I recently finished reading Karen Traviss’s famous Republic Commando novels, and the fourth book, Order 66, raised an interesting question: how much did Jango know about what was behind the war when he sold his genes to the Kaminoans?

Attack of the Clones fooled fans into thinking that Jango sold his gene template solely to collect his five million credits and Boba Fett, then betrayed the Republic by working for the Seperatists. We all thought that he was a money-motivated rascal who valued cash over culture (the correct Mando’a term would be dikutla shabuir, I think. Comment if you know what that means…) But did he know something more? More precisely: did he know who Palpatine was?

Mandalorians and Jedi don’t have a very good history together. They worked better with Sith, and regarded Jedi as arrogant scumbags. Jedi slaughtered True Mandalorians in the Battle of Galidraan, leaving only Jango alive, so he has plenty of personal hate for the Jedi as well. So he wouldn’t even have flinched when he discovered that the Republic had a Sith mastermind at its head.

If Jango had known the whole story all along–Palpatine arranging the war and controlling both sides anonymously–he probably wouldn’t have had any objection to selling his genes for a low price. He would have known that Palpatine would use the army to get rid of the Jedi at some point, and being a Mandalorian, that gave them a common enemy. Thus, it would be his interest to help create an army powerful enough to take down the Jedi Order.

The death of the Jedi by a Mandalorian army, even if they are only clones of a Mandalorian, would the ultimate way for Jango and the entire Mandalorian culture to get its revenge on the Jedi for what they did on Galidraan. In fact, that may have been another reason he trained the original one hundred Alpha ARCs–the most lethally trained men in the entire army–himself, and hired 90% Mandalorians as Cuy’val  Dar (“those who no longer exist,” the Mandalorians who trained the clone army). We don’t know a lot about most Cuy’val Dar, but Jango, Kal Skirata, Walon Vau and Rav Bralor trained their men as Mandalorians, and the others probably did, too.

So Jango walks away with a bit of cash and a cloned heir, after single-handedly catalyzing a war and producing an army to kill the Jedi. He was patient–even after he died at the hands of a Jedi.

Boba was furious when Mace killed Jango, but he after Order 66, he must have realized that his father didn’t fail, but instead had had his vengeance and achieved what no other Mandalorian had ever done.