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:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)
“I played by the rules of politics as I found them.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)