#given that he /did/ have provincial-level prominence

[warwickroyals]

you've mentioned places like great lakes and new westminster. are these states or provinces, or just general regions? how is sunderland divided administratively?

Yes, hello, these are provinces and Sunderland has ten of them! They look like this (roughly, it's a work in progress)

The ten provinces are:

Alexandria, Algonquin, Cheyenne, Danforth, Great Lakes, Iroquois, Lakota, Missoria, and New Westminster

Each province is represented by a provincial government and they are considered to have shared sovereignty with the federal government. Each province has a Governor-General, who represents the Crown aka Louis V. Each province has a certain amount of MPs (Members of Parliament) who sit in either the House of Commons (lower chamber) or the Senate (upper chamber). MPs represent the legislative interests of their provinces and municipalities at the federal level. There is a fixed number of twenty senators (two from each province), who are appointed by the King on the advice of his prime minister, while members of the House of Commons are elected directly in federal elections, with the number of MPs depending on the population of their province, the larger the province the more seats they have in the House of Commons.

In Sunderland, you don't vote for the prime minister directly, you vote for them through your MPs. So, if the potential prime minister (the party leader) belongs to the Liberal party, you vote for the Liberal MP representing your area, if that Liberal MP wins they have a seat in the House of Commons. If a majority of the MPs in the House are of a certain party (the main two being Liberals and Tory Conservatives), their party leader becomes Prime Minister with a majority government. If a party wins the most seats but fails to hold a majority, this is called a minority government and the ruling party has less absolute authority and will have to coalition-build with other parties in order to get things done. So, it's extremely important that the Prime Minister and his Ministers are supported by their MPs in the House of Commons, this is something Sunderland's current prime minister is struggling with. MPs can resign, retire, switch parties, or die on a whim, so the amount of power a government has can fluctuate.

The Senate is more of the wild-west as Louis is free to appoint to whoever he wishes for whatever reason he wants (on the advice of the prime minister, but he can ignore the advice). The general rule is that these people have to be of noteworthy public standing, but they don't have to be politicians. They can be activists, lawyers, civil servants, etc. If the King tries to appoint a friend or a family member, nothing but public outrage can stop him. So, naturally, Louis doesn't appoint friends or family and has grilled James and later Nicholas on this being something you should never do as King. Louis's Daddy James II didn't have the same restraint. . . Nor did King Nicholas (removing the leftists meant sacking the senate against them) . . . Or King George who fought tooth and nail to have his moronic son-in-law appointed to the Senate in 1898 . . . but it's not a corrupt system at all, I swear . . .

The Senate has the job of approving the potential laws (bills) passed to them by the House of Commons, in short: if they dislike it, they send it back or veto it, if they like it, they'll hand it over the Louis for royal assent. Believe it or not, the fact that there is an unelected body, that serves until the age of SIXTY-FIVE, picking and choosing what laws get greenlit has caused SCANDALS, with the protests happening in this post being triggered by the Senate rejecting an affordable housing bill forwarded by the Liberals in the House.

Until 1999, those appointed to the Senate were given a title of nobility, typically an Earldom or a Dukedom if The King thinks you're a really good boy. The families of Irene and Tatiana are descended from prominent Senators, this is where their family titles originated from. This tradition ended when the first woman was appointed to the Senate in 1999, since women can't inherit noble titles, Louis stopped the practice altogether, instead of . . .y'know, just getting Parliament to allow women the ability to hold noble titles suo jure. Louis can technically still hand out noble titles, but he informally agreed to stop granting titles to non-family members. People at the time viewed this as him becoming more egalitarian and progressive for the new millennia, but in reality, he was just keeping his crop of aristocrat ass-likers more exclusive. So, now your senators aren't literal dukes and earls . . . yay, progress?

Finally: The "commander-in-chief" of a province is called the premier. Think of him like a governor in the United States. These guys are elected through provincial elections and they form their own legislative bodies to handle provincial legislation (healthcare, education, etc.). They operate largely independently from the federal government and have historically resisted federal micro-management.

If you're familiar with American geography or history, you'll know that the provinces have Indigenous names (Cheyenne, Lakota, Missouria, Iroquois, Algonquin) and others are named after royalty (Alexandria and Louisia) and prominent figures/locations (New Westminster, Danforth) . . . the implications of these names say a lot about Sunderland's history.

Hopefully, I'll be able to update my map soon, hope you enjoyed the political lesson.

[teatitty]

Rí, or commonly ríg is an ancient Gaelic word meaning “King/Ruler”, and while the modern Irish word is still the same the modern Scots word is rìgh;  Rí has the same meaning as the Sanskrit raja, and the Latin rex/regis for comparison.

There were multiple levels of Rí; rí benn (king of peaks) or rí tuaithe (king of a single tribe) was commonly a petty king of a single territory, who held no legal authority outside of that territory. The size of the territory may differ but an example of what I mean would be Umhaill, which had 20 rulers, including the famous Grace O’Malley

Rí buiden (king of bands), also rí tuath (king of [many] tribes) was a regional King to which several other territories and rí benn were subordinate. While still a “petty king” in a sense, a rí tuath (also known as a ruirí or “overking” though apparently a ruirí was also superior to a rí tuath so /shrugs/) was capable of getting provincial-level prominence, and in some rare cases even a provincial kingship (more on that in a bit). Regardless, he was considered fully sovereign in any case. Examples of a rí tuath would be the Kings of Breifne or the Kings of Moylurg

And then we have the rí ruirech, the “king of over-kings”. These were the provincial Kings that ruled over the provinces of Ireland; Munster, Connacht, Leinster, Ulster and Mide (according to the Ulster legends these were the main five). These kings were also referred to as ri bunaid cach cinn ("ultimate king of every individual") which is one heck of a mouthful

And, finally, we have the ard rí; the High King (of Ireland), the supreme ruler of all provinces, who answered to no higher authority (except the Gods probably lol). Now in theory the rí ruirech were subordinate to the High King, however the power of the High King varies considerably in Irish stories and Mythology, and he was usually no more than a figurehead. 

According to tradition, the High King was crowned on the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny) upon the Hill of Tara in Meath, Leinster. When a candidate for the throne stood upon it, the monument would let forth a loud roar of joy. Supposedly this monument ended up getting split in half by Cu Chulainn (he used his sword uwu) when it didn’t recognize Cu’s chosen candidate as the High King. Said chosen candidate was his foster-son, Lugaid Riab nDerg (there’s a lot of incest involved with this guy’s story just a warning, but hey at least it’s all consensual?) though he did end up becoming a High King after this event, proooobably because nobody wanted to get on Cu’s bad side lmao. Regardless, Lia Fáil never roared again except under Conn of the Hundred Battles

(Also as an aside, there’s a lot of conflicting thoughts about Lugaid, as there are multiple Lugaid’s in the mythos and supposedly this Lugaid ruled for over 20 years which can’t be possible considering that Cu dies when he was 17 but was also there when Lugaid died. [Also this is where the “pissing contest” story came from though it wasn’t Cu doing the pissing it was a bunch of women anyWAY]

Granted though there are two separate stories about his death but again there is some debate over whether the second story was actually him or if he simply got confused with a separate, minor character from the Ulster Cycle who was associated with Cu Chulainn. Fun times for us mythos bitches I guess)

[st-just]

Barely coherent rambling about nation-states, culture, the Hapsburgs, and Canada

Because why have a blog except to occasionally purge one of the essays floating around half-formed in your brain. To be clear, it’s still half-formed, just on tumblr now. 1,666 words, here’s the Deveraux essay mentioned. Book is Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs: To Rule The World

So I’ve had like, nationalism on my mind recently.

And so there’s a kind of recurring beat in left-of-centre American political discourse (like, not ‘internet rnados screaming at each other’ discourse, ‘people with doctorates or think tank positions having debates on podcasts or exchanging op eds’ discourse) where you have some people on the radical end list some of the various horrible atrocities the country is built on, the ways that all the national myths are lies, and how all the saints of the civic religion were monsters to one degree or another – this can come in a flavor of either righteous anger or, like, intellectual sport. And then on the other end you have the, well, Matt Yglesiases of the world. Who don’t really argue any of the points of fact, but do kind of roll their eyes at the whole exercise and say that sure, but Mom and Apple Pie and the American Way are still popular, and if you’re trying to win power in a democracy telling the majority of the population that their most cherished beliefs are both stupid and evil isn’t a great move.

Anyway, a couple weeks back Deveraux posted an essay for the 4th of July (which I don’t totally buy, but is an interesting read) about why the reason American nationalism is so intensely bundled up into a couple pieces of paper and maybe a dozen personalities is precisely because it isn’t a nation at all. Basically, his thesis is that in proper nation-states like England or the Netherlands or wherever, there really is a core population that is the overwhelming demographic majority and really have lived in more or less the same places since time immemorial, and that once the enthographers and mythologists finish their work, all those people really do identify with both the same nation and the same state as its expression. America, by contrast, is by virtue of being a settler nation whose citizenry was filled by waves of immigrants from all the ass ends of Eurasia in a historical eyeblink, even before you add in the native population and descendants of slaves lacks any single core ethnicity that is anywhere close to a majority, as well as any organic national traditions or claims to an ‘ancestral homeland’ that aren’t obviously absurd (and we are trying to include the descendents of slaves and the native population these days, to varying levels of success). All this to say that his point is America is a civic state, not a national one, with the identity of ‘American’ being divorced from ethnicity and instead tied to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the whole cult around the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and [FDR and/or Reagan depending on your politics].

Which, like I said, don’t totally buy, but interesting. (to a degree he overstates how homogenus ‘actual’ nation-states are, he makes America sound very special but if his analysis holds that it’d presumably also apply to several other former settler colonies, in the American context there’s a fairly solid case to be made that the whole ‘nation of immigrants’ story and the racial identity of whiteness were constructed to function as an erratz national ethnicity, with incredible success, etc, etc).

But anyway, if we accept that the American identity is bound up in its civic religion and the mythologized version of its political history, it’s absolutely the case that there’s several segments of the left who take incredibly joy in tearing said civic religion and national mythology apart and dragging whatever’s left through the mud. I mean, hell, I do! (reminder: any politician whose ever had a statue dedicated to them was probably a monster). And, well, call it a greater awareness of historical crimes and injustice, or the postmodern disdain for idols and systems leaking out through the increasingly college-educated populace, or the liquid acid of modernity dissolving away all unchosen identities, or a Marxist cabal undermining the national spirit to pave the way for the Revolution or whatever you like, but in whichever case, that critical discourse is certainly much more prominent and influential among left and liberal media and politics types that is was in decades past.

And, okay, so I finished Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs a few days ago. And I mentioned as I was reading it that the chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries reminded me quite a bit of courses I’d taken in school on the late Ottoman Empire and Soviet Union. Because all three are multi/non-national states (Empires, in Deveraux’s terminology, though that’s varying degrees of questionable for each, I think. Moreso for the Hapsburgs than the rest) who outlasted their own ideological legitimacy. And in all three cases it just, well, it didn’t not matter, but even as all the ceremonies got more absurd and farcical  and the politics more consumed by inertia punctuated with crises, things kept limping along just fine for decades. Even in the face of intense crisis, dissolution wasn’t inevitable. (The Ottomans are a less central example here, admittedly, precisely because of the late attempt to recenter the empire on Turkish nationalism. But even then, more Arab soldiers fought for the Sultan-Caliph than ever did for the Hashemites, and most prewar Arab nationalism was either purely cultural or imagined the Empire reformed into a binational federation, not dissolved).

But as Rady says in the book – losing WW1 crippled Germany, it dissolved Austria-Hungary. And in all three cases, as soon as they were gone, the idea of bringing them back instantly became at least a bit absurd.

And okay, to now pivot to talking about where I actually live but about whose politics I (shamefully) know significantly less than America’s. I mean, maybe it’s because most of my history education from public school was given by either pinko commies or liberals still high off ‘90s one-world universalism, or maybe it’s just a matter of social class, but I really can’t remember ever having taken the whole wannabe civic religion of Canada seriously (the only even serious attempt at sacredness I recall was for Remembrance Day). Even today, the main things I remember about our Founding Father is that he was an alcoholic who lost power in a railroad corruption scandal.

Really, in all my experience the only unifying threads of national/particular Canadian identity are a flag, a healthcare system, those Canadian Heritage Minute propaganda ads, a bill of rights from the ‘60s, and an overpowering sense of polite smugness towards the States.

And that last one (or, at least, the generally rose-colored ‘Canada is the good one’ view of history) is taking something of a beating, on account of all the mass graves really rubbing the public’s noses in the whole genocide thing. At least among big segments of the intellectual and activist classes, most of the symbols of Canadian nationhood are necessarily becoming illegitimate as Canada is, in fact, a project of genocidal settle colonialism.

But it really is just purely symbolic. Most of the municipalities who cancelled their Canada Day celebrations are going to elect Liberal MPs and help give our Natural Governing Party its majority in the next election, no one of any significance has actually challenged the authority of the civil service or the courts. And, frankly, most of the people who are loudly skeptical of all the symbols of the nations are also the ones whose political projects most heavily rely on an efficient and powerful state bureaucracy to carry out.

(This is leaving aside Quebec, which very much does have a live national identity insofar as the vigorous protection of national symbols is what wins provincial elections. If I felt like doing research and/or reaching more there’s probably something there on how pro-independence sentiment has largely simmered down at a pace with the decline of attempts to impose a national Canadian identity).

I mean, Canada does have rather more of a base for a ‘national’ population core than the US (especially if you’re generous and count the people who mark French on the census as a core population as well). At the same time, no one really expects this to continue to be the case – even back in Junior High, I remember one of the hand outs we got explaining that due to declining fertility most or all future population growth would come from immigration (I remember being confused when my mother was weirdly uncomfortable with the idea when it came up). I suppose our government gets credit for managing public opinion such that anti-immigration backlash hasn’t taken over the political conversation. Which you’d think would be a low bar but, well.

But anyway, to try and begin wrapping this rambling mess up – it does rather feel like Rady’s portrayal of the late Hapsburg empire might have a few passing similarities to the future of Canada. A multinational state whose constitution and political system and built on foundations and legitimized by history that no one actually believes in anymore, or at least no more than they have to pretend to to justify the positions they hold, but persisting because it’s convenient and it’s there and any alternatives are really only going to seem practical after a complete economic collapse or apocalyptic war. (Though our civil service is a Josephist’s dream by comparison, really.)

Or maybe I’m premature, and the dominant culture will just be incredibly effective at assimilating immigrants into that civic identity. Anecdotally, the only people I know who are at all enthusiastic about Canada as an idea are first generation immigrants. I could certainly just be projecting, really – I’ve never really been able to get all that invested in the nation-state as an idea of more moral power than ‘a convenient administrative division of humanity’, and certainly liberating ourselves form the need to defend the past would certainly rectifying certain injustices easier.  

Or maybe I’m just being incredibly optimistic. Half the economy’s resource extraction and the other half’s real estate, so decent odds the entire place just literally goes up in flames over the next few decades. BC’s already well on its way.

[maryjoyftaguinodblogs]

Maria Montessori

“Do not tell them how to do it. Show them how to do it and do not say a word. If you tell them, they will watch your lips move. If you show them, they will want it to do it themselves.”

Montessori’s Life

     Maria Montessori was born on August 31, 1870, in the provincial town of Chiaravalle, Italy, to middle-class, well-educated parents. Her father, Alessandro Montessori, 33 years old at the time, was an official of the Ministry of Finance working in the local state-run tobacco factory. Her mother, Renilde Stoppani, 25 years old, was well educated for the times and was the great-niece of Italian geologist and paleontologist Antonio Stoppani.

     When she was 12, her parents moved to Rome and encouraged her to become a teacher, the only career open to women at the time.  While she did not have any particular mentor, she was very close to her mother who readily encouraged her. She also had a loving relationship with her father, although he disagreed with her choice to continue her education.

     She was first interested in mathematics, and decided on engineering, but eventually became interested in biology and finally determined to enter medical school. Facing her father's resistance but armed with her mother's support, Montessori went on to graduate with high honors from the medical school of the University of Rome in 1896. In so doing, Montessori became the first female doctor in Italy.

On March 31, 1898, her only child – a son named Mario Montessori was born. Mario Montessori was born out of her love affair with Giuseppe Montesano, a fellow doctor who was co-director with her of the Orthophrenic School of Rome.

     Montessori died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 6, 1952, at the age of 81 in Noordwijk, South Holland, Netherlands, receiving in her later years’ honorary degrees and tributes for her work throughout the world.

Montessori’s Careers

     From 1896 to 1901, Montessori worked with and researched so-called "phrenasthenic" children—in modern terms, children experiencing some form of mental retardation, illness, or disability. She also began to travel, study, speak, and publish nationally and internationally, coming to prominence as an advocate for women's rights and education for mentally disabled children.

     Montessori continued with her research at the University's psychiatric clinic, and in 1897 she was accepted as a voluntary assistant there. As part of her work, she visited asylums in Rome where she observed children with mental disabilities, observations which were fundamental to her future educational work. She also read and studied the works of 19th-century physicians and educators Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin, who greatly influenced her work. Also in 1897, Montessori audited the University courses in pedagogy and read "all the major works on educational theory of the past two hundred years".

     In 1897 Montessori spoke on societal responsibility for juvenile delinquency at the National Congress of Medicine in Turin. In 1898, she wrote several articles and spoke again at the First Pedagogical Conference of Turin, urging the creation of special classes and institutions for mentally disabled children, as well as teacher training for their instructors. She joined the board of the National League and was appointed as a lecturer in hygiene and anthropology at one of the two teacher-training colleges for women in Italy.

     Montessori became the director of the Orthophrenic School for developmentally disabled children in 1900. There she began to extensively research early childhood development and education. Montessori began to conceptualize her own method of applying their educational theories, which she tested through hands-on scientific observation of students at the Orthophrenic School. Montessori found the resulting improvement in students' development remarkable. She spread her research findings in speeches throughout Europe, also using her platform to advocate for women's and children's rights.

     Montessori was named director of the State Orthophrentic School in 1889.  She worked with the children there for two years.  All-day she taught in the school and then worked preparing new materials, making notes and observations and reflecting on her work.  These two years she regarded as her "true degree" in education.  To her amazement, she found these children could learn many things that had seemed impossible.  This conviction led Montessori to devote her energies to the field of education for the remainder of her life.

Montessori’s Contributions to Education

The Montessori Method

     In her book she outlines a typical winter's day of lessons, starting at 09:00 am and finishing at 04:00 pm:

9–10. Entrance. Greeting. Inspection as to personal cleanliness. Exercises of practical life; helping one another to take off and put on the aprons. Going over the room to see that everything is dusted and in order. Language: Conversation period: Children give an account of the events of the day before. Religious exercises.

10–11. Intellectual exercises. Objective lessons interrupted by short rest periods. Nomenclature, Sense exercises.

11–11:30. Simple gymnastics: Ordinary movements done gracefully, the normal position of the body, walking, marching in line, salutations, movements for attention, placing of objects gracefully.

11:30–12. Luncheon: Short prayer.

12–1. Free games.

1–2. Directed games, if possible, in the open air. During this period the older children, in turn, go through with the exercises of practical life, cleaning the room, dusting, putting the material in order. General inspection for cleanliness: Conversation.

2–3. Manual work. Clay modeling, design, etc.

3–4. Collective gymnastics and songs, if possible in the open air. Exercises to develop forethought: Visiting, and caring for, the plants and animals.

     She felt by working independently children could reach new levels of autonomy and become self-motivated to reach new levels of understanding. Montessori also came to believe that acknowledging all children as individuals and treating them as such would yield better learning and fulfilled potential in each particular child. She began to see independence as the aim of education, and the role of the teacher as an observer and director of children's innate psychological development.

     She also knew that, in order to consider these developments as representing universal truths, she must study them under different conditions and be able to reproduce them.  In this spirit that same year, a second school was opened in San Lorenzo, a third in Milan, and a fourth in Rome in 1908, the latter for children of well-to-do parents.  By 1909, all of Italian Switzerland began using Montessori's methods in their orphan asylums and children's houses.

     Word of Montessori's work spread rapidly.  Visitors from all over the world arrived at the Montessori schools to verify with their own eyes the reports of these "remarkable children."  Montessori began a life of world travel - establishing schools and teacher training centers, lecturing, and writing.  The first comprehensive account of her work, The Montessori Method, was published in 1909.

     In 1915, Montessori returned to Europe and took up residence in Barcelona, Spain. Over the next 20 years, Montessori traveled and lectured widely in Europe and gave numerous teacher training courses. Montessori education experienced significant growth in Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Italy.

Montessori’s Significant Awards & Legacy

     In 1949, the first training course for birth to three years of age, called the Scuola Assistenti all'infanzia (Montessori School for Assistants to Infancy) was established. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Montessori was also awarded the French Legion of Honor, Officer of the Dutch Order of Orange Nassau, and received an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Amsterdam. In 1950 she visited Scandinavia, represented Italy at the UNESCO conference in Florence, presented at the 29th international training course in Perugia, gave a national course in Rome, published a fifth edition of Il Metodo with the new title La Scoperta del Bambino (The Discovery of the Child), and was again nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1951 she participated in the 9th International Montessori Congress in London, gave a training course in Innsbruck, was nominated for the third time for the Nobel Peace Prize.

     Maria Montessori and Montessori schools were featured on coins and banknotes of Italy, and on stamps of the Netherlands, India, Italy, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Montessori’s Works & Writings

     Montessori published a number of books, articles, and pamphlets during her lifetime, often in Italian, but sometimes first in English. However, many of her later works were transcribed from her lectures, often in translation, and only later published in book form.

     Montessori's major works are given here in order of their first publication, with significant revisions and translations:

(1909) Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all'educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini

revised in 1913, 1926, and 1935; revised and reissued in 1950 as La scoperta del bambino

(1912) English edition: The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the Children's Houses

(1948) Revised and expanded English edition issued as The Discovery of the Child

(1950) Revised and reissued in Italian as La scoperta del bambino

(1910) Antropologia Pedagogica

(1913) English edition: Pedagogical Anthropology

(1914) Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook

(1921) Italian edition: Manuale di pedagogia scientifica

(1916) L'autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari

(1917) English edition: The Advanced Montessori Method, Vol. I: Spontaneous Activity in Education; Vol. II: The Montessori Elementary Materia

(1922) I bambini viventi nella Chiesa

(1929) English edition: The Child in the Church, Maria Montessori’s first book on the Catholic liturgy from the child’s point of view.

(1923) Das Kind in der Familie (German)

(1929) English edition: The Child in the Family

(1936) Italian edition: Il bambino in famiglia

(1934) Psico Geométria (Spanish)

(2011) English edition: Psychogeometry

(1934) Psico Aritmética

(1971) Italian edition: Psicoaritmetica

(1936) L'Enfant(French)

(1936) English edition: The Secret of Childhood

(1938) Il segreto dell'infanzia

(1948) De l'enfant à l'adolescent

(1948) English edition: From Childhood to Adolescence

(1949) Dall'infanzia all'adolescenza

(1949) Educazione e pace

(1949) English edition: Peace and Education

(1949) Formazione dell'uomo

(1949) English edition: The Formation of Man

(1949) The Absorbent Mind

(1952) La mente del bambino. Mente assorbente

(1947) Education for a New World

(1970) Italian edition: Educazione per un mondo nuovo

(1947) To Educate the Human Potential

(1970) Italian edition: Come educare il potenziale umano

[southeastasianists]

When Indonesia’s New Order regime met its end in May 1998, I was a PhD student researching Indonesian opposition movements while teaching Indonesian language and politics at a university in Sydney. Along with other lecturers and students, I watched the live broadcast of Suharto’s resignation speech, listening to the words of one of our colleagues as she translated the president’s fateful words for Australian TV. Clustered around a television screen in a poky AV lab, everyone present felt awed by the immensity of what we were witnessing, relieved that a dangerous political impasse had been broken, and nervously hopeful about the future after so many long years of political stagnation.

The extraordinary achievements of political reform in the years that followed formed one of the great success stories of the so-called “third wave” of democratisation—the worldwide surge of regime change that began in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s and then spread through Latin America, Africa and Asia. The post-Suharto democracy has now lasted longer than did Indonesia’s earlier period of parliamentary democracy (1950–1957), and the subsequent Guided Democracy regime (1957–65). While it still has another dozen years to pass the record set by Suharto’s New Order, Indonesian democracy has proved that it has staying power.

What few would question, though, is that the quality of Indonesia’s democracy was a problem from the beginning—and that under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) democratic quality has begun to slide dramatically.

Earlier this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit gave Indonesia its largest downgrading in its Democracy Index since scoring began in 2006. With a score of 6.39 out of a possible maximum of 10, the country is now bumping down toward the bottom of the index’s category of “flawed democracies”, on the verge—if it sinks just a little lower—of crossing into the category of “hybrid regime”. This downgrading of Indonesia’s position follows similar drops for the country in other democracy indices like the Freedom in the World surveycompiled by Freedom House.

Indonesia’s trajectory is not bucking the global trend. Around the world, democracy is in retreat. Freedom House says democracy is facing “its most serious crisis in decades”, with 71 countries experiencing declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2017 and only 35 registering gains, making 2017 the twelfth year in a row showing global democratic recession.

Unlike during an earlier era of military coups, today the primary source of democratic backsliding is elected politicians. Leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán undermine the rule of law, manipulate institutions for their own political advantage, and restrict the space for democratic opposition. Elected despotism is, increasingly, the order of the day. Indeed, as I argue here, the primary threat to Indonesia’s democratic system today comes not from actors outside the arena of formal politics, like the military or Islamic extremists, but the politicians that Indonesians themselves have chosen.

Eroding democracy, in democracy’s name

Over recent years, successive central governments have introduced restrictions on democratic rights and freedoms in Indonesia. This process began during the second term of the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presidency, which began in 2009, but has accelerated significantly since the election of Jokowi in 2014.

The immediate backdrop to some of the most regressive moves has been the contest between Jokowi and his Islamist and other detractors, especially in the wake of the mobilisations against the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok).

In July 2017, Jokowi issued a new regulation, subsequently approved by the national legislature, that granted the authorities sweeping powers to outlaw social organisations that they deemed a threat to the national ideology of Pancasila. The new law actually built on an earlier, somewhat less harmful version issued during the Yudhoyono presidency. The government quickly took advantage of the law to outlaw Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a large Islamist organisation that, while openly rejecting pluralism and democracy, has also pursued its goals non-violently.

At the same time, several critics of President Jokowi have been arrested on charges of makar, or rebellion (though it appears the authorities may not be proceeding with these cases). The government has coercively intervened in the internal affairs of Indonesia’s political parties so as to attain a majority in parliament. A prominent media mogul supportive of anti-Jokowi political causes was slapped with what appeared to many to be politically-motivated criminal investigations. Foreign NGOs and funding agencies face an increasingly restrictive operating climate.

Meanwhile, the military has been brought back into governance, at least at the lowest levels of the state, with the government reinstituting the Suharto-era of babinsa—junior officers assigned to villages—and promoting military involvement in non-security related functions as fertiliser distribution.

A related source of decline in the quality of Indonesia’s democracy, meanwhile, is intolerant attitudes toward religious and other social minorities, alongside narrowing public space for critical discussion of religious topics, and the growing ascendancy of religious conservatism in social and political life.

A few years ago, religious minorities such as Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyah sect were the most frequent target of violent attack and restrictions; recently, the country has been gripped by an anti-LGBT panic. It is possible that Indonesia will soon criminalise homosexuality. At a time when many third-wave democracies, notably those in Latin America, are becoming more respectful of the rights of homosexuals and other sexual minorities, Indonesia is moving in the opposite direction.

While none of these government measures has in itself been a knockout blow against freedom of expression and association, taken together they constitute a significant erosion of democratic space. As the global democracy indices recognise, it already makes no sense to speak of Indonesia as being a full, or liberal, democracy. These developments point toward, at best, Indonesia’s becoming an increasingly illiberal democracy, where electoral contestation continues as a foundation of the polity, but coexists with significant restrictions on political and religious freedoms, and where the rights of at least some minority groups are not protected.

Defying the odds

But the picture is not unremittingly gloomy. Indonesia has a long way to go before it sinks to the level of Russia or even Turkey, and it is worth pausing to contextualise the recent trends in the context of the achievements of Indonesian democracy over the last 20 years.

Many of these gains remain firmly established. Democratic electoral competition has become an essential part of Indonesia’s political architecture. Apart from sporadic calls to do away with direct elections of regional heads (pilkada), no mainstream political force calls openly for electoral mechanisms to be replaced with a rival organising principle. Even when the authoritarian populist Prabowo Subianto ran for the presidency in 2014, he had to disguise his anti-democratic impulses with talk of returning to Indonesia’s original 1945 Constitution—i.e. the version of the constitution that the Suharto regime had relied upon, but which seems attractive to many Indonesians because it resonates with Indonesia’s nationalist history.

Public opinion surveys demonstrate continuing strong support both for democracy as an ideal, and for the democratic system actually practised in Indonesia. Moreover, Indonesia still has a relatively robust civil society and independent media, at least in the major cities. Political debate on most topics remains lively. For example, it is generally easy for critics of President Jokowi to express their views loudly and directly—not something that can be done in most of Indonesia’s ASEAN neighbours. Indeed, some of the recent attempts to curtail free speech has been prompted by concerns about the ease with which so-called “fake news”, conspiracy theories and wild rumours circulate through social media.

Moreover, it is worth emphasising that many of the very people who pose the greatest threat to Indonesian democracy—its elites—have in fact bought into the new system. Elites throughout the country have benefited from the new opportunities for social mobility and material accumulation they have been able to secure through elections and decentralisation.

A recent survey of members of provincial parliaments, conducted by Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI) in cooperation with the Australian National University, shows that while Indonesia’s regional political elites are certainly illiberal on many issues, they are strongly supportive of electoral democracy as a system of government. Indeed, on many questions their views are markedly moredemocratic than the general population.

For example, when asked to judge on a 10-point scale whether democracy was a suitable system of government for Indonesia, the average score provided by these parliamentarians was 8.14—not far from the maximum score of 10 for “absolutely suitable”, and a full point higher than the 7.14 given by respondents in LSI’s most recent general population survey in which the same question was asked. Likewise, these legislators were considerably less likely to support military rule or rule by a strong leader than were the population at large.

These responses are significant, because democracy is not simply a system favouring protection of civil liberties and ensuring accountability of officials to the public (areas where Indonesia has, to spin it positively, a mixed record). It is also a means of ensuring regular and open competition between rival political elites.

Viewed in this light—as a means of regulating elite circulation—Indonesian democracy looks more robust. Though elite buy-in does not preclude continuing erosion of civil liberties at the centre, or guarantee protection of unpopular minorities, it does pose a considerable obstacle to the return of a command-system of centralised authority such as that which ruled Indonesia under the New Order.

A consolidated low-quality democracy?

It is in no small part due to this elite support for the status quo—in part begrudging and contingent, but nevertheless real—that Indonesian democracy has proven resilient to potential spoilers. This resilience is in itself an important achievement: there is a body of scholarly literature that suggests that once a country has experienced democratic rule for a lengthy period—one scholar, Milan Svolik, puts the figure at 17–20 years—it is very unlikely to regress toward outright authoritarianism.

Moreover, Indonesia’s present backsliding—as with the wider global trend—can arguably be viewed in part as a retreat that comes after a democratic high water mark is reached. If the last century is any guide, democratic progress and regression come in worldwide waves: the third wave of democratisation which began in the 1970s was preceded by two earlier waves that came in the wake of World War I and World War II. In both periods, many of the newly democratic regimes that were established in the wake of the breakup of multinational and colonial empires did not last long. But in each case, these retreats were superseded by new waves of democratisation.

Obviously, we need to be cautious when thinking about future trends. We are in the midst of a new world-historic transition and we do not know whether we are merely at the start of the worldwide retreat of democracy, or already near the turning of the authoritarian tide.

Most worryingly, some of the ingredients giving rise to democratic weakening in the current period are new, and do not yet show signs of abating. Strikingly, for the first time in decades, there are signs of weakness in advanced democracies—both in terms of declining popular support for democracy as measured in some opinion polls, and in the election of would-be autocrats such as Donald Trump. Wealth inequality in many countries is reaching levels not seen since the dawn of the age of mass democracy a century ago, with the result that the growing political dominance of oligarchs—a major focus of academic analysis in Indonesia—is a worldwide trend. Meanwhile, new communication technologies of the internet and social media are opening up participation in political debate, but also driving a polarisation that undermines a shared public sphere and delegitimises opponents.

The forces conspiring to undermine democracy globally, the resulting unsupportive international climate for Indonesia’s democratic revival, plus the growing signs of democratic decline in the country itself, should make us cautious about celebrating the twentieth anniversary of reformasi with a tone of triumph.

Nevertheless, it is worth viewing contemporary predicaments from the perspective of those of us who watched Suharto resign 20 years ago. Back then, as we watched Suharto read out his speech, my friends and I mixed astonishment, excitement and relief with genuine anxiety about what was in store for Indonesia. Many expert commentators were very sceptical of the notion that Indonesia could become a successful democracy. Some urged caution, pointing to the acrimony that had dogged Indonesia’s earlier democratic experiment in the 1950s, and highlighting the under-development of civilian politics and the continuing influence of the armed forces.

Indonesian democracy exceeded most expectations back then. It might just do so again.

[freifraufischer]

Evil Canadians

[[This is an excerpt of an alternate history role playing game that involved psychics, wizards, and a cold war that never ended I wrote in between 2002-2004.  This is an edited part of the section about Canada that several Canadian friends asked to see...]]

Canada is the world’s second largest country and occupies most of the North American Land mass, sharing with the United States of America what was once the world’s longest undefended border.  Though not extensively militarized until the Russo-American War, going as far back as the early 1990s many of the border provinces coming under control of the Dominion Unity Party (DUP) began paramilitary patrols to augment the official border crossing points.  Canada was settled as British and French colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries.   France surrendered to Britain its colony of New France, an area that composes present-day Quebec and Ontario at the Treaty of Paris in 1763.  

 ----

The Ungava Incident

            For almost forty years United States Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear-armed bombers flew armed over Canadian territory near the Arctic Circle on routine patrols.  These aircraft, by the 1980s aging B-52s with a host of electrical problems, flew from bases within the Continental United States, looped over the northern reaches of Canada, and than landed again at their bases in middle America.  Twice in the 1960s SAC B-52 on similar routes crashed with nuclear weapons on foreign soil. The first occurred on January 17, 1966 near Palomares, Spain during an in-flight refueling accident, three bombs were scattered over farmer’s fields and one in the ocean.  All four were recovered and the residents of the small Spanish town paid nearly $800,000 in compensation.  Just over two years later on January 22, 1968 another B-52 crashed near Thule Air Force Base, Greenland after a fire broke out in the navigator’s compartment.  Three hydrogen bombs were scattered across the ice, and one melted through and sunk to the bottom of Baffin Bay, unrecoverable.  The incident over Greenland, a Danish possession, caused massive protests in Denmark, and briefly strained relations between the two countries.

           These were nothing in comparison to the December 12, 1984 explosion of at least one (though some theorize that it may have been as many as three) hydrogen bomb over the Ungava Peninsula, in northern Quebec. The explosion vaporized the B-52 that the bombs were believed to have come from, killing the crew, and making investigation of the cause of the explosion nearly impossible.  Because the region was sparsely populated, mostly by isolated fishing villages, no one knows exactly how many people died, though estimates by both the Canadian and United States governments place the direct death toll from the explosion to be around 450.  This does not include the thousands of cases of radiation poisoning from fallout in Quebec, the Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as fisheries in the North Atlantic and as far away as western Europe.

           The United States Air Force immediately sent teams to help relocate survivors and those in the worst affected areas, but the estimated $4,000,000 in compensation has been considered inadequate and insulting by many Canadians and some of those eligible for settlements have refused them in favor of civil suits filed in American courts against the Air Force. The Department of Defense has attempted to have the suits thrown out citing national security concerns, but several Federal judges have kept it alive, even after decades of delay.  The mysterious deaths of one of those judges, and of a prominent Ungava survivors advocate are widely suspected to be the result of U.S. military covert operatives.  

           The Reagan administration dismissed concerns that the incident might permanently soured relations with the northern neighbor. Other American observers wondered though, as nearly fifty percent of Canadian Air Force personnel were recalled from joint programs such as the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  Though many of those same officers returned in the following years, but military cooperation between the neighbors has never been the same.  Polls carried out in the United States ten and twenty years after the incident show close to forty percent of the American people did not even know that it had occurred, and listed Canada as one of the United States’ closest allies around the world.

 -----

 The Friendly Dictatorship?  

 The Prime Minister of Canada has what are often considered extraordinary powers in comparison to other western leaders. Because of a system of strict party discipline within the Canadian House of Commons, an elected member faces great difficulty in voting against the party line (set by the Prime Minister). If any member of the Prime Minister’s governing party votes against any new legislation, he or she may be expelled from the party.  An expelled member must sit as an independent, without the right to ask a question, raise any issue before the Parliament, and stands little chance of winning re-election without the party’s resources. These measures mean that members of the governing party almost always follow the will of the Prime Minister. This was best exemplified by former Prime Minster, Pierre Trudeau, who referred to the backbenchers of the (than ruling) Liberal party as “trained seals” and the opposition backbenchers as “noblies when they are fifty yards away from the House of Commons.” The lack of checks and balances as theoretically seen within the US system has lead some to question such power, especially with the unexpected term of Walter Bechmann’s Dominion Unity Party, which has held the office since 2003

The major counterbalance to the power of the Prime Minster of Canada are near autonomous powers of the provincial premiers.  They are required to agree to any constitutional change, and must be be consulted over new domestic initiatives within their area of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, traditionally the most difficult primeir to deal with has been the Priemer of Quebec.

 The Rise of the DUP

            Traditionally there have been two major national parities within Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada (or predecessors under other names), with a large regional party the Bloc Québécois following behind.  None of these players took much notice as a small upstart, the Dominion Unity Party (DUP), began to win power on the provincial level in Saskatchewan and Alberta.  Rising out of the movements collectively known as “Prairie Socialists” the DUP advocated traditional values, wide ranging social programs, a strong military, and a resistance to what they characterized as the cuddling of the Quebec separatists by Ottawa.  

           The economic and ecological disaster that was the Ungava Incident, the lack luster American response, and Ottawa’s inability to force the issue lead to a growing sense that Canada had seeded too much of its responsibilities to the United States.  If Ottawa would not keep the French in line, or Washington from walking all over the country, than someone would.  And that someone, the DUP claimed, was them.  Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s the DUP gained control of all of Western Canada on the Provincial level, and became the official opposition party after the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives.  

Who done it?

           The leak of the incriminating file on Liberal Party funding to the CBC have become the Deep Throat of Canadian political history.  Both their origins and even their authenticity have been vigorously questioned (and denied).  Some leading theories include:

           That the deputy prime minister leaked the documents in an effort to force Chrétien to resign in favor of former finance minister Paul Martin.  He was taken by surprise when Martin did not win the election and has dropped out of public life.

           The Bloc Québécois leaked them after obtaining them by means unknown. Thinking that they would have an easier time working with a Conservative government, or at least a better chance of winning the next independence referendum, it blew up in their face when instead of getting the Tories they ended up with their worst nightmare.

           One of the Canadian intelligence or security services leaked the document—the finger is usually pointed at the FSS—either out of patriotism or out of cynical and very illegal manipulation of the political process.  

           One thing is clear to those that are familiar with Jean Chrétien.  Few believe that he actually knew about the dirty dealings with the American companies. If the documents were legitimate to begin with.

 ----

           The government of Jean Chrétien came under fire in 2003 as documents began to surface in the press linking the Liberals to campaign funding directly by American corporations with ties to the Department of Defense.  The implication being, though never quite proven, that an agreement was in the works to arrange for the Ungava lawsuits to be settled or dropped entirely in return for the illegal funds.  The exact origins of the leaked documents have never been established. So angry was the Canadian electorate that not only were the Liberals swept from power, but the Conservatives also took a major loss, leaving the last man standing, the quiet and boring former Premier of Saskatchewan, Walter Bechmann.

           Following the election night carnage as the Liberals went from holding a long-standing majority to six seats, barely half what would be needed for official party recognition on the federal level.  Still weakened from their collapse under Kim Campbell in 1993, the Conservatives held only 20 seats.  And with the effective merger of the New Democratic Party into the DUP, the official opposition party was the separatist Bloc Québécois.  Given the DUP’s strong anti-French stances it has made for ugly fighting in Parliament, but with little effect on Prime Minister Bechmann’s policy goals.  

           Most observers speculate that after years of Liberal rule with virtually no other option, the image of the effective, hard working, non-flaboyant man from Saskatchewan has endeared Beckman with the Canadian people. While the more conspiracy minded suggest that the inability of the other national parties to organize may be linked to more sinister interference.  The Bloc, always willing to scream about government and DUP misdoings, points to the Canadian Federal Security Service, which had long been battling Quebec nationalists and had closely allied themselves with the DUP on its rise.

The French Question

            Conflict between Canada’s Francophone minority and Anglophone majority is hardly new, though the extensive efforts made on behalf of the federal government to help preserve the French language and French Canadian culture is relatively recent.  Unfortunately equalizing language and granting Quebec some special status has not stopped an upswing in separatist activity, violent and non-violent. The first eruption of what have been several decades of sustained violence began on October 5, 1970 with a string of bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and attempted assassinations, all the work of a Marxist-Leninist group, Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ).

           Like many similar groups, West Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigade, and the American Weather Underground, the FLQ was made up primarily of middle class born again radicals who would not hesitate to attack the class structure as much as the Anglos.  Two weeks into the emergency Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ordered the Army into the streets to enforce Martial Law in Quebec under the controversial War Measures Act.  The overwhelming force, mass arrest of those associated with the FLQ (and their families), and the stretching of the organization’s resources beyond what they could handle for all practical purposes destroyed the organization.  The deaths of some of the detainees in the custody of the army and RCMP, and the disappearance of others have left a sinister note over the ending of the emergency.  Rumors still surface decades later of prominent Quebecois, made to disappear during the period, in the custody of particularly vindictive elements of the government.

           The next wave of extreme violence occurred in 1990 when a new group, calling itself the Armée de Libération du Québec (ALQ) and trading on the reputation of their similarly named predecessor began targeting Java Works, a nation wide specialty coffee chain which like many corporations continued to use its English name in Quebec.  Well-dressed young people, of an age to be university students, used automatic rifles to commit mass murder of the patrons and employees at one Saint-Georges shop.  Similar attacks followed within days, with brutality and efficiency associated to a particular terrorist leader soon identified as Amanda Legardeur, the daughter of an upper class Montreal family.

           Though relatively brief, the spree lasted just over a month; the brutality displayed cleared the fence sitters out of the way, leaving only those who would clearly choose between a sovereign and independent Quebec, and a united Canada.  That was of course, what Legardeur had intended, and the cultivation of a young woman who looked similar to her so that she could shoot her in the head to fake her own death was a small price to pay in her game.  It took CSIS and FSS nearly a decade to agree that she was indeed, still alive, though once they had, her legend grew even more.  Today she is the most wanted woman in Canada, believed to be not only armed, but possessing the organization and leadership skills to make her a one person national security threat.

           In response to the perceived failure of the moderates, the increasing violence of the extreme separatists, and what many particularly among the rank and file of the ruling DUP see as excessive allowances to the French, there has been a backlash.  With only the exception of the United States, the primary focus of the Canadian Federal Security Service—the most ruthless, and effective of the competing agencies—has been what is internally called “the French Question.” Some wonder though, if repressive and often highly illegal methods will only divide the country more, just as they did for the British in Northern Ireland.  

           The federal government believes—not without reason—that the violent separatists are being backed by east bloc communist countries that would use an independent Quebec as a base of operations on the Americans doorstep.  Unwilling to see the country torn apart, or to be used by either superpower in cynical games of brinksmanship, the Canadian government has begun to look at solving all their problems on a larger scale.

American Relations

            The Canadian government, and to some extent the Canadian people, have understood the true form of the American government longer than any other county in the world.  For them it is like having a window on the great superpower, seeing more up close in American news and American television—not to mention in frequent visits to the states to avoid high Canadian taxes—than anyone in the United Kingdom or the Europe ever does.  And certainly more than anyone ever gets to see of the Americans’ rival the Soviet Union.    

           Over the years though, at least from the American side, this familiarity has bread contempt.  Washington sees Ottawa, and more importantly in the Americans case, the Pentagon sees them as a joke.  The quaint socialist country to the north whose military is more focused on tracking down stray penguins and who police and intelligence services can be characterized by The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’s Dudley Do-Right.  The fact that there are no penguins in Canada has not entered into the American’s calculations.  The American public’s view is not much more nuanced, seeing their continental neighbors as unerringly polite, and with the firm belief that every Canadian citizen can kill, skin, and gut a grizzly bear with their bare hands.

           The view south from Ottawa is quite a bit more nuanced, though the Canadians have learned a hard lesson about the sometimes friendly sometimes vicious pit-bull they have been planted next to.  The the view has been common enough going all the way back to repeated American invasions during the War of 1812, it came to a nasty point when the indifference which the American military seemed to treat the accidental nuking of their country.  As one Strategic Air Command general at the Ungava Board of Inquiry commented to another when he did not know that his microphone was on, “All they have are trees and rocks up there, what’s the big deal?”

           A firm belief has developed, especially among the security and intelligence communities (with the notable exception of CSIS, who have a close working relationship with the Americans) that there is indeed a major military and security threat to Canada, the Canadian way of life, and even the lives of every Canadian citizen.

           Their neighbors to the south.

 A Fair Deal, an Even Playing Field, a Slippery Slop—The Canadian Psychic Experiments

            Like many countries around the world the Canadians are intimately familiar with the uses and abuses of the paranormal within the intelligence community.  As a commonwealth country they have long been familiar with the sorcerer viziers that have advised the crown for centuries.  However as with many things that come with the British heritage, the mother country has far more use of the community than the former imperial possessions.  

           The ruling DUP have an innate distrust of sorcerers owing to a distrust of anything supernatural that gives one man an advantage over another.  It is a political, philosophical, and religious distrust that has placed the country’s small sorcerer community at odds with the government… though not yet at war.  The leading wizard in the country is the queen’s representative, and a master of the mysteries of the mind, Karen Clarke.  She has focused primarily on checking the power of Prime Minister Beckmann and the agenda that most people have not yet discovered behind the party and by extension the government’s actions.

           The difficulties between the sorcerers and the government are nothing though, in comparison to the outright war that has been declared on psychic talent within the Dominion.  The idea that among the citizens exist a population—small as it may be—who can commit the worst violations on a person’s mind and body without any control by rule or law offends the prairie socialists very nature.  In the view of the party psychics are to be monitored, controlled, and eventually eradicated from society as a threat to the rest of the human race.

           Most within the power structure would chose to do this through “curing” the afflicted, many of whom themselves would gladly submit at first for any chance to lead a normal life.  The main arm of this goal, like so many other things within the party’s plans, has been the Canadian Federal Security Service (FSS).  The service itself though, has mixed feelings about the mission.  Those that know the ultimate goal also know that enemy countries, particularly the communist nations, have been using their own psychics against Canada.  The cleverest among them have begun to play both sides against the middle.  

           Section C of the FSS has been responsible for the beginnings of an extensive tracking network that will eventually use the DNA markers to identify psychics.  Or so they hope.  One problem they have discovered—and one that the Soviets have been independently finding at the same time—is that the genes that control psychic gifts are not in the same place for each subset of gifts.  The genetic code that turns on a telepath’s ability to read minds is not the same gene that allows a remote viewer to see beyond his body or a pyrokinetic’s ability to set the world ablaze.   Complicating matters even farther, some suspect that multiple genes can trigger psychic powers.  

           In addition to the genetic studies, extensive drug trials have been carried out in an attempt to dampen or control psychics so that they can be returned to society and not imprisoned for life.  Unfortunately, as the Americans discovered almost half a century before, psychoactive drugs are themselves a tricky business.  It is difficult to determine outside of the subject’s self-reporting if the drug has dampened the powers.  The only way of independently determining any drugs affects has been testing on pyrokinetics and telekinetics, whose powers manifest physically. This can be very dangerous, as many test subjects react badly to the conditions within Section C’s hospitals. If not outright killed by the psychics (which usually results in the death of the psychic), the staff often report frightening and wild displays of power as the scared and often mentally ill telekinetic or pyrokinetic looses the concentration and control needed to keep their world together.  

           As of now, there is no effective drug therapy to control psychic talent.

 Those Who Serve

           A relative few Canadian psychics are employed by the FSS to battle those of other nations in order not to leave the country vulnerable to attack.  This was made abundantly clear during the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics when several east bloc psychics were brought into the country in order to give their athletes an edge in the medal count.  The scheme was discovered when a West German coach who had escaped the East recognized a Stasi colonel who had tortured his brother to death among the East German Olympic Committee’s figure skating staff.  After a confrontation the night before the figure skating long program, both the West German coach and the East German psychic were expelled from the country.

           Unlike the Americans, who rarely use government psychics and have left the practice entirely to corporations and other private enterprises, and the Soviets who have fostered a system of the widespread utilization of psychics, the Canadians keep their mental attack dogs on a very short leash.  Each psychic has a strong willed normal agent, known within the community as a Controller (telepaths often have two to prevent one from falling under the spell of their charge).  This officer is responsible for all operations that the psychic is used in, and in the field has the authority to summarily eliminate any that become impossible to control.  As could be expected, a physical psychic (telekinetics and pyrokinetics) or a mental specialist like a telepath is much harder to control than even the most powerful remote viewer or precognitive.  

 The Personalities Involved

 Her Excellency, the Right Honourable Karen Mendelsen-Clarke, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief in and over Canada.  A Vancouver born academic with impeccable credentials, her recent appointment by the Queen as her representative in Canada caused a near constitutional crisis as it went against the advise of Prime Minister Bechmann. The Queen’s growing concern about Bechmann’s politics and leadership of the country led her to appoint Clarke, a Cambridge educated sorcerer with a specialization in the powers of the mind. Publicly she is polite and friendly to the PM, but privately she has been hard nosed and difficult, threatening to withhold royal consent from legislation and implying that she might dismiss several of his ministers.  In an unprecedented step, she has also formed her own guard battalion for protection after a suspicious car accident nearly took her life.   With the traditions of the reactivated Black Watch (Royal Highlanders of Canada), they are seen by the DUP as her private army and viewed with great suspicion. She is divorced with no children.

 The Right Honorable Walter Bechmann, Prime Minister of Canada, Leader of the Dominion Unity Party. A long time provincial politician in his home province of Saskatchewan, he served for nearly a decade as a Progressive Conservative backbencher in the provincial assembly before recognizing a wave of political change in time to ride it to the top.  He ended up sweeping the Provincial Party elections when the DUP was first created and then surprisingly took the DUP to the top spot in Saskatchewan.  Eventually the Party attained national membership, and gained power in other provinces.  After several years as the Premier of Saskatchewan, he retired from politics briefly, before coming back for Federal politics to become the national leader for the party.  Often seen in the press as bland and dense, he is actually an astute observer and can be very charismatic when he wants to be.  And he usually wants to be charismatic in private.  During Question Period many a young MP have learned to underestimate the old man at their peril.  He has a wife and three daughters.  

 David Cherier, Premier ministre du Québec, leader of the Parti Libéral du Québec.  A lawyer by trade, David Cherier specialized in defending those swept up in various federal anti-terrorism sweeps.  He was first elected to Parliament as Progressive Conservative before returning to Quebec to become the Minister for Natural Resources.  Hard work, competence and charm brought him to the head of his party and with the PLQ’s win in elections to the position of Quebec Premier. Though not a separatist himself, he is a strong Quebec nationalist, and has fought vigorously against the policies of Walter Bechman in his attempt to roll back concessions made to Quebec. His sometimes ally in this has been Governor General Clarke, but she has also sided with the prime minister when it suited her.  He is generally considered a good man, if relatively unsophisticated when matching wits with the PM.  There have been three assassination attempts on Cherier’s life, one when he was Minister for Natural Resources, presumably by separatist groups such as the ALQ, though they have not claimed responsibility.  

[glittergummicandypeach]

How Gaul ‘Barbarians’ Influenced Ancient Roman Religion

The continental neighbors of the Romans, the Gauls were considered barbaric entities which the Republic and Empire attempted to colonize multiple times. Caesar’s numerous conquests on the mainland allowed for constant military encampment within Gaul, resulting in a need to bring the Gallic religion under some kind of Roman control. This culminated in what is now known as the Gallo-Roman religion, an amalgamation of the two faiths.

Caesar’s Gallic Wars

Stretching through modern day France and Spain, the Romans came into contact with the Gauls consistently throughout their history, most prominently when Julius Caesar made it his mission to dominate the tribes on the coast of the English Channel. In doing so, he paved the way for two marches on the British Isles, most notably his infamous "crossing the Rubicon," though both times he failed to conquer the Insular Gauls.

‘Vercingetorix Throws Down His Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar’ (1899) by Lionel Noel Royer. ( Public Domain ) The painting depicts the surrender of the Gallic chieftain after the Battle of Alesia - 52 BC.

However, Caesar conquered much of Gaul during his Gallic Wars , so the Roman military often made their home in various Gallic territories—both for the battles, and to keep the Roman power in place following their victories. Because of this, it is believed that the Roman soldiers needed a way to worship their own gods and goddesses in this new territory.

Assimilating the Gods of the Gauls

One of the ways in which they accomplished this, also desiring to prevent overwhelming resistance from the native Gauls, was through assimilation, wherein the gods of the Gauls were likened to the Roman gods . This act is known as translation.

It is important to understand that the gods of the Gallic religion were not the same as those of the Romans. The Romans believed, like the Greeks , that their gods were idealized humans—they not only took human shape but also participated in various forms of human interaction and experience. That is to say that they loved, argued, took revenge, etc.

The Gallic gods, on the other hand, were representational deities —manifestations of the natural world. Not anthropomorphic, the springs and rivers and mountains and forests were worshipped as supernatural beings - but did not to take on human form. Worship, therefore, took place at the specific locations, and there were few—if any—specific temples dedicated to these natural forces.

A druid and warriors in Gaul. ( Erica Guilane-Nachez /Adobe Stock)

Gallic art reveals their belief in the gods quite clearly as, before the Romanization of the region, the gods were merely depicted as a consolidation of geometric shapes and stylized forms rather than bodily representations.  Epona, for example, the goddess of horses in the Gallic faith, was often represented as a horse by the natives rather than as a woman.

It was only when she was adopted by the Romans, one of the few deities taken from the Gauls and fully translated into the Roman pantheon, that she was depicted as a woman on a horse, riding into battle, alongside the Roman armies. Without the Roman influence, Epona would have remained a metaphor in art rather than a woman.

Epona, a resulting goddess from the Gallo-Roman fusion, was "the sole Celtic divinity ultimately worshipped in Rome itself." ( THIERRY /Adobe Stock)

Gallic Gods Renamed by the Romans

According to one of his written accounts, Caesar's Gallic Wars describes five primary gods of the Gallic religion. Their names, however, were given as those of five Roman gods: Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Minerva. This was undoubtedly because the Romans associated the Gallic gods with their known Roman gods, believing—in a way—that all other pantheons were merely misnamed versions of their own.

With their legions spread throughout Gaul, and desiring to worship their native gods anyway, it was not all that difficult to associate the two faiths and thus retitle the Gallic deities. Adding a Roman epithet to the Gallic name allowed the two faiths to blend in such a way that the Gauls could still refer to their own gods while venerating those of Rome. This move was then followed by artistic integration, similar to the Roman adoption of Epona.

The Celtic gods soon began to take on human forms, forms similar to the depiction of their Roman counterparts in the empire. There is no known definite iconography that the Gauls had for their gods, so transforming the metaphorical images was not very difficult. Lugh, the god of light, soon came to look like Mercury; the protector Nodens began to hold the sword and helmet of Mars; Sulis became known for armor that looked eerily similar to Minerva's, and so on.

The five "primary" Gallic gods became very Roman in their appearance, thereby allowing the Gauls to continue to worship their deities in a Roman guise. This anthropomorphism was furthered by the Romans coupling the Gallic and Roman gods, creating intercultural relationships to reflect what was happening among the humans. Roman gods were given Gallic wives in the native regions, further cementing the idea in the minds of the Gauls that the Romans were there to stay.

Political Motives for Religious Integration

Though the Gallic-Roman integration was mostly spearheaded by the religious desires of the Roman legions, it is important to understand the ways in which this integration allowed the Romans to expand their empire with little resistance. By associating Roman gods with the native Gallic ones, the Romans were actually quite clever—instead of making the Gauls feel as though their religion was being forcibly removed, the Romans chose to show their "take-over" as a unification of ideas instead.

A votive offering to an unnamed Gallo-Roman deity. (Siren-Com/ CC BY SA 3.0 )

This attempt was undoubtedly intended to help prevent rebellions, as threatening the belief system of another culture can have drastic effects, and the Gauls were already seeing a shift in their political system with the coming of Rome.

Integrating religions allowed for an assumed level of respect between cultures (whether or not it was truly meant) and it created an idea that the gods wanted such an action to occur, as they themselves were merging with one another. Art was the fiercest tool the Romans had at their disposal when the Gallic Wars were won, and they did a very good job of merging the two faiths to show a false equality among cultures.

Top Image: Gallo-Roman mosaic on a wall in Saint Romain en Gal, France . The Gallo-Roman religion is an amalgamation of the Gaul and Roman faiths. Source: Ricochet64 /Adobe Stock

Caesar, Julius. Gallic Wars . trans. W. A. Macdevitt (Wilder Publications: Virginia, 2009.)

Castleden, Rodney. The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts (HarperCollins: United Kingdom, 2012.)

Green, M.  Gods of the Celts (Sutton Publishing Limited: United Kingdom, 1986.)

Henig, Martin. A Handbook of Roman Art: A comprehensive survey of all the arts of the Roman world (Cornell University Press: New York, 1983.)

Rodgers, Nigel. Life in Ancient Rome People and Places (Hermes House: London, 2006.)

Salway, Peter. Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002.)

Scott, Sarah and Jane Webster. Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003.)

Wolf Gregg,  Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul  (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1998.)

This content was originally published here.

[ojamesy]

Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984).

It would be foolhardy to choose one among the many competing variations [ways of reading - Irish literature and history - Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism; Idealist, Radical, Liberal] and say that it is true on some specifically historical or literary basis. Such choices are always moral and/or aesthetic [5].

What I propose […] is that there have been for us two dominant ways of reading both our literature and our history. One is “Romantic”, a mode of reading which takes pleasure in the notion that Ireland is a culture enriched by the ambiguity of its relationship to an anachronistic and a modernist present [sic]. The other is a mode of reading which denies the glamour of this ambiguity and seeks to escape from it into a pluralism of the present. The authors who represent these modes most powerfully are Yeats and Joyce respectively. The problem which is rendered insoluble [5] by them is the North. In a basic sense, the crisis we are passing through is stylistic. That is to say, it is a crisis of language - the ways in which we write it and the ways in which we read it. In a culture like ours, ‘tradition’ is too easily taken to be an established reality. We are conscious that it is an invention, a narrative which ingeniously finds a way of connecting a selected series of historical figures or themes in such a way that the pattern or plot reveal to us becomes a conditioning factor in our reading of literary works. (p.5-6.)

A poem like “Ancestral Houses” owed its force to the vitality with [which] it offers a version of Ascendancy history as true in itself. The truth of this historical reconstruction of the Ascendancy is not cancelled by our simply saying No, it was not like that. For its ultimate validity is mythical, not historical. In this case, the mythical element is given prominence by the meditation on the fate of an originary energy which becomes so effective that it transforms nature into civilisation, and is then transformed itself by civilisation into decadence. The poem, then, appears to have a story to tell, and, along with that, an interpretation of the story’s meaning. It operates on the narrative and on the conceptual planes and at the intersection of these it emerges, for many readers, as a poem about the tragic nature of human existence itself. Yeats’s life, through the mediations of history and myth, becomes an embodiment of essential existence.

The trouble with such a reading is the assumption that this or any other literary work can arrive at a moment in which it takes leave of history or myth (which are liable to idiosyncratic interpretation) and becomes meaningful only as an aspect of the ‘human condition’. This is, of course, a characteristic determination of humanist readings of literature which hold to the ideological conviction that literature, in its highest forms, is non-ideological. It would be perfectly appropriate, within this particular frame, to take a poem by Pearse - say, “The Rebel” - and to read it in the light of a story - the Republican tradition from Tone, the Celtic tradition from Cuchulainn, the Christian tradition from Colmcille - and then reread the story as an expression of the moral supremacy of martyrdom over oppression. But as a poem, it would be regarded as inferior to that of Yeats. Yeats, stimulated by the moribund state of the [6] Ascendancy tradition, resolves, on the level of literature, a crisis which, for him, cannot be resolved socially or politically. In Pearse’s case, the poem is no more than an adjunct to political action. The revolutionary tradition he represents is not broken by oppression but renewed by it. His symbols survive outside the poem, in the Cuchulainn statue, in the reconstituted GPO, in the military behaviour and rhetoric of the IRA. Yeats’s symbols have disappeared, the destruction of Coole Park being the most notable, although even in their disappearance one can discover reinforcement for the tragic condition embodied in the poem. The unavoidable fact about both poems is that they continue to belong to history and to myth; they are part of the symbolic procedures which characterise their culture. Yet, to the extent that we prefer one as literature to the other, we find ourselves inclined to dispossess it of history, to concede to it an autonomy which is finally defensible only on the grounds of style.

The consideration of style is a thorny problem. In Irish writing, it is particularly so. When the language is English, Irish writing is dominated by the notion of vitality restored, of the centre energised by the periphery, the urban by the rural, the cosmopolitan by the provincial, the decadent by the natural. This is one of the liberating effects of nationalism, a means of restoring dignity and power to what had been humiliated and suppressed. This is the idea which underlies all our formulations of tradition. Its development is confined to two variations. The first we may call the variation of adherence, the second of separation. In the first, the restoration of native energy to the English language is seen as a specifically Irish contribution to a shared heritage. Standard English, as a form of language or as a form of literature, is rescued from its exclusiveness by being compelled to incorporate into itself what had previously been regarded as a delinquent dialect. It is the Irish contribution, in literary terms, to the treasury of English verse and prose. Cultural nationalism is thus transformed into a species of literary unionism. Sir Samuel Ferguson is the most explicit supporter of this variation, although, from Edgeworth to Yeats, it remains a tacit assumption. The story of the spiritual heroics of a fading class - the Ascendancy - in the face of a transformed Catholic ‘nation’ - was rewritten in a variety of ways in literature - as the story of the pagan Fianna replaced by a pallid Christianity, of young love replaced by old age (Deirdre, Oisin), of aristocracy supplanted by mob-democracy. The fertility of these rewritings is all the more remarkable in that they were recruitments by the fading class of the myths of renovation which belonged to their opponents. Irish culture became the new property of those who were losing their grip on [7] Irish land. The effect of these rewritings was to transfer the blame for the drastic condition of the country from the Ascendancy to the Catholic middle classes or to their English counterparts. It was in essence a strategic retreat from political to cultural supremacy. From Lecky to Yeats and forward to F. S. L. Lyons we witness the conversion of Irish history into a tragic theatre in which the great Anglo-Irish protagonists — Swift, Burke, Parnell — are destroyed in their heroic attempts to unite culture of intellect with the emotion of multitude, or in political terms, constitutional politics with the forces of revolution. The triumph of the forces of revolution is glossed in all cases as the success of a philistine modernism over a rich and integrated organic culture. Yeats’s promiscuity in his courtship of heroic figures — Cuchulainn, John O’Leary, Parnell, the 1916 leaders, Synge, Mussolini, Kevin O’Higgins, General O’Duffy— is an understandable form of anxiety in one who sought to find in a single figure the capacity to give reality to a spiritual leadership for which (as he consistently admitted) the conditions had already disappeared. Such figures could only operate as symbols. Their significance lay in their disdain for the provincial, squalid aspects of a mob culture which is the Yeatsian version of the other face of Irish nationalism. It could provide him culturally with a language of renovation, but it provided neither art nor civilisation. That had come, politically, from the connection between England and Ireland.

All the important Irish Protestant writers of the nineteenth century had, as the ideological centre of their work, a commitment to a minority or subversive attitude which was much less revolutionary than it appeared to be. Edgeworth’s critique of landlordism was counterbalanced by her sponsorship of utilitarianism and “British manufacturers”; Maturin and Le Fanu took the sting out of Gothicism by allying it with an ethic of aristocratic loneliness; Shaw and Wilde denied the subversive force of their proto-socialism by expressing it as cosmopolitan wit, the recourse of the social or intellectual dandy who makes [8] such a fetish of taking nothing seriously that he ceases to be taken seriously himself. Finally, Yeats’s preoccupation with the occult, and Synge’s with the lost language of Ireland are both minority positions which have, as part of their project, the revival of worn social forms, not their overthrow. The disaffection inherent in these positions is typical of the Anglo-Irish criticism of the failure of English civilisation in Ireland, but it is articulated for an English audience which learned to regard all these adversarial positions as essentially picturesque manifestations of the Irish sensibility. In the same way, the Irish mode of English was regarded as picturesque too and when both language and ideology are rendered harmless by this view of them, the writer is liable to become a popular success. Somerville and Ross showed how to take the middle-class seriousness out of Edgeworth’s world and make it endearingly quaint. But all nineteenth-century Irish writing exploits the connection between the picturesque and the popular. In its comic vein, it produces The Shaughran and Experiences of an Irish R.M.; in its Gothic vein, Melmoth the Wanderer, Uncle Silas and Dracula; in its mandarin vein, the plays of Wilde and the poetry of the young Yeats. The division between that which is picturesque and that which is useful did not pass unobserved by Yeats. He made the great realignment of the minority stance with the pursuit of perfection in art. He gave the picturesque something more than respectability. He gave it the mysteriousness of the esoteric and in doing so committed Irish writing to the idea of an art which, while belonging to  “high” culture, would not have, on the one hand, the asphyxiating decadence of its English or French counterparts and, on the other hand, would have within it the energies of a community which had not yet been reduced to a public. An idea of art opposed to the idea of utility, an idea of an audience opposed to the idea of popularity, an idea of the peripheral becoming the central culture - in these three ideas Yeats provided Irish writing with a programme for action. But whatever its connection with Irish nationalism, it was not, finally, a programme of separation from the English tradition. His continued adherence to it led him to define the central Irish attitude as one of self-hatred. In his extraordinary “A General Introduction for my Work” (1937), he wrote:

“The ‘Irishry’ have preserved their ancient ‘deposit’ through wars which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination; no people, Lecky said ... have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive ... Then I [9] remind myself that remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come to me through English - my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate … . This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.”

The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined.

The second variation in the development of the idea of vitality restored [viz., separation] is embodied most perfectly in Joyce. His work is dominated by the idea of separation as a means to the revival of suppressed energies. The separation he envisages is as complete as one could wish. The English literary and political imperium, the Roman Catholic and Irish nationalist claims, the oppressions of conventional language and of conventional narrative - all of these are overthrown, but the freedom which results is haunted by his fearful obsession with treachery and betrayal. In him, as in many twentieth century writers, the natural ground of vitality is identified as the libidinal. The sexual forms of oppression are inscribed in all his works but, with that, there is also the ambition to see the connection between sexuality and history. His work is notoriously preoccupied with paralysis, inertia, the disabling effects of society upon the individual who, like Bloom, lives within its frame, or, like Stephen, attempts to live beyond it. In Portrait the separation of the aesthetic ambition of Stephen from the political, the sexual and the religious zones of experience is clear. It is, of course, a separation which includes them, but as oppressed forces which were themselves once oppressive. His comment on Wilde is pertinent:

Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art - sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people ... But if some truth adheres ... to his restless thought ... at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.”

In Joyce himself the sin is treachery, sexual or political infidelity. [10] The betrayed figure is the alien artist. The ‘divine heart’ is the maternal figure, mother, Mother Ireland, Mother Church or Mother Eve. But the betrayed are also the betrayers and the source of the treachery is in the Irish condition itself. In his Trieste lecture of 1907, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, he notes that Ireland was betrayed by her own people and by the Vatican on the crucial occasions of Henry II’s invasion and the Act of Union: “From my point of view, these two facts must be thoroughly explained before the country in which they occurred has the most rudimentary right to persuade one of her sons to change his position from that of an unprejudiced observer to that of a convicted nationalist.” / Finally, in his account of the Maamtrasna murders of 1882 in “Ireland at the Bar” (published in Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 1907), Joyce, anticipating the use which he would make throughout Finnegans Wake of the figure of the Irish-speaking Myles Joyce, judicially murdered by the sentence of an English-speaking court, comments: “The figure of this dumb-founded old man, a remnant of a civilisation not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.” This, along with the well-known passage from Portrait [viz., ‘my soul frets in the shadow of his language", Portrait of An Artist, Chap. 5] in which Stephen feels the humiliation of being alien to the English language in the course of his conversation with the Newman Catholic Dean of Studies, identifies Joyce’s sense of separation from both Irish and English civilisation. Betrayed into alienation, he turns to art to enable him overcome the treacheries which have victimised him.

In one sense, Joyce’s writing is founded on the belief in the capacity of art to restore a lost vitality. So the figures we remember are embodiments of this “vitalism”, particularly Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. The fact that they were women is important too, since it clearly indicates some sort of resolution, on the level of femaleness, of what had remained implacably unresolvable on the male level, whether that be of Stephen and Bloom or of Shem and Shaun. This vitalism announces itself also in the protean language of these books, in their endless transactions between history and fiction, macro- and microcosm. But along with this, there is in Joyce a [11] recognition of a world which is “void” (a favourite word of his), even though it is also full of correspondence, objects, people. … His vitalism is insufficient to the task of overcoming this void. [... &c.]

Yeats was indeed our last romantic in literature as was Pearse in politics. They were men who asserted a coincidence between the destiny of the community and their own and believed that this coincidence had an historical repercussion. This was the basis for their belief in a “spiritual aristocracy” which worked its potent influence in a plebian world. Their determination to restore vitality to this lost society provided their culture with a millenial conviction which has not yet died.��� Whatever we may thing of their ideas of tradition, we still adhere to the tradition of the idea that art and revolution are definitively associated in their production of any individual style [12] which is also the signature of the community’s deepest self. [… &c.]’ (pp.12-13.)

There is a profoundly insulting association in the secondary literature surround him that he is eccentric because of his Irishness but serious because o his ability to separate himself from it. In such judgements, we see the ghost of a rancid colonialism. But it is important to recognise that this ghost haunts the works themselves. the battle between style as the expression of communal history … and Joycean stylism, in which the atomisation of community is registered in a multitude of equivalent, competing styles, in short, a battle between Romantic and contemporary Ireland.’ [Goes on to apply these ideas to the crisis in Northern Ireland.] (p.13.)

Joyce, although he attempted to free himself from set political positions, did finally create in Finnegans Wake a characteristically modern way of dealing with heterogenous and intractable material and experience. The pluralism of his styles and languages, the absorbent nature of his controlling myths and systems, finally gives a certain harmony to varied experience. But, it could be argued, it is a harmony of indifference, one in which everything is a version of something else, where sameness rules over diversity, where contradiction is finally and disquietingly written out. In achieving this in literature, Joyce anticipated the capacity of modern society to integrate almost all antagonistic elements by transforming them into fashions, fads - styles, in short. (Ibid., p.16.)

There is, therefore, nothing mysterious about the re-emergence in literature of the contrast which was built into the colonial structure of the country. But to desire, in the present conditions in the North, the final triumph of State over nation, Nation over State, modernism over backwardness, authenticity over domination, or any other comparable liquidation of the standard oppositions, is to desire the utter defeat of the other community. The acceptance of a particular style of Catholic or Protestant attitudes or behaviours, married to a dream of final restoration of vitality to a decayed cause or community, is a contribution to the possibility of civil war. It is impossible to do without ideas of a tradition. But it is necessary to disengage from the traditions of the ideas which the literary revival and the accompanying political revolution sponsored so successfully. (p.16.)

Although the Irish political crisis is, in many respects, a monotonous one, it has always been deeply engaged in the fortunes of Irish writing at every level, from the production of work to its publication and reception. The oppressiveness of the tradition we inherit has its source in our own readiness to accept the mystique of Irishness as an inalienable feature of our writing and, indeed, of much else in our culture. That mystique is itself an alienating force. To accept it is to become involved in the [17] spiritual heroics of a Yeats or a Pearse, to believe in the incarnation of the nation in the individual. To reject it is to make a fetish of exile, alienation, dislocation in the manner of Joyce or Beckett. [...] They inhabit the highly recognisable world of modern colonialism. (p.18.)

One step towards that dissolution [of the mystique] would be a revision of our prevailing idea of what it is that constitutes the Irish reality. In literary that could take the form of a definition, in the form of a comprehensive anthology, of what writing in this country has been for the last 300-500 years and, through that, an exposure to the fact that the myth of Irishness, the notion of Irish unreality, the notion surrounding Irish eloquence, are all political themes upon which the literature has battened to an extreme degree since the nineteenth century when the idea of national character was invented. The Irish national character [...] has been received as the verdict passed by history upon the Celtic personality. That stereotyping has caused a long colonial concussion. It is about time we put aside the idea of the essence - that hungry Hegelian ghost looking for a stereotype to live in. As Irishness or as Northerness he stimulates the provincial unhappiness we create and fly from, becoming virtuoso metropolitans to the exact degree that we have created an idea of Ireland as provincialism incarnate. These are worn oppositions. They used to be parentheses in which the Irish destiny was isolated. That is no longer the case. Everything has to be rewritten - i.e., re-read. that will enable new writing, new politics, unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish.’ (pp.17-18; end.)

[bookofjin]

Thoughts and Summary of JS042

The full Chapter 042 can now be found here:

http://bookofjin.tumblr.com/js042

Chapter 042 contains only four biographies Wang Hun, his son Ji, Wang Jun, and Tang Bin. This chapter sits squarely within a larger group of biographies focusing on the generals and officials of Western Jin. Since it contains biographies of two of the leading generals during the invasion of Wu, this chapter could be called the “Conquest of Wu” chapter, but more ink is spent on the quarrelling that followed afterwards.

Wang Hun (223 – 297) came from the very influential Wang clan of Jinyang in Taiyuan. His father was Wang Chang, Minister of Works during Wei. His cousin was Wang Chen, the historian-official. He himself was married to Zhong Yan, granddaughter of Zhong Yao, his daughter married He Qiao, and his son Ji a daughter of Empress Wu.

Coming from such a prominent family gave his career flying start, he was nominated to office by Cao Shuang, was temporarily dismissed when the latter was executed, but soon returned to office, becoming adjutant to Sima Zhao. At the beginning of Jin became Inspector of Xu province, before successfully holding military command at the frontier against Wu, first at Xuchang, and then at the very important post of Shouchun. As Commander-in-Chief of All Army Affairs of Yang province, Wu's heartland and capital Jianye were at least technically within his jurisdiction.

During the invasion of Wu in 280, Wang Hun's armies led the head-on assault, and ended up doing some of the heaviest fighting of the campaign as a result, facing Wu's Army of the Centre, commanded by the Chancellor Zhang Ti and Great General Sun Zhen. In the end Wang Hun's army destroyed the opposing forces, and Zhang Ti and Sun Zhen were killed.

At this point, according to the biography of Zhou Jun (JS061), Wang Hun was advised by his subordinates to exploit Wu's disarray, cross the Jiang, occupy Jianye and end the war. However, Wang Hun took the more careful approach of consolidating and resting his troops while waiting for Wang Jun's fleet from upriver, which when it arrived would come under his command.

Instead Wang Jun sailed straight past him, captured Shitou the fortress-port of Jianye, and accepted the surrender of Sun Hao, the last Wu ruler. Wang Hun crossed over the next day to hold a victory banquet at Jianye, but the Conqueror of Wu would of course always be Wang Jun, and Wang Hun harboured a life-long resentment for Wang Jun.

After some more years at Shouchun, Wang Hun was summoned to court in 285 AD (according to JS003) to be  Supervisor of the Left of the Masters of Writing.

His biography next quotes at length a memorial by Wang Hun arguing against sending Emperor Wu's brother, Sima You, King of Qi, to his fief. This was a hot political topic in the early 280s, and ended with Sima You's banishment and soon after death in 283. So it seems the memorial is chronologically misplaced. In the memorial, Wang Hun argues that Sima You is a loyal, honest and trustworthy person who should be involved in the government. As precedence he cites the ancient example of the Duke of Zhou, but also the Emperor's own uncles, Sima Liang, Sima Zhou and Sima Jun who had all been trusted with important posts. (Sima Liang was Grand Commandant by this point.) He also argues that Sima You together with Sima Liang would serve as counterweight against the Yang and Jia clans of the Empress and the Heir's Consort.

At the very end of Emperor Wu's reign, on 5 February 290, Wang Hun was made Minister over the Masses. He stayed out of the coup and counter-coups of 290-291, at one point refusing to be the elder statesman of the King of Chu, Sima Wei's regime, and continued on as Minister over the Masses during the government of Empress Jia, but does not seem to have been very active or influential during this time period.

Wang Hun died 4 September 297.

Wang Ji (c. 240 – c. 285) was the second son of Wang Hun. He married the Princess of Changshan and is described as an exceptional talent. He is said to been good in the Classic of Changes, the Zhuangzi, and the Laozi, which suggest a certain Daoistic leaning.

He was promoted to high office of Palace Attendant, who were the Emperor's personal advisers, at a very young age. According to the text, opinion at the time was that he had earned it through his talents rather than his marriage connection, but it is worth noting that out of the three other Attendants mentioned as being of equal rank as him, Wang Xun was the Emperor's maternal uncle while Yang Ji was Empress Yang's uncle.

Wang Ji's biography does not really say much about his political activities. Like his father, Wang Ji attempted to prevent Sima You's banishment, even involving his wife, the Princess. But Emperor Wu took this as undue meddling in his family affairs, and Wang Ji was temporarily demoted.

The rest of the biography is filled with anecdotes taken from the Shishou xinyu and similar stories, mostly showing Wang Ji's extravagance and irreverence. Though entertaining, these can't be said to portray Wang Ji as a very nice person, flaunting decorum in front of the Emperor, chopping down He Qiao's plum trees, winning Wang Kai's prize ox in a bet and then butchering it. And indeed text states that Wang Ji liked to hurt others with his sharp tongue and in the end had few friends.

The precise years of Wang Ji's life is not known. He died before his father at the age of 46 (Chinese reckoning) and must have lived past Sima You's banishment in 283.

Wang Jun (206 – 286) was a native of Hu in Hongnong. As such he was not at all related to Wang Hun and his clan. His family is said to have bred 2000 shi officials for generations (the salary level of commandery administrators) but no names are given.

Wang Jun seems to started his public career late, initially at the commandery level. He married a daughter of the scholar-official Xu Miao, supposedly after the daughter had picked him out as the most worthy man in a crowd of potential candidates.

Later on, Wang Jun moved to the staff of the General who Conquers the South, Yang Hu. Yang Hu recognized Wang Jun's high ability, and from then on his career picked up speed. He eventually became Grand Warden of Ba commandery on the Wu frontier, and later Grand Warden of Guanghan. These appointments must have come after the conquest of Shu in 263, at roughly the same time as Wang Hun, 17 years his junior but better connected, first became a provincial governor.

In 272, Wang Jun became Inspector of Yi province, replacing Huangfu Yan who had been murdered by the rebel Zhang Hong. Both Ba and Guanghan commanderies were located in Yi province. Wang Jun did well as provincial Inspector. At one point he was summoned to the capital to be Great Minister of Agriculture, but Yang Hu used his influence to retain him as Inspector of Yi.

Instead, Wang Jun was given the task of building up Jin's Jiang river fleet. The ships he built are described in some detailed, they are said to have had double hulls, multi-storied towers and room for more than 2000 people each. On the prows were painted herons and other beasts to frighten the gods of the Jiang.

At the court in Luoyang there was an ongoing debate on the practicality of invading Wu, with Zhang Hua and Du Yu in favour, and Jia Chong and Xun Xu opposed. Wang Jun sent in a memorial asking for the attack to be launched before the ships rotted away and he himself died of old age.

The invasion of Wu was finally launched at the beginning of 280, and Wang Jun set out down the Jiang with his river fleet together with his subordinate general Tang Bin. Wu had prepared iron awls linked by chains to block the river, but their whereabouts were known to Wang Jun who had prepared rafts with oil to deal with them.

Wang Jun's fleet continued down river, defeating all resistance. Somewhat unusual for the biography chapters, the text gives specific dates for his victories. On 20 March he took Xiling. On 22 March he took the Jingmen and Yidao forts. On 25 March he took Lexiang.

After this, Xiakou and Wucheng fell easily. Sun Hao, the Wu ruler, sent off a fleet under Zhang Xiang to meet Wang Jun at Sanshan, but it dispersed without fighting. At this point Sun Hao on the advise of his courtiers prepared a surrender document which was sent off to Wang Jun, Wang Hun and Sima Zhou. On 1 May Wang Jun took Shitou. That same day Sun Hao capitulated. So much for Wu. Pretty much the rest of his biography is taken up with his quarrel with Wang Hun.

At this point the text back-tracks to note that an earlier decree had stated that when Wang Jun came to Jianping he was to come under Du Yu's command and when he came to Moling to come under Wang Hun's. But Du Yu decided not to take over command, but instead sent Wang Jun a letter advising him to push on to final victory.

The text when paraphrasing or quoting Jin era texts consistently uses Moling, the old Han county, rather than Jianye. Was Jianye seen as an illegitimate name since it had been founded by the rebel Sun Quan?

As Wang Jun was approaching Jianye, Wang Hun sent him a messenger (in a small boat presumably) ordering him to halt his fleet, and come to Wang Hun's camp on the northern shore to discus further operations. Wang Jun claimed the wind was too stiff to cast anchor (!) and continued on. Wang Hun sent back to the capital a report that Wang Jun had disobeyed orders. Emperor Wu did not accept the suggestion that Wang Jun should be brought back to Luoyang in a prison cart, but did send a decree criticizing him for not following the earlier decree to obey Wang Hun.

Next follows a long memorial where Wang Jun defends himself against accusations of disobedience. Firstly a decree from 10 March (?) stated that the army should exploit victory and aim for Moling. Secondly a decree which put Sima Zhou, Wang Hun, Wang Jun and Tang Bin under the command of Jia Chong, but did not say anything about putting Wang Jun under Wang Hun. On 30 April Wang Jun arrived at Niuzhu, 200 li from Moling. Wang Hun sent him a letter that he should come to him for discussions, the letter did not say Wang Jun was now under Wang Hun's command. When he received Sun Hao's note of surrender, he sent messengers to Wang Hun, but before he received a reply, Sun Hao had capitulated at which there was little point in waiting for Wang Hun before taking possession. Finally, Wang Jun arrived at Moling on 1 May, but the decree placing him under Wang Hun's command only left Luoyang on 2 May. If Sun Hao had been a mantis waiting to destroy a weak army then acting so would have been criminal, but Wang Jun commanded a 80 000 man strong army while Sun Hao was a plucked bird without feathers, abandoned and alone.

Then another memorial where Wang Jun defends against accusations made by Wang Hun's subordinate general Zhou Jun of plundering and destruction caused by his troops. He first cites historical precedences of slander against generals in the field. He also suggests that Wang Hun through his associates and relatives forms a faction dangerous to the throne, and compare himself to Zeng Shen, a disciple of Confucius, who was falsely accused of murder several times until even his mother started to believe it. Shortly before his capitulation, some of Sun Hao's remaining men had demanded to fight to death, so Sun Hao had opened the treasury to reward them, but some people less willing to fight also took their share. And when Sun Hao capitulated, plundering continued by the inhabitants of Jianye, and someone set fire to the palace. Sun Hao capitulated on 1 May, and Wang Jun did not go to Jianye before 2 May, but he had already sent off magistrates to inspect the books. Before, when Wang Jun was at Shanshan, he received a letter from Zhou Jun saying Sun Hao was scattering his treasuries, and the storehouses were empty, but now he is accusing Wang Jun of taking it! Wang Jun also claims he has collected 2 000 stragglers from other Jin armies, and also accuses Zhou Jun of inflating enemy losses and spreading rumours that Wang Jun was in the habit of executing the men and taking the women.

Wang Jun returned to Luoyang were he continued to face various accusations from Wang Hun and his faction, but nothing came of them as the Emperor kept decreeing against punishing him. Instead he was promoted to Great General who Assists the State, later Great General of the Garrison Army and then Great General who Consoles the Army. These were all appointments to the capital army. It said that when Wang Hun came to visit Wang Jun, Wang Jun would not let him in before deploying his guards. After the conquest of Wu, Wang Jun also started to indulge in delicacies and fine clothing.

Wang Jun died 12 January 286.

Tang Bin (235 – 294) was a native of Zou in Lu state, his father reached the rank of Grand Warden. Tang Bin was strong, fast and good at hunting, but also loved reading the classics and teaching others. He is described throughout as a model official, and the authors certainly intended to contrast his modesty with the proud and arrogant people earlier in the chapter.

His early career is fairly typical for a man of ability without the top connections. He started out climbing the ranks on the commandery staff. At a provincial workshop he impressed the Inspector, Wang Chen, and he later made the move up to the provincial staff. He eventually was brought to notice to Sima Zhao as someone suitable for his staff, Chen Qian's recommendation secured him an interview and the interview got him the job.

This was evidently around the time of the conquest of Shu. At time Sima Zhao feared that people in Longyou resented the death of their long-serving commander Deng Ai, and sent Tang Bin to investigate. Tang Bin returned with the report that Deng Ai had in fact not been well liked, but was considered rude, intolerant of criticism, and was fond of adding labour to the people, people in Longyou had cheered his demise and there was nothing to fear.

At the beginning of Jin, he was first Prefect of Ye then Grand Warden of Yiyang, but had to leave office to mourn his mother. Later on he was appointed Overseer of All Army Affairs of Badong on the border between Yi province and Wu. According to his biography, the court had two candidates for this post, Tang Bin who was greedy and Yang Zong who was fond of drinking. Emperor Wu decided greed was a vice easier to cure and so chose Tang Bin.

During the invasion of Wu, Tang Bin led the vanguard of Wang Jun's fleet. In this role he took part in crushing all obstacles put in their way, though not much real detail is given about his exploits. Again the focus is on what happened next. Understanding that Wu was finished and not wanting to take part in a race for Jianye, Tang Bin claimed illness and halted, and so did not take in the squabble for spoils and glory. And he was still rewarded for his service.

Some time later Tang Bin was sent as military commander of You province were the northern border was troubled by border raids. Through his benign government he convinced the Xianbei chiefs Damohui and Zhihe to submit and send tribute. He also restored the Long Wall of Qin. However this sparked unease among the Xianbei and they killed Damohui.

Early in Emperor Hui's reign he was appointed Inspector of Yong province and he died there in office in 294.

[cover2covermom]

Today I am sharing a batch of mini book reviews from participating in #IronTomeAThon in the month of July.

*Books included in this batch of mini book reviews: Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor #1) by Mark Lawrence, American Gods (American Gods #1) by Neil Gaiman, Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse, and A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent #1) by Marie Brennan

» Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor #1) by Mark Lawrence

#IronTomeAThon

Red Sister is about a young girl named Nona who is beginning her training at Sweet Mercy, a convent that trains girls to become Sisters.  We follow Nona as she navigates her new life at the convent and the rigorous demands of her training.

 From the very first line, I was completely captivated by Red Sister.   The characters are complex.  The world is well developed and fascinating.  The plot was fast paced, action-packed, and an adventure from start to finish.  This book has everything I love in my fantasy books: bad ass leading lady, action, magic abilities, school/training setting, political drama, and an emphasis on friendships. 

One thing that Mark Lawrence did in Red Sister was take a few common tropes we see regularly in fantasy and flipped them into something unexpected.   You might think you know how a scenario might play out, but Mark Lawrence does a great job of keeping us on our toes throughout the entire book.

In my copy of Red Sister, Mark Lawrence included a glossary in the FRONT of the book, which I found very helpful.  More often than not, when these are included in the back of the book, I am not able to utilize it because I don’t realize the book includes a glossary until I’m finished.  This glossary included important information regarding the world, characters, etc.  I did not need to use this glossary aside from a time or two because everything is laid out clearly in the story, but I appreciated the inclusion.

One of my only complaints about Red Sister would be the fact that Nona was supposed to be a very young girl throughout much of the story.  Nona did NOT feel like a young girl of 9 or 10, but more like a girl of 14+ at the very youngest.  This does happen to be a pet peeve of mine in books.  While I do understand that this is a different world from our own thus a 9-year-old might mature faster than in our own world, it still bothered me slightly.

If you enjoy dark, gritty, and intense fantasy, I highly recommend Red Sister.   I read somewhere that someone described this book as “Arya Stark at Hogwarts,” and it really is an accurate statement.  Arya Stark is a character from Game of Thrones, and Hogwarts is the school setting in Harry Potter.  It also gave me The Name of the Wind and The Poppy War vibes.

***Trigger/content warning: graphic violence***

» American Gods (American Gods #1) by Neil Gaiman

#IronTomeAThon

American Gods is about our main character, Shadow, and how his world gets flipped upside-down when he get mixed up with a man called Mr. Wednesday, and begins working for him.  Wednesday insists that a storm of epic proportions is coming, and needs Shadow’s help rallying the troops.  Shadow & Wednesday set off on an epic journey across the U.S, where they come across eccentric characters, run into sticky situations, and see the different landscapes America has to offer.   Themes included throughout American Gods include identity, old ways vs. new ways, religion, belief, deception, etc.

I loved how Gaiman fused together ancient mythology with the modern, portraying the power struggle between the old ways vs. new ways.  He gives us classic examples of ancient mythological characters (i.e. Odin, Anansi, etc) and creates a few new gods (i.e. technology, media, etc.)  I enjoyed watching the rivalry and the build up to the big show down.  Furthermore, I also really appreciated that Gaiman’s cast of “old gods” represent many different cultures’ mythology.  For example, we see characters from Norse mythology, Slavic mythology, Ghanaian mythology, Egyptian mythology, Germanic mythology, etc.

Shadow was such an easy main character to root for.   Despite being thrown in the midst of chaos, he was very level-headed, loyal, and compassionate.  I could not help but love him and be invested in his journey.

American Gods is longer than Gaiman’s typical novels.  Coming in at around 630-ish pages in the paperback and just under 20 hours for the audiobook.  I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by a full cast, and I really think this is how this story should be experienced.  I doubt I would have enjoyed this story as much had I read it in print form.

I can totally see where this book would not be for everyone.  If you’ve read a Neil Gaiman book before and not enjoyed his writing style, then you will most likely not enjoy this one.  Neil Gaiman’s books tend to be dark, fantastical, odd, and quirky, so if you don’t enjoy those types of stories, Gaiman is probably not the author for you.  Actually, if you’ve never read a Gaiman book before, I would recommend NOT making American Gods your first. 

Is American Gods my favorite Neil Gaiman book?  No.  Neverwhere, Stardust, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane still hold the top spots as my favorite Gaiman books.  Do I think it is still a very worthwhile book to read?  Absolutely!  As long as you know what you are getting yourself into going into the book 🙂

I’d recommend this book to those that enjoy mythology, folktales, and longer epic saga type stories.

» Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse

#IronTomeAThon

Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Trail of Lightning is about a young monster hunter named Maggie.  Maggie is determined to uncover the truth behind a new breed of monster, but she quickly learns that the truth is much more evolved than she ever imagined.  Trail of Lightning features themes like survival, good vs. evil, what makes someone a “monster,” PTSD/anxiety, and morality. 

What really worked so well in Trail of Lightning was the post-apocalyptic world that Roanhorse creates.  In this story, a global flood has wiped out most of the population.  Dinétah, the former Navajo reservation before the “big water,” is such a cool backdrop for this story.  In this new world, mythological beings and monsters walk among the survivors.  I loved the infusion of Native American mythology within a post-apocalyptic world.  The concept behind the magic system, that certain individuals receive certain clan powers like speed, fighting, weather control, etc, was also intriguing.

Maggie, our main character, was a very complex character.  While she was courageous, fierce, & strong, she was also withdrawn and guarded.   I appreciated that she was not perfect, and struggled with her own morality throughout the novel.

I must admit, this was probably a 3.5 star read until the last 100 pages.  For only being  287 pages, the first half of the book was a slow build up.  The first two chapters were action-packed and brutal, but then things slow way down from there until the final 100 pages.  Since the book was so short, I feel like some of the plot and character development was a bit rushed.  Trail of Lightning could have been 100 pages LONGER to give more time to develop some of these elements.  The final 100 pages, the climax and resolution, were on point!  I look forward to reading the next installment in this series.

 I’d recommend this book if you like books that give you a western-ish feel, enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction, and books that feature Native American mythology.  Trail of Lightning also gave me similar vibes to the TV show Supernatural, so if you enjoy that show d I think you’d enjoy this book.

***Trigger/content warning: graphic violence***

» A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent #1) by Marie Brennan

#IronTomeAThon

A Natural History of Dragons is told in a memoir style narrative of a prominent dragon natural scientist in her early years before she became “Lady Trent.”  As a young girl, Isabella dreams of studying the natural sciences, specifically dragons.  A Natural History of Dragons follows Isabella as she grows from a young girl with a dream, to becoming a young woman traveling to the far off mountains of Vystrana on an expedition to learn more about the creatures that have fascinated her for years.

There was so much that I loved about this story: the Victorian era setting, the feminist tones, the fantasy-historical fiction mash up, the challenging of gender norms, the focus on natural science, the mystery story line…

With a title like “A Natural History of Dragons,”  you’d think that the book would include a lot of dragons or interactions with dragons, but it really doesn’t…  A Natural History of Dragons is really more about Isabella, her early years, her early interest in the natural sciences, her courtship, the expedition, and the mystery surrounding the expedition.  While I was a tad disappointed that dragons were not featured more throughout the story, I highly enjoyed Isabella’s personal journey.  I’m hoping that this first book is setting up the subsequent books for more dragon action.

Isabella was an excellent female lead who wasn’t about to tolerate the gender norms of the times.  While other girls her age are dreaming of making a suitable marriage match, Isabella is stealing books from her father’s library.  She is intelligent, ambitious, energetic, and persistent in her pursuits.  I loved that she refused to settle for a provincial life, but thirsted for more.  I also really appreciated that Isabella was very flawed, and admitted when she made mistakes.  She felt very realistic, and as a 19-year-old character, felt age appropriate.

It was refreshing to read a book from a single first person perspective that followed a linear timeline.   The storyline was easy to follow because I was not distracted by POV switches or a nonlinear timeline.  Since we are given access into Isabella’s thoughts and feelings through this first person perspective, I felt very invested in her character.

If you are looking for a book with lots of action and dragons, then A Natural History of Dragons is not going to be it.  If you are looking for a book that features a young woman that is passionate about the natural sciences and her struggle to overcome the limitations on her gender in a Victorian era setting, then this book is for you.

  Have you read any of these books?  If so, what did you think?

Comment below & let me know 🙂

    Mini Book Reviews: August 2019 - Part 1 #BookReview #Books #Reading #BookBlogger #Bookworm #AmReading #Fantasy Today I am sharing a batch of mini book reviews from participating in #IronTomeAThon in the month of July.

[jokingjustice]

NO VOICE OF THEIR OWN - CHILDREN COMPLAINT CELLS IN PAKISTAN

19 April 2018

The Talk Shows covering the recent rape and killing of a 7-years innocent girl in Kasur, disclosed that there had been eleven similar ugly cases relating to children in the city.  The shows also mentioned about some report revealing that during the last 3 years, reportedly 11,000 children had died due to inadequate facilities in children hospitals. Recently a news item appeared headlined ‘Oxygen non-availability: four children die in Lady Reading Hospital”.  Right from the ordinary citizens to Honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan and even, not seen earlier,  as I heard, the most respectable Chief of Army Staff also took notice of the incident.   The most thought provoking but naked comment was from Dr. Malick the Senior journalist, anchor and ex MD PTV in his talk show that no one has let the chance to show his presence on this occasion like Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri leading Nimaz-e-Jinaza etc. Dr. Malick’s golden but harsh naked words to remember were that in all this everyone spoke except for the children themselves who “have no voice” of their own.

 2.         This old man does not know exactly as to how many are there the Children Complaint Cells working under the Federal and Provincial Ombudsmen.  These Cells are situated not just in their Head Office Secretariats but also in Regional Offices.  As a layman,  I understand that these Children Cells are working under some “liaison” or some sort of patronage from the UNISEF”!  The Federal Ombudsman Cell deals with complaints “from children” whose rights are violated by a federal ministry, department or a Federal agency.  

 3.          At the time of establishment of the Child Complaint Center the Advisor to the Federal Ombudsman Mr. Ejaz Qureshi said in November 2010 that the issue of child rights was neglected for years and in a country like Pakistan, where there was so much potential, children can’t be ignored.  

4.          The children’s complaints cell of the Punjab Ombudsman’s Secretariat received 247 applications ”FROM MINORS” complaining about violation of their rights in 2010, according to the first annual report of the Cell.  Holding a ceremony in a “Hotel” the Cell launched an awareness campaign about child rights with the help of child volunteers, conducted capacity enhancement exercises for support institutions, and carried out research and analysis to identify the problems faced by children – all this sitting in a “Hotel”.    While covering the above hotel event, the newspapers published all this with a photograph of child searching papers on the road, and still hundreds and hundreds of similar live naked-photos our eyes catch daily.  What are the “beautifully” manufactured “words” showing the purpose of the above hotel event, having apparently no “material” meanings – same as our اہل زباں MQM leaders speak with flowery beautiful words which remain always as good نثر.  

5.          Late General Zia-ul-Haq, so called dictator who gave the best system to the people viz establishment of ombudsman system and which civilians acting as dictators destroyed, came into power for 90 days.  He said later, that he promised for 90 days as he did not know the gravity of things which prolonged his stay. General Musharraf said almost the same thing. Mr. Justice Sardar Muhammad Iqbal, the first Ombudsman Pakistan so far remaining unmatched for, after sitting on the chair for a while and assessing the gravity stated that the society in itself, in the first instance, was criminal in not protesting and struggling on injustices inflicted on them.  He said such silence of affected individuals was their criminal act towards the society. A year or so back I read a small piece from the grandson of late Justice Sardqar Iqbal.  This 70 plus old is about 75% blind hence, despite great wish, he can’t himself but wish Justice Sardar Iqbal’s grandson goes to the grave of his grandfather and say “Grandpa, you were wrong. In our country there are even minor children who today lodge complaints with the Ombudsman Complaint Cells” putting our children to American children level at least in this regard.  

6.          The issueless parents pray at Gujrat shrine ofدولے شاہ  that if God gave them children, the first born will be given, for good, to the shrine. An iron ring, in the shrine, is fixed around the head of such children to stop natural physical and mental growth of their skulls making them mentally unfit for rest of the life. Such children undergo the inhuman practice of being forced to be abnormal so that they could be sent for beggary for shrine as so calledدولے شاہ کے چوہے etc.  No Children Complaint Cell in Punjab, no member of the meeting held in Ombudsman or a suo moto is known to had spoken even “a word” on this cruel for life infringement of their rights?

7.           Who are and where live those 247 “Minors” who filed complaints with the Punjab Ombudsman in 2010.  This old man struggled whole life for his justified rights.  Mr. Justice Sardar Mohammad Iqbal, so far unmatched for the first Ombudsman Pakistan, many a times in writing appreciated this spirit of this conscientious civic minded old man.  The then Sindh Ombudsman in his Chamber advised me that when God had given me spirit to struggle, I should raise issues affecting community at large which, according to him, due to constrains they themselves could not initiate despite wishing to do so.  It was and till today is an unforgettable honour for me.  The written wording addressed to me to by our most learned S.M. Zafar reading “Javed, I wonder how much work you single handled do, why don’t you establish an NGO of your own?”  The purpose of mentioning about myself is not just in any way to show my so called ability, but the wonder and the proud feeling this old man has on knowing how in my beloved country small children know and struggle for their rights.  

8.     To highlighting the issues of child abuse in Pakistan, recently a consultative meeting was held at the Wafaqi Mohtasib Secretariat including Commissioner for Children Syeda Viquar-un-Nisa Hashmi, senior Adviser Wafaqi Mohtasib Hafiz Ahsaan Ahmad Khokhar and other prominent members of civil society.  The meeting   demanded the government to make National Commission on Rights of Children (NCRC) functional to address the issue of child abuse at the all level. The meeting discussed Zainab’s rape.  As an immediate measure, it was decided that a team led by Senator Dr. SM Zafar, including Shaheen Atiqur Rehman and senior representative of provincial Mohtasib Punjab to visit Kasur and meet Zainab’s family as well as the families of eleven other victims.  

9.     This civic minded conscientious income-tax-paying old man has the courage to question himself, as to why the participants of this meeting more particularly representative of the “Ombudsmen child complaint cells”, did not demand what they demand today, when two years back Kasur videos case surfaced?  No children complaints cell then visited Kasur or started any known investigation.    Why only after seeing civil society, Chief Justice and COAS reacting promptly on Zainb case, the above consultative meeting woke up?  Why did the participants specifically those related to Ombudsman Complaint Cells remained silent till then?  Did any of consultative meeting participants or children complaint cells participated in the Zainab’s last ritual?  Did these so many complaint cells requested the SC. to also listen them in the case. And last but not the least what would “now” the meeting do and achieve by visiting the Zainab family.

10.   This old man spent his almost whole life struggling for injustices, with the result in life he hardly had to give any “رشوت“ except for perhaps only once, and got his all legitimate works done.  Most honourable Mr. S.M. Zafar under whose presence on the chair above consultative meeting was held, in writing appreciated this struggling spirit of this now old man.  I often read the contents on a Facebook page created by some individual in the name of NADRA Group. Reading contents on this private NADRA Facebook page puts this old man into grief, sometime makes his laugh as how 98% of our people don’t have even the basic knowledge to whom a complaint can be made other than abusing the authorities or cursing Pakistan.  In such a dark environment, this old has a great wish that before going to his grave, he could at least see one or two children and kiss their hands who, in this generally lethargic society, utilized their fundamental and civic right by filing complaints with the ombudsmen complaint cells.  

11.   Last year an Employer chopped off  his 13-year-old's worker hand in Sheikhupura for demanding food, salary. Eyes of this old, since then, widely opened are thirsty of reading somewhere that the so kind hearted members of the Ombudsman office consultative committee, any ombudsman grievance commission or any Ombudsman children complaint cells generally holding their meetings in hotels taking a notice visited the child, followed the case and provided due relief to the child?  If any “human” having true love to his/her children or young brothers/sisters read about any such news, missed be my eyes, could update me about it.

 12.   This old man exactly don’t remember now minute detail about the photograph below, but does remember he copied it from the net with an item an Ombudsman Complaint Cell holding its Seminar (in a hotel?) about children rights. Have these so many Ombudsman children cells finished such scenes on our roads daily?

 13.   This 75% blind scribbled this some two months back but could not feel courage to post it.   Now, the other day, talk shows apprised the viewers  a similar incident happened in Chichwanti, one in Jaranwala/Faisalabad.  This prompted this old man now to post it with a very logical puzzling confusion would the above “committee” formed will also visit the parents of these two innocent victims?  And more importantly during these two months no news published or through talks shows pass through the eyes of remaining 25% vision of this 70 plus if actually the above committee formed in the ombudsman office actually materialized its visit by visiting Zainab’s parents whose father about last month complained about threats?

[inbonobo]

#corruption #canada #cdnpoli #healthcare #mri The prominent Manitobans flagged for "potential preferential treatment" while accessing #MRIs haven’t necessarily done anything wrong but are emblematic of broader #mismanagement in the #health-care system, the province’s #auditor general told the Free Press Tuesday. Ninety-two high-profile donors, sports stars, politicians and senior Winnipeg Regional Health Authority officials found themselves on auditor general Norm Ricard’s confidential list, which was obtained by the Free Press Monday.

The reason, he said, is more likely administrative failings than disreputable attempts to game the system.

"There needs to be stronger, consistent processes," Ricard said in an interview.

Ricard first called for an overhaul of MRI management across the province in an unsparing report released nearly two weeks ago. He said some patients — professional athletes with private insurance and patients "with influence" — were being prioritized.

Of those receiving possible preferential access, the report notes roughly a third got scans the same day as they made their request, a dramatic difference from the average Manitoban’s 23-week wait. Half of the request forms for "patients of influence" also lacked priority codes, and in the cases where there was one "it often did not support the quickness of the scan," Ricard wrote.

Politicians reached by the Free Press Monday expressed surprise and dismay their names were on the list. They made very clear they had followed doctor’s orders and done nothing to try to get special treatment. Yet their files could have been flagged because they didn’t have a priority code, so the auditor general couldn’t confirm, without discussing an individual’s care with their doctors, their MRIs were warranted at the speed at which they got them.

They also could have been flagged because they were slotted in to fill no-shows or cancellations ahead of someone with a greater medical need, Ricard said.

"We’re concerned that process is how some persons of influence, as well as just regular citizens, are getting quicker access to MRIs… over and above people who are on the cancellation list," he said.

He noted in his report some patients made clear they "could be available with as little notice as 5-20 minutes," and one facility didn’t even have a cancellation list.

Arguably more worrisome is some prominent officials could have been receiving preferential treatment without even being aware.

"There’s no evidence that persons of influence demanded expedited access," Ricard said, but that doesn’t mean an intake clerk or a scheduling clerk didn’t recognize them and "perhaps gave them quicker access to the system than they should."

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is adamant that never happened.

Chief medical officer Dr. Brock Wright told the Free Press earlier this week the authority conducted its own internal audit into a small sampling of the people flagged by the auditor general, specifically the four senior WRHA managers, which included WRHA president and CEO Milton Sussman, who was the deputy minister of health at the time. That audit found administrative issues were to blame, not misuse of the system, Wright said. As a result, the WRHA is focusing on the report’s recommendations, not looking more closely at the names on the auditor general’s list.

In his weekly note to WRHA staff sent Tuesday, Sussman denied seeking preferential treatment and announced an internal investigation into the leak, calling it a "troubling and serious breach of (the Personal Health Information Act)."

"I want to be very clear — I did not seek preferential treatment, nor was told I was receiving it," Sussman wrote. "I did not believe I was receiving preferential treatment. None of the other senior leaders identified asked for or were told they were receiving preferential care either."

Sussman took issue with the auditor general’s use of the word "preferential" given the lack of conclusive evidence of any wrongdoing. He re-iterated the WRHA’s position it does not "condone preferred access to diagnostic or any health-care services for anything other than medical reasons." The WRHA is in agreement with the auditor general recommendations concerning wait lists and centralized policies, he said.

"We recognize the need to reinforce the use of priority codes to ensure those waiting for scans are prioritized according to clinical need," Sussman said in his note. "We recently issued a directive re-emphasizing the importance of assigning priority levels to patients requiring an MRI exam to ensure booking is based on clinical criteria and that there is no preferential treatment for patients."

The auditor general recommended the province and the regional health authorities standardize and strengthen processes around booking, cancellations and wait lists, as well as ensure intake clerks know clearly what is expected of them. But, Ricard notes, some aspects of standardization will be tricky to finesse.

"If they tried to fill (an empty slot), couldn’t fill it and there’s someone in the building that’s there, then it seems better for that slot to be filled than unfilled," Ricard said. "It’s a difficult thing, for sure."

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca

(via Possible MRI queue-jumping is a product of health-care mismanagement: AG - Winnipeg Free Press)

After spending five days at the Brampton Civic Hospital, Jamie-Lee Ball was begging the nurses to discharge her.

Sitting in the hospital’s emergency room, the 24-year-old had collapsed in extreme pain from internal bleeding in her abdomen. The nurses had scrambled to find her a stretcher while she waited to be seen. Ball didn’t know it at that the time, but she would spend the entirety of her five-day stay at the hospital lying on that same stretcher — in a hallway.

“People go to the hospital and expect it to not be a vacation,” Ball said. “But to see the people being treated the way I saw them being treated … my mom made the comment that she felt like we were in a Third-World country.”

Seven weeks earlier, Ball had undergone major abdominal surgery. When she arrived at Brampton Civic Hospital’s emergency room on March 25 at 10:30 a.m., she was suffering from complications due to that procedure. While she was waiting to be seen, a “Code Gridlock” announcement on the PA system revealed that the hospital was at capacity and rooms were no longer available.

Ball — and more than a dozen other patients who needed them — would not get a room. After being seen by a doctor, she was stationed in a narrow hallway.

After two gruelling days surrounded by cancer patients and even a woman who had just given birth, the nurses had good news for Ball. She was ecstatic to learn she was finally getting a room in the neurology department.

“Really it’s a spot in the hallway with a sign on the wall that says ‘Hallway patient #1,’ ” Ball explained, adding that five other patients followed her there.

Being stationed there was the worst part of her stay, Ball said. Dementia and other mental-health patients were allowed to wander in the hallways, she said, and frequently passed by her stretcher yelling at the top of their lungs.

Even a trip to the washroom wasn’t easy. Nearly unable to stand, Ball had to leave her stretcher and make a painful two-minute walk down the hallway to a public washroom, dragging her IV pole behind her. When she got there, she had to wait in line with hospital visitors and other patients.

“Honestly, it was shocking to me,” said Ball, who was discharged without ever having a room. “It almost sounds like a fake story.”

Ball isn’t alone in facing arduous wait times in Ontario hospitals. According to the latest auditor general report, only 30 per cent of patients at three Ontario hospitals were transferred from the emergency room to acute-care wards in under eight hours — the target set by the province’s Ministry of Health. Instead, some languished in emergency rooms for 28 hours before getting a bed.

Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice-president of medical affairs at the William Osler Health System, of which the Brampton Civic Hospital is a part, said in an emailed statement that the hospital has seen an “exceptionally high number of patients in its Emergency Department over the last number of months.”

“We are trying to accommodate all patients and do use unconventional spaces for patient rooms, including the use of hallway beds, during these extremely busy times,” Mohammad wrote.

The hospital was built to attend to only 250 patients in a 24-hour period, the doctor said, but often sees more than 400. It’s still struggling with overcrowding despite the William Osler Health System receiving $25 million from the provincial government to help fix the problem. The opening of another hospital —Peel Memorial Centre for Health and Wellness Campus — in the city west of Toronto has yet to yield any significant results because it does not offer overnight beds.

Ontario Minister of Health Dr. Eric Hoskins admits there’s “more we can do” to open up beds for patients. Since 2013, 860 new beds have been added in hospitals across the province. Nearly $500 million was invested in Ontario hospitals this year alone, Hoskins wrote in an emailed statement.

Despite the investment, patients like Ball continue to endure long wait times for beds. Hoskins said he’s looking into Ball’s case to ensure “patients are treated with dignity and respect.”

“No patient or their family should have to deal with a situation like this,” he said.

(via np)

[teachanarchy]

During the high tide of “squadrismo,” members of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento movement, who would form the official Fascist party by 1922, mobilized tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of Italian men who carried out thousands of acts of brutal violence within their own communities and neighboring cities, towns, villages, and hamlets.

Before this “takeoff” in provincial fascism, the Fascists were initially an urban phenomenon, motivated primarily by nationalism. They desired revenge against the Socialists and others who had not supported Italy’s participation in the Great War. Even before the war’s end, veterans who would later become Fascists were calling for the extirpation of Italy’s “internal enemies,” whom they held responsible for Italy’s crushing defeat to the Austro-Hungarian and German forces at the 1917 Battle of Caporetto.1 Fascist attacks against Socialists, according to Benito Mussolini, were like assaults “on an Austrian trench.” He declared, “This is heroism…This is the violence of which I approve and which I exalt. This is the violence of Fascism.”2

The rise of fascism in the provinces of the Po Valley, in northern Italy, occurred in reaction to the remarkable postwar growth of Socialist power. During the biennio rosso (red two years), between 1918 and 1920, Socialists made huge electoral gains nationally and locally, while labor unions unleashed a wave of strikes unprecedented in Italian history. In the Po Valley, the Socialists established a virtual “state within a state,” winning control of municipal government, labor exchanges, and peasant leagues (unions). Socialists also founded cooperatives, cultural circles, taverns, and sporting clubs.3 Such working-class organizations exercised their power largely through legal means—elections, boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations—which nonetheless often led to clashes with police, with injuries and deaths on both sides.

Political culture and the social order had been radically altered, with rough peasants and workers occupying the halls of power and red flags hanging from town halls. For landowners, life in this new “red” state meant higher wages, higher taxes, reduced profits, lost managerial authority, deteriorating private property rights, and the threat of social revolution. Moreover, displays of red flags, busts of Marx, and internationalist slogans offended nationalist and patriotic middle-class sentiments.4 Conservatives denounced the “red terror” and “atrocities” of this period, though the landowners and middle classes were in little real physical danger.5 They were not physically assaulted, nor were their homes, offices, or private property damaged or destroyed. Yet, from their perspective, they lived in a world turned upside down. The Socialists had virtually “taken over,” and the liberal state appeared to have lost control of law and order.

          Advertisement  

In the provincial centers, Fascist violence was initially used to break the Socialist hold on local administration and labor organizations. Fascists interrupted meetings, beat elected officials, and made impossible the work of local government. Socialists in particular were intimidated, threatened, and even beaten until they resigned. The consequences for the Socialist Party, which was entirely unprepared to counter organized, paramilitary violence, were disastrous. In the province of Bologna, one of “reddest” provinces in the entire Po Valley, where the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) received almost three-quarters of the vote in 1919, the Fascists demolished the Socialist Party in a matter of months. Between March and May 1921, the squads destroyed dozens of newspapers offices, chambers of labor, peasant leagues, cooperatives, and social clubs.6

Throughout northern and central Italy, Fascists replicated this feat. Having conquered major provincial centers, Fascists spread out into small towns and hamlets. Major cities provided launching points for attacking other cities. Having consolidated power in these places, the squads then moved into more peripheral areas. Newly founded fasci were local initiatives, organized by Fascists who understood the life of the place. The leaders were often locals who bore a particular grudge against Socialists, whether economic, political, or personal. When necessary, stronger fasci nearby lent paramilitary support. After rooting Socialists out of a community, Fascists commonly held a public ceremony inaugurating the new fascio. As fascism penetrated smaller rural communities, it became a mass movement without precedent in Italian history.

As Adrian Lyttelton has noted, the most immediate and powerfully symbolic form of squadrist violence was the annihilation of the institutions of the Socialist Party, “but the ‘conquest’ of Socialist organizations and municipalities was reinforced and made possible by terror exercised against individuals.”7 The peasant leagues, cooperatives, labor halls, and social clubs—the entire infrastructure of the Socialist “state”—were intensely parochial institutions, organized around popular, charismatic political and labor leaders.8

Fascist squads thus practiced highly personal, localized strategies of violence and intimidation, attacking the most prominent and influential “subversives” within a given province, town, or comune. Fascists sometimes beat these men, occasionally with homicidal intent, but perhaps more commonly intimidated them until they were forced to leave town, thereby decapitating their organizations. The Fascists spent their weekends chasing prominent peasant leaders across the countryside.

               - MULTIPLE AUTHORS                Was Franco’s Spain a Fascist Dictatorship? Our Fascism Reading Group Has Questions.              

               MICHAEL EBNER                How Fascists Took Over Italy with Widespread, Intensely Personal Acts of Political Violence              

               RUTH BEN-GHIAT                How Did Mussolini Plan to Make Italy Great Again? A Racist, Imperial War in Ethiopia.              

               RUTH BEN-GHIAT                Why Mussolini’s Italy Embraced Hitler’s Anti-Semitism              

               KEVIN PASSMORE                Are You Living in a Fascist State? It’s Hard to Tell, but Consult This Chart for Starters.              

               - MULTIPLE AUTHORS                The First Episode of Our Series on Fascism Asks What That Slippery Word Really Means              

Join This Slate Academy

                              Advertisement  

Thus, life for labor leaders became terror-filled, especially because Fascists did not limit their attacks to the public sphere. Nowhere was safe. Late at night, 10, 30, or even 100 Blackshirts, as these squad members became known, sometimes traveling from neighboring towns, might surround a home, inviting a Socialist, anarchist, or Communist outside to talk. If they refused, the Fascists would enter forcibly or threaten to harm the entire family by lighting the house on fire.9

In small towns, where everyone knew everyone, Fascists inflicted ritual humiliation on their enemies, a powerful strategy of terror understood by all. Blackshirts forced their opponents to drink castor oil and other purgatives, and then sent them home, wrenching with pain and covered in their own feces. In some cases, squads forced their enemies to defecate on politically symbolic objects: pages of a speech, a manifesto, a red flag, and so on. After administering a castor oil treatment, Fascists sometimes drove prominent anti-Fascist leaders around in lorries in order to reduce them in the eyes of their own supporters.10 They also accosted their opponents in public, stripped them naked, beat them, and handcuffed them to posts in piazzas and along major roadways.11

Although individual working-class leaders might have been willing to live under the constant threat of physical attacks, most were unwilling to subject their families to such danger. Deprived of leadership, meeting places, offices, records, and sympathetic Socialist town councils, the landless peasantry became subject to the landowners’ conventional tactics of strike breaking and intimidation. Having broken the leagues, the Fascists then forced the laborers into “politically neutral” (Fascist) syndicates. Vulnerable peasants had little choice but to join. Landowners used their newfound position of power to restore labor relations to the 19th century status quo.

The squadrists’ most explicit goal—destroying “Bolshevism”—was rapidly achieved, yet the violence continued unabated. Only by perpetuating this “revolutionary” situation could the Fascist movement undermine the liberal state and continue its push for political power. Additionally, at the local level, violence and criminality persisted more or less independent of any immediate larger political goals. The power of the Ras and the bonds of squadrist camaraderie depended on Fascists sustaining a state of lawlessness and initiating new attacks.12 Illegal activities increased feelings of belonging and emotional interdependence among squadrists, making it more difficult for individual Blackshirts to pull out of the squads or refrain from violent acts. Any retreat, any return to normalcy, would have required dealing with potentially serious legal and psychological consequences.13 Violence thus became cyclical and self-sustaining. Squads perpetuated the environment of terror by constantly identifying new victims. Not surprisingly, due to its intimate nature, Fascist violence was shaped by local conditions: petty feuds, personal rivalries, and other motives beyond mere class warfare.

          Advertisement  

Having “conquered” and “pacified” Socialist communities, Fascists next asserted domination over the political and symbolic use of public space. The Fascists tore down red flags, busts of Marx, and Socialist slogans, replacing them with the Italian flag, busts of the king, and the fasces. Marches, parades, and political ceremonies reinforced the perception that the Fascists now dominated public spaces only recently occupied by Socialists. This “performance” of Fascist dominance intimidated real and potential enemies, while also fostering cohesion and solidarity among the Blackshirts.14 It also served to reassure the provincial bourgeoisie that their dominant social position had been restored. Conservative and even moderate liberal provincial newspapers expressed support for the Blackshirts, praising their “patriotism” and respect for “law and order.”15

The new Fascist “state within a state” was very different from the preceding two years of Socialist hegemony. Through illegal violence, rather than elections, Fascists controlled government administration and destroyed the offices, newspapers, and cultural and social organizations of the Socialists, trade unions, and peasant leagues. Cyclical violence directed against local leaders prevented Socialists from reorganizing. Mass demonstrations, supported by the police and property-owning classes, were patriotic, reaffirming the primacy of the nation over internationalism. Politically, economically, and socially, traditional elites had reasserted their dominance over the laboring classes.

In some cases, Fascist squads forced enemies to defecate on politically symbolic objects—pages of a speech, or a manifesto.

Despite its broad geographic impact and the importance of large, coordinated, interprovincial squad activity, the Fascist “Revolution,” or reaction, largely consisted of thousands of intensely local episodes of violence. Fascists and their victims perceived squadrismo as a continuation of the Great War, squads resorted to personal, highly symbolic, face-to-face violence and murder, rather than mass anonymous killing. In essence, although they could be exceeding brutal, Fascist squads practiced a selective, calibrated, and choreographed economy of violence.

Squad political violence started to erode the institutions of the liberal state even before the Fascists marched on Rome.16 Inside the parliament, deputies debated the legitimacy of squadrismo. Right-wing Fascist sympathizers deemed it patriotic, and therefore just, while Socialist and anti-Fascist Liberals lamented the demise of the rule of law. Meanwhile, the governments of Ivanoe Bonomi (1921) and Luigi Facta (1922) seemingly failed to appreciate the scope of the phenomenon, issuing assurances that incidences of attacks against citizens and the state were “limited and isolated.”17 On one hand, this misperception seems justifiable. Accounts of murders, beatings, and arsons appeared, if at all, in local newspapers, often in the sections devoted to common crime.18 Political elites with no personal connection to the localities affected by Fascist terror thus might be excused for failing to comprehend its magnitude.

          Advertisement  

On the other hand, Fascist violence deeply affected national politics.19 The elections of May 1921, which brought 35 Fascists into the parliament, were preceded by a wave of squad violence that, in just two weeks, left 71 people dead and 216 wounded. Fascists attacked candidates in their home districts, in Rome, and even in the parliament. At the convening of the new legislature, the Fascist deputies refused to allow the Communist deputy, Francesco Misiano, to enter the chamber. Fascists had thus successfully pushed for, and attained, a system in which state agents and political leaders tolerated and even legitimized illegal right-wing violence inflicted on Socialists, Communists, Catholic Popolari, and anti-Fascist liberal moderates. Though its success was not inevitable, the 1922 March on Rome was a Fascist coup against a system whose institutional integrity had already been severely compromised.20

The March on Rome has often been portrayed as a comic opera, a “bluff.” But as Giulia Albanese has shown, it was accompanied by serious, widespread violence. In provinces throughout Italy, paramilitary groups seized control of prefectures, telegraph offices, post offices, and rail stations. In Rome, Fascists marched through popular neighborhoods and destroyed the offices and meeting places of left-wing newspapers, social clubs, and co- operatives.21

Fascists also raided the homes of nationally prominent politicians—including the former prime minister, Francesco Nitti—throwing their books and furniture out the window and lighting the pile on fire. Meanwhile, in the provinces, Fascists seized control of local administrations that had resisted up until then. By the end of 1922, Fascists or pro-Fascists controlled virtually every communal administration in Italy.22 Finally, the freedom of the press was severely curtailed. In the days following Oct. 28, 1922, Fascists prevented most major dailies from publishing news of events.23

On Oct. 29, 1922, the Italian king appointed Mussolini prime minister. Mussolini presided over a mixed cabinet consisting of Fascists, Nationalists (who were absorbed by the Fascists in 1923), Liberals, and Popolari. Many political elites assumed that a Mussolini government would bring an end to two years of violent disorder, but it did not. By taking the portfolio of minister of the Interior for himself, he controlled the Italian police.24 Political violence in the years after the March on Rome continued to serve the same purposes as before: it suppressed opposition, replaced Socialist and non-Fascist administrations, and extended Fascist control over the rest of Italy.25 Mussolini occasionally decried the illegal activities of the squads, but they operated as the motor that drove his government along the road to dictatorship.