they hold services or preach to the masses. They claim to serve the Force, but there's not really any faith involved there, because the Force is a quantifiable thing in the Star Wars universe. (Faith would be a lot easier if your local priest could levitate cars with his mind.) There are Jedi 'temples' but non-Jedi are not permitted access, and its not clear that there is any wider congregation. I'm not super familiar with Buddhism or Hinduism, so maybe there are some clearer parallels there, but either way, the fact that Jedi can force choke people whether they believe in the Force or not kind of moves them away from "religious order" in my mind.

There are no Jedi civilians.

Every Jedi - and I mean literally EVERY Jedi - is a super warrior, capable of taking on whole platoons of regular troops and emerging unscathed. In addition, Jedi are also minor telepaths, capable of reading surface thoughts and even mind controlling people for small lengths of time. There's no such thing as a "helpless" Jedi. Even Younglings are phenomenally dangerous - there have been documented cases of people with literally no force training whatsoever dominating minds.

Jedi are DEEPLY political.

Unlike most monastic orders that Westerners are familiar with, who attempt to turn their backs on physical world to focus on spiritual matters, the Jedi are at the very center of Galactic power. They are ostensibly servants of the Galactic Council, but they wield tremendous authority, and there are at least some areas where Jedi do not appreciate the Council's involvement. They are routinely dispatched as diplomats, generals, and...'peacekeepers.' And if they feel it necessary, they have no problem deciding to remove the duly elected chancellor from power....with a lightsaber.

Painted in THAT light, the Jedi start to look more like the Praetorian Guard than a religious order. And political purges, no matter how brutal, are not generally considered to be genocides. The French Resistance killed THOUSANDS of suspected collaborators after the war, the September movement massacred hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia, and of course, Stalin's Great Purge went well into 7 figures - but none of those are genocides per the UN definition. If my memory from Revenge holds up, the Jedi were liquidated after a failed coup attempt, which is not exactly an unusual response to that sort of thing.

But it's a been a long time since I watched Revenge and I know that a lot of you know a lot more about the Star Wars universe than I do....so....am I missing something?

[TGLS]

I'll accept that the Jedi are not an ethnic or racial group, and for argument's sake a religious group. However, I will argue that the Jedi do in fact represent a national group. The logic of the argument is:
a) The Jedi were an arm of the Republic, including its multiracial values (see Yoda and other aliens in it's ranks).
b) The Empire proceeded to erase said values (see the all-Human presenting Imperial forces in OT).
c) (Following from A and B) The massacre of the Jedi was part of a campaign by Palpatine and the Empire to erase the Republic from history.

The massacre of the Jedi can be inferred to be akin to the massacre of the Polish Intelligentsia at Katyn Forest, with the goal of destroying Polish nationalism.

(BTW: The Stalinist purges and the Indonesian mass killings are poor examples of non-genocidal politicide; both are notable for targeting ethnic minorities, Chinese in Indonesia and many in the Soviet Union (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_operations_of_the_NKVD).

[Darth Wedgius]

I think the Jedi might qualify as a religious group, not thanks to their belief in the Force, but in their approach to it.

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.

The Jedi has prohibitions against marriage, a pretty common set of outfits, some believe in prophecies, etc.

It's arguable, of course. A lot of beliefs are approaches to life without being religions. The Rotary Club isn't a religion. The Jedi seem to me to share faith in the will of the Force, in the movies anyway, but some schools of economics believe in the eventual inevitability of their preferred system, too.

I think the deciding factor might be whether or not it's taxed. Maybe the Expanded Universe or Legends touched on that. If an Extra-Special Edition is made for The Phantom Menace, maybe they can squeeze that into the senate scenes.

[hammerofglass]

"You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion." -Tarkin.

[LittleRaven]

"You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion." -Tarkin.

I realize that at least a couple of people refer to Jedi as a religion - most notably Han Solo, though I think it's worth noting that those people do so long after the Jedi have been eradicated. Nobody in the prequels refers to them as a religion (to my memory, anyway) and nobody on Coruscant treats them like priests or holy men - they are treated like senior government officials. When was the last time you saw anyone approach a Jedi for spiritual guidance?

I think the Jedi might qualify as a religious group, not thanks to their belief in the Force, but in their approach to it.

An interesting take, but I think you pretty much zero in on the counter-argument just a few sentences later. Lots of organizations have creeds and codes and life philosophies without being religions, because while religions often have all of those things, all religions have something else as well - faith. Faith is what separates the Boy Scouts from the Mormons, the Shriners from the Catholics. To have faith is believe in something that you cannot prove and yet you know is real. The Baptists may feel the Holy Spirit enter them but they cannot measure it - Jews may believe that God forbids them to eat shellfish but they do not get struck by lightning if they do. Yet they believe regardless. That's faith, and that's why they are religions.

So...are the Jedi a religion? Well, in our universe they are - I'm sure there are people that believe in The Force but I suspect all of them will struggle mightily to prove it. But in the Star Wars Universe, The Force is very much a real thing. You can demonstrate it, you can test for it, hell, you can even quantify it. Take a sample of someone's blood and you'll know exactly how much Force potential they have. The Jedi don't need faith, at least, not faith in The Force. I guess maybe they could have faith in the WILL of The Force, or their place within it, but even that's a stretch - I mean, Force ghosts fairly routinely show up to cheer Jedi on. How much faith do you really require when your dead mentor will show up to talk you through rough patches?

TGLS - your angle is super interesting and deserves it's own response, but stupid work actually wants me to do something right now, so....I'll get back to you.

[Mecha82]

Thing is Order 66 was more like removing political opposition. It was what allowed Sith take over galaxy after taking advantage of fact that Jedi were more focused on protecting Republic than serving The Force. Something that Sith were aware of. So Sith managed to pin Clone Wars on Jedi to justify Order 66 and get people that were angry about war behind them. Then again they also used Clone Wars as justification for anti-alien policies that Empire had by having CIS be mostly alien with former Jedi as leader.

[LittleRaven]

The logic of the argument is:
a) The Jedi were an arm of the Republic, including its multiracial values (see Yoda and other aliens in it's ranks).
b) The Empire proceeded to erase said values (see the all-Human presenting Imperial forces in OT).
c) (Following from A and B) The massacre of the Jedi was part of a campaign by Palpatine and the Empire to erase the Republic from history.

I really like this take, but I have a couple of issues with it.

1) Scale.

The Galactic Republic is BIG. Really, REALLY big. Just unimaginable huge. As far as I know, we never get any kind of super hard numbers, but we do get enough to get a sense of what we're dealing with.

The Galactic Senate has 2000 members. As far as I know, we never get a precise breakdown, but we DO know that Padme was a single Senator for an entire planet. Maybe some planets get more Senators than others, but if there are 2000 Senators, then it follows that there are probably AT LEAST 500 planets, and probably more like 1000...or even more. Naboo was hardly a backwater, after all - they had massive underwater cities.

World populations in Star Wars are probably highly variable - we might expect Tatoonine or Hoth to be minimally inhabited, while Coruscant appears to be one planet-spanning city, who's population must be staggeringly high. (the Wookipedia says it has a population of over 1 trillion! ) So, for the sake of argument, let's say the average population is that of Earth - a measly 7.5 billion. (that's probably a very, VERY low estimate given the technology of Star Wars, but whatever) That times 1000 planets means that the Galactic Republic represents many trillions of sentients, which is frankly exactly what you would expect from a government that spans a galaxy.

But there were only 10,000 Jedi at the time of the purge. So when Palpatine liquidated them, he killed....let's see...10,000/750000000000000 = 1.3333333e-11, or 0.000000001% of the population. That's....a very small number. By contrast, after WW II, the Allies executed somewhere between 300 and 500 German officials for War Crimes. We did this with express intention of destroying the Nazi state, and in the process killed ~0.0006% of the German population at the time....inflicting many many more orders of magnitude worth of damage on the German population than Palpatine did to the Republic....but nobody would describe the Nuremburg trials as a genocide. Hell, when the Union marched through the South, they killed something on the order of 400,000 Confederates - with the express purpose of destroying the Confederate state, and the South only had something like 11 million people in it at the time, so that 400,000 represented almost 4% of the population - but nobody has ever called that a genocide either.

2) Timeline

The Galactic Republic doesn't end when the Jedi are wiped out. It's still trucking along QUITE a long time later, when everyone has all but forgotten the Jedi. Don't get me wrong, I can see a Star Wars historian making the argument that the massacre of the Jedi was the beginning of the end of Republic, much like we might say the Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the Final Solution, but nobody calls Kristallnacht a genocide in and of itself. What exactly Palpatine does in the long, long years between the Jedi massacre and the destruction of Aldaraan is mostly a mystery to me, but whatever it was, the Jedi massacre must have only been a very, VERY small part of it.

I can't really comment on your 'multiracial values' part because I'm largely ignorant of just how widespread that was before and after the purge. Yes, the JEDI appear to be quite multi-racial, but the armed forces of the Republic at large? Hard to say, since in the prequels they appear to be 95% robots or clones, and I haven't consumed enough EU material to confidently state otherwise.

(BTW: The Stalinist purges and the Indonesian mass killings are poor examples of non-genocidal politicide; both are notable for targeting ethnic minorities, Chinese in Indonesia and many in the Soviet Union (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_operations_of_the_NKVD).

I'm aware. However, I think you'll find that there are very, VERY few mass killings that don't end up falling particularly hard on minority groups - that unfortunate tendency appears to be baked into human nature. More importantly, none of the examples I listed (and I can list plenty more if you really like) are considered to be genocides by the UN....probably because the UN is actually rather particular about what constitutes genocide. All of them are Crimes Against Humanity, but that's a different category, and frankly I'm not sure THAT would apply to the massacre of the Jedi either, since that explicitly requires attacking civilian populations, and as previously noted - there are no civilian Jedi.

[Robovski]

The Jedi are a creed, and politically influential. This was more of a putsch than a genocide IMO.

[Madner Kami]

Hell, when the Union marched through the South, they killed something on the order of 400,000 Confederates - with the express purpose of destroying the Confederate state, and the South only had something like 11 million people in it at the time, so that 400,000 represented almost 4% of the population - but nobody has ever called that a genocide either.

What happening exactly are you refering to here? Were those 400,000 people civilians that were lined up on a wall or worked to death or were those in fact combatants?

[TGLS]

Hell, when the Union marched through the South, they killed something on the order of 400,000 Confederates - with the express purpose of destroying the Confederate state, and the South only had something like 11 million people in it at the time, so that 400,000 represented almost 4% of the population - but nobody has ever called that a genocide either.

What happening exactly are you refering to here? Were those 400,000 people civilians that were lined up on a wall or worked to death or were those in fact combatants?

I've looked up Civil War casualty figures on Wikipedia. Apparently, there were 290 thousand deaths of Confederate troops and 50 thousand civilian deaths (in general), with another 80 thousand deaths of slaves. I can't seem to find a source for the civilian deaths, but the problem with the soldier death figure is:
1) 94 Thousand died in battle
2) 194 Thousand died of disease
Though 30 thousand died in Union POW camps.

We could say the battle and disease was caused by the Union, but at that point you're stretching over backwards to justify an argument.