The narrative doesn’t directly examine why the Jedi who followed Revan and Malak fell. It is spoken of as a given – they followed Revan into war, so they followed Revan into darkness. That’s not how people work though. That’s not even how people under the influence of the Dark Side of the Force work. Spending twenty years as Palpatine’s thrall didn’t prevent Vader from throwing his Master into the reactor shaft to save his son. Revan can murder every NPC available to be murdered until reaching Rakata Prime only to pull a 180, redeem Bastila, and be feted as a hero of the Republic, Sith-eyes and all.
All but one of the surviving Revanchist Jedi who followed Revan and Malak into the Mandalorian Wars followed them again into the Jedi Civil War. Even the Exile, that lone dissenting actor, can say that they would have fought with their fellows against the Republic had their connection to the Force not been severed; that they were unable, not unwilling. Yet, the Exile can also say that they would not have followed Revan and Malak in attacking the Republic, that they went to war to defend the innocent. Many of the other Jedi who joined the war effort alongside them must have felt the same way, in the beginning.
Many of the soldiers of the Republic like Carth Onasi returned home after the Mandalorian Wars were over, even those like Saul Karath who would bow to Revan again. What then are the factors that led every surviving Revanchist Jedi, save the Exile, to follow Revan from the Mandalorian Wars into the Jedi Civil War?
1) The Mandalorian Wars changed the Jedi who fought in them. The Exile’s dialogue provides the different reasons why they might have left to fight in the war – to protect the innocent, to test their power, to defend the Republic, to win glory – reflecting varying motivations of Knights and Padawans recruited by Revan and Malak. However, despite the differences in the initial reasons for defying the Jedi Council to answer the Republic’s call, they all would have gone through similar uniting experiences during the war. Terrible experiences. Shared hardship often serves to reinforce group identity.
Older Jedi like Kavar and Arren Kae had fought wars before, but the initial expedition led by Revan and Malak was almost entirely composed of young Knights and older Padawans. Military morality, ethics in warfare, tends to be rather twisted from the perspective of modern western civilian morality. Your ability to prosecute the war and the safety of your soldiers takes priority over the lives of enemy, and sometimes even allied, civilians. Ruthless is more than a virtue, it’s a necessity. Collateral damage is an inevitability. For young relatively inexperienced Jedi, raised on ideals of valuing all life and always seeking non-violent resolutions, the transition to military command positions where they were not only required to kill, not only required to led troops to their death, but required to give orders which they knew would directly result in the deaths of civilians would have been distressing.
We know that the Exile once led troops directly into a minefield during the Battle of Dxun, but I think that barely scratched the surface. We aren’t given the full laundry list of the Mandalorians’ war crimes, but at the very least it includes the crime of aggression, murder of civilians, use of child soldiers, and conscription of captured civilians into the Neo-Crusaders and for forced labour. Given this disregard for the lives of civilians, I consider it likely that the Mandalorians also used hostages and headquartered themselves inside buildings like schools and hospitals. I suspect both sides used poison weapons, nuclear weapons, torture, and executed prisoners of war.
2) The Battle of Malachor V was a purge and a crucible of conversion. Kreia, HK-47, and the recording of Bastila Shan all say it; “a series of massacres that masked another war, a war of conversion”, “the intention was to destroy the Jedi, break their will, and make them loyal to Revan … Revan was "cleaning house" at Malachor V”, “to convert the last of the Jedi who fought beside [Revan] – and murder those who would not”. The Jedi in the radius of the Mass Shadow Generator would have included the Jedi Revan did not believe would agree with the plan to invade the Republic.
I think many of the Revanchist Jedi had already been falling by inches before Malachor. The Mandalorian Wars were brutal and one of the major symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is emotional dysregulation. Irritability, anxiety, depression, guilt, anger – the ongoing effects of trauma make a person more susceptible to inadvertently drawing on the Dark-Side of the Force. Using the Dark-Side of the Force was forbidden by the Code enforced by the Jedi Council, but the Revanchists had been pressured to compromise their ethics in other ways to effectively prosecute the war.
For any Jedi who had not already fallen, the detonation of the Mass Shadow Generator was a final blow they could not withstand. They all fell – into the Dark-Side, into death, away from the Force.
This was the conversion that Revan desired. The moral conversation – the acceptance of actions that violated their previous moral code, the previous moral code that would not have permitted making war on the Republic. The conversion in the Force – pushing Jedi to the Dark-Side ensured that they would not be accepted back into the Order by the Jedi Council even if they desired to return.
3) The Jedi Council’s decision to exile the Jedi who returned to face them was a gift to Revan and Malak. The Council’s judgement might have been rooted in their discomfort with what the Exile had become but the reason they publicly gave is that the Exile disobeyed the Council to follow Revan to war. That reason applied equally to every single other Revanchist. By exiling the one Revanchist to return the Jedi Council exiled them all, whether or not they intended to. They may not have, but by deciding to keep secret the true reasons behind their sentence of exile they ensured the other Revanchists could interpret their judgement no other way.
Telling the Revanchist Jedi they would never be welcome to return to the Jedi Order ensured that they would never go back. Onwards was the only path left to them.
4) Revan was extremely charismatic and competent. The Revanchist Jedi had already decided that Revan and Malak judgement was better than the Jedi Council’s when they chose to defy the Council’s orders to follow them to war. Revan, Malak and the Revanchists then won the war for the Republic. In fact, Revan even discovered the shadowy threat the which had been the Council’s justification for sitting out the war through engaging in it, while the Jedi Council remained ignorant.
The Republic government probably bungled the early stages of the Mandalorian Wars by not intervening sooner. The Mandalorians were committing more than enough war crimes for them to justify it, but they allowed Mandalorians to expand their territory, build their forces and industry, and entrench their advantage. When the Republic did enter the war, it wasn’t because the Republic leadership had made a strategic decision, or even a moral one; it was because some corrupt politicians organised bribes to fast-track Taris into the Republic because it was under threat and they wanted to protect their business holdings there. The Jedi Council was also tangled up in the culture of corruption; Lucien Draay was given a seat on the Council even though he’d been accused of planning and assisting the murder of four Padawans because of his powerful family connections.
The Old Republic was more an aristocratic republic than a democratic one. Alderaan, Onderon, the Empress Teta system – they were all monarchies during this period, not democracies. If aristocrats could hold power through right of blood and plutocrats through wealth, then why shouldn’t Revan lead the Galactic Republic by right of merit and conquest?
Revan was secretive, but at least some of the other Revanchist Sith knew about the shadowy threat – the True Sith Empire. If the Republic was going to need to fight another war against an even greater enemy, surely it would need better leadership. Leadership like Revan.
