No one wept for the victims of Shumari. Those of us who were disgusted by the Empire's wanton slaughter of the Jedi had long been numbed, euthanized to the murder of Masters, Knights and Padawans, men, women and children in the headlines, and we had no more tears to shed when dozens more died on Shumari and the planet was pulverized into nothing. But most of the spectators, the civilians, the politicians, the businessmen and the laborers all cheered. It was and is the shame of our time.

The galaxy's complicity in the purge of the Jedi is one of two legacies of the Clone Wars that will forever haunt our generation. It is something that we all ponder, but rarely do we discuss it, and rarer still do we face up to the fears and the inadequacies that compelled us to silence in those dire times. It is true that today we support the Jedi, condemn the massacre and declare "Never again," but we do not ask where our indignation, our outrage and our compassion was then when it was most needed.

Of course, it can be said (and has been oft said by historians) that the circumstances of the time must be considered; that the galaxy was at war, immersed in a culture of fear and insecurity that clouded our sensibilities and allowed Palpatine to slaughter the "insurrectionists" and the "enemies of the state" in the name of law and order. This explanation notes (correctly) that the Jedi were scapegoats, but it does not explain why they should be the ones scapegoated. It does not explain the mistrust and contempt that many citizens held for the Jedi a decade before the Clone Wars, when the galaxy was still at peace. It does not explain, in short, our fear of that which is different from us, and our willingness to believe a fallacy to justify its destruction.

Until we accept not only the failures of our government, but rather, until we accept the failures of our own characters that allowed the Jedi purge to occur, our slogans of "Never again" will ring hollow while the Jedi are still viewed with suspicion, derided as "mystics," and while their very existence is still denied by many.

But this is, as I noted, but one of two haunting legacies of the Clone Wars; the other is the treatment of the Separatists in our popular culture and our politics. It is fashionable today to regard the Confederacy of Independent Systems (or CIS) as the catalyst of the Clone Wars, and the antagonist that would ultimately give rise to Palpatine's Empire. Make no mistake: a catalyst it was, but it was but one of many, and while it is easy to consider them antagonists (especially because the cartoonishly villainous character of its leaders), one must not forget that the CIS waged its "rebellion" before we waged ours.

The CIS was, afterall, fighting ostensibly for very similar principles to our own; self determination, autonomy, and freedom from a massive, intrusive and corrupt government. Today, historians (and especially politicians, out of convenience) will discredit the entirety of the Separatist cause by noting that the Separatist leadership was working with Palpatine all along, as we later discovered. But as with the Jedi purge, this common explanation does not explain why tens of thousands of worlds would heed the Confederacy's call to arms, and join and fight in its ranks.

Despite their despicable leadership and their more despicable and reprehensible methods, the Separatists (and the millions of sentients under their banner) believed in a cause not unlike that of the Rebel Alliance, and indeed, many of those few survivors of the Confederacy would later enlist in the Alliance's own ranks to fight against the Empire; a government even more massive, intrusive and corrupt than the one that preceded it. Therefore, while the CIS was indeed responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent civilians, their methods aside, the Separatists are very much our ideological forebears.

Until we, as sentients, come to understand these two issues which are so often misunderstood, we can never safely put the horrors of the Clone War behind us, and consider its lessons learned. Some argue that we are doomed to repeat history, but I contend that it is through our history that we can understand ourselves and our mistakes, so that we can truly and firmly declare, "Never again."