Order 66 Was Even Smarter Than You Thought: How Palpatine Tricked The Jedi Into Training Their Own Killers

In more ways than one, Palpatine manipulated events so that the Jedi themselves trained their own killers in the Star Wars canon. As seen in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine enacted Order 66, a protocol that saw the Grand Army of the Republic turning against their Jedi generals and commanders, brutally ending the Jedi Order which had stood for thousands of years. However, a few key elements leading up to Revenge of the Sith show how Palpatine essentially tricked the Jedi into training the clones to one day overpower them.

Not only was the creation of the clone army for the Republic coopted by Palpatine and Dooku before the Clone Wars had even begun, but Palpatine ensured that the threats the Republic faced would ensure that the troopers would be more than capable of defeating the Jedi generals by the war’s end. This was the true sinister genius behind Palpatine’s schemes beyond controlling both sides of the conflict. He ensured that the Jedi unknowingly helped orchestrate their own demise.

The Jedi Trained Clones To Take On Lightsaber-Wielders

Grievous, Ventress, Savage, Maul…

Firstly, Palpatine ensured that many of the threats the Jedi and their clone forces would face were dark mirrors of the Jedi themselves. While he wasn’t on the front lines for most of the war as leader of the Separatist movement, Count Dooku wielded a red-bladed lightsaber as Palpatine’s Sith apprentice, one he used more than once when dueling Jedi such as Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi throughout the war. However, Dooku did have a handful of agents he sent out on various campaigns who also wielded lightsabers.

Dooku originally had Asajj Ventress, an assassin of the Sith who wielded two red lightsabers during the Clone Warts. There was also General Grievous who led the Separatist armies into battle while collecting and wielding the lightsabers of his fallen Jedi victims. Once Ventress became too powerful, Dooku replaced Ventress with Savage Oppress who also wielded a red lightsaber. Darth Maul also returned during the Clone Wars, claiming the world of Mandalore while wielding both a red lightsaber and the legendary Darksaber.

As a result, there were plenty of opportunities throughout the war in which the clone troopers of the Republic were faced with lightsaber-wielding threats. As such, it stands to reason that the Jedi would have wanted to prepare their soldiers for these types of foes given the high probability that they’d eventually be faced. However, this in turn secretly primed the clones to successfully turn against their generals and commanders with Palpatine’s Order 66. The partly helps explain why Palpatine allowed Dooku to have lightsaber and even Force-wielding agents in the first place despite the Sith’s Rule of Two (provided they didn’t become too powerful as Ventress did).

Anakin Personally Taught The 501st How To Handle Ahsoka

As seen in Tales of the Jedi

More specifically, Anakin Skywalker played an inadvertent role in training the 501st to take down Jedi once Order 66 went into effect. Wanting his apprentice Ahsoka Tano to be as prepared as possible for whatever threats may come during the Clone Wars, Anakin had Ahsoka constantly train against their own clones who would surround and try to stun her. While this did help Ahsoka survive the Jedi Purge as she was able to successfully ward off and escape the clones who’d turned on her, the inverse is also true: the 501st was simultaneously trained to counter the tactics of the Jedi.

This is shown in Revenge of the Sith with the 501st accompanying the newly corrupted Anakin Skywalker to slaughter those within the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. The entire Temple was wiped out, and it stands to reason that their unintentional training aided in their dark victory. Combined with their behavioral modification chips secretly implanted by Palpatine to guarantee their obedience, the odds of Order 66’s success were quite high.

Additionally, another example of the 501st being trained to take down Jedi can be seen during the four-park Clone Wars arc on the planet Umbara where the clones justifiably turned on their temporary Jedi general Pong Krell. Having fallen to the dark side while seeing to become Dooku’s new apprentice, Krell attempted to slaughter his own forces by putting them in the crossfire of their fellow clones. This led to a mutiny by the 501st ending with Krell’s death. While the Jedi were killed during Order 66 by clone troopers all over the galaxy, there was no better force to send into the Jedi Temple than the 501st Legion.

Palpatine Truly Was Star Wars’ Greatest Mastermind

All Too Easy…

Having spent years plotting for the formation of his Empire and the Sith becoming the dominant power in the galaxy, the actual activation of Order 66 seen in Revenge of the Sith is not the most impressive element of Palpainte’s victory over the Jedi. It’s all the secret pieces he put in place to get to that point. While there were still some Jedi who would survive Order 66 and go on to resist Palpatine and the Empire’s oppression, the vast majority of the Jedi Order was destroyed in one single campaign. A victory like that doesn’t happen without painstaking planning and years of preparation in the shadows.

It’s notable that many of the Jedi who survived the initial Jedi Purge were still hunted down in the aftermath thanks to Darth Vader and his Imperial Inquisitors, former Jedi seduced to the dark side by Palpatine. Within a generation, the memory of the Jedi was almost completely eradicated. The “Revenge of the Sith” against the Jedi was all-encompassing, the dark result of Palpatine truly being one of the Star Wars galaxy’s greatest masterminds of all time. It’s no wonder it was almost two decades before any kind of legitimate resistance was formed with the formation of the Rebel Alliance and the destruction of the Death Star.