A Josephite View on Party-Politics

[frill 2277]

 

A Josephite View on Party-Politics

 

Inked by William Wimble, actual burgher.

 

***

 

My good friend Sir Duke Liberius of Norjun, when we are talking of the malice posed by the conception of political parties within the Empire, very frequently tells us about an accident that happened to him when he was a fat-cheeked school-boy, which was at a time when the Emperor War ran high between the Josephites and Godfreyites. 

 

This worthy Knight, being at the time but an unlearned man of thirty years, had the need to ask which was the way to Emperor Joseph Lane due to an urgent appointment with a bottle of gin and some fine wax crayon, upon which the poor-person whom he spoke to, instead of answering his Question, called him a young Joey Fool, and asked him just who had decided to make Joseph an Emperor.  The boy, being in some confusion, asked the next man he found which was the way to Joseph’s Lane; but was called an elf-blooded craven for all his pains and good graces, and instead of being shown the way was told that he had been a Emperor before the Sir-Duke was born, and would be one after he was hanged. Upon this happening, says Sir Duke, he did not think it appropriate to continue to repeat the question, but instead going into every lane of the neighbourhood, asking the washer-women and other street vermin what they called the name of that lane. By this ingenious artifice he found the place he asked after, without giving offence to any party and with only a six hour delay to his meeting, his wax dinner still warm on plate.

 

There therefore cannot be a greater fate to befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as renders a government into two distinct people and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations.  The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common Norderling enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular political-person. This influence is very fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of our empire, and not only so, but destroys even what remains of their common sense. 

 

It is from this spleen and rancour so generated that the Sir-Duke implores the men of the Everardines to show the Canon Virtues of Compassion, Humanity and Listening To Him, wherein they may serve as the political horse-glue to fix the rending of the bipartite state of the Empire through voting for the Josephite Party and ending the Divisionary Nonsense plaguing the Politics of the Realm. Please.

[LithiumSedai 5750]

An old Administrator and Everardine backer known as Charles de Rennes allowed himself a moment of reflection. “While the old Godfreyite loyalist elite had offered a hand of reconciliation to the defeated, these Josephites, having attained in peace what they couldn’t through a bloody civil war, by backing any Imperial House that would take them – Carrion, Alstion cadets, Helane – have taken to transforming the Realm’s discourse through purges and division. Truly, in the Empire of today, progress is paradoxically measured by looking backwards, in a bizarre desire for avenging wartime woes through revisionism and scapegoating the Vile Pertinaxi regime; the old order and traditionalism it once stood for is challenged through reactionary ploys against the Church and the old nobility, rather than through genuine enlightenment and improvement of society. What will happen to Orenian society when its bogeymen, the Pertinaxi and the Flays have perished to old age, when the Nordlings are defeated once more? Who then, I wonder, shall be at fault for all that is wrong in Oren; who shall the Josephites turn on when the fuel of their ‘progress’ runs dry?”

[osumanduas 1442]

“It is a shame these Josephites take their inspiration from the good Emperor Joseph of Marna. They do his name a great disservice. What is an even greater horror is the ambition of some medievalists in our own party”

 

The Count of Rochefort contemplates, looking upon the parchment with great worry.

 

“Our own traditions which the wide majority consider are those of the oldest Johannian honors, before the menaces of a dark age Romstun pretender to the throne of the Empire itself. We must see to it that these disgusting beasts are curtailed into party lines and offered a proper path to true support in the rule of law; real education in the face of the propaganda of a bi-gone dark age. It is not a lack of fair trial or kin-slaying, not the chaos of a usurper’s illegitimate and arbitrary rule. As the rot of the Liberal majority will be this gross exaggeration of our rule of law, so will the backwater of the old barbarian dictatorship plague we Conservatives.”