Warning: this article contains spoilers for Star Wars: Crimson Reign #3!
In the latest Star Wars story from Marvel Comics, it's revealed how Palpatine was able to turn the galaxy against the Jedi. There was a time when the light of the Jedi shone brightly across the galaxy. But by the prequel era, that light was dimmed. The Jedi had withdrawn to a single temple on Coruscant and - as Ahsoka Tano discovered after she left the Jedi Order - they were entirely unaware of the fates of everyday civilians.
And then came Order 66, which almost wiped out the Jedi. Palpatine used modified recordings of his confrontation with three Jedi Masters as evidence the Jedi had been attempting a coup, and the entire galaxy turned on the Jedi. Soon a thousand generations of heroism had been forgotten, erased from the history books, with the Jedi remembered only as traitors to the Republic and enemies of the Empire. The scale of Palpatine's deception was breathtaking - and Star Wars: Crimson Reign #3, by Charles Soule and Steven Cummings, explains just how he was able to pull it off.
The issue tells the story of the Archivist, a scholar who studied the Force and specialized in the dark side. In one key scene, she reflects back on Palpatine's success, and concludes he was able to turn the galaxy against the Jedi because he understood what they meant to the people. "I believe, for most people who thought about it at all, the light side represented the way they wanted to live and act," she observes. "The dark side was more closely connected to how they were." This matters, she goes on to explain, because it means people always hated the Jedi just as much as they loved them. "It is hard to look at people who have become their best selves. It reminds you that you have not."
The Archivist understood what even the Jedi seem to have forgotten; that the balance between light and dark runs through the heart of every single person, not just a Jedi or a Sith. What she did not understand, however, was that the dark side was in ascendance; that over the course of a millennia the Sith had engineered a situation where people were encouraged to act in fear, hatred, greed, and selfish ambition, thus increasing the grip of the dark side in the galaxy. The Clone Wars amplified this, causing an unprecedented amount of fear, hatred, and anger, and then all Palpatine needed to do was direct those emotions.
As the Archivist notes, with the galaxy now against the Jedi it was easy to outlaw them - first to make it illegal to be a Jedi, then to know a Jedi, and finally to know anything about their teachings. Those Order 66 survivors who resisted were killed, and those who remained were - by literal process of elimination - those who were willing to live hidden away in fear. And in their fear, they too strengthened the dark side. While hideously simple, Palpatine's plan to have Star Wars' galaxy turn its back on the Jedi makes a terrifying amount of sense.