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:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)