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:
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The will to change begins in the body not in the mind
My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)