Politics
The Coordinator, the hereditary leader who rules over the Combine, is armed with a well-equipped, fanatical military in one hand and an ever-pervasive, all-seeing civilian bureaucracy in the other.
Two rival intelligence agencies, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and the Order of the Five Pillars (O5P) keep watch against any potential external and internal threat from lowly commoners, ambitious nobles, and members of the Coordinator's own family. The duty of physical protection of the Coordinator falls to the Otomo, a regiment of palace guards who are recruited from the military, not from the intelligence services.
The idée fixe of the Combine and the Coordinator is conquest. Since the days of Takashi Kurita, the Coordinator has been called the Unifier of Worlds. This is ironic: under Takashi's rule, many worlds slipped from the Combine's hands, first to the succession of Rasalhague Prefecture (now the Free Rasalhague Republic), then to the invasions by Clans Smoke Jaguar, Nova Cat and Ghost Bear.
Read more about this topic: Draconis Combine
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently.... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)