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#republic city is new too. only a generation old. majority of its population are either 1st or 2nd generation immigrants

thoughtsonargentdawn · 3 years

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On the potential of greener pastures.

While I don’t see the need to beat the dead horse that is the incelery of Blizzard Entertainment’s treatment of women and gay men - still holding out for the claims of transphobia, don’t worry it will be there - One thing I have noticed lately is the increasing willingness of long term WoW players moving to other realms and universes of fantasy.

But the question, is it the right thing to do?

Obviously no one reasonable to advocate for you to stay playing something you find uncomfortable - that is insanity and inhuman. But, is Tamriel, Eorzea or the Galaxy Far Far Away really the type of place that the average Argent Dawn player will feel at home in? I’ve had many discussions with my fellow CoAD team friends and we all have our opinions on the matter. While we all agree that as a creative medium, we as players should reclaim World of Warcraft as something that works for us all - not all of us are particularly comfortable in remaining on the game considering what type of behaviour paying for that subscription enables. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- So first up on the list. Tamriel,the main setting of the Elder Scrolls universe. As a whole I would say the Elder Scrolls Online thematically matches many popular brands on Argent Dawn. It ticks the boxes of House/Noble Roleplay, Military, Intrigue and “Race War Now!” - all fairly popular areas of roleplay on Argent Dawn. ESO also boasts a far more vigorously designed world compared to current WoW, a considerably more consistent lore and player housing that is very generous. The downsides? There always are downsides... ESO is shackled with an insular community that much like Guild Wars 2 - another former contender to WoW - has a somewhat small town Alabama mentality towards new players. This is also combined with a recurring problem of a number of players using their characters to effectively further their own real life politics or ideologies. In particular the crypto-fascists are very drawn to the Aldmeri Dominion faction, with the prominence of the Thalmor - yes the same elf supremacists from Skyrim - being a key factor. Thanks to blatant racism being a canonical factor of the setting many have gotten away with effectively using their character as a smokescreen. Alternatively the Neo-Roman Imperials also are a popular second choice for your standard chauvinistic “ew women” basement dwellers who would shrivel at the first touch of a real woman. Community issues aside, ESO also has system problems with a very awkwardly designed UI that is unintuitive to someone used to the traditional hotbar system present in many MMO games. Perhaps a minor problem in the long term as you get used to it but be prepared for heavy frustration and awkward handling. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Second up we have the supposed rising star of the genre, in the gleaming world of Eorzea, the primary setting for Final Fantasy 14. The setting is very conducive for Adventure type RP in particular, but by no means limited. The worldbuilding of Eorzea is very elaborate, with analogues to many real world cultures being present, Norse, Franco-German, Middle English, Levantine/Mediterranean and Far Eastern with smaller groups being present too. The lore is watertight, with very few inconsistencies - the few are merely a player issue of doing class quests in reverse order to the story quest mostly - and the setting is shown rather than explained through out of universe books. Player housing is rather advanced as well, with both personal and guild varieties being present in four capital cities so far.

Things are not always sunny however. Some glaring errors are present in the game. The UI and general intuitiveness of the systems present are incredibly dated and arcane. This is likely due in part to the need to keep things workable for the console players, and probably Square Enix not understanding their playerbase, especially in the West. In addition, due to how the story is the main system of progression, for those wanting to roleplay with a full understanding it is effectively mandatory to do the main story questline to completion before taking part in substantial or heavy roleplay. Finally and probably the most glaring problem is the issue of the community itself. While the general projection is that the FF14 community is very welcoming and kinder than the WoW community, this is only really applicable to the US servers. Both Crystal and Primal - the main ones - are highly active, busy and brimming with both helpful people and roleplay, so much so it spills out into the open world and cities. Crystal in particular is the most analogous to “golden age” Argent Dawn. The only major issue is the “problem” of ERP being quite acceptable and open in the games RP community, no weirdly KKK cosplaying attempts to shut it down will work here, unfortunately for some. That said it can be ignored and the players soliciting can be reported if they persist - and square enix is very good at customer support. However, the European servers are a whole other beast. Light has no roleplay of any major or notable amount, and half of the servers on it are not even populated. Outside of Lich, Shiva and Odin there are scant few players around. Chaos has more people on it, but the wrong kind of people. I have spoken to a now silly number of people on Crystal and to a lesser extent Primal giving abject horror stories they have brought from the Chaos server group. Most of the RP happens on Omega, with some smaller level on Moogle and Ragnarok. Though to call it RP is generous. Their “roleplay” consists of generally playing self-inserts in Second Life tier social roleplay. Those few who engage in actual roleplay often find themselves ostracised or even - subtly - harassed - remember, square enix are very good at customer support - for trying to roleplay within the setting they are in. It is no surprise then that there are more European players playing on the US server groups than on their own. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Finally the old man, though potentially most balanced of the three is the well established Galaxy Far Far Away - the setting of Star Wars: The Old Republic. With a colossal lore from both in game and the extended Old Republic universe itself the game has tremendous potential for all manner of RP, from your traditional Sith or Jedi RP to space Criminals, Military, space Researchers/Academics, Political RP and most things in between. The Stronghold System, while dated compared to the others does allow for expansive and varied environments to do both public and private roleplay within, with a whole catalogue of venues being available for perusal. Besides that, the planets themselves are highly expansive and massive in terms of scale, easily twice the size of major zones in WoW often with a variety of environments that make the planets seem like an actual world, or part of at least. Hoth really does have the sensation you are on a frozen tomb in the Outer Ring. The downsides of the game however are rather heavy. Roleplay is almost entirely guild centric, though not hidden away by any means. Competing “headcanons” have been know to create problems, but as the Galaxy is big enough it really boils down to a matter of taste rather than sociopathic cult leaders attempting to control the roleplay for everyone. In addition, the system of the game are woefully clunky, with the worst customisation for characters present, even if the transmog system is better than WoW’s. Thankfully the new expansion for it is coming soon which promises to revamp both character agency and customisation and fix systems that are horrendously out of place in 2021. Finally the other main issue of TOR is the presence of the free to play, but pay and get more model. Freemium is neither the F2P that ESO offers or the simple subscription model FF14 offers.

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With all that said, each game has its flaws and perks. Considering there loudest voices seem to be indicating either a shift towards ESO or FF14, it will be interesting to see if these become permanent converts - with all the moral grandstanding about how terrible Blizzard is - or they will quietly slink back to Azeroth once the dust settles and nothing sadly is done about the appalling corporate problems in Blizzard. I personally will remain engaged on Argent Dawn. WoW itself is a product that is shaped by its community more than its sleazy developers and strangulating Blizzard over it is realistically likely to cause more harm long term. Besides, how can we reclaim the setting for the players if we all decide to jump ship?

#roleplaying #World of Warcraft #Final Fantasy XIV #The Elder Scrolls Online #Star Wars: The Old Republic #community #argent dawn eu

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script-a-world · 5 years

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I hope this isn't a silly question but can beaches be in downtown areas? I personally live in a downtown area full of high rises with the harbour right in front of it. So why can't harbour be replaced with beach. Also some beach pics I find actually have lots of high rises in the backdrop, aren't those downtown areas too? Anyway both my beta and a writing friend are saying that beach in downtown makes no sense.

Synth: Downtown beaches are absolutely a thing that exist, though depending on the level of urbanization, they may not be naturally occurring ones. Last year the city I live in built a permanent beach downtown. Replaced an old docking area with gently sloping concrete slabs and dumped a whole load of sand on them. It has been very popular. IIRC Paris does something similar, trucking in huge amounts of sand to build temporary beaches in a few spots along the Seine during summertime (IDK what happens with all the sand when summer is over). If your city was carefully planned by the original builders, it’s not far-fetched at all to think they would have worked around any already existing natural beaches to preserve them for its citizens’ use.

Tex: I need to orient myself a little bit on this question, so I’m going to pull out a few definitions here.

Downtown:

Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English-speakers to refer to a city's commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart, and is often synonymous with its central business district(CBD). In British English, the term "city centre" is most often used instead. The two terms are used interchangeably in Colombia.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for "down town" or "downtown" dates to 1770, in reference to the center of Boston.[2] Some have posited that the term "downtown" was coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.[3] As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement, the "up" and "down" terminology coming from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south.[3] Thus, anything north of the original town became known as "uptown" (Upper Manhattan), and was generally a residential area, while the original town – which was also New York's only major center of business at the time – became known as "downtown" (Lower Manhattan).[3]

Beach:

A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles. The particles can also be biological in origin, such as mollusc shells or coralline algae.

Some beaches have man-made infrastructure, such as lifeguard posts, changing rooms, showers, shacks and bars. They may also have hospitality venues (such as resorts, camps, hotels, and restaurants) nearby. Wild beaches, also known as undeveloped or undiscovered beaches, are not developed in this manner. Wild beaches can be appreciated for their untouched beauty and preserved nature.

Beaches typically occur in areas along the coast where wave or current action deposits and reworks sediments.

Harbour:

A harbor or harbour (see spelling differences; synonyms: wharves, haven) is a sheltered body of water where ships, boats, and barges can be docked. The term harbor is often used interchangeably with port, which is a man-made facility built for loading and unloading vessels and dropping off and picking up passengers. Ports usually include one or more harbors. Alexandria Port in Egypt is an example of a port with two harbors.

Harbors may be natural or artificial. An artificial harbor can have deliberately constructed breakwaters, sea walls, or jettys or they can be constructed by dredging, which requires maintenance by further periodic dredging. An example of an artificial harbor is Long Beach Harbor, California, United States, which was an array of salt marshes and tidal flats too shallow for modern merchant ships before it was first dredged in the early 20th century.[1] In contrast, a natural harbor is surrounded on several sides by prominences of land. Examples of natural harbors include Sydney Harbour, Australia and Trincomalee Harbour in Sri Lanka.

Since “downtown” usually means a highly-developed area, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll even be near a body of water - and if they are, the coastal areas are possibly also developed into harbours/wharves because water transportation of goods is economically efficient. Under these constraints, a beach would be a stretch of un- or under-developed coastline that doesn’t generate as much revenue for the taxable area it’s connected to compared to a harbour.

Frequently, beaches generate revenue under the auspices of tourism, which means that the area would be cultivated accordingly - esplanades, or promenades, are a popular choice, and often grow near a harbor as a natural extension of a money-generating area. Seaside resorts are a closely-related cousin of esplanades, and sometimes have the focus of being a retreat.

Many of the beaches I’ve been to that have high-rises in the background are either those of hotels - who might own the beach property adjacent to their building(s) - or those of businesses. Idyllic beachfront properties that have a low overall skyline can be low-populated areas (which usually mean drawing a low-income from tourism), protected areas of varying degrees, unsafe for people to play in, or are owned by people in the immediate residential areas and thus private property.

Artificially-constructed beaches, as Synth mentioned, are possible but often costly because of the amount of effort and material that needs to be brought in. Those who build such things need to consider the possible costs and revenue of a beach compared to a harbor, and whether it would be financially beneficial for the area to convert it.

Highly-developed areas like city centers carry the risk of polluting the nearby environment, as evidenced by the history of:

The Nashua River in the US

The Ganges River of the Indian subcontinent

The Citarum River in Indonesia

The Yellow River in China

The Sarno River in Italy

The Matanza River of Argentina

The Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”

The Kamilo Beach of Hawai’i

Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Bajos de Haina in the Dominican Republic

Hann Bay in Senegal

Your beta and writing friend do, unfortunately, have a point - downtown beaches are rarely a thing, and if they are then they’re not likely to be very well-maintained or aesthetically-pleasing. It is possible to have one, if they follow the model that Synth mentioned, but it’s usually expensive, time-consuming, difficult to keep sufficiently clean, and their existence needs to be balanced against the current revenue-generating area that is probably a harbour.

If the society you’re worldbuilding settles a coastal area with the intent to preserve the coast and develop it into a beach, you have a good shot of putting one into your story, but harbours are disinclined in many ways to be replaced by a beach.

Constablewrites: Our idea of the beach as a pleasant leisure destination seems to have started with the English upper classes in the 1700s, and expanded as the growth of the middle class and advances in travel technology made tourism accessible to a larger population. And the business district of a city is built on commerce, which in our world heavily involves shipping. So if the city was developed before industrialization, its planners were far more likely to look at a beach and think “what a terrible place to unload a ship, we should fix that” than “oh, how pretty, people might come here to relax.” Plus, “downtown” generally refers to an area of only a few square miles at most where real estate is in high demand, so any stretch of open land is unlikely to remain open for long.

Now, because today we do value beaches as pleasant leisure destinations, it’s entirely possible that a city might create an artificial beach along its coast. River beaches are also a thing in several European cities, and many of them are temporary summer installations made with imported sand. And though they’re unlikely to be strictly in the downtown area, you can indeed find beaches in highly urbanized areas like in Miami, Vancouver, and frankly most of Southern California but let’s specifically say Santa Monica. But a city developing organically isn’t going to have a beach unless there’s significant incentive to designate and maintain one instead of using that land for something more lucrative. And unless the city was founded and built specifically around tourism, a beach is always going to be in addition to a city’s harbor, never in place of it. (Hell, even then. Cruise ships were one of the earliest and still an extremely popular method of tourism, and even if your tourists want to see the beach, they’re not getting to it without a harbor.)

Feral: Downtowns may be on waterfronts, but as previously pointed out, downtowns are generally not going to be developed on naturally occurring beaches, here being the sandy, ocean front stretches of land. Tex and Constable bring up great points about economic incentive, but also consider the physical constraints of what can be built on the beach - I think Jesus had something to say about building castles on sand, and as the son of a carpenter, I think he would know. In the States, Chicago and Charleston come to mind as being particularly relevant to your query.

Chicago is on Lake Michigan, which does have a sandy beach that is somewhat removed from downtown by various parks and smaller scale infrastructure. Downtown Charleston is a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers where they join to flow into the ocean, creating a small bay. The beaches associated with Charleston are actually on the nearby islands, not downtown Charleston, which has piers, wharfs, etc, as expected in a city founded by pirates.

A lot of the question of whether you can feasibly “build” a downtown on a beach is how built - literally - up you want it to be. The incredible innovation that went into building Chicago’s downtown, particularly its high rises and skyscrapers, is pretty well known in a general sense but you might want to look into how they were able to accomplish what they have given the very difficult topography. Charleston has no skyscrapers. In addition to the unstable, sandy soil, building in Charleston is made more unstable by being in an earthquake prone area. The big issues with downtowns being on traditional sandy beaches are the quality of the soil and bedrock and the question of erosion, which is a greater issue when dealing with ocean currents and tides.

Basically, it’s not impossible for a downtown area to have a beach, but given the issues that beaches present to building a downtown and the economic influences of why there would or would not be a beach, it’s unlikely without a lot of story behind it. And as you’re writing a story… that might be worthwhile to you. Or it might be a distraction from the story you really want to tell.

#pylons #beaches #Anonymous

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echoesoftheeast · 5 years

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Bulgars, Bulgarians, and the Macedonian Question

There’re good reasons that the Balkans are considered the “powder keg of Europe”. As the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was imminent and the various people of the Balkans were establishing their own national consciousness the struggle for modern Balkan self-identity was just beginning. The 19th century saw the formation of new autonomous Balkan territories as the people who faced Ottoman subjection for nearly 500 years finally found themselves in the position to free themselves from the rule of Istanbul. The Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians particularly had territorial aspirations that hearkened to their medieval kingdoms and empires. Caught in the middle of this, literally, was the region we now know as “North Macedonia”. Following the Balkan Wars, the territory of Macedonia was divided between Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria with the region that is now North Macedonia being ceded to Serbia. It wasn’t until 1946 when the region was officially declared the “People’s Republic of Macedonia” as one of the six federal states of Yugoslavia. It was renamed the “Socialist Republic of Macedonia” in 1963 and remained so until the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, whereupon they declared themselves the “Republic of Macedonia”. The newly formed Republic of Macedonia immediately sparked controversy as their Greek neighbors to the south declared that this newly formed republic has no right to the name Macedonia since, in Greece’s opinion, the ancient kingdom of Macedonia was Greek and the inhabitants of the Republic of Macedonia are Slavs. This argument between Greece and, since 2019, North Macedonia has been ongoing to the present over who has the right to use the name “Macedonia” as well as who can claim the ancient Macedonians as their own; the Greeks claiming that the ancient kingdom of Macedon was Greek while the Macedonians claim that the inhabitants of Macedon weren’t Greek. While the Greek-Macedonian naming controversy largely takes center stage there are also disputes between North Macedonia and Bulgaria regarding the identity of the Macedonians. While the Macedonians generally consider themselves a distinct Slavic people amongst the various Balkan Slavs, the Bulgarians generally consider the Macedonians to be Bulgarians. Historical arguments between the two nations typically focus on whether the First Bulgarian Empire was truly Bulgarian or Macedonian (as was claimed by the famed Russian-born Yugoslav historian George Ostrogorsky). Just as both North Macedonia and Greece argue over their right to the name Macedonia so too North Macedonia and Bulgaria argue over whether Tsar Samuil was Bulgarian or Macedonian. While I’ll make no comment regarding whether or not North Macedonia has been misappropriating either Greek or Bulgarian heritage. What I want to look at is how North Macedonia finds itself in a similar situation as Bulgaria when it comes to their national identity. Both modern Macedonians and Bulgarians are Slavic people while the original Macedonians and Bulgars were not. Both territorial regions now called “Macedonia” and “Bulgaria” were not the original territorial regions. Both the ancient Macedonians and Bulgars were assimilated into the larger Slavic population that migrated into the Balkans. While the historical specifics are obviously far more complex at the very least, we can see a degree of similarity between Macedonians and Bulgarians. The main difference is that while these historical circumstances are brought up against Macedonians to discredit their usage of the name Macedonia no arguments are made against modern Bulgarians using the name Bulgaria. My contribution therefore to the “Macedonian Question” is if Bulgarians aren’t challenged in their national identity as Bulgarians then why are the Macedonians? While the debates concerning the identity of the ancient Macedonians still rages on alongside the debates of the relationship between the Macedonians and the Bulgarians perhaps we can set these important issues to the side for a moment and take a look of the similar historical development of Bulgarian and Macedonian national identity and ask ourselves whether or not this can be taken into consideration when asking the “Macedonian Question”.

The Bulgars were originally a Turkic-nomadic warrior people who are generally believed to have lived around the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. In the 7th century, they formed what is known as “Great Bulgaria” which was located between the Dniester and lower Volga rivers (territorially located in modern southern Ukraine and southwest Russia). The 7th century also witnessed the migration of Bulgars into the Balkan region, led by Bulgarian Khan Asparuh, where they established themselves in the region after defeating an army of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV. These successes led to the formation of the First Bulgarian Empire which, at its height, encompassed most of the Balkan peninsula. The ethnic demographics of the First Bulgarian Empire was largely Slavic since large numbers of Slavs had already begun settling in the Balkans during the late 6th century. As the local Slavic population was more numerous than the Turkic Bulgars the process of assimilation witnessed the Slavification of the Bulgars. Through this assimilation, the Turkic Bulgars became a new South Slavic people who nevertheless retained the name of Bulgars.

Just as the Bulgars, the ancient Macedonians were not Slavs. The scholarly debate is still ongoing regarding the ethnicity of the ancient Macedonians but it is largely accepted that while they weren’t entirely Greeks they nonetheless adopted Hellenistic policies (aside from some major divergences from the ancient Greek society; for example, the ancient Greeks were organized according to city-states while the Macedonians were ruled by a monarch). The region of ancient Macedon is largely found within the modern Greek region of Macedonia, though the later Roman province of Macedonia also encompassed much of the modern region of North Macedonia. As mentioned earlier, various Slavic tribes migrated into the Balkan peninsula during the 6th-7th centuries and assimilated the local inhabitants of the Macedonian region of the Byzantine Empire. Slavic Macedonians were now the local inhabitants of the region, though they didn’t begin to self-identify as Macedonians until the 19th century.

The similarities between the ethnic developments of the Macedonians and the Bulgars are interesting. Both have been Slavs since the 6th-7th centuries while their name-sake ancestors were not. Both the ancient Macedonians and the early Bulgars lived in territorial regions which don’t correspond to their modern borders (though Northern Macedonia is much closer to ancient Macedon than modern Bulgaria and Old Great Bulgaria). Despite residing in territories that don’t correspond to their original predecessors (or claimed-predecessors) and despite being of Slavic ethnicity while again the original Macedonians and Bulgars were not, both modern Bulgarians and Macedonians self-consciously identify with their predecessors. Since there’s no controversy surrounding the Bulgarians stylizing themselves as Bulgarians, despite these historical discrepancies with the original Bulgars, perhaps there shouldn’t be so much controversy over the Macedonians using the name Macedonian despite being a Slavic people. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Macedonians can misappropriate either Greek of Bulgarian history while renaming it Macedonian. The debates whether it’s appropriate for North Macedonia to build statues of Alexander the Great or to claim the First Bulgarian Empire as a “Macedonian” Empire are both important and necessary. The only case that I wish to make is that if the title of Macedonian is to be denied to the Macedonians since they’re Slavs while the ancient Macedonians were not then we should be just as quick to criticize the Bulgarians usage of Bulgarian since they too are Slavs using the name of an older non-Slavic people. Even though North Macedonia is moving forward diplomatically in making concessions to both their Greek and Bulgarian neighbors it seems that North Macedonia still finds itself in the powder keg of Europe and sparks can still fly, potentially setting off the Balkans once again.

#macedonia northmacedonia balkans greece bulgaria bulgars nationalism

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ameliorator · 4 years

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May Covid-19 be one of the greatest PSYOP ever? Some reflections on what is happening in Italy. [rough draft]

Disclaimer:

This article is just rought draft, so by definition it is incomplete.

I was initially asked by some foreign friends about what is happening in Italy: therefore, I decided to put some information in the same space, rather than having bits and pieces scattered all over the place.

This is not an academic paper, it is more like an open letter.

Its main goal is to push the reader to ask questions, questions, questions: nobody should presume to be a carrier of truth, but we all need to act humbly and cooperatively now.

You will notice that some concepts are repeated throughout the short text like a mantra: this is a deliberate devise, as those concepts are the most striking evidence supporting the analysis.

With this in mind, all the sections need additional depth and references to give breadth and strength to the research: needless to remark, any contribution from all of you is more than welcome.

If someone who reads this text by chance wants to wear the sordid mask of the debunker in order to attack me as a conspiracy theorist, he/she needs to note that all the sources (with a couple of exceptions) are either official pubblications, press releases, entries on Wikipedia or articles from the mainstream media.

Avoiding “antagonist” authors or websites is a precise choice to make crystal clear that all the information you need is in plain sight on your average news sources, and to avoid wasting time in useless diatribes.

The driving force behind the following text is just common sense, paired with an attitude which can be easily defined with the words of the controversial Timothy Leary: «To think for yourself you must question authority».

Please do the same all the time, all of you.

Thank you!

1. An introduction (or the core of this brief article?)

While we are several weeks into this unprecedented situation, there are too many elements that don’t make sense in the official narrative: a further analysis driven by mere common sense and rationality is needed.

Let’s use a holistic approach while dealing with what everyone who still keeps some lucidity in these dire times would eventually come to understand as an unprecedented act of psychological warfare, that may lead to unwanted (at least by a minority of people who still has a tendency to think independently) changes and transformations, which we are supposed to clarify and debate with attention before it is too late.

Therefore, let’s try for a few minutes to get far away from the media-fuelled compulsively obsessed state of mind which keeps all of us focused only on the origins of the virus ("Is it a natural occurrence? Is it the outcome of a chemical warfare attack coming from the U.S.A or China? ___add here your favorite version___?”) and its supposedly extreme deadliness.

The starting point for this thesis is that any situation of “emergency” or “crisis” is the perfect precondition to arbitrarily change the rules of the game.

We will clearly see how marginal in the equation is the virus itself, with its very low case fatality rate and mortality rate.

As of now, we will only focus on what is happening in Italy. Let’s go straight to the point: the draconian measures adopted are absolutely disproportionate, when compared to the seriousness of the current risk. Besides that, they are unconstitutional.

In fact, the series of “DPCM - Decreti del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri (prime minister’s decrees)” are mere administrative acts which, upon the pretext of the emergency caused by the virus, violate at least the articles 16, 25 and 77 of the Italian constitution.

Unfortunately this is becoming even more sinister, as the government added to the aforementioned “prime minister’s decree” some so-called “decreti-legge” (decrees-law). Therefore, while the violation of article 77 of the Italian constitution is no longer the case, the scenario looks even worse. Let’s read a quickly translated excerpt of the Wikipedia article about the topic (which is in Italian only, of course):

« In the Italian legal system a decree-law (plural decrees-law and abbreviated in dl), also written decree law, is a provisional regulatory act having force of law, adopted in extraordinary cases of necessity and urgency by the Government, pursuant to art. 77 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic. It comes into force immediately after publication in the Official Gazette of the Italian Republic, but the effects produced are temporary, because the decrees-laws lose their effectiveness if Parliament does not convert them into law within 60 days of their publication».

The risk is that these totalitarian measures which Italians are experiencing at the moment, first introduced with an administrative act (the “prime minister’s decree”, emergency-based and basically worthless), then strengthened with another temporary measure (the “decree-law”, valid only for 60 days), might be finally converted into ordinary laws.

This might mean that some important aspects of the way Italians live their lives might be modified for good: beware, not according to the standardized procedures of the legislative process, but through the aforementioned stratagem (through the “backdoor”, so to say).

If you want to have a look at the series of DPCMs and Dls related to the Covid-19, please check the “Gazzetta Ufficiale”.

You would justify this scenario and the lockdown of an entire country in case of a plague, a major war or some alien attack: on the other hand, the culprit is a virus which up to now killed around 3,300 people in China, a country which counts around 1,435,000,000 inhabitants according to the 2017 Census (0.000002 per cent of the population. Yes, you read it right: there are 5 zeros after the comma).

Now, you can tell me that the law enforcement in China is what you expect from an authoritarian state and that the measures which were adopted in order to achieve the so-called “containment” of the contagion are even stricter than in Italy, with drones, robots, face recognition, tracking of the population via phone apps and all sort of available technology for surveillance and control.

An Orwellian nightmare, you would say, but again: for the risk posed by a virus which eventually would bring a few thousand deaths out of more than 1 and half a billion people?

This is nonsensical, and there is a growing number of scientists who is at least puzzled by the panic generated by this novel coronavirus.

If you want to watch a somehow “watered-down” (because it was not shot in Wuhan, the epicenter of the first contagion) version of what is described above, please have a look at this Japanese short documentary on the major Chinese city of Nanjing (taken from an Italian news website, but luckily the video is in the original language with English subtitles).

Moreover, it is now common knowledge that there are potentially millions of asymptomatic carriers, while millions more both in China and outside could have been affected by the virus at least between October 2019 (don’t forget that the virus has “19” for 2019 in its name, not “20” for 2020) and the beginning of January 2020, totally unaware of it.

So what’s the problem now? The ruling elites tell us through their spokespersons in the government (starting from the prime minister) that we have to prevent the contagion from spreading because the Italian healthcare system is collapsing. Why is that? Is it because of this specific disease? Clearly not.

Is it because of more than 3 decades of widespread adoption of the western neoliberal dogma which led to privatizations, shrinking and closure of hospitals, extreme cost-cutting and reduction of personnel? Well, yes.

If you are familiar with the Italian language or you are keen to use a translator, please have a look at this report. To have an additional reference on the effects of such phenomenon in a different country, you can read a much shorter newspaper article here.

After this pretty long introduction, let’s have a quick look at some aspects of this situation.

2. “Simulations”

In recent years, the ruling elites that shape the dominant narrative are telling us that it is necessary to be ready for a pandemic: besides the constant recommendations (which inspire in me more than a suspicion, but that’s only my humble reaction), they indulge in exercises and simulations to assess the potential readiness of governments and international organizations in dealing with such a scenario.

Recently, a lot of talking surrounded the simulation dubbed “Event 201”, organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in September 2019: beyond all the so-called conspiracy theories, at least some doubts arise about the timing and the chosen theme.

While their previous major simulation on the preparation to react to a pandemic as a result of a natural occurrence or bacteriological war is from 2005 (2-3 years AFTER the emergence of SARS, which – for those who still remember the propaganda machine at the time- was advertised as potentially leading to millions of deaths, but eventually resulted in a few thousands), this last simulation was carried out and published only a couple of months BEFORE the spread of Covid-19.

Macroscopic coincidences like this cannot be dismissed light-heartedly, especially when even kids nowadays know that one of the richest individuals in the world is actively both predicting scenarios AND prescribing solutions against pandemics.

Keeping on using some old-fashioned common sense and rationality as our only guides, we might ask ourselves: are these the acts of a good-hearted “philanthropist” or the very interested maneuvers of someone who is having a huge conflict of interest, being involved in vaccines development and SURVEILLANCE for decades with his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Going back to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (and, by the way, am I the only one who reads on their website “Johns Hopkins - Bloomberg School of Public Health”? We are talking about one of the richest individuals in the world – well, yet ANOTHER one1), you can compare the 2005 simulation (“Atlantic Storm”) with the 2019 simulation (the already mentioned “Event 201”).

A video recap of the latter is here.

Isn’t that strange that they constantly refer to the possibility of a deliberate release of a virus generating a pandemic? Pretty strange, isn’t it?

Please ask questions and make your own considerations, I am not adding anything else on this subject for now.

3. Some extremely quick historical references to similar pandemics

The main point here is to give some background to the repressive measures adopted while dealing with the current pandemic and hypothesize the potential scenarios2 in which all or some of them are maintained in the phase following the “containment” (see above for the stratagem used in Italy, which might lead to major changes in the Italian legislation by means of using the backdoor: this is completely anti-democratic).

In this regard, a crucial consideration is the following: the 1918 pandemic (the "Spanish flu3") caused between 17,000,000 and 50,000,000 deaths (other sources speak of 100,000,000), while so far we can use data from China (which is in an advanced phase of the "containment", even if it is not yet "out of danger") for an incomplete comparison with this Covid-19: in the Asian country, we are dealing with around 3,300 deaths out of around 1,435,000,000 Chinese citizens registered in the 2017 census (0.000002 % of the population). You will read these stats on the deaths caused by the novel coronavirus in China over and over again: this is done on purpose, as a red alert for our brains.

With this simple consideration in mind, we can easily realize that we are already going too far with this unprecedented experiment of transformation and individual and social re-programming, under the pretext of the virus.

A little glimpse on the last two decades: had not the SARS, the MERS and the 2009’s iteration of H1N1 been described as pandemics “with potentially millions of deceases” when they magically appeared?

In this regard, let’s use again Wikipedia and read about the 2009’s iteration of H1N1 (the so-called “swine flu”), which had both the highest case fatality rate and mortality rate among the aforementioned pandemics: “Meanwhile, some studies estimated that 11 to 21 per cent of the global population at the time – or around 700 million to 1.4 billion people (out of a total of 6.8 billion) – contracted the illness. This was more than the number of people infected by the Spanish flu pandemic,[6][11] but only resulted in about 150,000 to 575,000 fatalities for the 2009 pandemic.[12] A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu.[13] For comparison, the WHO estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 people die of seasonal flu annually.[8] ”

This seems pretty crystalline, right?

4. “... but hospitals are collapsing!”

The concept of “herd immunity” heralded in the UK hypothesized a scenario of millions of serious cases, so this seems to be yet another act of propaganda aimed at instilling fear and panic (please stay focused on what I keep on repeating about China: until now, a mere 0.00002% of the population died. How can everybody ignore that huge elephant in the room?), but in Italy they decided to do quite the opposite: they bring everyone who is showing symptoms (albeit especially acute) to intensive care units, so that the already underfunded and understaffed hospitals collapse.

This is the worst part of playing with people’s lives and emotions: do you think it is a standard procedure to admit everyone who has been infected by the seasonal influenza (albeit severely) to an intensive care unit? The answer is no, due to the limited availability of beds and equipment (which is shrinking for decades, as you can clearly understand with the help of the report mentioned in the introduction).

In the worst case scenario, the infected die in their houses, maybe without even being counted in the statistics of people dying for the seasonal influenza on a yearly basis (and the World Health Organization - not your local conspiracy theorist - estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 people die of seasonal flu annually, as seen above).

Those poor souls might be put into the accounts of other diseases they already have (comorbidities) or simply be accounted as victims of the inescapable process of aging: there is no clear standard on which “box” to use when the calculation of the deceased is performed.

With this in mind, when you create such a panic and you let everyone who is diagnosed with the Covid-19 be admitted to intensive care, what do you think you will get? A total CHAOS.

Besides, did anybody ask the relevant authorities what are the risks and collateral effects of testing drugs for Ebola or malaria on patients affected with Covid-19?

I would be extremely curious to have a full report on the effects on people who are already sick and/or old, besides merely knowing what are the ongoing experiments.

But, of course, they are feeding all of us with the dramatic story about the pain and suffering of Italian people and the collapsing healthcare system in Italy, without providing even the slightest motivation for this state of things.

Beware, I am not saying that the healthcare system is not actually collapsing: I am just inferring that this might be INDUCED.

Why would you otherwise justify the fact that our “heroic government” did not proceed with a requisition of all the private clinics/hospitals in the country from DAY ONE of the emergency?

Weren’t we all supposed to make sacrifices for the common good, for the sick and the elderly, for our overwhelmed medical personnel?

Well, apparently “some animals are more equal than others”.

Now they are talking about this topic of requisitioning and some regions got ready or are getting ready for such a “bothering” task: why so late? Why don’t we ask such a question?

As we will see in a very clear way in a moment, the average age of people accounted for having died since the outbreak and up to now in Italy is around 80 years. Besides, all the cases of deaths under the age of 60 are related to one or more comorbidities (when it comes to the statistics, let’s state once more that it seems that there is no clear agreement among at least the bulk of the major European countries when differentiating between deaths with Covid-19 and deaths due to Covid-19, i.e. HEALTHY people who died because they were infected with the virus).

For this reason, at the moment we can only rely on the analysis of the most precise data available to us: a good example of how crucial is a higher level of detail could be the study on the case fatality rate and characteristics of the deceased performed by the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanità4, which you can download and read here. Regular updates can be found here.

What is really striking in this study is the plain fact that only 6 out of 481 deaths in that sample had no comorbidity (1.2%). This means that 98.8% of the deceased were having from 1 to 3 comorbidities (pre-existing health conditions). The mean age was 78.5.

In other words, those people were old and/or sick (suffering from 1 to 3 diseases), meaning at high risk of dying for whatever infection/additional disease pairing with their pre-existing health conditions. This is a clear and undeniable statement, which leaves little room to the provoked scare of “millions of deaths”. Talking about millions, do we really understand how many millions of people could have already been infected with the virus (and come out of it) in the months before the so-called "emergency"? They might have confused it with bronchitis, pneumonia, a severe form of seasonal influenza or simply not have noticed it because it presented itself in an asymptomatic form.

Even the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S.A. indirectly admitted that the virus was already around for quite a long time (at least from the period of the last seasonal influenza, which is what matters now) and they might have miscategorized it: this, in turn, led to accusations from the Chinese government to the U.S.A. (but that’s another story and we won’t deal with it at the moment).

5. 60 million people under house arrest

What is the outcome of such an orchestrated mass psychosis? There are 60 million Italians who currently slaughter each other (on social networks and from the safety of their houses, of course) to defend their theses on the origin of the virus, offending each other for being either a conspiracy theorist or a dumb brainless individual, basically erasing each other’s position in a useless chatter (while wasting useful time and energies which should be devoted to figure out how to stop this).

Everyone is under house arrest, of course (because going out to buy groceries and medicines is NOT freedom of movement): in the meantime, the unconstitutional measures go from a restriction to another, inspiring (or not really?) other countries to do the same.

Theoretically we could (well, ahem, practically we are forced to) accept, obviously for a limited period of time, the prohibitions of gathering and meeting in "public" places, but forbidding a solitary walk in the countryside is unjustified, illogical and intolerable.

All of this is forced upon us due to the state of emergency that is based on provoked fear, which clashes with the basic common sense and especially with the already mentioned data from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità: if the statistics follow the same trend (and there is currently no indication that this will change), in more than 95% of the cases, the elderly and sick (with 1 to 3 comorbidities) die, with absolutely negligible figures when it comes to the total numbers of dead people against the overall population (once more, let’s keep on repeating it as a mantra, 0.000002% of the population in China died), especially if compared to the absolutely many more deaths per year due to war, famine, other diseases and all sort of accidents.

Once more, do those people die

DUE TO Covid-19

WITH Covid-19 AND 1 to 3 comorbidities?

Simple question: are those statistics reliable?

Once more, there are millions of asymptomatic carriers and millions more who might have contracted the disease before the WHO and the other big actors in what seems a big theatre-play gave it a name (as an experiment to prove what I am suggesting here, please ask your loved ones and friends or colleagues who felt sick between November 2019 and January 2020) and used it as a pick to change the "rules of the game". For these reasons, I keep repeating to observe and analyse the whole picture with a holistic approach, but leaving for a moment the origin and supposed deadliness of the virus out of the equation.

I call it psychological warfare because by means of this constant brainwashing the ruling elite keeps us in a cage and verbally fighting one against the other, under the pretext of the virus (which reproduces the classic them/us, bad/good, right/left dichotomies, in this case natural event/bacteriological weapon or, if you are in geopolitics, NATO/SCO), while the puppeteers use their puppets that are “in charge” for governing us to impose a totally unacceptable and unprecedented situation.

Mind you: not for the plague, smallpox, leprosy, world war, a nuclear explosion, aliens (!!!), but for one of the about 40 species of Coronaviridae, with a clear pattern when it comes to the case fatality rate, which is strongly linked to the characteristics of the infected (whether they are old and/or sick) while the mortality rate is even lower (as shown by the case of China up to now).

On top of that, everybody is asking for a vaccine, even if there is little or no doubt that it might prove completely worthless (because viruses keep on mutating, as you can read in whatever official source of your choice).

Isn’t it enough?

6. Why Lombardy?

A lot of people started linking the spread of Covid-19 with the rollout of 5G in Wuhan. I wouldn't go so far as to hypothesize a direct causality.

None the less, even almost 10 years ago, in a press release from 2011, the World Health Organization / International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans.

The mentioned research referred only to the damage of cellphones, at best with the 3G technology (4G was massively deployed only from 2011 onwards): as we are running faster towards the new generation (the 5G itself 5), the link between the damages to the immune system deriving from the continuous exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and the occurrence of contracting diseases should be clear to everyone. Of course, all the sycophants of Big Pharma and also the pro-technology lobbies will keep on denying it, but as usual time will tell.

It sounds like a very strange coincidence, but guess where both the Italian company TIM and the well-known Vodafone started the rollout of 5G in Italy? Yes, ladies and gentlemen: Milan (described by Vodafone as the European capital of 5G in the above linked article) and the whole region of Lombardy!

Moreover, and again not hypothesizing a direct causality, guess where is the epicentre in Lombardy? The cities and provinces of Bergamo and Brescia.

What happened there just before the spread of Covid-19, besides the fact that they were graced with this amazing new technology? Well, in those provinces public institutions took care of a mass vaccination against meningitis (they even wanted to clearly highlight that it was for free for those up to 60).

Without articulating the matter with too much depth, let’s keep on using some old-age common sense (or maybe 50 studies?) and realize that even kids (ahem, especially them) know that vaccines have some disturbing side effects when it comes to the immune system.

On top of that, guess what is one the worst and THE largest geographical area in Europe impacted by pollution due to PM 2.5, which causes very well known and documented respiratory diseases? Lombardy (and all the other heavily industrialized parts of Northern Italy, which are showing the highest number of cases)!

Have a look at this official publication by the European Environment Agency and scroll the page for this emblematic figure (pay special attention to the red level). This latter evidence alone would suffice to understand why the virus hit so hard those areas.

All this considered, what do you think about the circumstance of having these high levels of different forms of pollution AND the hotbed of Covid-19 in the same places? I keep on asking myself questions.

7. Positive aspects VS dystopian scenarios

Taking out of the account the incredible restriction of freedom and the nightmarish mass profiling, nobody could underestimate how good is for the environment to temporarily halt all the man-made pollution on such a large scale, and this is something we all should be happy for.

A lot of people are forced to rediscover their family ties, which is surely a great thing.

Moreover, hundreds of thousands are getting used to remote working (which was sort of a taboo topic in Italy until a couple of months ago): this may lead to good opportunities to achieve a better work/life balance, especially for mothers of young kids or for those who can’t afford a caretaker for the elders or any sick member of their families.

Some behavioral changes might be for the good, and we can only be hoping (especially if we are let free to choose, of course) that those traits will stay when the emergency ends.

None the less, there are some heavily dark clouds on the horizon. Are you ready for the dystopian scenarios?

Well, I am sorry: I won’t be your Charon.

As clarified in the disclaimer, I don’t want to get trapped in the counterproductive dichotomy conspiracy theorist/debunker. I am just trying to use my brain and analyse the potential outcomes of the course of actions led by an official narrative which makes no sense (as shown before and as it should be already clear to you, once you start asking questions).

Apologies, but I can’t stop myself from repeating that the keys here are common sense and rationality.

I won’t describe anything in detail, just check for yourself the Real ID project, the ID20206 Alliance, the role of GAVI in setting agendas and shaping policies, especially when it comes to their dream of mandatory vaccines, traceable with a very nice and tiny new system.

Of course, we all hope that no dystopia is going to come true (it really depends on whether we create or not a critical mass of critical thinkers, in my humble opinion) and that one day soon we will all wake up from this nightmare and go back to our “normal” lives: if it’s the contrary, though, please do not say that nobody alerted you!

All the best, my friends!

Sincerely,

Raffaele Amelio

1 Here is a story about another one of our favorite top-10 billionaires, who recently made some additional profits by a stroke of luck (NOT due to insider trading, of course).

2 One easy example to see how they want to make it seem “inevitable”: http://www.ansa.it/amp/sito/notizie/cronaca/2020/03/23/coronavirus-cambia-moduo-autocertificazione.-arrivano-i-droni-per-i-controlli_b6fa411d-89ac-46db-b247 -148735e6eab6.html

First part of the title: The paper form (to fill and sign and show to the cops in order to justify why you are out of your cage) is changed. Second part of the title: Drones arrive for patrolling. A nice way to communicate it, right?

3 When it comes to the Spanish flu, what a strange case of coincidence (or is it what someone calls “predictive programming”?) one can find in this article on USA Today from December 2019!

4 In another article of the Italian news agency Ansa, referring to a previous study by ISS with less cases (355, on the 17th of March), you can read the following excerpt (translated from the original Italian): «Only 0.8% of the victims had no other pathologies - says Bernabei - while 25% had one, another 25% two and 48% three. And only 10% were under 60 years old. They are the results of an ISS study on 355 medical records of the first victims of the coronavirus. "The fact that photographs the reality well - says the member of the technical scientific committee - is that the real risk factor is that of having a geriatric age and concomitant pathologies, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, diabetes above all, which find fertile ground. This is what explains the excess mortality»

5 The 5G has a peak data rate up to 10 times faster and a connection density per km² up to 1000 times higher than 4G, with a very short reach. In other words, more cells are required and they need to be placed closer to each other than the cells used to support the previous generations. On top of this, think about the fact that the number of connected devices is destined to grow exponentially, with hundreds of millions of smart “things” (in the “magic” world of IoT) just waiting for us to be used by them ;-)

6 https://www.biometricupdate.com/201909/id2020-and-partners-launch-program-to-provide-digital-id-with-vaccines

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Terran Imperial Republic (Black/Gold) A fusion of Democratic Republic and Theocratic Absolute Monarchy The Emperor holds absolute power and authority over all of Humanity on Terra, yet remains the many varying Nations of the Earth have near full autonomy, acting on their own accords and govern themselves, sending tribute in one way or another to the Emperor and the Imperial family, along with representatives to the Imperial Senate to voice their concerns to him and his cabinet, and finally sending 1/10th of their military to swear loyalty and fealty to the Emperor and the Emperor alone This fusion of governments emerged after multiple world wars, and global civil wars, and near total failure of the United Nations to keep the peace The purpose of this Empire, is to safeguard Humanity as a whole, and ensure that no ethnic group or culture overwhelms or controls another, preserving individual freedoms as well as Spiritual beliefs, and Ethnic identities and languages, and free from danger of eradication or external influence until Humanity is ever able to leave the Earth and form colonies for each individual culture, and allowing each said culture to evolve over time along its own accord freely. For this reason, the Emporer and his military control the totality of Nuclear materials and weapons on the planet. Should the Imperial Family ever be removed from power through violent force, the world would be bathed in nuclear fire, extinguishing all life more complex than a roach from the world, ensuring that no coalition of powers on Earth could ever rise to challange the Imperitor and his regime. Any Nation that violated this law would be subject to harsh punishments, and strict restrictions on trade, and even loss of territory. This ensured a stable world, with the Empire acting as an overseer. The Empire was also formed to prevent Plutocracies from forming, and to stop corporations from gaining any power or influence over the populations and governments. However, this much power in the hands of one man meant a great deal of danger to Humanity. As a means of balance, the candidates for the Imperial cabinet are selected by Democratic vote. Each country then sends forth their potential candidates and the Emporer then chooses his members. To further ensure each culture moves for its own interests and beliefs, a Nobility was reesablished followed by Monarchs and High Monarchs, all with a strong sense of Spiritualism. Each culture and Nation was ordered to select a group of Men and Women based on their actions, and to choose by vote who represented their people's cultural religious ideals and beliefs. These people became the first Democratically elected Nobles, the Paragons and Guardians of their Culture and way of life. To protect and serve their people, and to ensure that each aspect of Mankind would remain distinct yet in line with the rest of the species. Afterwords, the Monarchs were then chosen and elected by the New Noble Families. The new Kings and Queens, then chose to elect the High Kings and Queens. While the Nobility and Monarchs have great power, they function similarly to the Emporer, and rule with a very light hand, only intervening when needed, serving as a hard counter balance to elected officials. Effective administration is done through the peoples chosen forms of government, usually a Federal Republic. Although wars are far from being eradicated, they have been minimized and relegated to glorified ritual combat. Most military actions are done under the saction of the Imperial Government, usually under the consent of all parties involved and performed in predetermined locations, with the rewards of said wars also being predetermined and agreed upon. This supervised warfare has lead to resolutions of conflicts with minimal damage to the local infrustructure and enviorment and population. Mankind has never been so civil in slaughter of one another since the days of Feudal Europe.

Martian Empire (Red/Silver/Gold) A collection of 3 seperate species, the Martian Empire is composed of Majority Green Martians, the Warrior Reds, and the leader Blacks The Reds are four armed, four eyed apex predators on the planet, full of muscle and hight. In the early years of the Martian civilization, they were the rules of the species, ruling through using their strength to overpower their opponents, and controlled the much smaller Green Martians, whom they relied upon for food. Eventually, the Greens had overtaken the Reds, and managed to supplant them beneath their foot for a few mellenia, until the Blacks rose to power. While the physichally the strongest, one would be foolish to think they lack intellegence. They are however, blunt and prefer getting straight to the point, and dislike talking too much, giving the impression they arent overly bright. Aside from their massive size, body parts, skin color and loud personalities, they are unique among Martians for being one of the few species on the planet that do not perform any photosythesis, and must eat externally generated food like many other species in the universe. Red Martians live in Tribes, usually ansewering to a Male Chieftain and are semi-nomadic, something that has remained so even in the Martian underworld. Males and Females are easily distinguished, as most males are taller, have tusks and horns growing out of their heads and even chests, are slighty taller than females, while females generally have hair (usually black), though its not uncommon for either gender to have both or neither of these. A Red Martian with a frill or a mohawk isnt all that uncommon of a sight. They are also one of the few speceies capable enough to wander on the surface for a time without equipment, and are used as Elite Troops and hard laborers. A Martian Dynastic War is often determined by who has the most Red Martian Fighters. The Green Martians, unlike their Red counterparts, are approximately the size of Humans, though a bit shorter. Obviously, they have green skin, usually have red hair, though there are other colors and are by far the most numerous of the three species of Mars. This is due to their unique hybrid biology that allows them to utilize Star Rays via photosythesis while also having a traditonol digestive system, greatly reducing the need for aquiring and storing food. Aside from this biology, they seem almost the same as Humans in nearly all other aspects. The Blacks make up the smallest portion of the Martian peoples, and form the primary leadership of the Martian Empire, with Females taking on the roles of heads of state, and males being predominantely the military commander, advisors and Priests. Their biology is unique, while they do have mouths, and a sort of nose, they are covered in a membrance. This is because they absorb all their nutrition via osmosis through the skin, which is why they bath often in special nutrient rich waters. This is one of the main reasons why Black Martian dress so often skimpily when relaxing, in Martian culture, when a guest is in the house, it is customary for the family to bathe with their guest as a sign of welcome. Their other feature that sets them apart from other Martians is their innate Psionic abilities. They speak via their abilities, so controled they are, they can vibrate the air around them, sending out sound that others can hear, but can also change their "voices" to sound as they please, though most choose one voice and stimply stick with it throughout their lives. They can also communicate directly with another beings by transmitting their thoughts into anothers mind, creating a private conversation, though if another being with similar abilities is nearby, they can intercept and hear any thoughts by concentrating and listening in. The Martian Empire is far older than Human civilization, by many thousands of years, and were a space faring species by 10,000 BC However, their planet Mars, was undergoing a massive change in climate, and due to this, forced their species to retreat into the stars to find a new home. Due to not having developed a means of achieving light speed travel, an attempt to colonize Terra was made, but due to diseases and plague, most colonists were wiped out, forcing the Martians to abandon the attempt. Few however, remained alive, and brought with them civilazation, uniting various Human Tribes under them into what would later be known as Egypt, and would be later canonized as Gods. However, despite their long lives, the Martian survivors would perish from old age, leaving a great legacy on Earth, causing a jumpstart to Human civilizations. After the failure of colonization, the Martian peoples did not give, and instead, undertook a massive civilazationol project, the Great Tomb Underworld. A massive network of city sized super bunkers and tunnels were built throughout the planets crust. By 3000 BC, the surface of Mars became unihabitable, and by 1000 AD most of is various lifeforms and cities had long decayed into dust and nothingness after relentless beatings from great sandstorms. The only place one could find life was underground, and in the vast tunnel networks, a new ecosystem had evolved, and the Martians adapted well. The great Tomb Underworld houses thousands of farms, industrial centers, great forest gardens, bustling cities, menageries, zoo's, Temple's, and Magnificent Palaces. The Martian people are organized into Nation States called Dynasties, usually lead by a Black Martian Royal Family Each Dynasty has its own distinct sub-culture many with their own customs and dialects. The Dynasties are aligned with primary factions, the New Queendom, and the Old Queendom. All Martian Royals claims decent from a single being, the White Martian King, who is consider a God amongst the people of Mars, and is actually technichally the only genuine male. Supposedly he had taken a wife, who bore him twin Black Martian hermaphrodite daughters "of perfect beauty", who saw eachother being so beautiful, that they fell in love with one another and in turn, married eachother and bore many of their own children together via mutual incest. Thus was born the many Dynasties of the Martians. The Empire's many Princesses are each considered a living Goddess among their people, as they are believed to be Avatars of their Gods, each one baring the name of one of their Gods, which is given to them upon reaching adulthood based on their personalities and/or achievements. The New and Old Queendoms are the two main factions that are split on ideals and beliefs. The Old Queendom represents Traditions, and holds to them fiercely, and holds the majority of power, while the New Queendom is the much more forward thinking and more opted to change, and is also more warlike and aggressive. There is also the Middle Queendom, which blends both, but holds little power, considering its mainly made of Green and Red Martians with only lesser Dynasties to back it, and is not overly respected by the Old or New Queendoms. The many Queens of the Martian Dynasties fight for control over the Holy Throne of the Gods, for whomever is chosen to rise to the Throne, shall hold absolute power over Mars and its people, as she will be God Empress of Mars, and rules in the stead of the White King.

The Rodenthian Collective (Brown/Gray) Mice, Rats, Squirels, Rabbits, Chipmunks, Beavers and Bats Rashk'kass'Shika, the vastly homeworld of thje Rodenthian collective. It is a world choked to the brim with overpopulated cities, few resources, and the cheapest commodity are the lives of its citizenry. The people of Rodenthia are a diverse arange of humanoid rodent species. Mice, Rats, Squirrels, Rabbits, Chipmunks, Beavers, Bats and many other comparable Earth-like evolved species can be found on the planet . Life on the planet is a smogged planet filled with massive cities, espeically along mountain ranges. Much of the planet is covered with structures, and the crust of the world is filled with a massive network of tunnels, factories, mushroom farms, livestock ranches, and living centers. Even under the oceans, there are whole cities filled with millions of people. The only places with any sort of open areas are a few mega farms, planations, and deserts. Great mountains and active volcanoes are locations of the densest populations centers known as Hive Cities. Massive structures, filled with Billions of individuals. The only reason such a city exists is due to the Geothermal power being generated, in addition to the solar, aero and coal power being surged through the city. Given the enourmous needs of such a massive population, the rodent people have become adept at recylcing and maximising everything. Nearly nothing is wasted. Every crumb is either eaten, or used for compost. Every roof and skyscraper is home to hundreds of solar panels, gardens, crop farms and wind turbines. And yet, this still is not enough. The Rodenthians are known for being incredibly prolific in multiplying and breeding and maturing. This coupled with few predators and deaths, has resulted in a never ending population explosion over centuries. Plaegues, natural disasters, starvations, wars have eruppted over the centuries, killing billions. This has barely affected the popultion, as the people are swift to replace any lost. The Rodenthian Collective is actually a series of Plutocratic Ologarchies, with Rats serving as the dominat force. Wealth is nearly all that matters to the higherarchy, as wealth is power and anything that does bring the leaders wealth, is deemed worthless, including the lives of their people. Many people live in, at best, slums. Most apartments are home to multiple families and are vastly overcrowded. Those that live in such apartments are considerded more fortunante, as they are considered relatively safe place to sleep and store belongings. Those that arent considered overly lucky are those that live in poverty, and the overwhelming majority of Rodenthians live in extreme poverty, and are homeless with very little chance of advancing in society. For them, life is short, cruel, and cold. Their number one daily concern is finding food and someplace relativly safe before nightfall. Most Plutocrats live in isolated megadomed cities, filled with green parks, great gardens, blue lakes, homely sub-urbs, advanced technology and even false celestial bodies to simulate night and day. These are however, the lower upper class. The Managers. The true leaders, the absolutey rich Uber Elite that control the planet and the many species as a whole, live in massive Palace Stations orbiting the planet. And some even live on colonies on far away worlds. The Plutocrats maintain power through fear and desperation of the populace. The desperation stems from the planets massive overpopulation, as there are so many people, but far too few jobs to employ everyone. Nearly half of the population is unemployed, while the other half is employed by the Plutocrats. The main jobs of lower ranked Rodenthians are usually some forms of factory workers or farming or maintence of tools and structures. The main form of pay for workers is usually food and a safe place to sleep, and very little else. The competition from remaining employed is usually all it takes to keep most of the population in line, as the fear of living amongst Tribal Gangs on the streets of Urban Hellhole is considered terrorfying. In order to protect their assest from the inevitable mobs and rioters however, the Plutocrats employ a massive Army composed mostly of the local population, usually the larger, slightly better fed and dumber members of the locals, who keep other locals in line in exchange for better food and accomidations. The Elite Guard of the Rodenthian Collective however, known as the "Blood Horde", is composed of genetically enhanced soldiers, who have been altered to be both superior in strength and speed, while also being far more loyal than any other creature in the Plutocrat Employment. These Brutally Savage Super Rodents protect the Plutocratic Elite from all threats. While they have far less intellegence, these bruttish hairy beasts are cunning enough to follow orders and formulate clever tactics to undermine any opponent. They are cheap enough and easy to make by the thousands. Within a few years, a Legion of 10,000, with Conscript Auxillia, is ready to be deployed. They are so useful, that, in addition to local Rodenthian conscripts, they are hired out as Auxillia Mercenaries for other species, and due to their reasonable prices and suicidal tenacity, they find themselves employed often. These Devolved Rodents however, are merely apart of the strong arm for the Plutocrats. Fear of raids and invasions, and alien born plague keeps the population in check, as the Plutocrats, through their clever use of propganda and secret backroom deals, have made effective use of their "Enemies". Sooner, or later, usually sooner, the population of the Rodenthian Homeworld of Rashk'kass'Shika will become far too dense to remain stable, and eventually, the people of the world will rebel against their overly rich overlords, and will have to be 'quelled'. However, this would cost the Plutocrats time and resources, something they simply arent willing to sacrafice. However, clever as they are, they allow other species to do this for them, by letting Aliens such the Catarans and Canites to raid the planet every few years, and even invade every few decades to cull the planet. "Mowing the lawn" a few Rodenthian Nobles call it. Because the Plutocrats have a monopoly on the planets wealth and power, they also have a monopoly on entertainment, distribution of information, advanced weaponry and movement, they can tell the population whatever they want, and because of how cheap life can be, they can even show they 'try'. Therefore, they can simply put up a feigned fight, and after a few months of culling, they swoop in and save the world as benevolent overlords, showing the Rodenthian people they are truly valiant and needed to ensure the survial of their Collective. This relationship with Aliens, in addition to a few tactical controled Virus bombings has kept the Plutocrats in power for centuries. The aliens often do this as part of their "field training" and heritage, and these raids and invasion are usually their final test before considered ready for a true battle. They also recieve trophies in the process, such as pelts, skulls, bones, and slaves. Slavery is one of the chief exports of the Rodenthian Collective, and is the most common form of punishment for all criminals, and are sold by the hundreds to the highest alien bidders, though not all who are bought are used as slaves. Meat is another other chief export of the Rodenthian Collective, after all. In spite of all this ammorality, one would be mistaken to believe there isnt any resistance from within for the status quo, something the Plutocrats would like all to believe. There exists a number of migrant flotilla fleet that operate outside of Rodenthian law. A number of centuries ago, a number of trade ships broke off from their lanes, and never returned, forming a Rebellion against the Plutocracy, and fight for the freedom and advancement of the Rodenthian people's as a whole. However, their numbers are few, and their vessels are often scavanged and jury rigged together, and are in need of constant repair and maintenece. Given their biology, their need to breed and rapid maturation rate, combined with perpetually strained resources, most Rebels live in segregated fleets, whole flotilla's are composed of only 1 gender to keep the population in check, and to ensure the Great Nomad Fleets will never be overtaken in any given conflict. Given their situation, they are a desperate people, with very little chance of actually taking down their nemesis, the Plutocrats, and as such, are looking for dedicated allies and technology to back them in their war. Since they need both resources and work, they often sell themselves out as Freelancers, Mercenary Corps, Engineers, and Laborers to the highest bidders, taking weapons, armor, vehicles, ships and other munitions as payment.

The Simat Consortium (Orange/White)

Hailing from the world of Jun-Wei, the Simats are a collection of Ape and Monkey like beings formed into Trupes. Their cultured, structured and organized society has allowed their species to merge together in coalition. Each Simat city is ruled by a dominate Simat family group. Each city is contributing to a greater Nation under the control of an overarching Simat Clan. Burly Semi-Nomadic Appots serve as the dominate Sub-Species, serving as leaders. While the smaller and slimmer tailed Sim-Ahns serve as the subserveant works and form the backbone of Simate work force and armies. While many outsiders would consider this to be demeaning, or even outright slavery, the people of Simat consider this to be the natural order of things, as they believe each Simat has a natural role to fill, and as such, all are considered equal in their own ways. Appots will migrate across different cities every season while Sim-Ahns, usually loyal to the given Appot family, will stay in the City to maintain it. While there is a Nobility, and it is partially based in bloodlines, Nobles are determined more by philosophy and arguments, rather than simple birth. Indeed, bloodlines are sometimes considered a negative aspect of their society by those who inheret Nobility, for if a Simat's parents are considered Noble, then they are expected to be every bit as Noble themselves. Or if a Simats parents are considered Wicked, they will be expected to be wicked themselves. In Simat society, the reason for a deed is considered more important than the effects of the deed commited. If one can prove ones intentions were good and Noble, ones heinous actions and Evil actions may be forgiven. If a Simat steals food, and says he did it because he was hungry, then he is forgiven. However, one would be foolish to think Simats take everything at face value. In Simat society, reputation is of massive importance, while most societies take this into serious account, much of Simat society is built around it. Reputations often leads to predispositions of others, thus everyone treats all strangers with notable suspicion until they are sufficiently known on a personal basis. Therefore, if one gains a reputation, its hard to shake off, espeically given how social Simats are. While they are not unwilling to speak or deal with those that have less than savory character, they arent as likely to cooperate either. Simat societal leadership is based predominantly around personal merit. If one can argue as to why they would make an effective leader, they likely will be leader. Philosopher's are often considered the spiritual leaders of the Simat people's and are often called the Philosopher Kings, although they hold no real legal power, they are seen as being highly influencial. The Simats have a unique technology based around using wood. They grow special gigantic trees and through a secret treatment, the wood becomes harder than steel. Yet the more incredible aspect of this material, is the fact it can be repaired rather quickly by soaking it in a special solution. The Simats use this material for much of their armor and weapons, and even some of their ships and vehicles, though this is prohibitvly expsensive, and are only made in small numbers.

The Saurian Chiefdoms (Aqua/Blue/Yellow)

Sauria, a world of jungles, grass plains, vast oceans, numerous forests and volcanic ash wastes is home to the diverse warm blooded Saurians Split between 5 contienent, and divided into 2 rival overarching civilazations, divided into Nations, divided into Tribes The first civilazation, the Tyransaurs, are a predominantely a primitive war oriented peoples, as their dietary needs are great, and their society is largely unable to feed itself, with only herds of livestock being kept by a few to produce food and goods. While the second civilzation, the dominantly herbivore Herds, the Agransaurs peoples, are much more advanced in terms of culture and technology, and are far more peaceful, though still more than willing to engange in warfare. While the two civilazations attempt to dominate eachother, they both have largely been unsucessful. The technological superiority of the Agrans has kept the Tyrans from conquering them, and the Adaptive war oriented Tyrans have kept the Agrans attempts at pacifying the Tyrans from being sucessful. Saurian technology is primarialy stonebased, which is remarkably tough and effective for both construction and advanced combat. It is unclear how Saurian's make such materials, but given its resistance to heat, damage, and ease of repair, it has been a boon to the Saurian people in its rise in the great Void that is Space. Sharing the same Star System with the Rezan Union, they were the first species to encounter eachother. The Repzan leadership, in their foolish benevolence, looked upon the waring species in pity, and uplifted them in hopes of adding another member to their great union in an attempt to quell their warring ways. They succeded, at first, but within a decade of achieving of the building their own ship designs, the Saurians descended into conflict, and began to attack their Uplifters, the Rezan. The Saurians have devolved back to their old ways, now warring on a greater scale, and while contained mainly to their home system, are engaging other species in raids and skirmishes and mercenary work.

The Rezan Union (Red/Blue/Orange/Violet)

Hailing from the humid swamps and dry deserts and wet jungles of the world of Kerrep, the Repzan Union is a collection of various Reptillian and Amphibian species 5 primary species make up the worlds Nations, the Turtle like Testudan The Salendo Frogs/Toads Urod Salamanders The Suchet Crocs/Gators Ophidites Snakes

The Kataran Despots (Red/Yellow/Gold/Blue) Katraos, homeworld of the Kartaran people. It is a diverse sphere of red deserts, colorful seas, dim jungles filled with glowing flora, and vast open grasslands Spread across 3 major contienets, the people of Katraos are a cunning, diverse, and proud cat like species, and are so divided among 3 dominant factions, which are in turn divided into National Clans known as Prides. The Jaguars of the West, the Tigers of the East, and the Lions of the North, South and Center And each swears loyalty to the Council of Queens and the Kataran Emporer, who is elected by the Council of Queens. The Council of Queens are the both the Emporer's Harem and are the primary ruling political body of the Kataran Empire, and the Emporer is more of a poiltical figure head outside of war, whose primary function, is to lead armies in war and battle, and ensure the warring Prides do not overpower eachother or cause too much damage to eachother or their planets. Kataran society is Matriartichal, with the females doing the majority of administration work, while males perform most of the labor and combat duties. Kataran society is split by culture into 2 groups, Purebreds, who appear and act as far more beastial and Mongrels, who look cosiderably more Human. While there is some variation, most of their society is dominated by Purebred nobility, who act as the Nobles and leaders of any given Pride. Kataran Culture values the individual and their deeds. In fact, this is how a Kataran Emporer is chosen after the previous one is dead, usually slain by his sucessor. Personal merit is generally how one advances in society, though Purebreds must do more to advance, as they are already in high positions. Given this nature of Kataran society, they are always ready for war, and eager for battle and a chance to advance in their society.

The Canite Clans (Red/Brown/Black) Dogs, Wolves, Foxes and Bears Hailing from a cool temperate world, the Canites are a predominantly dog like species Nation.

The Avinian Hedgemony (Rainbow/Varies) Birds dominated by appearences, beauty and culture The homeworld of the Avianians is a series of lush yet dark forests and tropical marshlands, with a few deserts, warm arid shrublands, tall mountains and moderate icecaps with broad oceans. The planet has many contienents, all of which are connected in a network of natural landbridges, resulting a series of inland seas pocketing across the world. Approximatly 60% of the planet is covered in water, given the planet is realativly close to the sun, its rains often. The Avinians are split into 5 ruling factions, each filled with a diverse arrange of inhabitants and sub-species. The Penguin-like Spheni of the Icecaps, whose main trade export is fish and arctic crops they farm The Predatory Acciitii, a carniverous and territorial isolationist people, who dwell in mountains and are almost entirely carnivorous. The Anatidae, a Duck-like people who are easily insulted, and highly combative, usually living on the few isolated island continents The Tribal Struthio, a primitive race of large, fast running desert dwellers

The Mechan's (Aqua/White/Chrome/Silver) Sentient Machines created by Humanity and exiled into space on friendly terms

The Plauna Kritarchy Plants and Mushroom people

The Kwat'Jah Tribes Evolved Reptilian Hunters (Predator Yaut'Ja)

The Urkon Empire

The Artron'O'Thix Hives Insects

#star void

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mastcomm · 4 years

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Iran’s Stacked Election Is Expected to Produce a Hard-Line Parliament

When Iranians go to the polls on Friday they will be taking part in what may be the least representative and least fair election in the Islamic Republic’s history.

While Iran’s parliamentary elections have never been free and democratic, Iran’s clerical leadership disqualified more than 7,000 candidates from running this year, including most of the moderates and centrists, paving the way for tougher domestic and foreign policies.

At a time when Iran is navigating extraordinary challenges at home and abroad — from the possibility of conflict with the United States to crippling economic sanctions and a restive population — Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appears to have concluded that the best way to manage the turmoil is to squelch dissenting voices and assure a Parliament that would rubber-stamp conservative policies.

“The next Parliament will be completely obedient to Khamenei, more radical in their approach, and the little voices of dissent we hear on different issues will be silenced,” said Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, an independent Iran analyst based in New York.

About three-quarters of the current members of Parliament, where moderates and centrists make up a near majority, were barred from seeking re-election.

The new Parliament is expected to embrace a hard line against the United States and would be unlikely to support efforts to negotiate a new nuclear agreement or respond positively to American demands like ending support for proxy militias and allies across the Middle East.

To the contrary, analysts expect Iran to beef up ties with proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and militias in Iraq and Syria.

Many conservative candidates adopted the slogan “I am Qassim Suleimani,” a reference to the Iranian military leader who oversaw Iran’s regional proxies and who was killed by an American airstrike last month. These candidates pledged to pursue harsh revenge against the United States for the killing.

The heightened antipathy toward the United States may be at least partly the result of Trump administration policies. President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who staked his career on the nuclear agreement with the United States and European powers, was kneecapped when President Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2016.

Mr. Rouhani and moderate lawmakers — who hold 122 seats in the current 290-member Parliament — had bet that the lifting of economic sanctions in exchange for accepting limits on Iran’s nuclear program would end Iran’s economic isolation and bring foreign investment and prosperity.

Instead, the United States tightened sanctions in 2018, which have damaged the economy, cratered oil exports and brought hardship to many. Soaring gas prices set off mass antigovernment protests in November, which the government put down with violence, killing hundreds of protesters.

The Rouhani program, in the eyes of many Iranians, failed to deliver.

One priority for the new Parliament will be to curtail the policies of Mr. Rouhani and his administration for his remaining time in office, until spring 2022. Mr. Rouhani and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, widely disliked by conservatives as too pro-Western, are likely to face obstacles at every turn.

The conservatives are pushing a program of economic resistance, an effort to make Iran more self-reliant, less dependent on global markets and trade, and closer to Russia and China.

Ayatollah Khamenei has final say on these policies, but Parliament has the ability to shape, defend or criticize them.

The current Parliament advocated Iran remaining committed to the nuclear deal with world powers, to engage in diplomacy rather than confrontation, and to sign an international agreement against money laundering. All of those policies are at risk.

In Washington, the Trump administration said Thursday that it was freezing the assets of five Iranian election officials over the mass disqualifications.

“Unfortunately for the Iranian people, the real election took place in secret long before any ballots were even cast,” Brian Hook, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran policy, told reporters.

Iranians “know that tomorrow’s election is political theater,” he said. “It is a republic in name only when the government disqualifies half of the candidates running for office.”

The five sanctioned officials were members of the Guardian Council, a panel that vets political candidates and wields oversight of Parliament.

Turnout in the election is expected to be at all time low in the capital, Tehran, and other big cities. Many ordinary Iranians, prominent activists and moderate politicians plan to boycott.

“This is an engineered selection, not an election, so I am not voting,” said Mostafa Tajzadeh, a prominent moderate politician and former acting interior minister. “This level of disqualifications is unprecedented and very alarming.”

Some Iranians said they had lost hope in the idea of changing Iran through the ballot box.

“I’m not voting because my vote doesn’t count,” said Roya, a 41-year-old business owner in Tehran, who asked not to use her last name. “They don’t listen to our demands and only want use our votes to show they have popular support.”

Ali Gholizadeh, a 34-year-old political activist from Mashhad and a university lecturer, said he and his family are not opponents of the clerical leadership but still they would not vote on Friday.

“I care about national security, I care about my country but I can’t stand how they have such total disrespect of the public,” he said in a telephone interview. “These are sham elections. Nobody was allowed to run except their own people.”

Another potential deterrent for turnout was the news of a coronavirus outbreak in the city of Qum, a Shiite religious center that has a constant flow of pilgrims going in and out of the city. Two people have died in Qum from the virus and five more were reported infected on Thursday.

Health officials in Qum warned people to stay away from public spaces, raising alarm about the safety of tightly packed polling stations and a requirement that voters stamp their fingers in a public ink well.

Qum’s governor said Thursday that elections would be held as planned and voters should bring their own pens to mark their ballots. He said polling stations would be equipped with masks and disinfectants.

On social media, ardent supporters of the Islamic Republic tweeted that the coronavirus would not deter them from their civic duty. Some suggested that foreign powers like the United States may have had a hand in spreading it to keep people from voting.

“Coronavirus is such a smart virus! It showed up in Iran just a day before elections,” tweeted Ali Akbar Raefipour, a hard-line conservative commentator. “The U.S. is stooping so low and its local stooges are trying so hard.”

Supporters of the disqualifications defended them, saying the ousted candidates were not fit to run, either because they were corrupt or disloyal to Ayatollah Khamenei and the Islamic revolution.

“There are enough reformist candidates on the ballot,” Foad Izadi, a conservative political analyst, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “The new Parliament will be stronger and more united with a better oversight role. They will use all the tools they have to keep Rouhani’s ministers in line.”

Voters will have a choice among various shades of conservatives: a new generation of zealot technocrats; religious and anti-corruption hard-liners; or members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the military.

In Tehran, for example, 134 conservatives are running against 28 moderate candidates for 30 seats. Only one well-known moderate politician is running. In the city of Mashhad, not a single reformist or centrist candidate is on the ballot.

And for the first time, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, could become the next speaker of Parliament. Mr. Ghalibaf, a former Tehran mayor and chief of police, is the lead conservative candidate in Tehran.

Lara Jakes contributed reporting from Washington.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Ireland: From Conservative Stronghold to Left-wing Globalism

Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain and its later conflict in the north of the Island dominated its history in the 20th century, a chapter which finally came to a close with the Good Friday agreement. You would think that a Catholic, heavily conservative and homogeneous island would be able to resist the forces of mass immigration and globalization, but this has not been the case.

The cracks began to show in the 1990s when the true scale of Catholic sexual abuse and illegal adoptions began to leak into the media. This largely centered around the ‘Magdalene laundries’, where unmarried, pregnant mothers were taken from society and kept in isolation. They would give birth to their children, who were then either given up for adoption abroad (often in America) or murdered, whilst the mothers remained in the homes, where they were forced to do manual work because of their ‘shame’ and ‘fallen’ status.

The uncovering of such widespread abuse shook Ireland in the 1990s, and the Catholic Church’s standing in the country, which had been unassailable since the early medieval period, began to falter. This was the perfect opportunity for the left to pounce and seize the initiative – which they did to great effect. A referendum on the legalization of gay marriage was held in 2015, and the mainstream media along with all major political parties supported a yes vote, something which would have been unthinkable just 20 years before. So gay marriage became legalized, and then the next nail in the coffin of conservative Ireland was hammered – the legalization of abortion. George Soros and many other globalists were in favor of repealing the 8th amendment, and in the end, they got their way. A referendum was held in 2018, and abortion is now legal in the country.

Nothing symbolizes Ireland’s social and political transformation more than its current Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who is a mixed race homosexual. He came to office in 2017 and is a very strong supporter of globalism and mass immigration. He is the man largely responsible for Ireland’s Project Ireland 2040, a scheme which will see 1 million immigrants move to the country in the next few decades. This plan is not just promoted and coordinated by the government, but also by the mainstream media as well. Dublin estimates that the plan will cost £116 billion, a staggering amount when you consider the population is currently just 4.7 million.

This plan, along with other policies, is really of little surprise when considering Ireland’s primary role in the European Union. A country which fought a bloody war of independence with the British Empire was more than happy to become a vassal state just a few decades later with the promise of investment from wealthier members (like old foe Britain ironically). Although Ireland’s economy has mostly done very well in the last 20 years, it suffered greatly in the crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession, a fact which showed it had become tied to international finance.

The effects of globalization on the Emerald Isle are now very clear for all to see. Like Australian cities such as Melbourne, Dublin is suffering a crime wave caused by African gangs, who are terrorizing suburban neighborhoods with drugs, rape, and burglaries. Political correctness has meant the media and government overlooking and ignoring such problems, which means they will only get worse. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what will happen when the 1 million migrants from Project Ireland 2040 settle in Ireland, judging by the behavior of those who have already arrived.

Sinn Fein, much like the SNP in Scotland, is a so-called nationalist party which has embraced mass immigration and liberal policies. The sight of Gerry Adams cheering the legalization of gay marriage back in 2015 only confirmed this and leaves any resistance to the globalist onslaught in doubt. There are the beginnings of a pushback by Ireland’s younger generation in some areas but is still too small to have any effect. As with most western countries that have experienced mass immigration, it seems that things will have to get worse before any fightback begins. Ireland is still overwhelmingly white, despite the efforts of Peter Sutherland and George Soros, and you can be in no doubt the latter will accelerate his campaigns in the years to come.

The Irish have turned away from the Catholic Church, and so in the future, a new institution will have to arise to support a conservative, right-wing restoration in the country. It is fair to say that Ireland has been spared the worst problems that immigration has brought to bigger economies like Britain and Germany, but it is only a matter of time before that changes. The Irish are quite frankly very naïve about their demographics, something which needs to change because the globalists have this island in their sights and have already altered this nation significantly in a short period of time.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2Pxj4Yt via IFTTT

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nebris · 6 years

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“Apéritif á La Tour Rouge”

Author's Note: I wrote this about five years ago, one of my earliest Sisterhood short stories. I don't repost it much because it's long on Info Dump and short on 'story', which is one of the pitfalls of Ideologically Driven Fiction. That said however, it does give a clean view of how I hope The Sisterhood unfolds, tho I am realistic enough to know it'll probably won't look like this.

~Miki Nemmera sat in a secure private lounge of Le Tour Rouge, sipped her Passito, looked out upon the Parisian skyline. In the distance, the lights of the newly refurbished Eiffel Tower had just come on, bright against the Autumn dusk. Le Tour Rouge a was the premier diplomatic watering hole in Paris, the new headquarters city of the United Nations. New York was still a shambles and too vulnerable to storms, so the European Union proposed Paris, with the entire Île-de-France as a UN Protected Zone. This choice was to make up for Berlin becoming the EU capital itself, a deal that was brokered by the Union of Matrilineal Republics. Miki Nemmera kept track of such things, being First Vice-Minister of External Affairs of the UMR. And most did call her Miki, her given name, Mictecacihuatl – an Aztec vampire Moon Goddess – being far too difficult for most to pronounce. Le Tour Rouge was an elongated plasteen pyramid perched upon the butte Montmartre, its particular variety of the space manufactured material refracting through the red spectrum, which cause it to shine like a vast ruby during the day, but be a reflective jet black after dark. At its base was a ring of flagpoles flying those of the UN's members. The oldest, after the UN's sky blue and white globe flag, was the deep blue EU banner with its ring of yellow stars. Both predated the Age of Storms. The others were newer. The Union of Matrilineal Republics' was a field of twilight blue – symbolizing a New Dawn – with a narrow red band at the bottom – paying homage to the old California state flag, the original home of The Sisterhood – and an eight pointed red star imposed upon a white wreath in the upper left canton – indicative of The Sisterhood's expansion out onto the world and beyond. Some called that The Flag of The Sisterhood, but while the UMR was functionally also The Sisterhood, its flag was not. The Sisterhood's flag was a solid black – symbolizing the infinite nature of the universe – while in the upper left canton was a white Pentagram – symbol of Witches – with a red V superimposed upon it – representing The Sisterhood's Five Precepts – both inside a white wreath – representing union and triumph. But that was a 'religious' flag and The Sisterhood was wise enough to keep their Politics and their Religion separate, at least outside of their own borders. The African Federation's flag had a black silhouette of the continent, at its center a large yellow wreath with a crossed yellow spear and spade, imposed upon a field of red and green divided horizontally. The Siberian Confederacy's flag was three simple horizontal bands of red, green, and brown of equal width. There were a few dozen more, but those four, Europe, Africa, Siberia, and The UMR, were the 'major players' on the world stage at the moment. And here in Paris is where they played Politics. Miki poured herself some more Passito, an act that would shock some of The Sisterhood's opponents. Many of them believed no Sister would ever perform any type of 'menial task', but would instead have some Servitor do it for her. She laughed softly at the thought. She'd countered that argument a number of times. “When I was a little girl,” she'd say, “I made my own bed and cleaned my own room,” both true statements and also true for any Sister who grew up in one of The Cults. Occasionally, she'd bring up Universal Service, but that tended to scare people and remind them that The Sisterhood was not simply a Matriarchy, but also an Amazon society, so she usually did not mention that up unless she wished to intimidate. Universal Service was the UMR's final Citizenship Ritual, requiring every Sister to provide a contiguous thirty months service in one of Earth Force's three branches – Ground, Sea, and Sky Force – some time between their twentieth and thirtieth birthdays. And then be part of the Ready Reserve essentially for the rest of their lives. Earth Force was one of the two major components of the Ministry of Force, the other being Space Force. The Ministry, which was generally known as MoF [said Em-Oh-Ef], was actually a paramilitary department and really used very little 'force' at all. Though Ground, Sea, and Sky Force were somewhat analogous to a army, navy, and air force, the majority of their operations were effectively civil in nature, infrastructure projects, search and rescue, peacekeeping, etc. For example, the vast archeologies where non-citizens resided were constructed by the Ground Force Corps of Engineers. Now that the non-citizen population was dwindling, the GF/CE was converting them into vast hydroponic towers. But the GF/CE's pride and glory was the Quito Space Elevator, built in cooperation with Sky Force and Space Force's own separate Corps of Engineers. It was The Sisterhood's main highway into space and the principal instrument by which they had come to dominate near Earth space. Miki had gone into Sea Force on a Space Force track, the latter being organized upon naval lines, and learned the essentials of large vessel operations. When she completed her Service Contract with Sea Force she went straight to Space Force Academy at the El-Five Complex. That lasted twice as long as Sea Force service. She served twelve years after that, mostly on the gigantic Loop Ships that ran on long loop shaped orbital patterns out from El-Five to Mars or to the Asteroid Belt and back. The Mars run was eighteen months round trip. The Asteroid Belt run was thirty five months. Space Force operated all of the UMR's space endeavors, military discipline and organization being a functional prerequisite for operating in that highly unforgiving environment, but it too was largely paramilitary, with the emphasis on the 'para'. In fact, MoF's name was really a psycho-political euphemism. Except for what had become three of the most terrifying words in the world: Marine Drop Trooper. The Space Force Marine Corps was a purely military organization and when force was actually required, it was the Marines who provided said, dropping down out of orbit upon whomever had provoked The Sisterhood sufficiently. Unlike Ground Force, where the majority of personnel were Sisters, in Space Force and its Marine Corp, Sisters were officers and NCO's. The rest were Mandroids, all specialized technical personnel. And Marine Mandroids were specialized in fighting, killing and, occasionally, dying. Usually no more than a battalion were kept active on Response Status. The rest were kept in storage in a light medical coma, a technique widely used for non-operational Mandriods on long space runs. Marine Drop Troopers were not sociable beings and The Sisterhood kept them on a tight leash. Like the majority of Space Force officers, Miki had only encountered Drop Troopers during her Academy days as part of an Orientation and Familiarization Course. And even though as an Initiated Sister she was a formidable killer in her own right, like many, they made her shudder a bit. But most space ops had no need of them. Space Force Mandroid personnel were perfectly disciplined and cooperative and always efficient. That was thoroughly programed into them. Miki sighed. Even given the obvious rigorousness and dynamism of The Sisterhood, the regular insinuation of Decadence was a standard Phallist canard, based upon the real fear of the UMR's massive number of Mandroid servitors, a number which grew steadily with each passing day. Mandroids were really just a type of cyborg, but since the majority of humans these days had some manner of cybernetic augmentation, a separate term had been needed. Most Mandroids were grown in uterine replicators based upon modified porcine uteri, and were commonly called 'tank babies'. Y-chromosome DNA was used exclusively in that process and was extensively engineered to enhance inclinations and tendencies for the various subtypes. Tank baby Mandroids were usually of a lesser mental capacity and heavily augmented, Guidance Mechanisms being implanted in the brain's pleasure/pain centers before they were ever hatched. That also solved the problem of 'socialization'. Experience had shown that the isolating 'non-humanness' of the replicators tended to regularly produce sociopathic and psychotic individuals, which was one of the principle reasons The Sisterhood practiced the live birth of their daughters. Obviously, they did not bear any male offspring and they certainly had the tech to make sure that they never did. The Sisterhood used a certain amount of purely mechanical/electronic robots, but overall, robots had never reached the level of functional and economic efficiency of Mandroids, either in manufacture or operation. Too many raw materials needed. Basic mechanics too complex and often unreliable. But it was in 'brain function' that robots really fell behind Mandroids. Ultimately, it was far easier to downgrade the biological that it was to upgrade the cybernetic. It was the UMR's Ministry of Service that designed and created every variety of Mandroid, and was not only their sole producer, but also their sole legal owner. All Mandriods were leased, not owned, by their end users under a Usufruct Contract and that included every one of them from a single domestic servitor to the tens of millions employed by Space Force from Dirtside to the Asteroid Belt. And the MoS's Rules and Regulations regarding Care and Utilization under that contract were well defined and rigorously enforced. And so The Sisterhood had finally resolved the ancient and pernicious human problem of social inequality, and permanently solved the issue of Labor Supply, by creating a specialized working class, one which was always happy and productive, and whose members could be stored in a medical coma when not needed or when shipped on long distance runs off planet. Of course, the entire concept and its mechanisms were an anathema to Humanists and Phallists alike, though for different reasons. For the latter, it meant that they and their world view were doomed, as who could resist such a society? Essentially, they were fighting a 'rear guard action' and knew it, not that this made them any the less determined to fight. For the former, it was considered slavery, plain and simple, and was therefore Evil, no matter the details. That they could never come up with a realistic plan for what to actually do with the 'slaves' they wished to liberate was brushed aside. And they were horrified by The Sisters when they said, “Well, we could just space them all,” usually with a predatory grin. Miki, and The Sisterhood in general, tended to have more contempt for The Humanists than for The Phallists. At least the Phallist position was honest. They were overtly committed to Masculine Supremacy and were not at all apologetic about that. The Sisterhood knew The Phallists were wrong - history made that quite clear - but they stood by their position without equivocation. The Humanists however used all manner of philosophical smokes screens such as Freedom and Individuality to disguise a set of beliefs and practices not particularly different from The Phallists. At its core, Humanism boiled down to Survival of The Fittest, with some 'social welfare' attached to pretty things up. Liberal Humanism had once been a vital force and had changed human affairs for the better. But it inevitably fell victim to the Cult of The Individual and then fractured into ideological factionalism, individual narcissism and intellectual decadence. Its absolute rejection of Hierarchy doomed it to impotence. Humans are a social species and Hierarchy comes naturally to all human endeavors. The Sisterhood, The Phallists and The Humanists all existed Hierarchically, but the latter rigorously denied it. Both of the former could then undermine them in detail. The Phallists had used the Humanists as moral cover to pass laws in several states totally banning Mandriods. This included the EU, Africa, and Siberia. Such laws were meaningless however, as the MoS forbade the exportation of most types of Mandriods outside the UMR itself and of any type to a state that had not entered into a Friendship Treaty with the UMR. Such a treaty gave the MoS full and unilateral access to their Servitors and the authority to take “direct and forceful action to preserve and protect said.” That included calling in Drop Troopers if necessary. To date, every entity that had signed a Friendship Treaty had been first socially and then legally annexed by The Sisterhood within a decade or so of signing, as male birth rates would plummet and most the local females tended to become fully fledged Sisters. The relentlessness of this trend forced the improvement of women's status throughout the rest of the world. If a women was unsatisfied with her lot, she could immigrate to The Sisterhood, which had all manner of Genetic and Cybernetic programs for fully integrating 'outside' Sisters into the fold. All a woman had to do was apply at any UMR Embassy or Consulate. No woman was ever turned away. More terrifying to the Phallists however, was the significant number of mostly younger males who also immigrated into the UMR. The MoS maintained a Special Augmentation division to convert these male immigrants into Special Service Mandriods, quite often some type of Pleasure Servitor. These types were highly prized and very well treated and their lives were something of a legend outside of The Sisterhood. There was a Male Birth Movement, in which men would have a womb surgically implanted and would only have male children. But they were few in number and most Phallists were repulsed by the idea. And because of the psychological problems inherent in non-augmented 'tank babies', attempts to increase the male population using that technology had been grotesque and horrifying failures. One of them, a South Asian republic of homicidal psychotics, had required the deployment of an entire Marine Drop Brigade to 'clean up the mess'. Miki had been at Space Force Academy during that little horror. The whole Cadet Corps had been glued to the live feeds for days. She finished off her second glass of Passito on that memory. She looked again at the night time sky over Paris, the city now fully illuminated and living up to its old title. Miki was here at Le Tour Rouge to have a private meeting with the Foreign Minister of the Siberian Confederacy, Yulia Prokharovka. And the secure lounges were the next best thing to the UMR's own Embassy, Le Tour Rouge in fact being owned – through about a dozen front companies – by the MoF's General Security Directorate. The GSD handled all The Sisterhood's 'security issues', everywhere. Siberia had become very powerful in the last decade, the melting of the permafrost opening up access to raw materials and making it an agricultural dynamo. The Confederacy had absorbed Mongolia, Manchuria, and the Korean Peninsula, more with food than with military might, though it possessed that as well. Kaminov Yao, the Prime Minister for two decades, had been the motivator of this expansion. He smiled out at the world, but kept a tight rein at home. He was not overtly hostile to the UMR: that was suicidal at best. But he quietly resisted its influence as best he could. However, he had recently 'become ill'. Hence Miki's meeting with Prokharovka. As First Vice-Minister of External Affairs, she handled all the 'delicate' matters. And they had been their respective state's UN Ambassadors at the same time, so she had known Yulia for years...and she was also her GSD contact. Yulia arrived precisely at the appointed time. They smiled, hugged and kissed. They could be sisters. Tall, solidly built, with jet black hair and 'Asiatic' features, though Miki was darker, having Mesoamerican blood and a dozen years of UV in Space Force. Miki poured her some Passito. They made small talk. And then Miki activated the various dampeners. The air went dead. “I can never get used to that,” Yulia said. “It's like someone closed my coffin.” “Only the dead can hear us,” Miki said with a light smile. Yulia laughed, then turned serious. “We have Yao on ice. Literally. Stuck him in a Cryo unit. The evil little peen!” she snarled. “Who is in charge?” “That would be me,” Yulia said brightly. Miki smiled. “I was hoping you'd say that.” “As if the GSD didn't tell you already.” “They were not absolutely sure. Your security has been excellent.” Yulia grinned widely. “Now that is a true complement!” Miki smiled softly. “Merely an accurate observation.” She paused a moment. “So, tomorrow...?” Yulia was to address the General Assembly. “Some boilerplate about 'Yao sending his regards etc'. And then the announcement that we're opening negotiations with the UMR vis-a-vis a Friendship Treaty. Just negotiations. Nothing final.” she said with practiced nonchalance. Miki smiled wolfishly. “Yes, incrementalism is best.” Yulia nodded. “The dick swingers will be up to their hairy asses in Mandroids before they even realize it!” Miki raised her glass. “Sisterhood!” Yulia clinked it with hers. “Sisterhood!” They upended their glasses. As Miki refilled them, she said, “So, let me tell you about these new bioforms the MoS has been working on. Detachable penises.” Yulia leaned in closer, her eyes sparkling.

#The Sisterhood

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Skocpol - 4 & 5

of the Constituent Assembly, there now succeeded the strongest centralization that France had yet known."39 Draconian and summary judicial measures, known as the Terror, were adopted to imprison and execute enemies of the Revolution. Urged upon the Montagnard government by its popular supporters, these measures struck nobles, refractory priests, and rich bourgeois most frequently (in relation to their proportion of the total population). But in absolute numbers many more peasants and urban poor were affected, most of them from rebellious areas. The overall patterns of executions in the Terror conclusively suggest that its primary function was not class war but political defense, that in the words of Donald Greer it was "employed to crush rebellion and to quell opposition to the Revolution, the Republic, or the Mountain ... "40 Without such measures it is difficult to imagine how any semblance of centralized government could have so suddenly emerged. Even with the Terror (indeed in part because of its violent arbitrariness), the system that did emerge was at first not at all routinized. Instead it featured representatives on mission and local bodies doing widely various, even contradictory, things in different places, all in the name of defending the Revolution (and the Montagnards).41 Only gradually were more standardized controls instituted. The chief purpose and most enduring achievement of the Montagnard dictatorship was to expand, envigorate, and supply the national armies of France. One of the first measures adopted (in August 1 793 ) by the Committee of Public Safety was the famous levee en masse, which proclaimed: All Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for army service. The young men will go to fight; the married men will forge arms and carry supplies; the women will make tents and uniforms and will serve in the hospitals; the children will shred the old clothes; the old men will be taken to the public squares to excite the courage of the combatants, the hatred of royalty and the unity of the Republic.42 The armies of France expanded enormously, and the members of the Committee on Public Safety, above all Lazare Carnot, "the organizer of victory," busied themselves with selecting and advising new generals for the armies, propagandizing the troops, and bending all of the government's powers to the enormous problems of supplying the armies. For as it promoted mass military mobilization, the Montagnard government also requisitioned and purchased food and other supplies for the armies and cities, organized the manufacture of armaments, and regulated prices for basic commodities and labor. The "regulation of the economy was soon as extensive as the bureaucracy of the day and the power of coercion could make it. "43 This was not only because, as many interpreters of the Revolution stress, the Montagnards were under constant pressure from the sans culottes to relieve popular economic distress. It was also because only through such tight controls could the revolutionary armies be supplied with food and materials. SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY CRISES in France, Russia, and China set in motion political and class struggles that culminated in fundamental and enduring structural transformations. Important patterns of change were common to all three Revolutions. Peasant revolts against landlords transformed agrarian class relations. Autocratic and proto-bureaucratic monarchies gave way to bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states. The pre-revolutionary landed upper classes were no longer exclusively privileged in society and politics. They lost their special roles in controlling the peasants and shares of the agrarian surpluses through local and regional quasi-political institutions. 1 Under the Old Regimes, the privileges and the institutional power bases of the landed upper classes had been impediments to full state bureaucratization and to direct mass political incorporation. These impediments were removed by the political conflicts and class upheavals of the revolutionary interregnums. At the same time, emergent political leaderships were challenged by disunity and counterrevolutionary attempts at home, and by military invasions from abroad, to build new state organizations to consolidate the Revolutions. Success in meeting the challenges of political consolidation was possible in large part because revolutionary leaderships could mobilize lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics, either urban workers or the peasantry. Thus, in all three Revolutions, landed upper classes (at least) lost out to the benefit of lower-class groups on the one hand and new state cadres on the other. In each New Regime, there was much greater popular incorporation into the state-run affairs of the nation. And the new state organizations forged during the Revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime. Hence they were more potent

within society and more powerful and autonomous over and against competitors within the international states system. Yet, of course there were also important variations in the outcomes of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, which need to be understood along with the patterns common to the outcomes of all three Revolutions. The results of the French Revolution, to begin, contrasted to those in Soviet Russia and Communist China in ways suggested by the usual labeling of the French outcomes as "bourgeois." The Russian and Chinese Revolutions gave rise to party-led state organizations that asserted control over the entire national economies of the two countries and (in one way or another) mobilized the populace to propel further national economic development. In France, however, no such results occurred. Instead, the French Revolution culminated in a professional-bureaucratic state that coexisted symbiotically with, and indeed guaranteed the full emergence of, national markets and capitalist private property. Democratic popular mobilization was (after 1793 ) either suppressed or channeled into military recruitment and routinized, symbolic political pursuits. And despite the massive presence in society of the French state as a uniform and centralized administrative framework, further national economic development and social differentiation remained primarily market-guided and outside the direct control of the government. In contrast to France, Soviet Russia and Communist China resembled each other as development-oriented party-states. But otherwise they differed in key respects, with the Russian regime exhibiting some important similarities to France. For like the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution gave rise to a professionalized and hierarchical state oriented to the firm administrative supervision of social groups. This applied in particular to the domination of the peasant majority in society in the name of urban interests. There were, of course, differences between France and Russia: Aside from the greater direction of the economy and national development exercised by the Soviet state, the state administration in Russia, though privileged and dominant in relation to the rest of society, was itself subjected (along with the populace at large) to manipulation and coercion by the top leaders of the Communist Party and their police agents. The Soviet regime, in short, became an amalgam of, on the one hand, dictatorial and coercive political controls (supplied by or in the name of the Party) with, on the other hand, professionalized bureaucratic administration along formal hierarchical lines not too different from those of capitalist systems. Indeed, as we shall see, formal hierarchies of command and control and inequalities of rank and reward were in important respects extraordinarily extreme in Soviet society after 1928. In China, the Revolution generated a state that was, to be sure, highly

centralized and in basic ways thoroughly bureaucratic. But it was also oriented to fostering broad and penetrating popular mobilization. Party or army organizations served not only as means of control over the state administration and the society, as in France and Russia, but also as agents of popular mobilization -especially to further national economic development. The contrast to France and Russia has been most striking with respect to the mobilization of peasants for rural development. As a corollary, the Chinese New Regime (compared to the French or Russian) has been less amenable, though by no means immune, to professionalism and a stress on formal rules and unitary hierarchies of routinized command.2 Furthermore, the Chinese Communists have uniquely made recurrent attempts to reduce or prevent the unchecked growth of inequalities of rank and reward in state and society. The tasks for Part II as a whole are suggested by the discussion so far: The outcomes of the Revolutions need to be characterized more fully. And the actual conflicts of the revolutionary interregnums must be analyzed and compared in order to explain how the broadly similar and individually distinct outcomes emerged from the original social-revolutionary crises. These tasks are straightforward enough; what requires more discussion is the approach that will be used to accomplish them. The analysis of the processes and outcomes of the Revolutions will focus upon the struggles surrounding the creation of new state organizations within the socialrevolutionary situations. The characteristics of those states in relation to the socioeconomic orders of the New Regimes will also be examined. Each Revolution will be followed from the original crisis of the Old Regime through to the crystallization of the distinctive sociopolitical patterns of the New Regime. And the thread that we shall follow throughout will be the emergence and consolidation of new state organizations and the deployment of state power in the revolutionized societies. Why does this approach make sense, and what does it entail? The balance of this introductory chapter seeks to answer these questions. One reason for a focus on state building is almost definitional: "A complete revolution," writes Samuel P. Huntington, "involves ... the creation and institutionalization of a new political order. "3 It is the position of this book that social-revolutionary outcomes were, so to speak, on the agenda in French, Russian, and Chinese history once the Old Regimes had broken down. Nevertheless, it is of course true that the Revolutions were fully consummated only once new state organizations- administrations and armies, coordinated by executives who governed in the name of revolutionary symbols- were built up amidst the conflicts of the revolutionary situations. In all three revolutionary situations, political leaderships and regimes- the Jacobin and then the Napoleonic in France, the Bolshevik in Russia, and the Communist in China-emerged to reestablish national

order, to consolidate the socioeconomic transformations wrought by the class upheavals from below, and to enhance each country's power and autonomy over and against international competitors. Had this not happened, we would not speak of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions as "successful" (i.e., complete) social revolutions. At most, they would be considered abortive cases, like Germany in 1848 and Russia in 1 905. Beyond definitional considerations, the reasons for a f orus on state building are suggested by Franz Borkenau's assertions that "the changes in the state order which a revolution produces are no less important than the changes in the social order."4 Social revolutions do, of course, accomplish major changes of class relations; and they affect basic areas of social and cultural life such as the family, religion, and education. Equally if not more striking, however, are the changes that social revolutions make in the structure and function of states, in the political and administrative processes by which government leaders relate to groups in society, and in the tasks that states can successfully undertake at home and abroad. Nor are such changes in the "state order" at all mere by-products of the changes in the social order. Indeed, to a significant degree, it is the other way around: The changes in state structures that occur during social revolutions typically both consolidate, and themselves entail, socioeconomic changes. Thus in Russia and China, the Communist Party-states not only sanctioned attacks from below on the existing dominant classes (as did the French revolutionaries). They also completed and extended the overthrow of those classes as the Party-states stepped in to take up many of the economic functions formerly perf onned by private property owners. Analogously in France, the strengthening of private property and the national market economy were in large part due to changes wrought by the Revolution in the structure of the French state. An emphasis on state building is warranted, therefore, because of the clear importance not only of political consolidation but also of state structures in determining revolutionary outcomes. POLITI CAL LEADE RSHIPS Having established that state building may be a fruitful thread to follow in analyzing social revolutions, it remains to clarify what such an emphasis entails. One thing it means is that the political leaderships involved in revolutions must be regarded as actors struggling to assert and make good their claims to state sovereignty. This may sound obvious, but it is not the usual way in which political leaderships in revolutions are analyzed. Typically, such leaderships are treated as representatives of classes or social groups, struggling to realize economic or status interests, and/or as actors attempting to implement a certain ideological vision of the ideal social

order. Congruent with such ways of looking at political leaders, their individual backgrounds are often searched for evidence of origins within, or connections to, the classes or groups they are said to represent. And if the appropriate origins or connections are manifestly missing, then emphasis is placed upon showing how their ideological orientations and activities resonate with the relevant social interests. What tends to be missed in all of this is that which political leaderships in revolutionary crises are above all doing- claiming and struggling to maintain state power. During revolutionary interregnums, political leaderships rise and fall according to how successful they are in creating and using political arrangements within the crisis circumstances that they face. Struggles over the most fundamental issues of politics and state forms go on until relatively stable new state organizations have been consolidated; thereafter political struggles continue about how to use state power in its broadly established form. To regard political leaderships in revolutions as would-be state builders means to take their activities more seriously than their social backgrounds. Nevertheless it is true and of some interest that the backgrounds and "career" orientations of those political leaderships that were ultimately successful in consolidating new state organizations in the three Revolutions are at least congruent with a view of these leaderships primarily as state builders rather than as representatives of classes. For in France, Russia, and China alike, the relevant political leaderships precipitated out of the ranks of relatively highly educated groups oriented to state activities or employments. And the leaders arose especially from among those who were somewhat marginal to the established dominant classes and governing elites under the Old Regimes. Through much of its course, the French Revolution was led by groups operating in and through a series of nationally elected assemblies- the National/Constituent Assembly of 178 9-91 the Legislative Assembly of 1 791-2, and the Convention of 1792-4. All of these bodies were predominantly populated by administrative and professional men from the Third Estate. The most important leaders of the early phases of the Revolution, from 1788 through 1790, are best described as "notables," that is, nobles or wealthy and privileged members of the Third Estate. Yet of the members of the National/Constituent Assembly from the Third Estate, fully 43 percent were venal office holders, mostly from the provinces and localities, and another 30 percent were lawyers or other professional men. 5 The subsequent Legislative Assembly was even more heavily dominated by local-level officials and politicians. 6 And the Convention drew 25 percent of its membership from office holders and a hefty 44 percent from lawyers and other professionals. 7 Moreover, as the Revolution entered its most radical phase in 1 792-4, the actual national leadership was taken over by Montagnard Jacobins. They were (especially as contrasted to the more

moderate Girondin faction within the Convention) disproportionately likely to come from administrative-professional rather than commercial families and to hail from small or medium-sized provincial administrative towns, rather than from the cosmopolitan, privileged, and wealthy regional capitals or commercial seaports.8 Eventually, to be sure (as we shall see later in more detail), the most radical leaders of the French Revolution fell from state power, which was ultimately usurped by Napoleon and his administrative and military agents. These people, however, included many former Jacobins. They also included former functionaries of the Old Regime, especially middle-level civil and military officers from both petty noble and nonprivileged Third Estate backgrounds9- that is, other formerly marginal elites who also achieved career mobility through the state during, and as a result of, the Revolution. The leaders of the French Revolution were "marginal" because they tended to come from lesser, provincial urban centers and/or from the lower levels of the former royal administration. The revolutionary leaderships in Russia and China, however, included some people who were marginal by virtue of social origins and others who, although they came from privileged social backgrounds, had been converted to radical politics during the course of modem secondary or university education. The Bolsheviks of Russia and the Communists of China recruited people from all strata, including the working class and the peasantry. But in both parties, most of those in top and intermediate-level positions of leadership came either from dominant-class backgrounds or from families on the margins of the privileged classes {e.g., especially urban middle-class families in Russia, and especially rich peasant families in China). 10 Moreover, both revolutionary leaderships included very high proportions of people who had received formal secondary and {domestic or foreign) university educations. 11 Traditionally in Tsarist Russia and Imperial China, education was the route into state service. And when modem schools and universities were established in the two societies, they were intended to provide officials for the state. (In post-1900 China, large numbers of young people were also sent to foreign universities for the same purpose.) But modernized forms of higher education also became a route by which some students in each cohort, regardless of their disproportionately privileged backgrounds, became converted to critical perspectives calling for the fundamental transformation of the Old Regime. 12 As a result, many were inducted not into state service but into the career of the "professional revolutionary," ready to tum from political organizing and propaganda to efforts at revolutionary state-building whenever opportunities might arise. The original leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were not too different in background and career trajectories from those of the Kuomintang Nationalist Party, and the Bolshevik leaders in Russia also shared

many social characteristics with the rival Menshevik leaders. 13 But it is interesting to note that, in both countries, the ultimately successful (communist) revolutionary leaderships possessed from the start (and gained increasingly over time) general ethnic and regional profiles that were closer than those of their rivals to the background characteristics traditionally associated with elite political status in the old, imperial regimes. Thus, the Bolsheviks in Russia were more disproportionately and homogeneously Great Russians from the core provinces of the empire than were the Mensheviks, who were more likely to come from minority regions and nationalities. 14 And, in China, the Communists came more frequently from Central (and finally also North) China, and more often from interior areas, than the Kuomintang leaders, who were heavily recruited from South China and the most Westernized coastal areas in general. 15 Note that these patterns for Russia and China resemble the contrast between the Montagnards and the Girondins of the Convention in France: The Montagnards tended to come from the administrative centers that had formed the base of the absolutist monarchy, whereas the Girondins were heavily recruited from commercial port cities, that had historically existed in some dissociati"on from, and tension with, the monarchical state.16 Two sets of considerations help to account for the fact that political leaderships in all of our social revolutions came specifically from the ranks of educated marginal elites oriented to state employments and activities. In the first place, Bourbon France, Manchu China, and Tsarist Russia all were "statist" societies. Even before the world-historical era of capitalist development, official employments in these societies constituted both an important route for social mobility and a means for validating traditional status and supplementing landed fortunes. All such agrarian states as France (after the consolidation of royal absolutism), 17 Tsarist Russia, and Imperial China (as well as Prussia/Germany and Japan) more or less continuously generated surpluses of aspirants for participation in state employments. And some such people were always potentially available for rebel or revolutionary political activities in crisis circumstances. In the second place, with the advent of capitalist economic development in the world, state activities acquired an import greater than ever in those agrarian states that were forced to adapt to the effects of economic development abroad. As we have seen, the inescapable effects of such development initially impinged upon the state's sphere in the form of sharply and suddenly stepped-up military competition or threats from more developed foreign nations. Concomitantly, the cultural effects of development abroad first impinged upon the relatively highly educated in agrarian bureaucracies- that is, upon those who were mostly either employed by the state or else connected or oriented to its activities. It was thus understandable that, as agrarian states confronted the problems raised by development abroad,

virtually all politically aware groups, from conservative reformers to radicals and revolutionaries, viewed the state as the likely tool for implementing changes at home to enhance national standing in the international context. This is obvious for Russia and China. Consider, as well, the fascination of educated officials and laymen in prerevolutionary France with British economic and political models, and the widespread calls for implementation of reforms by the monarchy. Edward Fox has pointed to the irony of the fact that during the eighteenth century in France, in the middle of what has been described as the "democratic revolution," an entire generation of gifted social critics and publicists should all but unanimously demand the royal imposition of their various programs of reform. In the theoretical and polemical literature of the time, the "absolute" monarchy was criticized for its failure to exercise arbitrary power. To Frenchmen of the ancien regime, it was the monarchy that represented what was modem and progressive; and political "liberties" that appeared anachronistic ... For virtually all the inhabitants of continental F ranee, fiscal and judicial reforms were far more urgent issues than the development of political liberty; and the monarchy was the obvious agency for their implementation. Only the king's failure to live up to their expectations drove his subjects to intervene. 18 In France, as in Russia and China, civicly aware critics of the Old Regime, including, of course, the administrative-professional groups from whom the future revolutionary leaders would come, were oriented to the need and possibility for changes in and through the state. In sum, the backgrounds of the revolutionary leaderships that came to the fore during the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions are congruent with the perspective advanced here that these were state-building leaderships. They were people who created administrative and military organizations and political institutions to take the place of the prerevolutionary monarchies. Nevertheless, knowing the general background characteristics of the revolutionary leaderships hardly tells us why the Revolutions had the (shared and varied) outcomes they did. Why did revolutionary leaderships end up creating the specific kinds of centralized, bureaucratic state structures (with varying relations to social groups and varying functions within society) that they did? THE ROLE OF REVOLUTIONARY I DEOLOG IES To answer this question a particular explanatory tack is often taken by those students of revolution who do take revolutionary leaderships seriously as politicians. More often than not, such investigators argue or imply that the ideologies (such as "Jacobinism" and "Marxism-Leninism") to which revolutionary leaderships are committed provide the key to the

nature of revolutionary outcomes. They believe, too, that ideologies reveal the practical strategies that the revolutionary leaders follow as they act to bring the outcomes about. 19 Analyses of revolutionary processes and outcomes that stress the ideological orientations of revolutionary vanguards are typically premised upon a cenain notion. According to this view: although the contradictions and inherent conflicts of the old regime may bring about a societal crisis in which revolutionary transformations are possible, nevertheless the actual carrying through of revolutionary changes- anJ especially what panirular kinds of changes are carried through - depends upon the intentions of determined, organized revolutionary vanguards. If this is true, then it seems to follow that explanations for revolutionary outcomes must refer primarily to the ideological visions of the revolutionary leaderships. For how else can one account for the realization of particular possibilities rather than others within the openended societal crisis? This line of reasoning has a certain plausibility. Let us therefore examine the role of revolutionary ideologies. Certainly it does seem that revolutionary ideologies such as Jacobinism and Marxism-Leninism functioned to sustain the cohesion of political leaderships attempting to build and consolidate state power under socialrevolutionary conditions.20 Likewise, commitment to these ideologies helped the revolutionary politicians to struggle in appropriate ways. Here a brief look at the Meiji reformers of Japan can point toward what I mean by contrast. The Meiji radicals could struggle for state power in a very different ideological and organizational style than the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Chinese Communists. The Meiji radicals came together and sustained group cohesion through particularistic connections within and between existing han governments {since most of the leaders of the Restoration came from Satsuma and Choshu, two "outer" provinces). They attained state power and effected far-reaching changes through factional infighting and manipulation of established institutional mechanisms. And they could justify innovative and universalistic actions to themselves and to other elites through references to a previously deemphasized yet traditionally available legitimating symbol, "the emperor." Certain traditional institutions, connections, and symbols could be used thus by the Meiji radical reformers because of the unique flexibilities and potentials for quick adaptations to modern conditions of the Tokugawa regime from which they emerged.21 These were characteristics that, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the Bourbon, Manchu, and Romanov regimes lacked. Within social-revolutionary situations in France, Russia, and China, new ideologies and organizations had to serve functions for revolutionary leaderships similar to those served for the leaders of the Meiji Restoration by the emperor symbol, the han ties, and the potentials for factional manipulations within established political arrangements.

Revolutionary ideologies such as Jacobinism and Marxism-Leninism could help political elites committed to them to struggle for, build, and hold state power within social-revolutionary situations for several reasons. First, these were (in their historical and national contexts) universalistic creeds that could allow and encourage people from very diverse particularistic backgrounds to work together as fellow citizens or comrades. This was important in France, Russia, and China because the Revolutions were not consolidated through takeovers by formerly existing sectional elites as in Japan. Moreover, the only preexisting society-wide political legitimations were the monarchical symbols that became discredited within the social-revolutionary situations. Revolutionary ideologies. then came to the fore to justify the rebuilding and the exercise of state power. Second, these ideologies enjoined the revolutionary elites to proselytize and mobilize the masses for political struggles and activities. And this orientation, even if it did not lead to many real conversions, nevertheless gave Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Chinese Communists access to crucial additional resources for politico-military struggles against counterrevolutionaries whose ideal and material interests made them less willing to call upon, or benefit from, mass initiatives. Third, Jacobinism and MarxismLeninism were both secular "totalitarian" outlooks that provided j ustification for the actors who believed in them to employ unlimited means to achieve ultimate political ends on earth- ends such as "the enactment of the General Will" and progress toward the "classless society." And, as Egon Bittner has suggested, if totalitarian ideologies are to be sustained as exclusive faiths within groups, certain kinds of organizational mechanisms may very well need to be established. These would include mechanisms such as controls to encourage the undivided commitment of cadres to the group and hierarchical lines of authority focused on extraordinary symbols and leaders. 22 However unappealing such mechanisms may be from the perspective of liberal political theory, the fact is that they are likely to give to armed minorities formidable advantages in unlimited political struggles of the sort that mark revolutionary civil wars. Thus revolutionary ideologies and people committed to them were undoubtedly necessary ingredients in the great social revolutions under investigation here. Nevertheless it cannot be argued in addition that the cognitive content of the ideologies in any sense provides a predictive key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the revolutionaries who built the state organizations that consolidated the Revolutions. Any line of reasoning that treats revolutionary ideologies as blueprints for revolutionaries' activities and for revolutionary outcomes cannot sustain scrutiny in the light of historical evidence about how Jacobinism and Marxism-Leninism actually did develop and function within the unfolding social-revolutionary situations in France, Russia, and China.23 Jacobin

ideologues shared in the rule of revolutionary France for only about one year, and the "Reign of Virtue" failed completely to take hold. The jacobins accomplished instead more mundane tasks- of state building and revolutionary defense- indispensable to the success of the Revolution that devoured them. 24 In Russia, the Bolsheviks were pummeled by the exigencies of the attempt to take and hold state power in the name of Marxist socialism in an agrarian country shattered by defeat in total war. They found themselves forced to undertake tasks and measures that directly contradicted their ideology. In the end, triumphant Stalinism twisted and upended virtually every Marxist ideal and rudely contradicted Lenin's vision in 1 9 17 of destroying bureaucracies and standing armies. 25 In China, the Communists set out in proper Marxist-Leninist fashion to take power through proletarian risings in the cities. Not until well after these were crushed and new and viable peasant-oriented movements had taken root in military base areas in the countryside did "Maoist" doctrine develop to sanctify and codify what had been done. Thereafter epicycles were always added to the basic model whenever necessary to justify practical detours on the road to national power. 2 6 In short, ideologically oriented leaderships in revolutionary crises have been greatly limited by existing structural conditions and severely buffeted by the rapidly changing currents of revolutions. Thus they have typically ended up accomplishing very different tasks and furthering the consolidation of quite different kinds of new regimes from those they originally (and perhaps ever) ideologically intended. This should not seem surprising once we realize and reflect upon a straightforward truth: Revolutionary crises are not total breakpoints in history that suddenly make anything at all possible if only it is envisaged by willful revolutionaries! There are several reasons why this is so. For one thing, revolutionary crises have particular forms, and create specific concatenations of possibilities and impossibilities, according to how these crises are originally generated in given old regimes under given circumstances. Furthermore, although a revolutionary crisis does entail institutional breakdowns and class conflicts that quickly change the parameters of what is possible in the given society, many conditions- especially socioeconomic conditions- always "carry over" from the old regime. These, too, create specific possibilities and impossibilities within which revolutionaries must operate as they try to consolidate the new regime. And so do the given world-historical and international contexts within which the entire revolutionary transformation occurs. The Analysis to Come Now all of the defining features of the explanatory approach to be followed in the rest of Part II can fall into place. We shall follow the thread

of state building through from the original revolutionary crises to the crystallization of the basic revolutionary outcomes. And we shall take revolutionary leaderships seriously as politicians struggling to consolidate and use state power. But we shall not seek to decipher or explain the revolutionary developments from the perspective of ideological world views or programs. Instead, we shall direct our attention to how the forms of the revolutionary crises and the legacies of the Old Regimes shaped and limited the efforts and achievements of the state-building revolutionary leaderships. Several sets of cirrumstances impinging upon the state-building efforts will be brought into each case analysis and will constitute the analytic basis for comparisons among the Revolutions. Above all, close attention will be paid to the particular features of each social-revolutionary crisis, thus referring back to much that has already been established about each Revolution in Part I. This analytic emphasis has two aspects. In the first place, the specific way in which each Old Regime broke down politically (as analyzed in Chapter 2) had important consequences. It determined the initial patterns of political conflict during the revolutionary interregnum and influenced the possibilities (or impossibilities) for temporary stabilization of liberal political regimes. It also helped to determine the kind of administrative and military tasks that had to be faced by mass-mobilizing leaderships as they emerged within the revolutionary situations. In the second place, much depended upon the timing and nature of peasant revolts or agrarian disorder within the revolutionary crises, matters explicable in terms of the agrarian sociopolitical structures discussed in Chapter 3. Where peasant revolts ocrurred suddenly and autonomously, as they did in France and Russia, they had immediate, uncontrolled effects upon the cours� of national-urban political struggles. In China, peasant revolts against landlords were delayed until peasants of necessity were politically mobilized into the process of revolutionary state-building. It was thereby ensured that Chinese peasants were uniquely influential in shaping the New Regime. Yet even though revolutionary state-builders in France and Russia politically mobilized urban workers rather than peasants, they, too, had to come to terms with the peasantry and with the revolutionized agrarian orders. And to see how they did this is to understand much about the course and outcomes of each Revolution. Old-regime socioeconomic legacies will also figure in the case analyses, especially for the purpose of explaining variations among the Revolutions. Attention will be paid to the particular kinds of urban-centered commercial, industrial, and transportation structures carried over from the Old Regimes. Were there modern industries or not, and if so, what kind and where were they located? The answers help to explain the kinds of urbanbased social classes and class conflicts that figured in each revolutionary

drama, the possible bases and limits of urban support for revolutionary state-builders, and the opportunities (open or not) for using revolutionary state power, once consolidated, to promote national industrialization (of one sort or another) under state control. Finally, we shall, of course, consider the influences of world-historical circumstances and international relations upon the emergent revolutionary regimes. The world-historical timing and sequence of the Revolutions affected the models of political-party organization and of ways for using state power that were available to the successive revolutionary leaderships. Moreover, in France, Russia, and China alike, both military invasions from abroad during the revolutionary interregnums and international military situations after the initial consolidation of state power powerfully affected the development of the Revolutions. The particular kinds of international influences varied from France to Russia to China, but such realities were important in shaping the revolutionary outcomes in all three cases. In the remainder of Part II, some arguments are going to be developed to explain shared patterns across all three Revolutions, and others to explain key variations among the Revolutions against the background of the shared patterns. Thus I shall try to demonstrate that the emergence of more centralized, mass-incorporating, and bureaucratic states in F ranee, Russia, and China alike is explicable in terms of broadly similar exigencies, challenges, and opportunities. These were created for revolutionary state-builders by the original conjunctures in all three cases of old-regime breakdown and widespread peasant unrest. At the same time, I shall use comparisons among the three cases to specify how the particular features of each revolutionary conjuncture in the given world-historical setting, along with the specific conditions carried over from the Old Regime, served to shape the struggles and the outcomes distinctive to each Revolution. Chapter 5 examines the process and outcomes of the French Revolution from 1789 to the consolidation of the Napoleonic regime. Chapter 6 deals with Russia from 1 917 through the triumph of Stalinism in the 1930s. And Chapter 7 analyzes developments in China from the aftermath of 1911 through 1 949 to the 1960s.

T HE C OURSE OF the French Revolution was shaped by the consequences of a social-revolutionary crisis in which liberal stabilization proved impossible, and by the emergence through mass mobilization of centralized and bureaucratic state organizations. As in Russia and China, such state organizations served to consolidate the Revolution in the context of civil and international warfare. Our examination of the dynamics and outcomes of the French Revolution will emphasize these fundamental developments. As a prelude to this analysis, though, let me first enter into the ongoing historiographical debate about how the French Revolution as a whole should be characterized. A BOURGE OIS REVO L UTION ? What fundamentally changed and how in the French Revolution - these are subjects of much controversy among contemporary historians. Telling criticisms have been leveled against the until-recently dominant " social interpretation" - a view of largely Marxist inspiration, which holds that the Revolution was led by the bourgeoisie to displace feudalism and the aristocracy and to establish capitalism instead. 1 No counter interpretation of comparable scope and power has yet achieved widespread acceptance. 2 This is true in part, perhaps, because debates over possible reinterpretations have remained largely within the socioeconomic terms of the established frame of reference. As Marxist notions about the centrality of the bourgeoisie and the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production have been opened to question, the most vociferous debates about what to put in their place have merely tinkered with parts of the original argument, leaving its substantive focus and structure intact. New groups, other than the bourgeoisie, with economic interests corresponding to the not-so-capitalist economic outcomes of the Revolution have been sought out. 3 Or else a more indirect and cautious way to restate a faint echo of the Marxist argument in social but not economic terms has been stressed.4 The upshot has been the placing of interpretive emphasis upon very partial aspects of the revolutionary outcomes. Thus any links between the historical rise of capitalism and capitalists and the actual political events and struggles of the French Revolution have been rendered more and more tenuous, even though some intrinsic ultimate connectkm is still supposed to exist- and indeed to "explain" the Revolution overall. Meanwhile, changes wrought by the French Revolution in the structure and functioning of the French state have been largely ignored by contemporary interpreters trying to discern the overall meaning of the Revolution. 5 Yet hints have appeared, here and there in interpretive essays and syntheses, and even more clearly in the findings of empirical studies on developments in the army and administration during the Revolution. These indicate that the overall logic of the conflicts and outcomes of the Revolution may lie primarily in sociopolitical and juridical transformations- that is, bureaucratization, democratization, and the emergence of a politico-legal framework favorable to capitalism - wrought through a confluence of political struggles for state power and peasant struggles against seigneurial rights, rather than in a basic transformation of the socioeconomic structure effected by the class action of a capitalist bourgeoisie. 6 To be sure, the differences involved here are matters of emphasis and perspective, but such differences can be very consequential, especially if they prompt us to try to explain the processes and outcomes of the Revolution in new ways. The Revolution and Economic Development Proponents of the view that the French Revolution was a "bourgeois revolution" can point to evidence that seems to support their position. Certainly, the political elites that emerged did not take direct control of the economy to spur national industrialization; instead, the Revolution strengthened classes based on private property ownership. Regional, estate, and guild barriers to the formation of a national market were eliminated. And, in time, France did undergo capitalist industrialization.

However there are equally important facts that contradict any economically grounded version of the "bourgeois revolution" thesis. Before the Revolution, French industry was overwhelmingly small scale and nonmechanized; and commercial and financial wealth coexisted nonantagonistically, indeed symbiotically, with the more settled and prestigious "proprietary" forms of wealth (land, venal office, annuities). During the Revolution, political leadership came primarily from the ranks of professionals (especially lawyers), office holders, and intellectuals. The men who dominated France after the Revolution were not industrialists or capitalist entrepreneurs but primarily bureaucrats, soldiers, and owners of real estate. 7 And the economically relevant reforms enacted during the Revolution were either spurred by revolts from below or else were the culmination of " . . . the century old movement for the abolition of the internal customs . . . [a movement] led throughout, and ultimately brought to success, not by the representatives of commercial and industrial interests, but by reforming officials" of the French state. 8 More telling, the Revolution almost certainly hindered capitalist industrialization in France as much as it facilitated it. Immediate roadblocks to development might be expected to accompany any period of revolutionary turmoil. Thus: the series of upheavals and wars that began with the French Revolution and ended with Waterloo ... brought with them capital destruction and losses of manpower; political instability and a widespread social anxiety; the decimation of the wealthier entrepreneurial groups; all manner of interruptions to trade; violent inflations and alterations of currency. 9 One disruption was especially important. Before the Revolution, many of France's nascent industries had been nourished by a wide-·ranging and expanding overseas trade. 10 But this trade collapsed as a result of the Revolution and the ensuing wars, so that, although " ... from 1716 to 1789 the foreign trade of France quadrupled ... , " it did not again attain its prerevolutionary levels until well after 1815. 11 The Revolution hindered French economic development in even more fundamental ways as well. The socioeconomic structure that emerged from the revolutionary upheavals featured a nonindustrial bourgeoisie and a securely entrenched peasantry. 12 To be sure, the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie was wealthy, ambitious, and enjoyed unalloyed rights of private property ownership. However, the base of the ... bourgeoisie was not in industry, but rather in trade, the professions and the land. The new men who thrust themselves forward as a result of the opportunities created by social upheaval ... did not see in industrial investment and production the main avenue

for taking adv�ntage of the new-won freedoms. Fortunes could be built up far more quickly in speculation in land and commodities. They might later find their way into industry, but only as and when opportunities presented themselves. 13 Yet (especially compared to the situation in England) opportunities for industrial investments emerged only gradually in nineteenth-century France. The postrevolutionary economy remained predominantly agrarian, and the peasants continued to work the land in virtually unchanged fashion. The Revolution strengthened rural smallholders through the abolition of seigneurial privileges and transfers of some land and through the legal reinforcement of partible inheritance. And as Alexander Gerschenkron has pointed out: There can be no doubt that the French family farm deserves a place of distinction in the array of hindrances and handicaps placed in the path of French economic development. First of all, the French farms proved a very inadequate source of labor supply to the cities. The French farmer clung to his land ... At the same time, ... the desire to purchase additional land always seemed to rank highest in determining the economic decisions of the French Peasantry. Thus its proverbial thrift meant abstention from buying additional consumers' goods; yet little of the savings was used for the acquisition of capital goods such as machinery and fertilizers ... As a result, the French peasantry not only failed to aid industrial development by providing it with cheap and disciplined labor . . . ; it also failed to act as a large and growing market for industrial products. 14 After 1 8 14, French industry found itself far behind British industry and turned to the strengthened French state "to perpetuate in France a hothouse atmosphere in which antiquated and inefficient enterprises were maintained at high cost, while new plants and enterprises lacked both the sting of competition and unobstructed connection with foreign countries for the importation of capital goods and know-how." 15 More beneficial contributions by France's strengthened state to the facilitation of capitalist industrialization had to await the advent of the railroad age. Even then, French economic development merely seems to have picked up not far beyond where it left off in 178 9 and to have proceeded steadily in a socioeconomic environment not, overall, much more or less favorable to growth than that of the Old Regime. As a case for which economic historians have been unable to agree on any period as the time of "industrial takeoff," France provides poor material indeed for substantiating the notion of a bourgeois revolution that supposedly suddenly breaks fetters on capitalist development.

Political Accomplishments Nor is it sufficient simply to transfer the classic bourgeois-revolution thesis from a primarily socioeconomic to a more strictly political level of analysis, arguing that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois liberalism accomplished through political struggles fueled by class conflicts and led by the bourgeoisie. 17 The political struggles of the French Revolution were not in any meaningful sense led by a capitalist bourgeoisie or its representatives. Key changes wrought by the Revolution in the political structure of France strengthened executive-administrative dominance within government rather than parliamentary-representative arrangements. And the possibilities for authoritarian rule were furthered at the expense of civil liberties. Perhaps most important of all, any analyst trying to make sense of the conditions that influenced the political struggles and accomplishments of the Revolution must pay special attention to the effects of French involvement from 1792 to 1 8 14 in major European wars. For state building in revolutionary France was more powerfully and directly shaped by the exigencies of waging wars and coping with their domestic political repercussions than by the class interests of conflicting social groups. A bird's-eye view of what the French Revolution did most strikingly accomplish is- interestingly enough-nowhere better expressed than in the passage quoted as the keynote for this chapter, taken from Karl Marx's pamphlet on "The Civil War in France." 18 This remarkable passage puts the "medieval rubbish" of the Old Regime in correct perspective by suggesting that it was closely intertwined with the state apparatus of the monarchy. Superimposed upon the increasingly fluid and modem socioeconomic structure of prerevolutionary France (as we saw in Chapter 2) was a cumbrous collection of institutionalized and politically guaranteed local, provincial, occupational, and estate rights and corporate bodies. Some of these had forms or labels inherited from medieval times, but all of them had long since been functionally transformed through the expansion of absolute monarchy and the spread of commercialization. What the social and political upheavals of the Revolution certainly succeeded in doing was eliminating this "medieval rubbish," which had both depended upon the monarchical state for its continued existence and, simultaneously, limited the efficient functioning of royal absolutism. Seigneurial privileges and rights were swept away, leaving an agrarian economy dominated by medium and small landholders with exclusive private rights to their lands. The Nation- composed of citizens stripped of estate and corporate distinctions and officially equal before the laws of the landreplaced hereditary, divinely sanctioned monarchy as the symbolic source

of legitimate political sovereignty. As Map 3 shows, uniform, rationally ordered political jurisdictions- featuring 80-90 "departments" (themselves encompassing districts and communes) - replaced the hodgepodge of "35 provinces, 33 fiscal generalites ... , 175 grands bailliages, 13 parlements, 38 gouvemements militaires, and 142 dioceses" of the Old Regime. 19 Nationwide systems of law, taxation, and customs replaced the regional variations and local barriers of prerevolutionary times. In the army and state administration, fully bureaucratic principles for recruiting, rewarding, and supervising officials replaced the practices of venal officeholding, farming out of governmental functions, and special recognition of noble status and of corporate privileges that had so compromised the unity and effectiveness of the monarchical state. The central government expanded in size and functions. And the new national polity became more "democratic," not only in the sense that the nation of civil equals replaced monarchy and aristocracy as the source of legitimacy but also in the sense that the state reached farther, and more even-handedly, into society. In so doing, it attempted to distribute services and opportunities without formal regard for social background and demanded more of everyone, more active involvement in state functions, and more resources of money, time, and manpower to carry out national objectives. In sum, the French Revolution was "bourgeois" only in the specific sense that it consolidated and simplified the complex variety of prerevolutionary property rights into the single individualistic and exclusive form of modem private property. And it was "capitalist" only in the specific sense that it cleared away all manner of corporate and provincial barriers to the expansion of a competitive, national market economy in France. Of course these were very important changes. They represent the elimination of quasi-feudal forms of surplus appropria�ion and the establishment instead of promising juridical conditions- though not ideal socioeconomic conditions - for capitalist appropriation and for the capitalist industrialization of France.20 But we should not forget that these transformations were only a part of the story. They were in a sense simply complements to the more striking and far-reaching transformations in the French state and national polity. These political changes, in tum, were not simply or primarily "liberal" in nature, nor were they straightforwardly determined by bourgeois activity or class interest. Rather they were the result of complex criss crossings of popular revolts and the efforts at administrative-military consolidation of a succession of political leaderships. By virtue of both its outcomes and its processes, the French Revolution- as the remainder of this part will attempt to demonstrate- was as much or more a bureaucratic, mass-incorporating and state-strengthening revolution as it was (in any sense) a bourgeois revolution.

THE EFFE CTS OF THE SOCIAL- REVOLUTIONARY C RISIS OF 1 789 If the French Revolution was chiefly the transformation of an absolute monarchy encumbered by "medieval rubbish" into a centralized, bureaucratic, and mass-incorporating national state, then how and why did this happen? The political outcome of the French Revolution, fully consolidated under Napoleon, was not that preferred by the economically dominant groups in France. Although they never could agree on the institutional specifics, what most wealthy, propertied Frenchmen probably wanted out of the Revolution was something like the English parliamentary system. This was a system with local governments and a national assembly (or assemblies) dominated by representatives of educated, wellto-do people, and with the national representative body enjoying powers to initiate legislation and exert financial controls on the executive. But this liberal sort of political outcome is not what emerged from the socialrevolutionary process in France, any more than in Russia or China. Right from the start, from 1789 on, the social-revolutionary crisis- marked by the incapacitation of a monarchical administration upon .which the dominant class had depended, in combination with uncontrollable peasant revolts- contained the seeds of breakdown for attempts to consolidate the Revolution in liberal forms. To see how and why this was true, it is useful to contrast briefly the French sociopolitical structure and revolutionary trajectory with those of England during her seventeenth-century parliamentary Revolution. Dominant-Class Political Capacities From the beginning, the French dominant class had less capacity than the English to make a liberal political revolution against the monarchy. The English Parliament was a functioning national assembly during the century before the English Revolution, and it brought together prosperous notables representing both urban and rural areas. (Indeed many county cliques of landed gentry had simply absorbed the rights to represent the urban corporations of their areas in the House of Commons.) Moreover, the representatives in Parliament had well-established ties to local governments that controlled most of the means of administration and coercion in the country.21 When the English dominant class set out to clip the powers of the monarchy, therefore, it acted to assert and defend the powers of an already-existing national representative assembly. And when quarrels broke out over control of armed forces, followed by the Civil War, the dominant class factions supporting Parliament could use their connections to local governments (London and many counties) to

mobilize military and financial resources at least equal to those available to the king and his supporters. In France things were very different. The dominant class was internally divided from the start over what kind of representative institutions it wanted vis-a-vis the king. The Estates-General was really nothing more than a historical precedent; and preexisting politically relevant privileges would be at stake if provincial estates, parlements, and voting by order were sacrificed for the alternative of a unified national assembly. By the late spring of 1789 the liberal notables of the Third Estate and the aristocracy had won the battle for the National Assembly. Yet, unlike the English Parliament, this newbc>m French body enjoyed no established ties to strong local governments. Instead, its survival in the face of royal opposition was only secured through the spontaneous, nationwide Municipal Revolution of the summer of 1789. Although the National (renamed Constituent} Assembly obviously benefited from the Municipal Revolution, it did not in any sense direct this movement. And afterwards it could do little more than constitutionally sanction the decentralizing results. It was true that the new municipal committees were strongly oriented to national politics and anxious to support the Revolution. 22 Yet, administratively speaking, the result of the Municipal Revolution was not only to disorganize the royal government but also to forestall the emergence of an effective revolutionary government. "The fundamental fact," wrote Alfred Cobban, paraphrasing an earlier historian, "is that before 1 78 9 . . . there was not a single truly elected assembly in the country, but only government officials; in 1790 there was no longer a single official, but only elected bodies."23 So great was the distrust of any centralized executive power in the early phases of the Revolution, that no workable system was created to replace the monarchical one. Instead the localities were confirmed as virtually autonomous authorities, though without adequate arrangements for them to raise revenues.24 Simultaneously, the national government found it increasingly difficult to implement policies on a coordinated basis, or even to raise adequate revenues through taxation. To govern the country, the members of the Assembly had to rely upon their own ability to persuade local authorities to follow national directives. English parliamentary leaders faced similar difficulties during the Civil War. But at least they could deal with well-established and familiar local authorities, masters of local governments with proven powers of social control. French local authorities after 1789 were brand new and without adequate means to perform their assumed functions. As soon as departments had been created in 1790 as an important level of government "above" the municipalities, the two sets of local authorities, each tending to represent different kinds of interests, often found themselves at odds

with one another. And changing national leaderships or competing national factions courted first one level of local authorities, then the other. 25 Through all of this, furthermore, the political integration of rural areas was potentially weak - and subject to breakdown when and where peasant and urban interests became contradictory. For the most active local authorities in the newly emerging national system were strictly town based. Overall, then, the revolutionary liberal government that emerged in France in 1 78 9-90 was more tenuously based than the English parliamentary government. This was hardly surprising, given the origins of the French liberal regime. It had only been able to form in the first place by virtue of the decentralizing disorganization of the royal administration upon which the prerevolutionary dominant class had depended. The Impact of Peasant Revolts To make matters worse, the French liberal revolutionaries immediately and persistently faced more dire threats than the English parliamentarians- threats both of uncontrollable revolts from below, and of deepening dominant-class polarization over fundamental social and political issues. Here peasant revolts become important. For the reasons spelled out in Chapter 3, widespread peasant revolts against dominant-class landlords never developed in the English Revolution. The English upper class was left free to quarrel over political forms (about which they were potentially much more unified than the French anyway) without facing a socialrevolutionary challenge from below. But peasant revolts, directed especially against holders of seigneurial rights within the French dominant class, did emerge in France in the spring and summer of 1789. And their consequences for the French Revolution were very substantial. Most basically, of course, the direct accomplishment of the peasant revolts was an attack on the existing class structure, the elimination of one existing mode of surplus appropriation and control over agricultural property and production. Of equal, if not more, importance were the "feedback" effects of the peasant revolts on the course of national revolutionary politics. Because of their impact upon the actions of the Constituent Assembly (directly in August 1789 and indirectly after that), the peasant revolts spurred the abolition not only of seigneurialism but of many other old-regime institutions as well. They facilitated the emergence of the uniform, rational administrative and legal system that has characterized modem France since 1790. But at the same time, the peasant revolts and their national political repercussions promoted increasing political polarization within the dominant class. Thus the peasants helped to ensure that the institutionalization of a liberal, constitutional-monarchist regime would be a mirage ever fading as the moderate revolutionary leaders reached out for it.

The snowballing rural unrest of the summer of 1789 presented the newborn Constituent Assembly with stark choices and created a crisis mentality among the members. In contrast to the urban popular unrest of July, the peasant revolts could not be managed or coopted by any constituted authorities. Nor could they be systematically repressed without regenerating the absolutist administration that had so recently been disassembled and partially replaced in the cities and towns. Some of the more militant deputies in the Assembly saw the crisis situation as an opportunity to speed up and guarantee the elimination of many particularistic privileges that compromised national unity and the ideal of juridical equality for all citizens. So on the famous night of August the fourth seigneurial rights were "abolished" (actually made commutable through monetary payments). In addition, a succession of special privileges, property rights, and tax immunities- of towns, provinces, court nobles, provincial nobles, venal officers, and the Church- were surrendered in a partially engineered, partially spontaneous outburst of renunciations. Compensation was voted for economically significant losses (such as seigneurial rights, venal offices, and reduced ecclesiastical tithes). Nevertheless a lot of "medieval rubbish" was swept away very quickly.26 Privileges of the Third Estate elites as well as nobles and churchmen were sacrificed. Yet for many conservatives who had already been forced to accede reluctantly to the establishment of the National/Constituent Assembly, these socioeconomic losses so quickly superimposed upon the loss of political privileges were too much to accept. In addition, within months, the Assembly was forced to confiscate Church lands in order to rescue the still deteriorating national finances; for new state obligations to venal officeholders and the Church had been incurred as a result of the August reforms. Rural unrest continued to simmer and recurrently boil over, as the peasants refused to pay redemption for seigneurial dues while still withholding the dues themselves. Occasionally the peasants struck out violently at seigneurs or their manors.27 And discipline in the army continued to deteriorate as rank-and-filers, here, deserted in large numbers and, there, refused to obey or rebelled against the mostly noble officers. 28 Nobles, especially, became ever more disproportionately vulnerable to attacks and losses. For the means of administration and coercion were now largely in the hands of municipal authorities. Thus the nobles- and especially the rural nobleswere without direct control over or access to any administrative or military means to protect their interests and position. Thus, in steadily increasing numbers from the fall of 1789 on, many rural nobles, as well as other conservatives who abhorred popular disorders and national political developments, emigrated from France. 29 They often went to join the counterrevolutionary army being formed by the king's brother Artois, who was appealing to other European monarchs to intervene militarily in France.

Meanwhile at home, the king and other reluctant conservatives never ceased to demonstrate distaste for the Revolution and refused to cooperate wholeheartedly with moderate leaders, who kept trying to consolidate a nationally unified constitutional monarchy. The king and his friends had no administrative or military means at their disposal to reverse the Revolution. Yet their noncooperation, especially in the context of the growing counterrevolutionary rhetoric from the emigres abroad, was enough to reinforce radical- and ultimately republican and democratic- political tendencies within the Assembly and among those who followed its proceedings across France and in Paris. Thus from August 1789 onward a dynamic of polarization was set up that inexorably strengthened the extreme of full-scale aristocratic-monarchical revival on the orie hand. On the other hand, there was intensified distrust of the king and fear of counterrevolution, leading ultimately to radical republicanism. As we shall soon see, the tensions increasingly immobilized and finally (under wartime conditions) tore apart the tenuously united liberal revolutionary government of 1789-92. In tum, this would provide openings for urban mass mobilization by radical political elites, men who were marginal to the old landed-commercial dominant class and primarily oriented to self- and national advancement through state-building activities. Comparable openings for urban popular radicals and state-building elites never emerged in the English Revolution. There the center of gravity- and the leadership of the revolutionary New Model Army- remained with landed gentlemen from a dominant class securely politically based in parliament and local governments. No such nexus of political power was available to the French dominant class. Once the revolutionary crisis of 1789 had emerged, therefore, not only did owners of seigneurial rights have to cope with peasant revolts in the uncontrollable countryside. Equally fateful was the fact that the liberal sectors of the dominant class also proved unable to replace absolute monarchy with any solidly based parliamentary-style government that would be capable of reuniting the propertied strata and securing their rule against potential bureaucratic and popular political threats. WAR, THE JACOBINS , AND NAPO LEON Ultimately it was the French declaration of war on Austria in April 1792 - involving the nation in the first of a series of international conflicts that were to embroil Europe until 1815 - that delivered the coup de grace to the liberal phase of 1789-91. This act set in motion the processes of governmental centralization and popular political mobilization that were to culminate first in the Montagnard Terror of 1 793-4, and then in the Napoleonic dictatorship. As Marcel Reinhard once succinctly put it, "La guerre revolutionna la Revolution."30 The pressures upon the French revolutionary leaders after 1791 to mobilize for wars on the Continent, even as they fought counterrevolutionaries at home, must be reckoned as a set of conditions comparable in importance to the effects of the social-revolutionary conjuncture of 1789 in determining the centralizing nature of the outcomes of the French Revolution. Again France contrasts to England, for the English revolutionaries did not face invasions from major military powers. How could we conclude, as have one set of interpreters, that war was a historical accident that "blew the Revolution off course" ?31 To believe this is to suppose that the Revolution could have proceeded, let alone broken out, in a France somehow suddenly and miraculously ripped out of the context of the European states system in which it had always been embedded. Neither the domestic actors in the French revolutionary dramas nor the foreign spectators, kings and peoples, ever succumbed to such an illusion. Underlying the initial outbreak of war (between France and Austria) in 1792 and the recurrent outbreaks on ever wider scales thereafter were simply the long-established tensions and balance-of-power dynamics of the European states system - now interacting with the uncertainties and sudden changes of the unfolding Revolution.32 Within revolutionary France conflicting groups were repeatedly tempted (like Court cliques under the Old Regime) to use for factional purposes preparations for wars, and the anticipated or actual consequences of successful campaigns. Similarly, the other powers of Europe discovered in both the initial debasement of monarchical France, and then in the threatening results of the renewed strength of Republican and Napoleonic France, reasons aplenty to fight again and again. Ultimately the French Revolution gave direct rise to a militant system that attempted, as Louis XIV had dreamed, to master the entire Continent. It failed because both France and the other Continental land monarchies were outflanked by, on the one hand, the burgeoning commercial-industrial power of Britain and, on the other, by the unconquerable vastness of Imperial Russia.33 With that failure the unique impetuses of the revolutionary legacy were spent, without having achieved international supremacy for France. Nevertheless, under the aegis of mobilization for war and military intervention in unstable internal politics, a centralized bureaucratic state had been constructed, to be bequeathed to a consolidated French nation. Thus warfare was far from extrinsic to the development and fate of the French Revolution; rather it was central and constitutive, just as one would expect from knowing the nature and dilemmas of the Old Regime from which the Revolution sprang.

Popular Discontents and Mobilization for Revolutionary Dictatorship When the Brissotins engineered France into declaring war against Austria in April 1792, they supposed that the effort would unify a patriotic and revolutionary nation and propel it to easy victories. But, in fact, internal political polarization was only exacerbated. The armies pedormed poorly, debilitated by the emigration or disaffection of many officers, and by the insubordination or lack of training of rank-and-file soldiers. The ensuing French military defeats, in tum, raised the hopes and fears of reactionaries and radicals at home. At the same time, war ineluctably brought inflation as the value of the assignat plummeted. While radical politicians spread republican slogans, the worsening political and military crises and the rising cost of basic foodstuffs aroused the discontent of the masses of urban menu peuple. Who were these urban menu peuple, and what was the basis of their role in the revolutionary process? They were not a class in any modem (especially capitalist) sense, for their loosely defined ranks included: property owners such as shopkeepers, master artisans, and small merchants; proto-wage workers, such as journeymen and hired hands; and minor salaried or professional people. 34 If such people had anything socioeconomic in common, it was that they worked for a living, acquired or held property (if at all) only in close conjunction with their work, and shared a mutual resentment of the rich and privileged (including bourgeois) who "lived nobly." Likewise, the menu peuple shared a concern about the price and sheer availability of basic necessities. For as nonprivileged urban dwellers in a historical period when the supplying of cities with bread and other goods was recurrently problematic due to the vagaries of weather, difficult transportation, and "imperfect" markets, they could never be certain of affording or getting enough to take care of their families. Certainly, as the researches of George Rude have demonstrated, the basic anxiety of the menu peuple about affordable necessities underlay popular political participation at virtually all of the decisive turning points (joumees) of the Revolution from 1788-9 until 1795.35 Yet there was another factor at work: selective and steadily deepening political awareness. 36 For the menu peuple at each point in the Revolution threw their support to those political elites who seemed the surest supporters at first ( 1 788-9), of "liberty" and, then (1791-), also of "equality" - equality in political rights and the right to livelihood. And as the threat of armed counterrevolution grew, the politically active menu peuple, above all in Paris, became the self-consciously republican, antiaristocratic, and moralistically equalitarian sans culottes. They demanded that the distinction

between "active" and "passive" citizens enshrined in the original 1790 Constitution be abolished. And they organized their own political and military participation in neighborhood sections (in Paris), in urban communes, in committees of surveillance, and in armees revolutionnaires (armed bands of self-appointed defenders of the Revolution, which also increasingly took it upon themselves to procure basic supplies for the towns and cities) .37 By the end of 1 792, due in large part to the active intervention of the sans culottes in key political demonstrations and anned actions, not only the Brissotins, but the monarchy and the Legislative Assembly as well, were swept away in favor of a liberal-democratic Republic. Initially, though, the structure of national government remained as administratively noncentralized as before, supposedly coordinated by the elected Convention while it was at work drafting a new constitution. As might be expected, this was not adequate to the crisis circumstances of the day. Events soon overwhelmed the Convention and tore apart at the seams the decentralized form of government carried over from the liberal antimonarchical revolution. Notwithstanding some fortunate early victories by the armies of the Republic, by early 1793 foreign enemies were pressing in anew upon France. Simultaneously there were internal revolts. Spurred by the threat of conscription to the national army, the peasants of the Vendee rose against the revolutionary government in March. And as events in Paris (such as the purging of the Girondins from the Convention in late May) outran political developments in the provinces and threw ever more disaffected politicians into opposition, numerous local rebellions based upon departmental or municipal governments broke out to challenge the authority of Paris. By early summer over one-third of the departments of France were involved in such counterrevolutionary or "federalist" revolts, in some cases providing favorable opportunities for foreign military intervention. What emerged to meet the crisis of defending the Revolution from its armed enemies at home and abroad was a dictatorial and arbitrary system of government. The leaders were dedicated minorities of Montagnard Jacobins, who mobilized, manipulated, and channeled the spontaneous discontents and fervor of the sans culottes. 38 In Paris, Robespierre and other Montagnard deputies in the Convention established themselves in the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security and maintained links to spokesmen for the sans culottes of the Paris Commune. Working through "representatives on mission" and "national agents" dispatched from the Convention, through local district committees of surveillance, and through the network of Jacobin clubs throughout France, the Committees imposed steadily tighter central coordination on the nation's politics. "Elections were suspended, and the renewal of [local] administrative councils was turned over to the national 'representatives' with the help of the popular societies ... To the extreme decentralization

Yet an important point about the revolutionary dictatorship's military achievement should be made. The Montagnards did not start from scratch. Nor did they scrap the regular armies and simply replace them with armed volunteers, organized into self-governing units as the early revolutionary militias had been. As the recent researches of S. F. Scott have demonstrated,44 the line armies of France, though weakened considerably by unusually high rates of rank and file desertion in 1 789 and 1 790, and unsettled by the massive emigration of noble officers from 1789 through 1792, nevertheless were organizationally quite intact in 1793 when the Montagnards took over. Line army units had, moreover, already recovered to normal rank-and-file strength by 1791-2, and the officer corps had been replenished by promotions of pre-1789 enlisted men (who constituted more than half of the officers by early 1792). During 1793-4, the Montagnards amalgamated volunteer units and newly mobilized citizen soldiers with the existing line units of the standing armies. Simultaneously, politically loyal and victorious officers were promoted from within by representatives on mission from the Committee of Public Safety. To be sure, the armies were vastly expanded and infused with new patriotic elan; and (as will be discussed later) certain new kinds of battle tactics became possible with highly motivated citizen troops. But these troops were- for all their political awareness and involvement- incorporated into the framework of line armies that had not completely dissolved in 178 9-92. Despite transformations, these had survived to serve as a basis for revolutionary statebuilding in the context of Continental land warfare. The Fall of the Montagnards Under the dictatorial rule of the Committee of Public Safety the armies of revolutionary France turned from demoralization and defeats to frequent victories. By early 1 794, they had mastered every major internal and external military threat to the Republic. From then on, however, dissatisfaction grew among former supporters of the Montagnard dictatorship. And by the summer of 1794 Robespierre and his key lieutenants were dispatched to the guillotine as the Convention revoked its support for the Committee dictatorship. There were both political and economic precipitants to the Dictatorship's downfall. To consider the economic difficulties first, the Montagnard attempt to control prices and wages had, in actuality, been virtually impossible to administer in such a decentralized preindustrial economy.45 The emergency needs of the state had been met, but social groups were left disgruntled. In the urban centers, shopkeepers, merchants, and small employers complained of too-low prices and too-high wages. And the poorer members of the sans culottes complained above all when the Montagnards

tried to lower the wage maximum in the spring of 1794, a time when reasonably priced bread was still hard to come by. Meanwhile, property-owning peasants in the countryside were incre; ingly reluctant to produce or sell in return for artificially low prices, or � the face of forcible requisitions by government agents and anned bands O• urban revolutionaries. The irony is that these peasants were the same ones who had been most advantaged by the agrarian changes of the Revolution. They had benefited most not only from the peasantry's collective struggle from below against seigneurial claims and tithes but also from the legal decrees by which radicals in the Convention sought to court peasant support during the military crisis of the Revolution. Montagnards were willing to sanction the peasants' victory of 1 789-92 by eliminating the (unenforceable) laws calling for peasants to compensate owners of the old seigneurial rights. The Montagnards also made some efforts to allow peasants to purchase in small units lands confiscated from the Church and emigre nobles. Yet, like all other political leaderships during the French Revolution, they consistently aimed to reinforce the legal rights of individual property owners. In fact, this was the only sensible political strategy for the Montagnards to follow, given that their "party" enjoyed no extensive organizational basis in the countryside, and given that French poor peasants had no collective organizations of their own through which to press programs for land redistribution (or for legal protection of those particular collective rights carried over from feudal times that guarded their interests). Politically, the best that the Montagnards could hope to do was to attach as many peasant smallholders as possible to the revolutionary cause by legally sanctioning the gains already made, and by allowing as many individuals as possible to purchase national lands. Simultaneously, however, this had the effect of reinforcing the hold over the agrarian economy of the very same peasant proprietors whose interests would necessarily be aggrieved by the emergency price controls and forcible grain requisitions of the Montagnard dictatorship in 1 793-4. In addition, the Montagnards were facing political contradictions, again the logical result of their own policies. 46 Perhaps sensing their insecure position, the Montagnards actually intensified the official Terror after the decisive military victories were won. And they used it not only to punish defeated counterrevolutionaries but also to strike out at factions to the immediate right (Dantonists) and left (Heberrists) of the leadership of the Dictatorship. This served to make moderates in the Convention uneasy, rousing them to look for ways to revoke their mandate to the Committees. And it severed the Committees' strongest leadership ties to the popular movement in Paris. The loss of the Hebertist link to the left was especially serious because, by the spring of 1794, the sans culottes were no longer the spontaneous revolutionary force they had been when their interventions

originally brought the Montagnards to power. Ironically, one of the prime accomplishments of the Dictatorship had been to tame and routinize the popular movement. Popular assemblies and bodies that had once been direct democracies were either discouraged from meeting or were coopted as subordinate organs of the Dictatorship, with their leaders in many cases becoming paid government officials. The all-out war effort, moreover, had depleted the ranks and fervor of the original sans culottes, as many went to the fronts, and as the energies of those left behind were channeled into routine support work. Add to all of this the growing economically motivated disgruntlement of the sans culottes with the Montagnard government, and it is not difficult to understand why Robespierre could be toppled in Thermidor without effective resistance from below. Some combination of these economic and political contradictions is usually invoked by historians as sufficient to explain why the Montagnard dictatorship was curtailed and the radicalization of the French Revolution ended in 1794. Indeed, the aforementioned contradictions were sufficient, but only because they operated in the sociopolitical and world-historical context of late-eighteenth-century France. As we shall see in the next major part of this chapter, very similar difficulties pressed in upon the Bolsheviks in 1921 in the immediate wake of their Civil War victories. Had the Bolsheviks fallen from power, historians could easily attribute their fall to the worker and peasant discontent and to the economic contradictions of the "war communist" command economy- both of which conditions were acutely apparent in 1921. However, the Bolsheviks managed to execute - economic policy changes (including concessions to market-oriented interests and pe�sant smallholders} and remain in national political power. Why could they do it, and not the Montagnards in 1794? As the "party of the proletariat," operating in a twentieth-century society that already had large-scale, modem industries, the Bolsheviks enjoyed two advantages: They possessed both an ideological self-justification and a realistic organizational basis for a political mission that could sustain their movement in state power beyond the military defense of the Revolution. The Bolsheviks could "fall back" on state-controlled industries and could devote themselves after 1 921 to devising ways to use state power to expand those industries and the numbers of factory workers employed in them. By contrast, the Montagnards in France, even if they had been consistently willing to conceive of themselves as the "party of the sans culottes, " did not have objectively available to them any expansionist economic mission to sustain them in state power beyond the military victories of 1793-4. The sans culottes themselves were an inextricable mixture of market oriented small property owners and non-propertied people who had an interest in resisting current trends of economic development. More important, a French economy consisting almost entirely of small-scale agriculture

and commercial units (and some nonmechanized industrial enterprises) simply could not be directed from above by a political party. There were no "commanding heights" for the state to manage; and even foreign models of large-scale industry were entirely lacking at that point in world history. In revolutionary France, therefore, the potential practical contributions of the Jacobin radicals to French national power and development ended when the dire counterrevolutioriary military threats were overcome. At that point little remained for them to do but to continue violent punitive measures against ever more vaguely defined counterrevolutionaries, and to attempt to enforce the cultural forms of the Republic of Virtue, complete with the "Cult of the Supreme Being" to replace Catholicism. 47 The political cohesiveness of the Montagnards decreased as their potential opponents in the country and the Convention grew bolder. Even the "twelve who ruled" on the Committee of Public Safety did not stick together or act with decisiveness of purpose from the spring of 1794 - a real contrast to the way the Bolshevik leaders would act in 1921. The Search for Stability After the fall of Robespierre, the Thermidorian Convention quickly dismantled the judicial apparatus of the Terror and the centralized controls of the emergency revolutionary government. Suffering the effects of rising prices and the sudden loosening of economic restraints, the Parisian menu peuple rose again in the spring of 1795. 48 But without radical political elites willing and able to channel their support, the urban menu peuple could no longer be the arbiters of the Revolution. Indeed, this time their initiative was brutally suppressed and their leadership eliminated, as the Convention called in the army against them. By the end of 1795, a regime called the Directory (because it featured five executive directors} was installed under a new republican constitution. This constitution was designed both to preserve moderate politicians of the Convention in power {by law, two-thirds of them had to be elected or appointed to the Directory's councils} and to give wealthier citizens considerable local administrative and national legislative power. Once again an attempt was being made to consolidate the Revolution in liberal form. But the liberal-republican Directory was to be no more successful than the pre-1792 constitutional monarchy, for it was plagued with similar problems and inadequacies. The Directory did not dismantle everything inherited from its predecessors; it retained most civil servants and expanded the central administrative bureaus. "The central bureaucracy was thus given a renewed stability, which paved the way for the vital role it was to play in the new state moulded by Napoleon and bequeathed by him to later generations

Nevertheless, executive authority was weak. Nominally there were agents of the Directors charged with sup�rvising local departmental authorities, but they were usually influential men of their communities appointed through the patronage of local representatives in the legislative councils. Faced with overwhelming problems of economic crises (especially in 1795-7), continuing foreign wars and financial crises, and outbreaks of White Terror and resistance to anti-Catholic policies, the Directors found themselves without effective legitimate means to influence the composition or policies of either the national legislative councils or the local governments. "[nhe central government proved incapable of enforcing its own decrees. It could not persuade electors to vote. It could not force recalcitrant authorities to levy the forced loan [a device to alleviate the government's financial crisis], pursue refractory priests, or answer government questionnaires. It could not prevent them from condoning massive desertion. " 50 The Directory's difficulties reflected not only its inefficient institutional structure but also its weak social support. 51 Though its structure and policies were meant to (and did) benefit the property-holding strata, these did not wholeheartedly support the Directory in return. Partly this was because the Directory, despite its anti-Jacobin policies, was still far too radical in its personnel and its antiroyalist and antichurch policies for many propertied elements. Partly, too, it was because the dominant economic groups in France were by 1795 more politically fractionated than ever, with royalists opposing republicans and each camp divided within its own ranks. In the wake of the popular mobilizations of 1793-4, with their threats to rights of property and to social hierarchies, the French propertied strata were even less capable than they had been before 1793 of compromising about and operating within a set of decentralized, liberal political institutions. The Directory represented an attempt by republican politicians of the Thermidorian Convention to retain and liberalize state power with property holders' support. But it was an unsuccessful attempt, both because of its institutional inadequacies and because the propertied would not- and probably could not- cooperate politically. Lacking either broad social support or administrative means for authoritarian rule- and of course unwilling to resort to mass political mobilization -the precariously based Directory turned to the armies of France to shore up its rule, not only through direct repression of armed rebels but also through repeated purges of the elected legislative councils. Meanwhile the national armies were evolving into highly professionalized and organizationally self-contained bodies: One-time revolutionary volunteers w�re "increasingly indifferent to domestic political squabbles, and increasingly aware of the special skills and interests of the soldier's trade."52 And the officers, once dependent upon civilian governments for advancement to the higher ranks, were now being coopted from within by

the generals. "By the end of the Directory, the fastest way to achien promotion was to join the clientele of an influential general."53 Thus, even as government leaders came to rely routinely upon the armies, their leaders were becoming less subject to civilian political control. Predictably enough, it was not long before an adventurous general (invited to intervene by some of the Directors in 1799) proved willing to exploit the indispensability and prestige of the army to seize power in a coup d'etat. Napoleon Bonaparte used his base in the army to establish himself (step by step) first as de facto dictator, then as First Consul for life, and finally as full-fledged dynastic emperor. Much more important, though, were the institutional developments under Napoleon. By legally confirming the status quo of the social and economic accomplishments of the Revolution and by reintroducing administrative centralization, Napoleon managed to put end to the violent civil conflicts of the revolutionary period. His approach worked so well especially because, to assemble his regime, Napoleon borrowed personnel without prejudice from politically flexible survivors of all previous regimes. As Godechot puts it: This gigantic administrative reorganization, involving state appointment to a large number of well paid posts, gave Bonaparte the opening for a work of reconciliation. The Directory owed its fall partly to the narrowness of its political foundations. Bonaparte, well aware of that fact, looked for allies on the Right as well as on the Left, and his most successful method of winning sympathy was to appoint men from all sections of the political world to the new posts which were opening ... [A]mong the prefects: in the first batch were 15 constituants, 16 legislateurs, 19 conventionnels and 26 former members of the Directory's Councils. Some had been terrorists, others belonged to the nobility. 54 To make his eclectic system work, Napoleon judiciously dispensed with nonroutinized mass mobilizations and with all manifestations of ideological commitment. Wielding instead the symbols, rituals, and propaganda of a highly generalized French nationalism, Bonaparte decorated his essentially authoritarian-bureaucratic regime with a hodgepodge of symbolic concessions to the inherited factions: plebiscitary and patriotic rituals for the radicals; consultative councils with restricted electoral bases for the liberals; and a Concordat with the Catholic Church for conservatives. 55 After a breather in 1 802-3, the price of Napoleon's internal settlement was continuing French participation in general European wars. Napoleon marshalled French enthusiasms and resources more efficiently than ever before for foreign military adventures, which remade much of the face ot Europe. Nevertheless, Napoleon's project of conquering the entire Continent was ultimately doomed to failure. French conquests soon stimulated nationalist reactions in the other countries of Europe, so that Europe's

long-standing patterns of state competition and power balance triumphed again in new political forms. Moreover, Napoleon's inland-oriented "Continental" system could not at that point in world history hope to best England's commercial-industrial empire based on sea power.56 Yet no matter how much strain his military exploits put on French resources, Napoleon never lost his grip at home while they were at all successful. Given the only purposes to which the enhanced state power generated by the Revolution could have been (at that point in world history) directly and immediately applied- that is, to stabilization at home and to the attempt to establish French hegemony in Europe through military conquests-Napoleon's political "solution" to the power struggles of the Revolution indeed made more sense than the Jacobins' extravagant dream of the Republic of Virtue. Napoleon was only removed from power by foreign interventions after military collapse. Even then, his basic institutional accomplishments remained behind, because subsequent regimes could afford neither to reverse the revolutionary settlement nor to dispense with the administrative power bequeathed to them by Bonaparte. THE NEW REG IME What kind of sociopolitical system did Napoleon's military dictatorship consolidate? To understand the basic and enduring features of the outcomes of the French Revolution, we need to retrace our steps. This time, though, it is important to pull back a bit from the dynamics of the Revolution in order to review systematically the most striking changes wrought by the revolutionary struggles in the structure of the French state and its functioning within society. Changes in the Anny Nowhere were the bureaucratic and "democratic" accomplishments of the Revolution better exemplified than in the army. With respect to two lines of military development in Europe- professionalization of the officer corps and the emergence of a national army- the French Revolution represented a true watershed.57 Under the Old Regime, the officer corps constituted an inflated set of honorific as well as functional positions. The highest offices were virtually monopolized by men with noble status and connections at the royal court and with the wealth to pay for commissions and promotions. Officers' duties, conceived as prestigious "service" in the feudal tradition, were not paid for as if they constituted a full-time occupation. Moreover, to afford the expenses of display associated with the status, most officers had to combine their military pursuits with remunerative activities on the side

The Revolution basically changed the organization and functioning of the officer corps. 59 The abolition of nobility and establishment of equality of opportunity formally opened access to officer posts to citizens from all social backgrounds. The number of officer positions was restricted as honorific functions gave way to the strictly utilitarian. For the same reason, the technologically advanced artillery was raised from the last-ranking to the first-ranking branch of service. 60 Venality of commissions and promotions was abolished, and military officers were provided with salaries adequate to allow them to become full-time, career specialists. Finally, promotions, which came unusually frequently in the midst of the internal strife and wars of the revolutionary period, were made on the basis of education, skill, and, above all else, military experience, including service in the ranks (though, of course, political connections always mattered, especially for promotions to the highest positions). These organizational changes, together with the social and political upheavals of the Revolution, ensured an influx of men of nonnoble (especially urban, educated middle class) backgrounds into an officer corps that had been over 90 percent noble before 1789. Nevertheless, many men of noble background survived and even prospered unusually under the new system. In fact, nothing better confirms the fact that the changes wrought by the Revolution were as much organizational as purely or primarily social than the remarkable career success in the army of the revolutionary period of many poor, provincial nobles. Such individuals could not have expected to compete successfully with wealthy, court-connected nobles under the Old Regime. 61 Napoleon Bonaparte himself provides a striking example of provincial-noble mobility during the Revolution. Born the son of a minor Corsican nobleman, he attended a provincial military academy under the Old Regime and was commissioned a lieutenant. The Revolution remarkably enhanced what could only have been a dead-end career. Connections to the jacobins enabled Bonaparte to be placed in command of the artillery in the battle to subdue rebellious Toulon, and after the victory over the royalists there Napoleon was promoted to brigadier general. Thermidor brought temporary setbacks, but before long, after helping to suppress royalist demonstrations against the regime in 1795, Napoleon rose in the service of the Directory to become commander-in-chief, first of the Army of the Interior and then of expeditionary forces in Italy. Such were the possibilities for army men of talent and guile during the Revolution, even for many of politically disadvantageous noble background. The Revolution brought changes for the rank-and-file infantry as well. Before 1789, enlistment was "voluntary" but did not attract those with decent civilian livelihoods. Discipline was crude and arbitrary, and the pay and upkeep were low and undependable. The standing army, numbering about two-hundred thousand, was not large relative to France's

populati on of twenty-five million; Prussia, for example, enlisted a much higher proportion of her subjects. And one-sixth of the French army consisted of foreigners. 62 With the Revolution came increasing mass military involvement in forms celebrated as patriotic. It began with the establishment, and then gradual expansion to include poorer citizens, of the urban National Guards, and reached a peak in the celebrated levee en masse of 1 793. The French armies swelled to 770,000 by 1794.63 With the continuation of wars, the Directory passed in 1798 a Law of Conscription, which set the framework for a permanent national standing army: "Every Frenchman is a soldier and owes himself to the defense of the Fatherland," the law declared.64 Napoleon put organizational teeth into this law and used it to raise ever-increasing numbers of soldiers. "In the ten years from 1804 to 1813 he drafted 2,400,000 men . . . "65 His campaigns spent men liberally, for he extended systems of fighting and maneuver inherited from the fierce battles of 1792-4. In these campaigns civilly treated and politically propagandized citizen soldiers were hurled against enemy armies in huge, loosely supervised masses and were urged to live off the land and to attack and pursue the enemy until his armies were destroyed. In sum, as Gordon Craig writes: The destruction of the old regime and the granting of fundamental rights to all citizens had an immediate effect upon the constitution of the French army. They made possible the creation of a truly national army, and one which, because its rank and file was composed of citizens devoted to the national cause, was freed from the rigid limitations of eighteenth-century warfare. It was no longer necessary for the French to concentrate their forces in dose array upon the battlefield, forbidding independent manoeuvre lest it lead to mass desertion. The French tirailleurs advanced in extended order, fighting, firing, and taking cover as individuals, and the army gained immeasurably in tactical elasticity in consequence. Troops could, moreover, be trusted to forage for themselves, and it was now possible to divorce French units from the cumbersome supply trains and the dependence on magazines which restricted the mobility of the old model armies. This liberation from the tyranny of logistics, combined with the new tactics and the perfected divisional organization, introduced a completely new kind of warfare to Europe- the type of lightning war of which Napoleon showed himself the master in the Italian campaign of 1 800. 66 Changes in the Civil State Analogous to the changes wrought in the .military sphere, l.he French Revolution brought about in the civil state a "conjunction of democratic government with bureaucratic administration," variations of which have ever after

marked the political system of France. 67 The first and most basic thing to be noted is the sheer growth in size of the French administrative machinery during the Revolution. One scholarly authority, Clive H. Church, has been reported as estimating that during the Revolution "the size of the bureaucracy may have risen from 50,000 to nearly a quarter of a million; the staff of the central ministries, for example, increased from 420 in 1788 to over 5,000 by 1796."68 Indeed, according to Richard Cobb, perhaps as many as 150,000 new bureaucrats were appointed during the Terror alone. Cobb quips that the Revolution created HLa France fonctionnaire. "69 Obviously this seems appropriate given the numerical expansion alone; it seems all the more so once we comprehend the social and organizational implications of the bureaucratizing changes wrought by the Revolution. These implications have been brilliantly documented for the realm of state finances by J. F. Bosher. His book, French Finances, 1 770-1 795, is tellingly subtitled "From Business to Bureaucracy," to convey that "in the realm of government finance, the French Revolution seems to have brought to an end an era of private capitalism and inaugurated an age of public administration. "70 For "something happened that was more fundamental than the victory of one social class over another. This was the invention of an administrative weapon for social and political domination." 71 Under the Old Regime there was no unified royal treasury and no central budgetary accounting or control over governmental revenues and expenditures. Instead the management of state finances was in the hands of venal officers- at once noblemen and profit-seeking businessmen- such as the farmers general, receivers general, treasurers general, payers of the rentes, and other high accountants. These higher offices had become the private property of accountants and were fast becoming the patrimony of noble families. Accountable only to the Chambers of Accounts, these high financial figures were not part of an administrative hierarchy and not subject to ministerial inspection or command. Most of their income did not come from salaries but from profits on their activities as the Crown's bankers, collecting and spending revenues, lending the government more and more money, and engaging in their own business activities. Loosely organized in professional corps or compagnies with committees to review their corporate interests, the financiers exercised a profitable monopoly over the collecting and spending of royal revenues and over the short-term credit business in the system. 72 What elements of true bureaucracy there were under the Old Regime were confined to the scattered bureaux, consisting of groups of clerks working for the independent higher officers or for the bureau heads of the royal ministries. As salaried employees these "might be thought of as having bureaucratic status, except that they were more like the domestic servants

of the men they served,"73 for they assisted their masters in personal business as well as in the management of royal finances, and they were hired and fired at will. Fundamental changes came with the Revolution, for the "National Assembly, in large majority, did not like the financial system precisely because it was in the hands of profit-seeking capitalists-they used that word- "74 and it sought to establish national management of public finances instead. The National Assembly planned to guard the public finances by bureaucratic organization. With a vision of mechanical efficiency and articulation, ... the revolutionary planners hoped to prevent corruption, putting their faith in the virtues of organization to offset the vices of individual men. This hope was at the very heart of the financial revolution. Instead of several hundred separate caisses (funds) in the hands of independent, profit-seeking accountants and tax farmers, France was to have a consolidated central fund in a bureaucratic Treasury composed only of salaried officials performing their duties according to a rational plan of functions. The Treasury grew and grew over the revolutionary years, absorbing the other caisses one aher another. The assembly demanded lists of employees, salaries and operating expenses, and arranged for full annual accounts such as the monarchy never had. 1s The social concomitant of these measures for the state's officialdom was change from a system of entrepreneurial independence and personal hierarchy of precedence and patronage to one of administrative hierarchy based upon impersonal but firm supervision of officials by their superiors. Henceforth, moreover, state officials were expected to engage in the execution of specifically defined public duties distinct from private business. The positions and emoluments of the venal and aristocratic financial agents were abolished. Bureau heads, once independent and well-paid aspirants for the noble higher offices, were reduced to mere f mictionnaires with lowered salaries not far above their subordinates. And their clerks were turned into regularly paid civil servants, freed from "personal dependence on their masters, who became merely their superiors."76 What emerged was a ladder of salaried civil servants all paid by one central authority and subject to central supervision and control. As for the mode of executive control that enveloped the increasingly bureaucratized staffs of the state administration, the Revolution (as we have seen) passed through a succession of phases. A single legitimating theme ran through all of the phases: an identification of executive functions with the implementation of the nation's or the people's will. Not incidentally, even Bonaparte accomplished his work under the guise of a national-democratic dictatorship. Four times Napoleon, who styled him

self the "first representative of the nation," had his rule endorsed by national plebiscites. 77 Nevertheless, Napoleon's institutional achievements were anything but democratic (or liberal). 78 Essentially he added to the reorganized bureaus and staffs inherited from the revolutionary assemblies and from the Directory a system of centrally appointed general administrative and judicial officials. At the apex of the system, was the Council of State, a body of experts appointed by Napoleon and vested with wide de facto powers. Government ministers did not form a cabinet, but instead reported individually to the Council (and to Napoleon). New laws were regularly formulated and deliberated in the legislative section of the Council, and its other working sections (on war, navy, interior,. and finance) supervised relevant parts of the state bureaucracy. Below this technocratic apex stretched a hierarchy·of appointed judges and administrative officials, reaching down to subprefects and mayors. The crucial link in the hierarchy was the departmental prefect, comparable to the intendant of the Old Regime, yet more controllable- and also more powerful, because his jurisdiction was smaller and unencumbered with privileged corporate bodies. Of course France has had many political regimes since Napoleon's dictatorship- indeed, Bonaparte himself lasted only until 18 14, when he was followed by, first, restored Bourbon monarchs, then a "bourgeois" monarchy, a Second Republic, a Second Empire, a Third Republic, and so on into the twentieth century. Most of these regimes involved more significant attempts (than Napoleon I's) to institute (more or less democratic) liberalparliamentary political controls. Yet as Herbert Leuthy cogently points out, an observer who concentrates only on the recurrently changing constitutional forms will miss understanding the real basis and enduring power of French government. If one looks at a constitutional handbook one will find no mention of, or at most a casual footnote devoted to, any of the great institutions on which the permanence of the state depends ... No mention is made of the Ministries which remain after the Minister of a day has departed. No mention is made of the Council of State which, because of its jurisdiction over the administrative machine, rules supreme over the instruments of state power, is indispen5able to an executive incapable of carrying out its will without it, interprets according to its own code the true content of laws passed by Parliament or quietly buries them, and as the universal advisor of Governments usually gets its own way even in the formulation of Government policy, because it has authority and permanence, and the Government has not. No mention is made of the general staff of the financial administration, which is able to modify and interpret the budget passed by Parliament as autocratically as the Council of State is able to modify and interpret its laws, and by its control over state revenue and expenditure is able to

exercise a decisive influence over the life and death of Governments ... Not one of these institutions is derived "from the people." They represent the state apparatus of the absolute monarchy, perfected and brought to its logical conclusion under the First Empire. When the crowned heads fell, the real sovereignty was transferred to this apparatus. But it works in the background, unobtrusively, anonymously, remote from all publicity and almost in secret . . . It is not so much a state within a state as the real state behind the facade of the democratic state. 79 Crystallizing this "real state" in the process of ending and consolidating the Revolution was not only Napoleon's most important task, it was also a remarkably enduring achievement. The State in Society The revolutionized French state had a stronger grip on more functions than the old-regime monarchy. University and secondary education were brought under government control to form a highly selective, centralized, and elitist system from which state administrators and experts could be recruited.80 Napoleon's settlement with the Catholic Church made some concessions (including granting Church control over most primary education). But the Church, with much of its property gone and its priests now paid by the state, was no longer the independent corporate power that it had been under the Old Regime. Equally striking was the change in state financial administration: With taxes now collected by permanent state appointees not by venal entrepreneurs or elected local authorities, revenues could be relied upon and the cooperation of bankers obtained to create a Bank of France, which "rendered consiuerable service to the state by advancing funds in the form of banknotes."81 It is true that French public finances were never fully stabilized under Napoleon's regime. But, in decisive contrast to the Old Regime, the new state could ride out financial crisis. Napoleon could confiscate funds from financiers and ignore the protests of dominant economic groups, whereas the monarchical state had been tom asunder by financial crisis in 1787-9.82 The state now had the potential edge even over its most powerful citizens. Moreover, the revolutionized French state impinged more directly than ever before on the lives of all citizens, whether they wanted it or not. In the words of William McNeill: What the French revolutionaries did was to sweep away obstacles to manipulation of men and resources by a single national command center. Peculiar local practices and immunities were systematically suppressed ... After revolutionary legislation had been codified and applied throughout France, individual citizens confronted the august

embodiment of the Nation, as it were, fact to face, without the protecting integument of corporate identities and roles ... In actual fact, w - hat a citizen confronted was an agent of the central government- whether representative-on-mission, prefect, tax collector, or recruiting sergeant- who, in the name of the People, demanded goods and services on a far more massive scale than royal agents had ever been able to command.83 The effect of this extended reach of the state could be especially jolting for rural communities. Based on their studies of the relations of peasant communities in Brittany to the pre- and postrevolutionary governments, Le Goff and Sutherland concluded that the "Revolution came as an unprecedented and often unwelcome intrusion into the lives of many ... people. After 1790, the demands the central government made on citizens for attention, activity and loyalty went far beyond the claims of the ramshackle administration of the old regime. "84 Before the Revolution, as long as taxes were paid and major rebellions did not develop, the Breton peasants were left to settle their own disputes, police themselves, and themselves tend to whatever community concerns they and their priest cared to define. Priests and royal government often cooperated informally to channel information "up" and official concerns "down" the state-community ladder. With the Revolution, the local priests were first bypassed by the authority of the departments, districts, and communes, and then officially turned into public employees. Local people were supposed to give more resources and attention to supravillage levels of government run by townbased and urban-minded officials. At the radical height of the Revolution, moreover, many peasants were subject to outright coercion from revolutionary supporters determined to acquire supplies of grain, enforce military conscription, and implement measures to punish refractory priests and suppress Catholic rituals. In parts of France, including especially Brittany and other areas of the west, the post-1789 changes helped to stimulate peasant resistance to revolutionary authorities, ranging from local actions to guerrilla warfare and participation in large-scale regional revolts. Available studies on the socioeconomic bases of peasant reactions to the Revolution suggest that they were likely to be more amenable to the revolutionary changes in areas where established market relations tied together propertied peasants and local townsmen. Peasants were likely to be less amenable- hence inclined to resist, if possible - in areas where market relations were newly penetrating or where noncommercially oriented peasants were active but unsuccessful competitors with townsmen for lands sold during the Revolution. 85 In the end, though, all overt resistance was suppressed because, due to developments we have already traced, the "Revolution shifted the initiative from the community to the government and at the same time gave goverment a power to coerce which its counterpart in the old regime had never possessed." 86 The Napoleonic settlement did, however, back off from the sorts of coercive economic policies and extreme anti-Catholic measures that had turned entire peasant communities and rural regions against the Revolution. Instead, the newly consolidated administrative state, while claiming taxes and conscripts more firmly than ever before, sought an accomodation with property owners in each locality. Well-to-do landowners, including richer peasants, rentier townsmen, and often former nobles, were elected through a limited franchise to cooperate in local government with centrally appointed executive and judicial officials. 87 One result- which politically paralleled the desolidarizing consequences of the successful antiseigneurial revolts- was to undermine the remnants of village-based solidarity between richer and poorer peasants. This process occurred as oligarchies of richer peasants were officially set apart from, and above, their poorer neighbors and became more closely linked to propertied townsmen and to the centralized state administration. Perhaps more striking still was the cost for village political autonomy. This is well summarized by Thomas Sheppard, who traced the "village" of Lourmarin in Provence through the Revolution. During the eighteenth century, he writes, if the village council did not initiate any major programs, neither was it completely submissive to outside authority. It was Lourmarin's political vitality, relatively broad participation in village affairs, and its continuing concern for all its inhabitants, that were hallmarks of the ancien regime in Lourmarin. This vitality and excitement were gone after the Revolution and Lourmarin became in the nineteenth century ... a mere cog in the administrative machinery of the central government. The municipal council discussed only those matters referred to it, made very few decisions itself, and functioned primarily to administer laws and orders channelled to it by the prefect. Bureaucracy and centralization had come to Lourmarin, but the village paid heavily for such modernization. 88 Yet although French peasants- as indeed all Frenchmen- had to contend after the Revolution with a more powerful and intrusive state, this state was obviously not as all-encompassing or dynamic a presence in the society and economy as the Communist Party-states of revolutionary Russia and China would be. The overall outcome of the French Revolution can be characterized as the symbiotic coexistence of a centralized, professional-bureaucratic state with a society dominated by some moderately large and many medium and small owners of private property. In this French New Regime, the state was not oriented to promoting further social-structural transformations. It was geared instead to maintaining itself and guaranteeing the social order based upon professional or

bureaucratic status and upon private property and market relations. Moreover, just as the strengthened state could now operate on a more autonomous basis, so were private wealth-holders now (at least marginally) more likely to pursue their economic interests on the market rather than by purchasing state offices or directly using politico-juridical mechanisms to appropriate surpluses. Thus, despite the fact that they had not caused the Revolution, or been suddenly furthered by it, capitalist relations of production could expand gradually but steadily in the relatively favorable legal and administrative framework crystallized by the Revolution. By a century after 1789, France was becoming an industrial capitalist nation. Yet, even in capitalist industrialization, France has continued to be marked by social and institutional pecularities: Through generations of modem economic development, large numbers of French peasants have clung to the land as tenants or smallholders; and the French national state has always been a major force in economic life, making and breaking opportunities for private investors and profoundly shaping the regional and sectoral contours of industrial development. Not only conditions broadly favorable to capitalist development, therefore, but also sociopolitical patterns that have made France relatively distinctive among capitalist industrial nations, are traceable to the major accomplishments of the French Revolution. Indeed, the Revolution is best understood as a "gigantic broom" that swept away the "medieval rubbish" of seigneurialism and particularistic privilege-freeing the peasantry, private wealth-holders, and the state alike from the encumbrances of the Old Regime.

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By Andrew Levine

The last time Confederate symbols were Topic A was two summers ago, when a deeply troubled twenty-one year old named Dylann Roof murdered nine members of a Bible study group at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A photograph of Roof alongside a Confederate battle flag became a fixture on cable news.

My view, then and now, is that the focus on symbols – mainly flags in 2015, now also statues — is misguided, but that, in matters such as these, since African Americans have the most at stake, they should call the shots.

If they want those symbols out of public spaces, then out they should go.

Making a fetish of the Stars and Stripes has long been an American pastime, especially in benighted circles, so it is not surprising that exceptionally benighted people with nefarious values and aims would regard Confederate flags the same way. In the end, though, like all flags, they are just pieces of cloth. And inasmuch as few, if any, of the offending monuments are of significant historical or aesthetic interest, there is no compelling reason to retain them.

Therefore, even if I am right in thinking that all the fuss is diversionary, going along with it is basically harmless, except perhaps to the people who fetishize those symbols. It is hard not to feel that they deserve it.

It should be noted too that some good has come out of this latest eruption of sound and fury. For example, more notice is taken and there is more discussion of white supremacy generally than there was two years ago – not just within communities that have always born the brunt of racial injustice, but also among people who would otherwise be oblivious. Ironically, Donald Trump and the miscreants who crawled out from under the rock he turned over have helped increase awareness too.

Also, the Black Lives Matter movement, having assumed something like a vanguard role within the African American activist community, broadened its purview, partly in consequence of the heightened level of consciousness brought on by struggles over Confederate symbols. While retaining its focus on police violence, it took on matters of general concern to African Americans and other persons of color. With so many older civil rights militants coopted into a Democratic Party reeking of Clintonite (neoliberal, liberal imperialist) politics, the need for a new leadership, with uncompromised moral authority, was and remains obvious.

But there are no unmixed blessings; and when unexamined emotions become politically consequential, it is easy to get off track.

I think something like that happened two years ago, the last time Confederate symbols were much in the news; specifically, that a political initiative that might have kept both Trump and Clinton at bay was quashed. Hardly anyone agreed with me then, and I daresay that even fewer would agree with me now, but it is worth recalling nevertheless — because, insofar as my idea was not wildly implausible, it does illustrate how according uncritical support to efforts to villainize Confederate symbols can have a downside.

It was already clear, back then, that all the GOP contenders, not just Trump, were incompetent buffoons. Believing naively that the vast majority of voters would realize this and draw the obvious conclusion, I was sure that any minimally competent Democrat would prevail in November.

I was probably right. Where I went wrong was in not realizing how incompetent a candidate Hillary Clinton would be. My problems with her then had mainly to do with the politics associated with her and her husband’s name. Obama was bad enough; she was on track for making him look good.

Of course, I also knew that competence was not her forte; that as a First Lady, a Senator and a Secretary of State, she had messed up a lot, doing little good and much harm. But I never thought that losing to Trump was more than just a theoretical possibility, even for her.

I also thought that of all the actual and potential challengers to the Clinton juggernaut, a group that included Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, the former Virginia Senator, just might be just the one to pull it off, edging the country towards a slightly more salutary political dispensation in the process.

Anyone who is curious about why I held this admittedly idiosyncratic view can look here. There is no point in going back over the arguments because what was probably a non-starter all along became moot in light of the reaction to the Charlestown murders. Unfair as it might be, the symbolism was wrong.

Suffice it to say that I knew, and still know, little about Webb’s politics, though I suspected that it was no worse than the average Democrat’s. I was mainly impressed by the evident depth of his understanding of the moral complexities of soldiering and war, and by the fact that he is an author of considerable merit, unlike any other American politician at the national level in modern times.

Webb was also a man of the Appalachian south with ties to his own people, and apparently also to their black neighbors. Clinton had no time for the former. For the latter, she had kind words and trickle down beneficence derived from her and her husband’s decades long courtship of amenable African American notables, and from their ties to the region’s, and the country’s, black political machines.

Black-white alliances, based on solidarities arising out of the struggles of “the wretched of the earth,” had been part of the region’s political landscape in the past, despite the efforts of the white power structure to encourage a kind of white identity politics grounded in racist attitudes. Webb was giving voice to a progressive “populist” sensibility at odds with the “populism” they espoused.

He was also speaking as a creature of a post-World War II military culture that, though hardly “post-racial,” has done more to cut across racial lines than most other societal institutions. In recent decades, one of the very few good things to come out of the American military, the Marines especially, has been an expectation of trans-racial comradeship. As a Marine with a record of service more unambiguously “heroic” than, say, John McCain’s, Webb was very much a part of that world.

The kind of militant, class-conscious racial politics that brought the white (mainly Appalachian) Young Patriots together with the (mainly Puerto Rican) Young Lords and the Black Panthers half a century ago has long been out of reach; and, in any case, such alliances can never be forged from the top down in the course of electoral campaigns.

But it was not out of the question, I thought, that someone at the top of the Democratic ticket, who holds generally progressive views, and who is of, by, and for the people, as distinct from corporate and Wall Street elites, could do wonders to encourage the requisite bottom-up organizing efforts that need to take place for the goals of Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist organizations to advance.

Not implausibly, though on the basis of only scant evidence, I suggested that Webb might be just what the doctor ordered.

More likely than not, this was a pipe dream. But, then, in the very earliest days of the campaign for the Democratic nomination, so was the idea that, for example, Bernie Sanders’ campaign would take off to the point where, had the fix not been in, he might actually have won.

We will never know, thanks in part to the reaction against Confederate symbols that erupted in the aftermath of Roof’s murderous rampage.

***

Donald Trump is incapable of reasoned argument, but he does sometimes have a point. Whatever the reasons behind it, his interest in good relations with Russia is an example. Another is his claim that if Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee should not be memorialized because they owned slaves, then neither should Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.

Trump’s idea was to rile up his base by playing the “political correctness” card; with that audience, the PC ploy never fails. However, his position is not without merit. It has been painful to observe liberal commentators arguing otherwise.

They could argue, as I just did, that removing Confederate symbols and getting Confederate monuments out of public spaces is no big deal. But pragmatic considerations like that are not for them; they would prefer to moralize.

The problem, though, is that they have no defensible way to do that because they cannot justify the distinction they want to draw – between, say, Washington and Lee — and that, because they cannot, those symbols and monuments really are just the top of a slippery slope. This puts them in a dilemma: they can either argue for their position on pragmatic grounds or acquiesce in its arbitrariness.

I would venture that the pragmatic argument is the best they can do: too much is named for Jefferson and Washington. And why stop with them? What about the other great Virginia planters and their slave-owning co-thinkers throughout the South who contributed to the republic’s founding and growth?

Many of the other founders, the Northern merchants and traders, benefited from the slave trade and the South’s slave economy too. Why should they be cut slack? And then, of course, there is Christopher Columbus.

In a country whose capital city is called Washington, DC, purging symbols of the Confederacy and of the extermination of indigenous peoples would be no mean feat. There are so many reasons not to go down that path. Unless we were prepared to deny almost the entirety of our history, there is no way to wipe the slate clean.

The line among liberal pundits is that the difference between good slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson and bad ones like Davis and Lee is that the former helped found the United States, while the latter fought against it. This they call “treason,” the implication being that this puts them in an altogether different, and far more reprehensible, moral plane.

Really? For self-righteous talking heads, the consensus seems to be that the difference is too obvious to require justification. But they are plainly mistaken.

Davis and Lee were no less conscious of the morally problematic nature of slavery than Jefferson, much less the other Southern planters there at the creation. Indeed, having come of age at a time when New World slavery was everywhere disputed, and already abolished throughout much of the Caribbean and Central and South America, they were, if anything, even more aware.

Moreover, many of the Confederacy’s leaders, including Davis and Lee, had done yeoman service for the United States, its army especially, before the Civil War. They were no more eager to betray the nation they served than they were ardent and unconflicted proponents of slavery. Their first loyalty, however, was to their respective states.

At a time when the United States, like most other nation states around the world, was still in formation, this was hardly exceptional. The United States was different from the others mainly in supporting two different models of capital accumulation: one based on agricultural exports and chattel slavery the other on commerce and wage labor.

This caused it to be, as Lincoln said, “a house divided.” It did not, however, make it a house divided by “deplorable” people in the thrall of white supremacist ideology, and righteous folk devoted to the idea that, in Jefferson’s words, “all men (sic) are created equal.”

Economic exigencies, not white supremacist attitudes, account for the South’s accumulation model. Racist attitudes came to the fore there, as in the North, mainly for psychological reasons; because the minds of oppressors, and of beneficiaries of oppression, need to justify their oppression of others to themselves.

Insofar as those attitudes were more evident in the South than in the North, demography was largely to blame. In slave-owning regions, racial politics was woven into the fabric of daily life; in the North, it was, for the most part, something that happened somewhere else.

Indeed, the original laborers in the plantations established in North America and the Caribbean were indentured servants from the British Isles; local indigenous peoples were another labor source. Had those arrangements worked out satisfactorily, there would never have been a reason to import slaves from Africa.

But they didn’t work out. Too many longstanding common law protections stood in the way of a developed labor regime based on indentured servitude; and local Indian populations proved too difficult for planters to bring to heel. To fulfill the labor requirements of the emerging plantation system, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were, in any case, too decimated by the diseases that European settlers brought with them to be of much use.

And so, the Atlantic slave trade began.

The dynamic in territories conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese was different, but in regions suitable for plantation agriculture under their control, they relied on African slaves too. Slavery, in fact, started earlier and lasted longer in parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires than in the United States –nearly three decades longer in some cases. Brazil and Cuba were among the very last to abolish it. Race relations in those countries have generally been better than in the United States, especially in Cuba, since even before the Revolution.

It can never be clear exactly how to apportion blame, but it would be fair to say that the dreadful state of race relations in the United States after Reconstruction is not so much the fault of the fact of secession as of the divide and conquer strategy perpetrated by the propertied classes, even before the Reconstruction era ended. The connection between the emerging Jim Crow system and the Confederacy was not as organic as some black activists and the well-meaning liberals who support them uncritically assume.

It is even clearer that when those liberals struggle to distinguish, say, Washington from Lee, that charges of treason and violent insurrection ring hollow. What, after all, was the Revolutionary War about?

***

In deepest Virginia, there is a perfectly honorable university, comprised of a well-regarded liberal arts college, a Law School and a Business School; its name is “Washington and Lee.” Its record on race, and its acceptance rate for students of color are no worse, or maybe slightly better, than at comparable institutions.

Of course, when Southern schools were segregated from kindergarten up, it was too. But as far as I know, nobody, black or white, thought of it as more racist than normal for its time and place; nobody nowadays does either. Washington and Lee is not, and never was, a bastion of white supremacism – except in the ways that institutions of higher learning generally have been.

I wonder how that university is dealing with its name, now that white supremacists, like Dylann Ruff, are effectively empowered to determine the meanings of all things Confederate. It is, to say the least, unseemly to accord such power to the most “deplorable” among us, but such is life in Trumpland.

However, that may be, clear-headed people should remember that what symbols mean is essentially arbitrary and utterly dependent on the understandings of the people who find them meaningful.

Confederate symbols have been used to intimidate African Americans before – not quite to the same extent as nooses and cross burnings, but very nearly so. Nevertheless, those who maintain that those symbols are being castigated unfairly have a point. Confederate flags are inexorably intertwined with the history of slavery and its aftermath, but then so too is the American flag – arguably to an even greater extent.

Those who would consign Confederate flags to oblivion, but who shudder at the thought of dishonoring the Stars and Stripes are therefore, to say the least, inconsistent – insofar as their objections to the one, but not the other, arise out of their historical ties to the slave economies of the American South.

“The republic for which it (the American flag) stands” enshrined slavery in its Constitution, just as the Confederacy did. The connection was implicitly upheld by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott case just two years before the Civil War began.

The U.S. Constitution even enshrined the so-called three-fifths compromise, according to which, for census purposes, a slave counted for three-fifths of a person. And during the Civil War itself, even after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was legal in the five states that that never seceded. In two of them, it was legal until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

It is relevant too that there was another crime of comparable of even greater historical magnitude conducted, in its later stages, under the banner of Old Glory: the physical and cultural genocide of the peoples living in the lands European settlers stole.

That crime actually intensified after the Civil War. To purge public spaces of the symbols, monuments and names of its perpetrators would require the erasure of nearly the entirety of American history.

Among the grievances Jefferson listed in The Declaration of Independence to justify secession and armed rebellion was this: that he “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

This was not just a gratuitous ethnic slur, ostensibly out of place in an otherwise high-minded document. It was an acknowledgment of the fact that Britain’s relations with the indigenous peoples of North America were, on the whole, more amicable than the colonists’.

The British — and the French as well – generally had less than honorable reasons for allying, from time to time, with Indian tribes. Indeed, their relations with indigenous peoples typically had as much to do with European wars as with the exigencies of colonial settlements. Nevertheless, affected indigenous peoples generally did better under the secessionists’ colonial masters than under the secessionists themselves.

The Confederacy too did less harm to indigenous peoples than their rivals to the North, though, in fairness, it must be said that it was too short-lived to make meaningful comparisons. On the other hand, before, during, and for many decades after the Civil War, the Union waged wars of extermination against American Indians — with great brutality and to great effect.

These are among the many reasons why it is hard to justify vilifying Confederate symbols while giving their Yankee counterparts a pass. For native peoples especially, it is, or ought to be, especially hard.

But exceptional circumstances aside, vilifying symbols is pointless. If ever there was a time for what Gore Vidal called “the United States of Amnesia” to live up to its name, this is it.

Learning about the past is crucial if we are not to repeat it; and perhaps, as William Faulkner put it, in this case, “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.” But fighting over its symbols is pointless, except insofar as those symbols have become vested with new meanings that pertain to struggles raging in the here and now.

A half century ago, as the Civil Rights movement gave way to a struggle for black liberation, and the class-consciousness of the American contingent of “the wretched of the earth” was more acute than at any time in living memory, the Black Panthers and Young Lords were able to make common cause with the Young Patriots, and no one would have thought to mistake, for example, the Band’s song, “The Night They Burned Old Dixie Down” for a racist anthem. Monuments to Confederate leaders and prominent slaveholders were seldom, if ever, contested either; they were left to age in place.

It is not that people knew less then than they know now; quite to the contrary, they were wiser and understood more – and did politics in a better space. Had Webb flourished and Trump floundered, we might currently be in a latter-day version of that space again.

For now, though, all we can do is let the current flare up of anti-Confederate animus run its course, supporting it as necessary, criticizing it whenever that would be helpful, and, the sooner the better, getting past it and onto more constructive ground.

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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melindarowens · 7 years

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Shia vs. Sunni: The Schism Western Politicians Don’t Understand and Won’t Discuss

Western politicians rarely acknowledge the schism between Shia and Sunni Islam. There is nothing remotely comparable to this schism in any other religion in the modern world.

The Sunni-Shia conflict defines the political structure of the Middle East, from the international rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia to the internal politics of Muslim nations. And yet, Western politicians, eager to portray Islam as a “religion of peace,” speak of Muslims as homogenous.

At the hard core of political correctness, Islam is treated more like a race than a religion, a monolithic ethnic bloc like “Hispanics” or “Asians.” Both of those groups are, in turn, diverse populations absurdly squeezed into monoliths for the convenience of left-wing political strategists.

In truth, there are Shiite Muslims who do not think Sunnis count as Muslim at all, and vice versa. Adherents of the more extreme sects within the Sunni and Shia schools view moderate followers of the same basic tradition as apostates.

The Sunni-Shiite Divide

Few Western politicians know the first thing about the Sunni-Shiite rift, which flows from a doctrinal dispute that might seem trivial to modern outsiders. When Mohammed died in the 7th Century, there was a profound disagreement among the early followers of Islam about who should succeed him as leader.

The heart of the Sunni-Shiite conflict is that the Sunnis thought the new leader or “caliph” should be elected and chose Mohammed’s close friend Abu Bakr. The leader of the Islamic State, who styles himself as “caliph” or ruler of all true Muslims, calls himself “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” in homage to the first caliph. His real name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri.

The dissident group we now know as Shiites insisted that only a blood relative of Mohammed was fit to lead, rallying behind Ali bin Abu Talib, who was both Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali actually took a turn as caliph after Abu Bakr died, so it would be more precise to say the enduring rift within Islam was caused by Ali’s assumption of leadership and the argument over his successor.

A great deal of 7th-century tribal politics swirled around this conflict, making it more complex than any brief summary could capture. Among other factors, there was Islam’s development into a warrior religion, leading to clan rivalries and vicious arguments over plunder. Personal loyalties to Ali or his rivals played a role as well.

But this is a religious schism, not a matter of stimulating debate between historians. Shiites believe stealing leadership away from the lineal descendants of Mohammed was apostasy, a sin against the true faith.

Ali was assassinated, stabbed in the forehead with a poison sword while praying. Modern Shiites still make a pilgrimage to the mosque where they believe he died and is entombed, located in what is now Iraq. The city where it is located, Najaf, has been the scene of much sectarian bloodshed. The Sunni government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein enraged a generation of Shiites by abusing the Imam Ali mosque.

Ali did not win the title of “caliph” in an election, either. Abu Bakr only reigned for a few years before he died. Ali got the job after Abu Bakr’s second successor, Caliph Uthman, was killed by his own troops in the Muslim holy city of Medina. One reason the Sunni-Shiite divide is so bitter is that Sunnis of the time were furious at Ali for accepting the title of caliph instead of punishing Uthman’s killers.

Followers of Uthman thought Ali committed acts of blasphemy and arrogance against true Islam, and Ali’s followers felt the same way about the Sunni elite. A major point of contention was, and remains, whether Ali swore and broke a binding oath of loyalty to the Sunni hierarchy and the caliphs that came before him.

This is not a minor dispute over the life and times of a long-dead historical personage, but a profound question of religious legitimacy.

Iran still believes its theocracy has rightful authority over Islam under the Shiite model of descent from Mohammed, for example. One of the candidates in the recent Iranian presidential election, cleric Ebrahim Raisi, wears a black turban to signify he is a sayed, a descendant of Mohammed. Raisi choose green as his campaign color because he wanted to take the color back from the secular “Green Movement” demonstrators and restore its “real meaning” as the color of “the revolutionary grandsons of the Prophet.” Those grandsons attempted a revolution against the early Sunni caliphs. They did not die of old age.

Sunni and Shia share many essential beliefs, but even their shared beliefs can be sources of tension. Both Sunnis and Shiites make pilgrimages to the holy cities in Saudi Arabia. Iran frequently castigates the Sunni Saudis over their management of the hajj pilgrimage, alleging discrimination against Shiites along with poor event management. The Saudis supply plenty of poor event management to complain about.

The royal family of Jordan is seen by some analysts as key to bridging the Sunni-Shiite divide, because the Hashemite ruling dynasty of Sunni Jordan claims direct descent from Mohammed’s family, satisfying the Shiite criteria for authentic leadership of Islam. Unfortunately, this also means the Jordanian regime gets to enjoy the violent hatred of both Sunni and Shiite extremists. The Sunni Islamic State infamously burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and spread the image across the Internet as one of its favorite propaganda videos. Jordanian officials have nevertheless said they regard the Islamic Republic of Iran as a greater threat to their security than ISIS or other Sunni extremists.

Non-Sunni Minorities

Syria’s dictator, Bashar Assad, is a member of the small Alawite subsect of Shia Islam. Alawites only make up about ten percent of Syria’s population, but the Assad regime, under both Bashar and his father Hafez, consolidated power by appointing Alawites to high government positions. The vast majority of the Syrian population is not Alawite, or even Shiite, but Sunni. Bashar Assad frequently responds to criticism of his brutality by pointing to his history of protecting Syrian religious minorities, including Christians, and noting he belongs to a minority himself.

What is the difference between an Alawite and a Shiite? There are many minor differences in custom and tradition, but the major difference concerns Imam Ali. Recall that Shiites revere Ali as the rightful leader of Islam who should have succeeded Mohammed, and was divinely martyred in death, while Sunnis regard him as a traitor. The Alawites believe he was God incarnate. Some Sunni religious leaders consider them “worse infidels than Christians and Jews,” as one prominent cleric of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood put it in 2013 when calling for a Sunni jihad against them.

Another branch of Islam that often suffers discrimination and violence from other Muslims is the Sufi sect. The Sufis are neither Sunni nor Shiite — or they might say they are both, since both Sunni and Shiite Islam have Sufi chapters. This makes them an abused minority in both Shiite nations like Iran and Sunni countries like Egypt.

Sufism is more defined by its approach than specific doctrines, unlike the way Sunni and Shia or Shia and Alawite are distinguished. Modern Sufi have a reputation for gentleness and moderation, although they were a formidable military force in the past. The famed “whirling dervish” swordsmen of antiquity were a Sufi invention. Dervishes still whirl, but now the practice is seen as performance art or a form of moving meditation, like tai chi.

Sufi are generally less interested in strict interpretations of the Koran and Islamic sharia law, which makes them despised by hardcore Islamist sects. They are sometimes accused of diluting pure Islam with mystical mumbo-jumbo, or serving as agents for Western powers, seeking to subvert and “tame” true Islam as part of a Western imperialist agenda.

None of these branches of Islam are themselves homogeneous. There are dozens of different Sufi orders, for instance. Some of them are militant or political in nature, contrary to the general impression of Sufis as peaceable mystics.

Sunni Minorities

A school of Sunni Islam that has become increasingly important to American and European politics is Hizmet, a highly organized group founded and led by an imam named Fethullah Gulen. The government of Turkey sees Hizmet as far too organized, prosecuting it (literally) as a vast criminal conspiracy that attempted to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year. The Turkish government refers to Hizmet as “FETO,” an acronym for “Fethullah Terrorist Organization.” Turkey’s diplomatic relations with both Europe and the United States have been rocked by its pursuit of Hizmet and Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Sunni Islam also includes a movement known as the Salafi, the Islamic fundamentalists. Salafists believe Mohammed, and to a lesser extent his first two generations of descendants, were perfect human beings who should be emulated in every way, including dress and personal hygiene. Salafism includes its own, even more primitive and regressive sub-sects, including the Wahabbi Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State’s apocalyptic belief system.

“Primitive” is not a pejorative term – Wahabbi Muslims literally embrace the primitive lifestyle of the 7th Century, when Mohammed lived. Their hostility to modernity is one of their defining attributes. Another is their hostility to all other variations of Islam, most definitely including Shiites.

The rapid spread of Salafist beliefs through well-financed overt and covert networks — Salafist madrassas, and agents of influence sent to infiltrate more moderate Islamic schools — is one of the major security concerns of our age, for those analysts and officers who have not been intimidated out of discussing it.

Islam and the West

That brings us back to the problem of sterilizing Islam by treating it as homogenous. The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood has been considered for designation as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, but its defenders say not even the Brotherhood is a single entity. They insist it has many chapters, many of which cannot be fairly regarded as extremists or terrorists.

To be sure, not all Muslims feel any of this doctrinal animosity. It would be a fool’s game to say “most do” or “most don’t,” given the size of the global Muslim population, the differences between Muslims of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, and the effects of emigration and assimilation.

In his speech in Saudi Arabia, President Trump observed that Muslims are often the victims of Islamic terrorism:

In sheer numbers, the deadliest toll has been exacted on the innocent people of Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern nations. They have borne the brunt of the killings and the worst of the destruction in this wave of fanatical violence. Some estimates hold that more than 95 percent of the victims of terrorism are themselves Muslim.

This is true, but also an incomplete picture of the problem. Muslims abuse and kill each other over doctrinal conflicts on a horrifying scale. Most of that violence and oppression is not “terrorism.” It comes from military conflicts and government crackdowns on religious minorities.

Sectarian strife is one of the reasons why so many Syrian rebel groups viewed favorably by the West are willing to ally with al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In Iraq, there are Sunnis living in territory captured by ISIS that openly welcomed their ghastly conquerors, or were at least reluctant to work with the Iraqi government, because they distrusted the now-Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, and were terrified of the Iran-supported Shiite militias operating in the region.

In Bahrain, the government is under fire for suppressing the Shiite majority in its population, with five dead in a recent police raid against a Shiite community. The Bahraini monarchy, in turn, credibly accuses Iran of seeking to destabilize the country by exacerbating Sunni-Shiite tensions. Bahrain’s Sunnis fear they would be brutalized on an epic scale if Shiites overthrow the government.

This all becomes America’s problem because our national interests in the Middle East are tangled inexorably with the Sunni-Shiite schism. Bahrain, for example, is the strategically vital home to the U.S. 5th Fleet. Shiites resent America for supporting the Sunni monarchy. American military planners are understandably nervous about the prospect of renting a base for the 5th Fleet from a post-revolutionary Bahrain that would be a Shiite satellite of Iran, to say nothing of the cascade effect such a religious war would have on other Sunni allies in the region.

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everettwilkinson · 7 years

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Shia vs. Sunni: The Schism Western Politicians Don’t Understand and Won’t Discuss

Western politicians rarely acknowledge the schism between Shia and Sunni Islam. There is nothing remotely comparable to this schism in any other religion in the modern world.

The Sunni-Shiite Divide

This is not a minor dispute over the life and times of a long-dead historical personage, but a profound question of religious legitimacy.

Non-Sunni Minorities

Sunni Minorities

Islam and the West

In his speech in Saudi Arabia, President Trump observed that Muslims are often the victims of Islamic terrorism:

Source link

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ericpoptone · 7 years

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As you’re probably aware, February is Black History Month. Most of the month’s observances will naturally focus on the long history of black African-Americans, most of whose ancestors were brought to the US during the centuries long slave trade. While I certainly don’t want to take anything away from that, I thought that given the current political climate, it might be nice to focus on more recent (and voluntary) immigration from Africa to the US. Since Nigerians are the most numerous of recent African immigrants, I’m starting with them for this episode of the No Enclave series.

Satellite map of Nigeria and neighbors

Although Nigerians are the most numerous of African-American immigrants, I’ve only personally known a few. When I was young, my mother had a Nigerian colleague whose name was, I believe, Alex Ogedegbe. In order to relieve non-Nigerians from saying his actual name, he instructed people to simply refer to him as “Alex OK Baby.” Around the same time there was a Nigerian guy on my soccer team, Miebaka Adouye. He was exceedingly good natured albeit mentally disabled and one of his quirks was that he’d call me on the phone whenever he heard Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” on the radio, which in 1989 was quite often. Thankfully cell phones were much more rare then. In Los Angeles I only count two Nigerians among my acquaintances, two brothers in fact, both of whom work security.

Marina at Dusk (photographer unknown)

Although by far the most populous country in Africa and home to the most populous African city (Lagos), I reckon most Americans have few notions about the country. Practically all of us have heard or been the targets of advance fee email scams originating from there (and elsewhere). Most of us are probably aware of the Radical Right Wing Terrorist group, Boko Haram. I reckon that the reasonably engaged American is also familiar with Nigeria’s Nollywood, Afrobeat, and oil-rich/conflict-ravaged Niger Delta. Nonetheless, few Americans have experienced Nigeria firsthand. Most American tourists to Africa go to see ancient ruins and “exotic” animals, not bustling metropolises or people.

Even if you’ve never met a Nigerian-American, chances are you’ve met someone with ancestors from what’s now that country. In school you hopefully learned that most African-Americans’ African ancestors were Hausa, Igbo, and/or Yoruba, three nationalities indigenous to what’s now Nigeria (and neighboring countries). Calabar was a major point of export of slaves. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, roughly 12.5 million Africans were abducted from their homelands. An estimated 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage, and about 10 percent of those ended up in the American Colonies and US. As of the 2010 census, 38,929,319 (12.6% of the population) identified as African-American, the vast majority of whom were descended from slaves. A small minority, including our last president, have more recent connections to Africa.

Most recent African-American immigrants arrived in the US following the 1968 enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula that had until then given preferential status to certain European peoples. After the passage of the immigration act, large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America came to the US; however, Africa has provided relatively few. Between 1968 and 2007, only an estimated total of 0.8 to 0.9 million Africans immigrated to the US, accounting for just 3.3% of total immigration. 75% of African immigrants came from just twelve of the continent’s more than 50 countries.

African immigrants to the US have largely eschewed forming urban ethnic enclaves and have generally shown preference for the suburbs. From what I’ve seen, there are only two African enclaves in the entire US, New York City’s Little Senegal and Los Angeles’s Little Ethiopia. There is, in other words, no Little Lagos nor Nigeriatown. Instead, there are large but diffuse Nigerian populations located mostly in the states of Texas, New York, Georgia, Maryland, and California. There are an estimated 264,550 Americans of Nigerian origin. California is home to roughly 20,000 Nigerian-Americans but how many live in Los Angeles is unknown. While the last census counted 68,000 African-born Angelenos, no distinction was made among African countries of origin. Nigerians nationally comprise about 14% of the African-born American population so assuming that that figure is roughly the same within Los Angeles, that would suggest a population of about 9,520.

A VERY BRIEF NIGERIAN HISTORY

The human history of Nigeria begins at least as early as 11,000 BCE. The oldest human fossil remains yet discovered in West Africa were found in the Iwo-Eleru cave in Nigeria. By the 4th millennium BCE, what’s now Nigeria was home to several populations including savannah pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and farming cultures. Metalworking was developed by 600 BCE. Islam arrived between the 9th and 11th centuries and was the religion of the majority by the reign of Mai Idris Alooma (1571–1603).

Pre-Colonial Nigeria was home to several kingdoms and empires, including the Benin, Borgu, Fulani, Hausa, Ibibio, Kanem Bornu, Kwararafa, Nri, Nupe, Oyo, Songhai, and Warri. The British captured Lagos in 1851, formally annexed it in 1861, and occupied Nigeria for 99 years afterward. Nigeria became a republic in 1963 but democracy was short-lived, with the military taking control in 1966. In 1967, separatists formed the Republic of Biafra which ignited the three year Nigerian Civil War. Another short-lived republic was established in 1979 but again ended with a military coup. A third republic was created in 1993 and yet again replaced by military rule. Lasting democracy seems to have arrived with the creation of the fourth republic in 1998.

NIGERIAN CUISINE

Sumptuous African Kitchen (Nick A.)

Although Nigerian cuisine is relatively obscure in the US, some of the origins of Southern cuisine/soul food can be traced back to West African cuisine, which Nigerian cuisine is a subset of. The cuisine of the Southern US largely arose from West Africans using both African and Native American ingredients and applying West African cooking techniques to suit the tastes of European-American slaveowners. Cloves, collards, cumin, mint, mustard, okra, parsley, rice, sorghum, turmeric, and turnips were all common in African cooking. Cassava, maize, tomatoes, and potatoes all came from the New World.

“the vegetarians enjoyed a hearty meal too” (Nkechi African Cafe | Francesca “Let’s Be Friends” L.)

The all-American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is actually neither a potato (Solanum tuberosum) nor a yam (Dioscorea). The word “yam” is related to the name of both a staple food and verbs relating to eating in several West African cultures. Amongst Nigeria’s Fulani people, the verb “nyami” means “to eat.” Bearing its superficial resemblance to the yam, the American sweet potato became known as a “yam” despite the fact that it is more closely related to the morning glory than it is to either the yam (more closely related to lilies) or the potato. The confusion persists to this day, with one variety of sweet potato usually labeled “sweet potato” and another labeled “yam” although actual yams are almost unknown outside of African and Asian markets.

Although Nigerian cuisine encompasses the variations of hundreds of ethnic groups present in there, it also resembles strongly the the broader cuisine of West Africa. Deeply seasoned and sometimes spicy sauces, soups, and sauces predominate. Most dishes are either bean based (e.g. akara, ekuru, ewa agoyin, gbegeri, and kiyara batonu) or rice based (e.g. coconut rice, fried rice, jollof rice, pate, tuwo masara, and tuwo shinkafa). Maize, millet, and plantains are common ingredients as well. Yams and cassava are used in the preparation of pastes and porridges. Popular beverages include fura da nono (made from milk and millet or sorghum), isapa/zobo (made of roselle juice), kunu (made from maize, millet, or sorghum), palm wine, and soy milk.

Toto’s African Cuisine (Taro Y.)

Aside from Ethiopian cuisine, African cuisines are not especially common in Los Angeles. However, the South Bay suburb of Inglewood is home to ten African restaurants representing five African cuisines making it, (as I wrote in “African Restaurants of Los Angeles“) to African cuisine what Alhambra is to Asian. Amongst Inglewood’s African restaurants, four are Nigerian: Bamboo Café, Nkechi African Café, Sumptuous African Restaurant, and Veronica’s Kitchen. Rivaling Inglewood is the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Van Nuys, home to three restaurants representing three different African cuisines, one of them being Nigerian, Toto’s African Cuisine. Over in San Diego, there’s a Nigerian market and restaurant called Lizy Gidy African Market & Lagos Kitchen.

Liz Gidy African Market & Lagos Kitchen (Kat L.)

NIGERIAN FILM

Globally, only India’s Bollywood film industry produces more films than Nigeria’s Nollywood. Despite this fact — and the fact that I studied African Cinema in college — I’ve only watched one Nollywood film — and I can’t remember the name. I’ve also only watched one Bollywood film, well, the first three hours of one. Prolificacy isn’t exactly a selling point for me.

A British technician training a Nigerian Television camera man (BBC 4)

Nigeria’s film history is almost as old as cinema itself. The first films exhibited in Nigeria were shown there in the late 19th century. The first films actually produced in Nigeria were made in the 1920s, by British colonials. In the 1950s, mobile cinema vans began exhibiting films produced by the Nigerian Film Unit (NFU) to millions of Nigerians. The NFU was established under the aegis of the British Ministry of Information and the films’ purpose was primarily one of propaganda, such as encouraging support for Britain’s war efforts. After independence, Nigerians themselves played a much larger role in the creation of Nigerian Cinema, often film adaptations of Yoruba Theater productions. Low-budget, home video productions, often sold as VCDs, became enormously popular in the 1990s. In the 2000s, the New Nigerian Cinema was driven by the rejection of celebrity-driven popular cinema in favor of filmmaking with artistic aspirations.

Nollywood VCDs (VozAfric)

Although Nollywood productions have largely been shunned by international film festivals, Los Angeles’s Pan-African Film Festival has exhibited several, including The Figurine (2009), Confusion Na Wa (2013), Dry (2014). In 2012, the Los Angeles Nollywood Film Awards was launched. It’s hard to determine if it’s still an annual occurrence, especially given the broken state of its website.

Los Angeles has also, at one time or another, been home for several Nigerian actors, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Dayo Okeniyi, and Tony Okungbowa.

NIGERIAN MUSIC IN LOS ANGELES

Nigeria, despite being amongst Africa’s most musically rich nations, has made a relatively minor impact within the US. However, after the death of Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley in 1981, there were a couple attempts to break Nigerian music to the worldbeat crowd.

On the suggestion of Robert Palmer, Chris Blackwell signed Oshogbo-born “King” Sunny Adé to Island Records and marketed him as the “African Bob Marley.” Island’s Mango imprint released Adé’s Juju Music in 1982, the artist’s first international release. It reached a respectable #111 on Billboard‘s Pop Albums chart and a writer at the New York Times described it as that year’s “freshest dance-album.” Although not exactly a household name in the US, 35 years later Adé still commands a sizable following and last August he and his band played the Regent Theater.

Clive Davis‘s Arista Records signed Nigerian afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. Whereas Adé’s accessible take on jùjú music is cheerful and poppy, Kuti’s music was hard-edged, political, funky, and with songs occasionally exceeding thirty minutes, not exactly radio friendly. Kuti was radicalized in Los Angeles in 1969, when he encountered members of the Black Power movement. That year he performed six nights a week at Bernie Hamilton‘s nightclub-art gallery Citadel d’Haiti on Sunset Boulevard (now the parking lot of Cherokee Plaza) and recorded The ’69 Los Angeles Sessions. Kuti’s American popularity came posthumously, after his death from AIDS in 1997. In 2000 The Best Best of Fela Kuti was released in the US and for about a decade afterward it seemed impossible to get a drink at the Short Stop without hearing “Water No Get Enemy” on the jukebox.

The resurgence of interest in Fela Kuti opened doors for other Nigerian musicians like Tony Allen. Several compilations of Nigerian music introduced more Nigerian recordings (invariably from the 1970s) to the broader music-listening population. It should be noted that there are also several Nigerian musicians with strong ties to Los Angeles. Drummer Francis Awe received a Master of Arts degree in African Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Nigerian-American musician Jidenna formerly lived in Los Angeles; and Patrice Wilson, Princess Vitarah, and Tyler, The Creator apparently all still do.

Los Angeles is also home to Nnamdi Moweta, host of Pacifica Radio‘s excellent African music program, Radio Afrodicia, which has aired on KPFK since 1995. Moweta was born in Nigeria’s Jos Plateau state and moved to Los Angeles in 1982.

NIGERIAN-ANGELENO ATHLETES

Ugochukwu “Ugo” Ihemelu (US Soccer Players)

As with most of the world, football (soccer) is Nigeria’s most popular sport. The Nigeria Football Federation is the country’s governing football organization. Most of Nigeria’s top footballers play internationally and on the current national squad, only Ikechukwu Ezenwa plays for a Nigerian team (Ifeanyi Ubah). The rest play in European, Asian, and other African leagues. As far as I know, only Enugu-born Ugochukwu “Ugo” Ihemelu ever played for the Los Angeles Galaxy, but is now with FC Dallas.

Other Nigerian-Americans who’ve at least at one time called Los Angeles home include basketball players Alon Abisola Arisicate Ajoke “Abi” Olajuwon, Al-Farouq Aminu, Ekenechukwu Brian “Ekene” Ibekwe, Ekpedeme Friday “Ekpe” Udo, Ikechukwu Somtochukwu “Ike” Diogu, Ime Sunday Udoka, and Nnemkadi “Nneka” Ogwumike; and American football players Adebola Olurotimi “Ade” Jimoh, Chidi Iwuoma, Christian Okoye, and Nnamdi Asomugha.

OTHER PROMINENT NIGERIAN-ANGELENOS

Other prominent Nigerian-Angelenos include Adaora Udoji (journalist), Chinedu Unaka (comedian), John Dabiri (biophysicist), Bisi Ezerioha (automotive engineer), and Kola Aluko (oil baron).

NIGERIAN ORGANIZATIONS IN LOS ANGELES

There a handful of organizations serving the Nigerian-American community of Los Angeles. They include the Nigerian American Foundation (Baldwin Hills), The Nigerian American Lawyers Association (Koreatown), the Los Angeles Nigerian-American Christian Meetup, the Nigerian Muslim Association Of Southern California (Gramercy Park), and the Nigerian Chamber Of Commerce (Baldwin Hills).

Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, writer, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities — or salaried work. He is not interested in generating advertorials, clickbait, listicles, or other 21st century variations of spam. Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Form Follows Function, Los Angeles County Store, the book Sidewalking, Skid Row Housing Trust, and 1650 Gallery. Brightwell has been featured as subject in The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, and on Notebook on Cities and Culture. He has been a guest speaker on KCRW‘s Which Way, LA? and at Emerson College. Art prints of Brightwell’s maps are available from 1650 Gallery and on various products from Cal31. He is currently writing a book about Los Angeles and you can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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No Enclave — Exploring Nigerian Los Angeles As you're probably aware, February is Black History Month. Most of the month's observances will naturally focus on the long history of black African-Americans, most of whose ancestors were brought to the US during the centuries long slave trade.

#Black History Month #Inglewood #Nigeria #Nigerian-Americans #Nigerian-Angelenos #No Enclave

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