Bleeding Red: The Grand Army of the Republic and Humanization Through Violence, Part III

By Anna Heneise

Violence is one of those deeply human things we like to pretend is not human. Our capacity for violence is something to be restrained, to be feared, to be punished. Civilized people would never do something so primal as get blood on their hands. And yet, for all our modern morals, we continue to be human, and so we continue to be violent. World War II, not even a hundred years past, is thought to be the deadliest in history. In our news, in our fiction, in our daily lives, we are surrounded by— and fascinated by— violence.

And, maybe more importantly, by its impact on our lives. Awareness and understanding of trauma that stems from experiencing or being exposed to violence is increasingly common. Pain, loss, helplessness. The ways we are harmed and the ways we harm others leave an impact on us, and on the way we engage with the world. Very few things have the power to so completely destroy and re-create a life as violence. 

The clones of the GAR are a people who exist solely in the context of war. They were created for war, spent their whole lives training for it and then fighting it. Their entire cultural identity is constructed around the fact of being soldiers; they value duty and loyalty, courage and self-sacrifice. They are proud to defend the Republic and consider war to be their purpose. They are good soldiers; but then, they are very literally engineered to be. In Attack of the Clones, while giving Obi-Wan a tour of the cloning facility, Prime Minister Lama Su informs him: “They are totally obedient, taking any order without question. We modified their genetic structure to make them less independent than the original host.”

Later, in the Inhibitor Chip Arc of The Clone Wars, when Tup’s chip activates prematurely and Kix suggests his breakdown is a result of combat related stress, Captain Rex shuts that train of thought down with— “You should know better. We were designed to withstand any stress.” And so, from the mouths of their creators and from the clones themselves, it is believed that the modifications to their DNA made them perfect soldiers in both form and function. They will not disobey an order, and they will not be traumatized by what they are ordered to do. 

The clones are understood by the wider galaxy to be a step above droids, but not people. Not really. They can’t be people with the ways they’ve been modified and commodified. The narrative itself often assigns the GAR the role of faceless minions. Clone troopers are always getting shot and dying in the corner of the screen— a Jedi Knight strides confidently through the battlefield, deflecting laser blasts with a lightsaber, while all around them clones are hit by those same bursts of blue fire, throwing up their arms with a scream and toppling dramatically to the ground.

But the clones do have faces. Varied faces; the heavily tattooed faces and intricately styled hair of people all working to make the same baseline features into something unique, something individual. 

If you start with human DNA, you will end with human DNA. You cannot cut out and reorganize the essential personness of a person. Not even the violence, and especially not the cost of violence.