What Is The Code Of The Sith & What Does It Really Mean?
There are a lot of dumb things in the old “Star Wars” Expanded Universe, but the Sith Code isn’t one of them. It adds a sense of realism to the dark side practice, giving it a more malicious and cult-like feel than it had previously. In “Star Wars” Legends, the doctrine is attributed to Sorzus Syn, but in the real world, it was written by David Gaider. He put it together for the 2003 video game “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” with permission from Lucasfilm. He looked to two sources of inspiration to create it, the Jedi Code and another, much darker document.
“That’s where the Code of the Sith came from (reverse the Jedi Code— done!),” Gaider wrote on his Tumblr page roughly a decade after the game released. He went on to explain that the overall Sith philosophy behind the Code that’s explored somewhat in “Knights of the Old Republic” stems from “Mein Kampf”: the 1925 manifesto and autobiography written by Adolf Hitler. “The Sith philosophy (at least what I wrote of it for Korriban) was inspired by ‘Mein Kampf’ at least in parts (which made the forumites who talked about how awesome it was, and how it made sense, one part hilarious and one part frightening),” Gaider added.
Though the Sith are fictitious and many find their aesthetics cool, in truth, there’s some real darkness behind the them, their code, and their overall philosophy. Their villainy has its roots far closer than a galaxy far, far away after all.