I love when people are like “this character is a war criminal” and show a character from a setting where we have no idea what the rules of war are. Like yeah they’re a torturer or murderer or whatever but if you wanna call them a criminal over it you gotta back it up with some kind of indication of what things might be in their conventions.
I don’t Star Wars so I have no idea about Obi Wan’s surrenders but I think it’s worth pointing out that in general, people often misunderstand that particular rule. It’s illegal to falsely surrender, as in, you can’t pretend to surrender to let your enemy’s guard down and then ambush them or attack them during the surrender or use it to get close to their base for a sneak attack or anything. Once you have properly, genuinely surrendered, it is NOT illegal to try to escape, or take advantage of opportunities to spy and sabotage that are handed to you by your enemy, or just generally be an inconvenience in ways that aren’t violating the terms of your surrender. A POW escaping a prison camp isn’t committing a war crime. A POW who overhears their captors planning and manages to get a warning out to their own army isn’t committing a war crime. Someone who surrenders their unit because they know they know that doing so will stall the enemy more than fighting or fleeing, and give the rest of the army a better fighting chance, is not committing a war crime. If the enemy decides to take prisoners and then can’t control those prisoners, that’s their own fucking problem; if they weren’t prepared or equipped to deal with prisoners, they should’ve taken the territory and made the surrendering party retreat peacefully instead. the surrender itself must be genuine but once the surrender is complete you are under no obligation to continue to be cooperative outside the terms of that surrender.
Yeah, no, Obi-Wan literally pretended to surrender as a “clever trick” to stall the enemy leadership negotiating the surrender terms until Anakin could reach him and help kill them all, IIRC. It’s in the first Clone Wars episode I believe.
Like, it worked for the story, but that’s definitely going to undermine any legitimate surrenders the Jedi ever need to make and potentially get people killed because it “could be a trick” if you think about it.
Peasant uprisings were repeatedly crushed by nobles offering a parlay to the leaders and then capturing/executing them, because the riled-up illiterate peasants were unlikely to have even known about something that happened on the other side of the country 50 years ago.
Like it’s not just “ooh Marx, nifty!” the 19th century really did expect, on a reasonable basis, that a permanent international network linking commoners with literacy and historical education would be able to turn the tables
