I have argued this for years, but a lot of people don’t like to hear it.
at its most basic, all the separatists wanted was freedom from the imperialistic core, which stole their resources and pushed for legislation that made their worlds more dangerous. If we were to bring this into the real world, the separatists could represent the third world, and the core could represent the western first world.
Like, sure, the CIS was heavily funded by banks. but the politics of the star wars galaxy don’t pair 1:1 with our politics, and they were quite literally waging an anti-imperialist war against a deeply corrupted political elite who used a cult of space wizards to carry out their bidding, then utilized the equivalent of a child slave army for crushing resistance.
Yes, Palpatine manipulated the situation, but the CIS would’ve happened without him. Palpy simply abused a long-rooted problem of the republic to make the inevitable war happen the way he wanted it to. Without him it still would’ve happened, and there are good odds the CIS could’ve won. They’re only the “bad guys” because Palpatine needed them to appear that way, so republic citizens would support the rise of the empire and the dawn of space fascism. Remove Palpatine, and the outcome for the galaxy would’ve likely have looked a lot more like a decentralized confederation that allows the rim worlds to flourish, while levelling the playing field between the core and the rim.
(also the added actual lore of the only race that came anywhere near communism was in the CIS)
IIRC weren’t the banks neutral in the CWs? I remember that episode from The Clone Wars, where they were pushing for deregulation, so they could charge exorbitant interest rates to the republic. Also them refusing to stop dealing with the CIS.
Galactic Banking Clan, integral part of the central bank of galaxy which is literally FED but even more private, was core part of CIS and their main source of money. Also obligatory mention that Darth Plagueis, Palpatine mentor, was a big fish there. Rest of the banks were officially neutral, but supported CIS with laundering money and putting high interests on Republic war credits.
That’s a problematic take. The main force of CIS was made almost entirely by really scummy capitalists, which started entire war explicitly for more profits. True, they did had a lot of antiimperialist forces with them like the Jabiim insurgents, but those seems to be mainly local planetside militias. 9/10 times we see CIS forces in action it were droids. They also had a lot of outright fash, crime syndicates etc.
It reminds me what Lenin wrote about WW1. That the smaller nations defending from imperialists like Serbia changed nothing in the fact it was an inter-imperialist war. And the Clone war was too, even if we remove the Palpatine, an inter-imperialist war.
