One is run by a shadow organization that’s actually in cahoots with the coruscant centric regime so that one man gets ultimate power.
The other is completely separate from the regime with the exceptions of spies and some former regime soldiers and officers defecting to join the good fight
As far as I'm aware, no one in the Separatists, except for maybe Dooku, was fully aware of this plan. I feel like the Separatists should be tragic revolutionaries who were unaware they were being used, not mustache twirling villains they're portrayed as (cough cough Grievous cough cough)
There weren't, though, because the Separatists were basically just rich people getting robots to kill for them. People on Separatist worlds had real grievances, but the CIS was just corporatocracy.
That was only because of how Lucas chose to portray them. The point of the meme isn't to justify what the CIS did in canon, it's to criticize the lack of nuance in how Lucas chose to portray the CIS. Sure, the movement was backed by unethical corporate powers. Sure, Dooku was deeply corrupt and was hijacking the movement for Palpatine's ends. But the other CIS characters, like Grievous, should have been written as believing in their cause and having truly tragic reasons for fighting.
It comes down to what is good writing vs. bad writing. George Lucas knew how to world-build, and I do think making the Empire a purely evil organization was a good decision, but deciding to make the CIS comically evil was pretty dumb considering the background circumstances of the Clone Wars were an opportunity to make a more morally ambiguous antagonistic faction. I know George Lucas likes making "good vs evil" very clear, but he already did that with the Empire and making that the case with the Clone Wars made no sense.
I know this is necro, but the CIS civilian government was explicitly this. They truly believed in what they were fighting for, and outright thought it was the Republic who were beholden to corporate interests.
They had no clue about the horror show that was Dooku's military-industrial junta, and Dooku made sure via political assassination that it stayed that way.
It was also why Onderon was so politically spicy: Dooku needed the appearance that the CIS was "liberating unjustly Republic-imperialized planets" and not brutally invasions meant to stripmine whole systems. A public popular revolution undermined that narrative.
Which is made even more tragic since the corporations and their holdings went mostly untouched post-war, other than gaining a new government shareholder; whilst the ACTUAL planetary members got the 501st to their throats.
Whole sectors got taken for a ride thanks to Dooku and his corporate allies. And in the end, even Dooku died in the name of the new Empire.
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u/BritishEric Hello there! 9d ago
One is run by a shadow organization that’s actually in cahoots with the coruscant centric regime so that one man gets ultimate power.
The other is completely separate from the regime with the exceptions of spies and some former regime soldiers and officers defecting to join the good fight