Thread by @swankmotron

Let's strip away some myth and look at some deeds, shall we?

In the Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker explains that the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, and hubris. And it's hard to argue with him. Over the course of the prequel trilogy and Clone Wars, it's pretty apparent.

Maybe Luke Skywalker didn't watch the Prequels and the Clone Wars, but my feeling is that @rianjohnson certainly did and we're all better for it. Though I would like to have been a fly on the wall when Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Yoda broke down all that history for him.

To start, we need to go to The Phantom Menace. (It always blows my mind when people suggest you need to skip it because there's nothing important there, because everything important is there.)

Qui-Gon is an atypical Jedi. He's tapped into the Living Force. He's all about saving people everyone thinks are worthless. He's more worried about living in the moment than random anxiety about the future.

But even still, Qui-Gon is still trapped in some of that Jedi dogma and teaching. Midi-chlorians are one example. He's sitting here wowed by how powerful Anakin is in the force but still wants the midi-chlorian sample.

The idea that the Jedi have abandoned some part of their spiritual connection to the Force for science should have been a major red flag for us.

But let's take this to the Jedi Council. What happens when Qui-Gon tells them that he's reasonably certain he fought a Sith Lord on Tatooine?

"Impossible. The Sith have been extinct for a millennia."

"I do not believe the Sith could have returned without us knowning."

"Ah. Hard to see the dark side is."

That's it. "We don't believe you, what else have you got for us?" And they move onto other business.

We know this is a Sith Lord gunning for revenge against the Jedi and the Jedi Council, in a literal ivory tower, handwave that away like it's no big deal if it exists at all.

They do this A LOT.

Palpatine is over here playing chess to take all their pieces and the Jedi Council don't even realize the opening moves have been made.

That's part of Palpatine's brilliance, right. Who thinks the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is going to be the opening gambit to end the Jedi?

This opening move yielded Sheev Palpatine the chancellorship. To take the chess analogy one step further, the Naboo gambit was moving his own piece as a pawn to the back row to trade it for a Queen.

We see that Palpatine is looking for other pieces to play as well. It's not a secret that the Jedi Council isn't keen on training Anakin. He's already a point of contention for them. Naturally, Palpatine will "watch his career with great interest."

The piece the Jedi sacrificed without realizing it was their most important Knight. Qui-Gon. Because of their hubris, they kept him from being on the council as a guiding voice.

Obi-Wan mentions this pretty blatantly that if Qui-Gon stuck to the code and the dogma a little more closely he'd be on the council.

"You still have much to learn," Qui-Gon tells him with a wry smile and affection in his voice.

But The Phantom Menace ends, Palpatine is in power, and the one Jedi who could probably right the ship is dead.

Fast forward to Attack of the Clones.

This is where Palpatine starts directly challenging the Jedi. The conflict on Naboo was handled in a catch as catch can sort of way. But here he's laid out the groundwork in a way they don't even see coming.

In fact, Palpatine was had begun moving the pieces that attack in Episode II even before he became Chancellor. Master Sifo-Dyas was killed and Dooku was turned while Sifo-Dyas was still Chancellor. The order for the Clone Army was placed shortly thereafter.

There's some speculation that Dooku hadn't officially left the Jedi yet when he'd turned apprentice to Sidious, and part of that is in the deletion of Kamino in the archive records.

And it played right into more hubris of the Jedi, in this case, Jocasta Nu, the worst librarian in the history of the galaxy.

Honestly, what kind of arrogance does it take to say, "Nope. If the thing you're looking for doesn't exist in our current record of knowledge, it doesn't exist."? It's mind boggling.

Palpatine knows the Clone Army is ready and has continued to push the military creation act. Senator Amidala is the chief opponent to it. When her assassination doesn't work, why not attach that piece he'd collected from Phantom Menace to that problem?

It's no accident that Palpatine suggests Anakin and Obi-Wan for the job to protect Padme. There's a number of reasons for it, but chief among them, no doubt, is that Palpatine knows Anakin's feelings for Padme.

In fact, Palpatine is the only person across AotC and RotS that treats Anakin like a friend with a sympathetic ear, who tells him everything you'd want a friend to say to you. We know Palpatine has kept in touch. Why not? This kid saved his planet. He's a hero.

All of the Jedi stick to the Dogma. "Don't get attached. Forget about your mom. Don't like Padme."

There's literally no humanity to their treatment of his concerns. Palpatine is the only one who shows that to him.

I don't think Qui-Gon would have made that mistake.

So, Palpatine uses Qui-Gon's signature move against the Jedi and gets the kind-hearted Gungan to propose the military creation act and create the first significant test of the Jedi to sell out their ideals in his direction.

Step by step he will do this and it's stunning to watch. He'll force them to take one more step away from themselves. Then another. And another. Until it's too late.

In Phantom Menace, think back to the words of Qui-Gon on the eve of the Battle of Naboo. "I can only protect you. I can't fight a war for you."

In the beginning of Attack of the Clones, Mace WIndu agrees with this. "We're keepers of the peace, not soldiers."

And what happens to the Jedi the second there's an army that needs commanding? They take on military titles and start fighting this war with them. Hypocrisy. Hubris. Failure. But this isn't the end of it.

As the Clone Wars unfold, they do, indeed, become soldiers. There are Jedi who turn dark in revolt to this dark turn, from Bariss Offee to Pong Krell. The cognitive dissonance literally turns them to the dark side.

My favorite example of hypocrisy happens to be from Mace Windu, though, and it starts right at the beginning of Attack of the Clones.

Padme, rightly, tells Windu that she thinks Dooku is behind the assassination attempt.

Windu doesn't believe her and says, "As you know, Count Dooku was once a Jedi. He wouldn't assassinate anyone, it's not in his character."

And then, at the beginning of @ChristieGolden's wonderful book, Dark Disciple, which is based on unused scripts from The Clone Wars, it opens with Mace Windu telling the council "We need to assassinate Dooku if the war is going to end."

If that doesn't prove how corrupt the war made them, I don't know what does. And this isn't the first or last time they're told the truth and simply don't believe it.

Dooku flat out tells Obi-Wan EVERYTHING on Geonosis. About Sidious. About Naboo and the Trade Federation. That the Senate is in control of a Sith Lord. Period.

Obi-wan's response? "I don't believe you. The Jedi would be aware of it."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MAN?

The Jedi spend the entire war like this. They don't ask questions about what's going on and they just assume that if there was a problem they would know about it.

But, in addition to the hypocrisy, there's that lack of compassion that bites them in the ass, too, specifically with Anakin at the close of the war.

At the Battle of Coruscant, Anakin and Obi-Wan are ordered to the Invisible Hand, to rescue the Chancellor and face Dooku and Grievous, hopefully for a final time.

Obi-Wan, Anakin confront Dooku in a situation that looks visually tied to the throne room scene in Return of the Jedi. Obi-Wan is taken out of the fight and Anakin must face Dooku alone, under the watchful eyes of Palpatine.

This is his enemy. This is the person who cut his arm off. This is the person who has kept this war going and kept him from his wife. When he disarms him and the Chancellor chides him to "Do it," he does it, but regrets it.

Something else happens, too. Palpatine lets him know that revenge is natural. "Remember what you told me about the sand people... and your mother?"

I think Padme and Palpatine might have been the only two people Anakin felt honest enough with to tell about this. And after what they did to his padawan, I'm surprised he ever trust a Jedi again.

I'm glossing over it here, but Ahsoka leaving the Jedi order over their treatment and distrust of her is another huge lynchpin in this story of their failure and hubris.

They ABSOLUTELY failed that girl by not sticking by her and not believing her, and then only when the proof was undeniable did they say, "Hey, welcome back to the club." She was completely right to turn her back on them.

But Anakin's murder of Dooku caused a conflict in him. It WAS the wrong thing to do. You don't just murder an unarmed prisoner (even if you're the one who cut his hands off.)

"I'm a Jedi. I know I'm better than this." This is a line Anakin uses to voice the frustration and confusion he feels in the gap between his teachings and his actions. This Dooku thing is eating him up. This is Palpatine beginning his end game.

Palpatine is using Anakin against the Jedi and playing him against himself. "The Jedi don't trust me, I need your voice there. I'm not going to tell you that they'll treat you like crap and mistrust you, but it's going to have a purpose for me later."

Palpatine isn't stupid. He knows how the Jedi Council is going to react to Anakin being appointed by him to the council. And he knows they will NEVER send him solo on a mission to defeat Grievous. But Anakin's ego makes him think he DESERVES all this.

So when they act exactly like you would expect (and as Palpatine expected) it's easier to turn Anakin against them, especially against the backdrop of Ahsoka's departure from the order.

When Grievous is dead and Anakin reports to Mace Windu that Palpatine is the Sith Lord, Anakin does EXACTLY what a Jedi was supposed to. But Windu still doesn't believe him.

"If what you've told me is true, you'll have earned my trust." But Anakin never earned Windu's trust. No one but Windu ever did. And when he walks in on Windu about to murder Palpatine the same way he did Dooku, he feels the Jedi are all selfish liars.

Windu is technically correct. Palpatine was too dangerous to be left alive. But Palpatine, with the help of the Jedi order, had twisted the boy into becoming what he was.

But this isn't his only reason. We haven't even talked about Padme's pending death. And the response to these visions from the Jedi and Palpatine offer stark contrasts.

Anakin goes to Yoda and Yoda gives him a very zen answer, "Rejoice for those around you for those who transform into the force. Mourn them do not, miss them do not. Learn to let go of the things you fear to lose."

While this answer is correct, it's more difficult. A bitter pill. And the last thing you want to hear if your loved one is dying. Anakin already made a promise over the grave of his mother to NEVER let a loved one die if he could help it again. This is bad news to him.

But what does Palpatine tell him? Not only that it's a totally natural thing to want to keep your wife, maybe if we work together, we can figure out how to save her, how to cheat death...

"Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is central to a Jedi's life."

This is what Anakin understood being a Jedi to be. And the Jedi showed him none of it. They didn't know to. They were too sure of themselves.

And they KNOW they're too sure of themselves. Yoda tells this to Obi-Wan flat out in AotC when Obi-Wan says Anakin is arrogant. "A flaw more and more common in Jedi these days. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones."

Naturally, Windu's lack of trust, arrogance, and departure from Jedi ideals put him in a situation where Anakin could stop him, Anakin did.

Palpatine backed the Jedi into corner after corner after corner, even making it look like HE was the one being backed into a corner, until they literally cut each other's hands off and killed their own younglings.

They were so keen to be generals, they spread across the galaxy with troops they didn't know enough about, and were turned on.

The Jedi order ignored the rise of this darkness and clung to their own understanding of things, their own dogma, despite the warning signs. And they paid the price for it.

How do you think this story played into Luke checking in on Ben that night? Did Luke want to ignore the darkness as the Jedi had before? Was he making the same mistake?

I've heard some people say Luke's speech was a shot at the prequels, but I don't see it that way. I see the prequels as a haunting cautionary tale and Luke, standing in that young boys bedroom, didn't know what lesson to learn from them.

Again, if you like all this stuff. Listen to me yak on @FullOfSith and @Fauxthentics.

I'm going to go take more meds and pass out now.

Also: Don’t @ me with your takes about how much you hate the prequels. Or how badly made you think they might be. Not relevant. MTFBWY!