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Hypocrite / Star Wars

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Movies:

  • The Phantom Menace: Yoda admonishes young Anakin for being afraid to lose his mother, saying that fear leads to the Dark Side. Yet, at the end of the same film, he tells Obi-Wan that the reason he disapproves of training Anakin, is that he's afraid of doing so.
  • Attack of the Clones: Mace Windu vehemently states that the Jedi are peacekeepers, not soldiers. At the end of the movie he is the one who leads the Jedi into a war, during which the Jedi become Generals in the Grand Army of the Republic.note 
  • Revenge of the Sith: Anakin has Count Dooku at his mercy, and kills him with Palpatine egging him on. Anakin regrets the decision immediately afterwards, but Palpatine justifies it with "He (Dooku) was too dangerous to be kept alive." At the climax, however, when Mace Windu is about to kill Palpatine/Sidious, Anakin objects, and Windu explicitly says, "He's too dangerous to be kept alive!" The only difference is, Anakin chops off Windu's hand, allowing Palpatine to kill him.
  • A New Hope: Tarkin offers Leia a deal: Tell them where the rebel base is, and Alderaan will be spared. Immediately after she complies, Tarkin blows up the planet anyway. A few scenes later, he reacts with shock and outrage when he finds out that the princess lied to him. I mean, really, what kind of person does that?
  • All throughout the Star Wars prequel trilogy until his mask came off, Palpatine was a ginormous hypocrite. He pretended to care for the people of Naboo, while secretly arranging for their destruction. He pretended to love democracy and the Republic, again while secretly arranging for their destruction and putting himself in place as an autocrat. Even in his own order Sidious is a hypocrite. Despite being a part of the Rule of Two, Palpatine raised Darth Maul as a Sith apprentice while he was an apprentice himself. The master is supposed to encourage the apprentice to overthrow them so that the rivalry between the two makes them stronger, yet Palpatine raises apprentices that either don't want to try and overthrow him (Darth Maul was blindly loyal to him until after his accident) or can't possibly hope to compete (Darth Vader after being burned alive and given deficient cybernetics, although Palpatine did recruit him before that, and bragged to Yoda that Vader would be stronger than either of them). His own actor outright said that "everything he does is pure hypocrisy."
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda gives his famous "Do, or do not. There is no try." speech to Luke. Mind you, the reason he is hiding out on Dagobah and lecturing Luke is because he lost his one and only fight with Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. Having seemingly concluded that he cannot be certain of winning a rematch ("do"), Yoda has decided that there is no point to trying again. Imagine if Luke had adopted this exact same attitude following his defeat by Vader in Cloud City, and decided to subsequently sit out the fight against the Empire because he could not be certain of success.
  • In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren refers to Finn, a defected stormtrooper, as a "traitor". Kylo Ren himself betrayed his family, the Jedi Order, and the New Republic when he became a member of the Knights of Ren.
  • The Last Jedi:
    • Hux calls the Rebels war criminals. The only thing they've done that might count as a war crime is blowing up Starkiller Base, and that's really stretching the definition; even then, the First Order used that same base to blow up multiple planets. It's pretty clear that Hux is just labeling his enemies war criminals to justify exterminating them. He on the other hand oversees attacks on the unarmed Resistance transports, not to mention said wholesale destruction of civilians in the first film, which are both war crimes on Earth, and very probably the Star Wars universe too (not that the First Order are likely to care).
    • Kylo is very adamant about letting the past die. The Jedi, the Sith, the Resistance ... but not the First Order. And in his obsession with killing the past, he's continuing to allow the past to influence his decisions and actions to the point it costs him his goals.

Series:

  • The Mandalorian:
    • The Client comes off as this during his rant about how terrible and uncivilised the Galaxy has become since The Empire has fallen. Hard to accept an era where people are hostile to each other and lack order, could be any worse than the time where entire planets get blown up on the whim of tyrannical space Nazis. Then again it’s you can write it off as a case of Believing Their Own Lies.
    • On the other hand, from what we see in the New Republic, their organisation is pretty hypocritical as well. Despite considering themselves moral and fair compared to the Empire, they still open fire on Mando in their X-Wings in "The Passenger" for not emitting a transponder on his ship, even after he gives them ping. While they do later rescue Mando from a Giant Spider and acknowledge he’s helped the New Republic, they still refuse to help him fix his ship and abandon him. Even before that in the “The Prisoners”, several New Republic X-Wings pilots blow up an entire space full of people, all because the station was going to launch a single gunship. True it’s better to be careful with the number of threats in the Galaxy, but their actions don’t really paint them as any better than the Empire.
    • Bo-Katan Kryze really comes off as this. In “The Heiresses” she looks down her nose at Mando for being a Child of the Watch and for refusing to take his helmet off, criticising his tribe as “zealots” who refused break away from outdated traditions. Yet during the finale Bo-Katan can’t accept getting casually handed the Darksaber, all because of an outdated tradition where the Darksaber has to be won from a fallen opponent not freely given. This shows she’s just as hung up on ancient Mandalorian customs as Mando is, if not more so. The Clone Wars makes Bo-Katan look even more hypocritical here since she was the one who hated and sought to undo the new pacifistic teachings of her ruling sister Satine and bring Mandalore back to its martial roots. But when Mando stays loyal to the ancient values, she conversely regards him as a freak.
      • Her attitude to Boba Fett can be seen as hypocritical, she’s disgusted by the fact he’s a clone of Jango Fett. She had no problem working with Clone Troopers when she needed to take back Mandalore from Darth Maul in the Clone Wars.

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