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Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes
- Thread starter Uhura's Mazda
- Start date
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Endemic Monarchies of South America (1 of 2)
Empire of Brazil
Brazil attained its separate existence in 1822, when Dom Pedro, eldest son of Joao VI of Portugal, declared the colony's independence under his own rule. The energetic and adventurous Emperor Pedro I needed all his dubious talents to face up to the challenges posed by Portuguese garrisons, centripetal provincial forces, and the Kingdom of South America. Pedro I also found it difficult to take a back seat and govern as a constitutional monarch, and in the early years of the 1830s he had to contend with an out-and-out rebellion from the 'Liberals', who were characterised by their support for slavery and election-rigging. The rebellion petered out after Pedro's death, fairly young still, in 1834, at which point the Liberal leaders took the opportunity of co-operating in the Regency of Pedro's son. An elder daughter, Maria, had been dispatched to Portugal to succeed her grandfather in 1826, and there she personified a shaky relationship of mutual toleration between Constitutionalists and Absolutists by marrying her uncle, Miguel. Who was not, himself, entirely happy about the situation.
Young Pedro II, meanwhile, was a reserved and cautious monarch with an aptitude for hard work, which made him indispensable in the first decades of his personal rule (he was declared an adult at the age of 14 when the Regency governments ran out of steam) but made him seem increasingly pedantic as the state became more complex and interlinked. As the Empire only really functioned as a result of Pedro II's personality, it seemed unlikely that the Empire would survive him. This was especially true after the deaths in childhood of his two sons, his elder daughter's apparent infertility, and the death of her husband the Comte d'Eu at the Siege of Humaita, fighting the Grand Alliance of the Paraguayans and South Americans. The sense of an outmoded regime was, perversely, reinforced by the questionably constitutional actions of the Emperor and the Princess Imperial in securing the abolition of slavery - thus effectively killing the planting interests which had been the foundation of the monarchy.
In 1889, however, General Deodoro da Fonseca led a military revolt against the Government and met virtually no opposition. Although he met with Republican leaders in Rio de Janeiro, the General chose to throw his weight behind the Emperor's inveterate intriguer of a grandson, Pedro Augusto, who appealed to him on the grounds of his career as an Army officer and his protestations of radical Liberalism. Pedro II and the Princess Imperial were sent into exile, but it soon became apparent that Pedro III had no political principles whatever. The next decade involved a series of power-plays and military coups, all involving the Emperor in some way - but his manic plotting caught up with him, and he was simultaneously deposed by seven different conspiratorial factions in 1901, whereupon the unstable ex-Emperor was put into an asylum.
Kingdom of South America
The grandiose name of this Kingdom belied its actual extent, which was essentially confined to the interior provinces of the Rio de la Plata, plus Upper Peru and, at times, the Banda Oriental. Its exact relationship with Paraguay also remained in some doubt for much of the nineteenth century. The Kingdom came about as a result of the Congress of Tucuman in 1816, in which the creole elite of the Rio de la Plata declared its independence from Spain, but by the same token, was also impressed by recent events in Europe, including the restoration of various monarchies. Manuel Belgrano suggested that a monarchy be set up in the new country, and the delegates from the interior selected a man named Dionisio Inca Yupanqui, a descendant of the Inca Emperors who had served as a representative in the Cadiz Cortes in 1810.
King Dionisio I presided over a loose agglomeration of provincial elites, most of them essentially autonomous, and he did not succeed in bending them to his authority. This was particularly true after the failure of Belgrano's attempt to bring Paraguay to heel and the secession of the Province of Buenos Aires under a King of their own. This was the key to his survival: no caudillo could be bothered to set his own quarrels aside and depose the powerless monarch from his palace in Cordoba - especially not when said caudillo's wife found herself much gratified by being addressed as the Marquesa de Catamarca. Dionisio's pleas for equality between whites and Indians went practically unheard in this context, although he did attract attention (most of it unfavourable) for marrying off the Prince of Cuzco to Princess Amethyste of Haiti.
The Kingdom of South America spent the vast majority of its time at war, mostly with their neighbours in Buenos Aires, but also in the fraught region of the Banda Oriental. South America supported the rural gaucho element, the Blancos, against both Brazilian garrisons and the Porteno proxies in the Colorado Party. The Cisplatine War of the 1820s ended with an independent Uruguay between the three powers, but war broke out again in 1839, by which point the Republic had become a symbol of liberty in predominantly monarchist South America, and radical adventurers came to support the Colorado defenders of Montevideo. Another Uruguayan crisis resulted in the Great Southern War, in which the Kingdom of South America aligned with Paraguay and the Blancos against Brazil, the Rio de la Plata, and the Colorados. The defeat of the Kingdom's disorganised local militias sounded the death-knell for the regime, now embodied in the figure of King Tupac I.
Two decades of civil war ensued, with Tupac uniting Indian communities with an ever-changing network of 'loyal' caudillos against regional rebellions. By the time of Tupac's final defeat at the Battle of Salto in 1882, the Chileans had seized the copper-bearing regions of Alto Peru and parts of Patagonia, most of the north had been incorporated into the hereditary dictatorship of the Paraguayan Lopez family, and the balance had united under the leadership of Buenos Aires. The disunited Kingdom was no more.
Empire of Brazil
Brazil attained its separate existence in 1822, when Dom Pedro, eldest son of Joao VI of Portugal, declared the colony's independence under his own rule. The energetic and adventurous Emperor Pedro I needed all his dubious talents to face up to the challenges posed by Portuguese garrisons, centripetal provincial forces, and the Kingdom of South America. Pedro I also found it difficult to take a back seat and govern as a constitutional monarch, and in the early years of the 1830s he had to contend with an out-and-out rebellion from the 'Liberals', who were characterised by their support for slavery and election-rigging. The rebellion petered out after Pedro's death, fairly young still, in 1834, at which point the Liberal leaders took the opportunity of co-operating in the Regency of Pedro's son. An elder daughter, Maria, had been dispatched to Portugal to succeed her grandfather in 1826, and there she personified a shaky relationship of mutual toleration between Constitutionalists and Absolutists by marrying her uncle, Miguel. Who was not, himself, entirely happy about the situation.
Young Pedro II, meanwhile, was a reserved and cautious monarch with an aptitude for hard work, which made him indispensable in the first decades of his personal rule (he was declared an adult at the age of 14 when the Regency governments ran out of steam) but made him seem increasingly pedantic as the state became more complex and interlinked. As the Empire only really functioned as a result of Pedro II's personality, it seemed unlikely that the Empire would survive him. This was especially true after the deaths in childhood of his two sons, his elder daughter's apparent infertility, and the death of her husband the Comte d'Eu at the Siege of Humaita, fighting the Grand Alliance of the Paraguayans and South Americans. The sense of an outmoded regime was, perversely, reinforced by the questionably constitutional actions of the Emperor and the Princess Imperial in securing the abolition of slavery - thus effectively killing the planting interests which had been the foundation of the monarchy.
In 1889, however, General Deodoro da Fonseca led a military revolt against the Government and met virtually no opposition. Although he met with Republican leaders in Rio de Janeiro, the General chose to throw his weight behind the Emperor's inveterate intriguer of a grandson, Pedro Augusto, who appealed to him on the grounds of his career as an Army officer and his protestations of radical Liberalism. Pedro II and the Princess Imperial were sent into exile, but it soon became apparent that Pedro III had no political principles whatever. The next decade involved a series of power-plays and military coups, all involving the Emperor in some way - but his manic plotting caught up with him, and he was simultaneously deposed by seven different conspiratorial factions in 1901, whereupon the unstable ex-Emperor was put into an asylum.
Kingdom of South America
The grandiose name of this Kingdom belied its actual extent, which was essentially confined to the interior provinces of the Rio de la Plata, plus Upper Peru and, at times, the Banda Oriental. Its exact relationship with Paraguay also remained in some doubt for much of the nineteenth century. The Kingdom came about as a result of the Congress of Tucuman in 1816, in which the creole elite of the Rio de la Plata declared its independence from Spain, but by the same token, was also impressed by recent events in Europe, including the restoration of various monarchies. Manuel Belgrano suggested that a monarchy be set up in the new country, and the delegates from the interior selected a man named Dionisio Inca Yupanqui, a descendant of the Inca Emperors who had served as a representative in the Cadiz Cortes in 1810.
King Dionisio I presided over a loose agglomeration of provincial elites, most of them essentially autonomous, and he did not succeed in bending them to his authority. This was particularly true after the failure of Belgrano's attempt to bring Paraguay to heel and the secession of the Province of Buenos Aires under a King of their own. This was the key to his survival: no caudillo could be bothered to set his own quarrels aside and depose the powerless monarch from his palace in Cordoba - especially not when said caudillo's wife found herself much gratified by being addressed as the Marquesa de Catamarca. Dionisio's pleas for equality between whites and Indians went practically unheard in this context, although he did attract attention (most of it unfavourable) for marrying off the Prince of Cuzco to Princess Amethyste of Haiti.
The Kingdom of South America spent the vast majority of its time at war, mostly with their neighbours in Buenos Aires, but also in the fraught region of the Banda Oriental. South America supported the rural gaucho element, the Blancos, against both Brazilian garrisons and the Porteno proxies in the Colorado Party. The Cisplatine War of the 1820s ended with an independent Uruguay between the three powers, but war broke out again in 1839, by which point the Republic had become a symbol of liberty in predominantly monarchist South America, and radical adventurers came to support the Colorado defenders of Montevideo. Another Uruguayan crisis resulted in the Great Southern War, in which the Kingdom of South America aligned with Paraguay and the Blancos against Brazil, the Rio de la Plata, and the Colorados. The defeat of the Kingdom's disorganised local militias sounded the death-knell for the regime, now embodied in the figure of King Tupac I.
Two decades of civil war ensued, with Tupac uniting Indian communities with an ever-changing network of 'loyal' caudillos against regional rebellions. By the time of Tupac's final defeat at the Battle of Salto in 1882, the Chileans had seized the copper-bearing regions of Alto Peru and parts of Patagonia, most of the north had been incorporated into the hereditary dictatorship of the Paraguayan Lopez family, and the balance had united under the leadership of Buenos Aires. The disunited Kingdom was no more.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Endemic Monarchies of South America (2 of 2)
Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata
There had long been a terse and tense relationship between the city of Buenos Aires and the interior provinces of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, and the decision of the latter elements to crown an Indian as King and establish a capital outside of the predominant port city incited active opposition. Chief among the complaints of the Portenos was the allegation that Dionisio intended to move the capital to Cuzco or even Lima, returning to the colonial situation in which Buenos Aires had been artificially kept as a backwater. Some among the city's dignitaries insisted on establishing a Republic, but the decision eventually came about to appoint as King the junior Spanish Infanta, Don Sebastian. As Sebastian I was at this point a mere five-year-old, this would allow the politicians a decade or so of untrammeled power. Sebastian's grandmother, Queen Carlota Joaquina of Portugal (who had been a persistent contender for the throne herself) was invited down as Regent, but her Absolutist tendencies caused no end of problems, and the people of Buenos Aires let out a sigh of relief when she returned to Portugal with her husband Joao in 1822.
Replacing Carlota as Regent was the boy's own mother, Maria Teresa of Portugal, who was no less Absolutist, and it was no surprise that Sebastian grew up to cavil at the restraints of constitutional rule. The leaders of the Rio de la Plata embarked on a series of military adventures against the Kingdom of South America, often being able to detach a few local strongmen from their loyalty to Dionisio I. Seeking to halt the mounting expenditure on warfare, and the rapidly declining public support for the existing foreign policy, Sebastian signaled a turnabout upon reaching majority age and ceased intervening in South America. He went on to use this initial burst of public enthusiasm to assume greater powers for himself and persecute individuals associated with the Republicans and Liberals. A secret police was established and it became compulsory for men to wear their beards in the same manner as King Sebastian.
Unfortunately, the repression did nothing to refill the Kingdom's coffers, and neither did the cessation of war. In 1839, a Civil War erupted in Uruguay and Sebastian aligned with the Kingdom of South America in support of the Blancos - the Colorados, meanwhile, were bankrolled by Sebastian's brother-in-law, the Emperor of Brazil, and supported by the French and British navies, which proceeded to place Buenos Aires under a blockade. Sebastian was forced to reverse his policy after a further decade of financial difficulties and eruptions of violence, and entered into a closer alliance with Brazil. He now entered into a fraught relationship with the new Prime Minister Mitre, who was equally prone to vote-rigging shenanigans and eventually dragged the Rio de la Plata into a renewed war with South America in the 1860s.
The Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata was, at length, on the winning side of the Great Southern War, but Sebastian's position was not greatly strengthened, with most of the laurels going to Mitre. Sebastian's other weakness lay in his lack of surviving children, and he showed how little he had learned of politics by forcing the legislature to accept his nomination of his Carlist cousin, the Count of Montizon, as heir presumptive. In 1872, a Republican coup took place under the civilian auspices of Domingo Sarmiento, and the Republic of the Rio de la Plata now occupies about half of the Southern Cone of the Americas.
Kingdom of Chile
Perhaps the most unlikely monarchies established in the Americas was that of Chile, which had been fighting for independence under a series of Republican governments for over a decade by the time King Jose disembarked from the Esmeralda at Valparaiso. The most significant Chilean leaders, O'Higgins and San Martin, had believed in a continent-wide sentiment of liberty, which led them across the Andes and up to Peru. However, they made the mistake of depending on the Scottish radical, Admiral Cochrane, to export their vision up and down the Pacific coast. And after the conquest of Lima, it became readily apparent to Cochrane that neither he nor his Chilean seaman were ever going to be paid for their hard work.
Having an affinity for the Napoleonic regime, Cochrane led a naval descent on Valparaiso and marched into Santiago, where he declared the Kingdom of Chile and invited Joseph Bonaparte, ex-King of Spain, to assume the vacant throne. Although Joseph had already rejected the throne of Mexico, good manners alone impelled him to accept a throne that had already been won for him, so he left New Jersey behind. The rest of the 1820s was occupied by royalist campaigns against the remaining Republican redoubts and another amphibious invasion of Lower Peru, at the end of which Cochrane was finally paid.
King Jose I acted a constitutional monarch dependent on the goodwill of various factions of the military. He suffered both from the opposition of the remaining Republicans, and also from the Catholic Church and the Pelucones (or Wigs - the conservative faction) who regarded him as a dangerous anticlerical (Jose was a Freemason) and liberal. The most conservative province of Chile, that of Lower Peru, was in a constant state of unrest, which in turn demanded high expenditure on the Army and Navy (to get the Army past the Atacama desert), which reinforced the tense power structure of the Kingdom. In the 1830s, the aging King turned to the Pelucones to help him govern. The new regime was more natural and stable, although it depended for its survival on repression and ballot-rigging.
Jose was succeeded in 1844 by his son-in-law, Carlos Luciano, who spent more time on birdwatching than on politics, but even so was a dangerous liberal by Chilean standards, and he tacitly encouraged a Republican revolt in 1851. This failed, and the Kingdom instead saw a style of industrial modernisation that largely served the agrarian elites who filled the Senate and the rolls of the nobility. Later, the Cardinal-King Luciano pursued successful wars against the indigenous peoples in Araucania and across the Andes in Patagonia, and also preyed on the break-up of the Kingdom of South America to seize mineral-rich Upper Peru and other provinces.
The Bonaparte dynasty governed constitutionally, despite rebellions and coups, through the Fascist period and into the mid-20th century, when economic crises brought the Socialist Party to power and Salvador Allende distracted from his own failures to resolve the situation by elevating himself to the role of President of Chile. There was some discussion during the rise to power of General Pinochet of restoring the monarchy, but pressure from the USA set this at naught. Since 1972, then, no American state (barring Haiti) has been governed by a non-European monarch.
Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata
There had long been a terse and tense relationship between the city of Buenos Aires and the interior provinces of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, and the decision of the latter elements to crown an Indian as King and establish a capital outside of the predominant port city incited active opposition. Chief among the complaints of the Portenos was the allegation that Dionisio intended to move the capital to Cuzco or even Lima, returning to the colonial situation in which Buenos Aires had been artificially kept as a backwater. Some among the city's dignitaries insisted on establishing a Republic, but the decision eventually came about to appoint as King the junior Spanish Infanta, Don Sebastian. As Sebastian I was at this point a mere five-year-old, this would allow the politicians a decade or so of untrammeled power. Sebastian's grandmother, Queen Carlota Joaquina of Portugal (who had been a persistent contender for the throne herself) was invited down as Regent, but her Absolutist tendencies caused no end of problems, and the people of Buenos Aires let out a sigh of relief when she returned to Portugal with her husband Joao in 1822.
Replacing Carlota as Regent was the boy's own mother, Maria Teresa of Portugal, who was no less Absolutist, and it was no surprise that Sebastian grew up to cavil at the restraints of constitutional rule. The leaders of the Rio de la Plata embarked on a series of military adventures against the Kingdom of South America, often being able to detach a few local strongmen from their loyalty to Dionisio I. Seeking to halt the mounting expenditure on warfare, and the rapidly declining public support for the existing foreign policy, Sebastian signaled a turnabout upon reaching majority age and ceased intervening in South America. He went on to use this initial burst of public enthusiasm to assume greater powers for himself and persecute individuals associated with the Republicans and Liberals. A secret police was established and it became compulsory for men to wear their beards in the same manner as King Sebastian.
Unfortunately, the repression did nothing to refill the Kingdom's coffers, and neither did the cessation of war. In 1839, a Civil War erupted in Uruguay and Sebastian aligned with the Kingdom of South America in support of the Blancos - the Colorados, meanwhile, were bankrolled by Sebastian's brother-in-law, the Emperor of Brazil, and supported by the French and British navies, which proceeded to place Buenos Aires under a blockade. Sebastian was forced to reverse his policy after a further decade of financial difficulties and eruptions of violence, and entered into a closer alliance with Brazil. He now entered into a fraught relationship with the new Prime Minister Mitre, who was equally prone to vote-rigging shenanigans and eventually dragged the Rio de la Plata into a renewed war with South America in the 1860s.
The Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata was, at length, on the winning side of the Great Southern War, but Sebastian's position was not greatly strengthened, with most of the laurels going to Mitre. Sebastian's other weakness lay in his lack of surviving children, and he showed how little he had learned of politics by forcing the legislature to accept his nomination of his Carlist cousin, the Count of Montizon, as heir presumptive. In 1872, a Republican coup took place under the civilian auspices of Domingo Sarmiento, and the Republic of the Rio de la Plata now occupies about half of the Southern Cone of the Americas.
Kingdom of Chile
Perhaps the most unlikely monarchies established in the Americas was that of Chile, which had been fighting for independence under a series of Republican governments for over a decade by the time King Jose disembarked from the Esmeralda at Valparaiso. The most significant Chilean leaders, O'Higgins and San Martin, had believed in a continent-wide sentiment of liberty, which led them across the Andes and up to Peru. However, they made the mistake of depending on the Scottish radical, Admiral Cochrane, to export their vision up and down the Pacific coast. And after the conquest of Lima, it became readily apparent to Cochrane that neither he nor his Chilean seaman were ever going to be paid for their hard work.
Having an affinity for the Napoleonic regime, Cochrane led a naval descent on Valparaiso and marched into Santiago, where he declared the Kingdom of Chile and invited Joseph Bonaparte, ex-King of Spain, to assume the vacant throne. Although Joseph had already rejected the throne of Mexico, good manners alone impelled him to accept a throne that had already been won for him, so he left New Jersey behind. The rest of the 1820s was occupied by royalist campaigns against the remaining Republican redoubts and another amphibious invasion of Lower Peru, at the end of which Cochrane was finally paid.
King Jose I acted a constitutional monarch dependent on the goodwill of various factions of the military. He suffered both from the opposition of the remaining Republicans, and also from the Catholic Church and the Pelucones (or Wigs - the conservative faction) who regarded him as a dangerous anticlerical (Jose was a Freemason) and liberal. The most conservative province of Chile, that of Lower Peru, was in a constant state of unrest, which in turn demanded high expenditure on the Army and Navy (to get the Army past the Atacama desert), which reinforced the tense power structure of the Kingdom. In the 1830s, the aging King turned to the Pelucones to help him govern. The new regime was more natural and stable, although it depended for its survival on repression and ballot-rigging.
Jose was succeeded in 1844 by his son-in-law, Carlos Luciano, who spent more time on birdwatching than on politics, but even so was a dangerous liberal by Chilean standards, and he tacitly encouraged a Republican revolt in 1851. This failed, and the Kingdom instead saw a style of industrial modernisation that largely served the agrarian elites who filled the Senate and the rolls of the nobility. Later, the Cardinal-King Luciano pursued successful wars against the indigenous peoples in Araucania and across the Andes in Patagonia, and also preyed on the break-up of the Kingdom of South America to seize mineral-rich Upper Peru and other provinces.
The Bonaparte dynasty governed constitutionally, despite rebellions and coups, through the Fascist period and into the mid-20th century, when economic crises brought the Socialist Party to power and Salvador Allende distracted from his own failures to resolve the situation by elevating himself to the role of President of Chile. There was some discussion during the rise to power of General Pinochet of restoring the monarchy, but pressure from the USA set this at naught. Since 1972, then, no American state (barring Haiti) has been governed by a non-European monarch.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Proinsias Mulligan (1923-2001)
Mulligan entered the Dail in 1948 as part of the swing against Fianna Fail which brought the First Inter-Party Government into power - but assiduous readers will note that this was not his first foray into electoral politics. Previous to his election at the age of 25, he had been a distinctly unspectacular candidate for a fascist party which he had joined during the course of his career as an Economics student at University College Dublin. This period in his life was, even so, a step forward from his adolescence as a volunteer in what was left of the IRA, in which he followed his father and uncles. Both of these facts, of course, were later excused as immature indiscretions.
Be that as it may, Mulligan's career in Dail Eireann was not notable for its productivity, the new TD being stymied in his desire to be a gadfly on the Government's posterior by the inconvenient fact that his own party, the left-Republican Clann na Poblachta, was part of the very broad Government coalition, and seemed determined to squander its policies (Mulligan later claimed that he'd been mainly attracted by CnaP's endorsement of monetary reform) as a blood sacrifice to the egos of its major figures, Sean MacBride and Noel Browne. In the inevitable rupture between the two leviathans of narcissism, Mulligan sided with MacBride on the flip of a coin, and spent the ensuing years in Opposition alongside his leader, pouring a barrage of invective on Fianna Fail which was cheapened by the fact that he'd been a compliant backbencher in the last Government.
But Mulligan grew somewhat over his time in the Dail: although starting as a knee-jerk radical Republican, he presented an unusually moderate and statesmanlike image during his 1953 speaking tour of Northern Ireland (which perhaps contributed to poor ticket sales), and finally broke with MacBride over the issue of internment - MacBride brought down the Second Inter-Party Government in protest at the prospect of his old IRA mates being locked up merely for being involved in the Border Campaign. Mulligan found this distasteful and won his seat as an Independent, going on to sit with Noel Browne and then to join his new party. However, Browne was just as arrogant and domineering as MacBride, and forced Mulligan to identify more and more as an outright Socialist - a label which he had previously done his best to avoid, in view of his rather provincial constituency. He was defeated in 1961 by Stephen Coughlan, who was a Labour member but at least had the decency not to discuss such a disturbing disability within 50 miles of Limerick. Of course, it would later emerge that Coughlan was even more of a fascist than Mulligan had ever been.
The next stop on Mulligan's list was the same as the destination of many Irishmen of the period: England. In the early 1960s, he had the visionary idea of organising a party to fight English constituencies in solidarity with the Welsh and Scottish nationalists and the Anti-Partition League. This new 'Radical Party', which borrowed liberally from the contemporary manifestos of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, attracted the endorsement of both the CND and the Liverpool-based Social Credit Secretariat - which was very impressive, considering the Secretariat was entirely predicated upon the idea that contesting elections was for chumps. By some fluke, a pearl of a by-election sprang up in 1964 when the Labour MP for Liverpool Scotland died - a seat formerly held by the Irish Nationalist T. P. O'Connor. Although attracting a decent proportion of the Irish migrant vote, Mulligan failed to make it stick and the Radical Party was virtually moribund by the time of the general election a few months later. The Social Credit Secretariat's conclusion was that electoral contests were, indeed, for chumps, and the chump Pronsias Mulligan was so ashamed that he fled the country again.
Thereafter, he did not trouble the scorers to any great extent for twenty years, although he did parlay his active management of an Irish pub in central Whanganui into a reliable third place in the local seat, standing for Social Credit and holding some national-level positions within the League for want of anyone more suitable. After campaigning successfully for opening hours to be extended from 6 to 10pm in 1966, Mulligan did not win an important vote until 1987, when he narrowly unseated Education Minister Russell Marshall to become the NZ Democrats' sole MP. He was a forthright opponent of the Fourth Labour Government's foolhardy privatisation policy, albeit usually lampooned as a crotchety old drunkard in the cartoons of the day. He was re-elected by his constituents amid a massive swing to the Nats, and subsequently joined forces with a more orthodox left-winger, Jim Anderton, as one of the 'terrible twosome' of Alliance MPs.
After retiring from public life and publicanry in 1993, Mulligan made a final move to live with his son in British Columbia, where he was manipulated into making a final, unwise bid for office on the rather small bandwagon of ex-Minister Paul Hellyer.
Pronsias Mulligan never came into his own, either as a serious politician or as a parliamentary trouble-maker, always being overshadowed by more dominant egos and lacking the staying power to really build a reputation. By temperament, he was a good, if unexceptional, team player, and would have made an acceptable junior minister - his ambition, however, was to be a maverick, and in this respect his only success lies in the bald facts of his CV.
- Ailtiri na hAiseirghe candidate for Limerick (1944)
- Clann na Poblachta TD for Limerick East (1948-1957)
- Elected 1948, 1951, 1954
- Independent TD for Limerick East (1957-1958)
- Elected 1957
- National Progressive Democrats TD for Limerick East (1958-1961)
- National Progressive Democrats candidate for Limerick East (1961)
- National Progressive Democrats candidate for Cultural and Educational Panel (1961)
- Radical Party candidate for Liverpool Scotland (1964)
- Social Credit candidate for Wanganui (1966-1984)
- Democrats MP for Wanganui (1987-1991)
- Elected 1987, 1990
- Alliance MP for Wanganui (1991-1993)
- Canadian Action Party candidate for Vancouver Kingsway (2000)
Mulligan entered the Dail in 1948 as part of the swing against Fianna Fail which brought the First Inter-Party Government into power - but assiduous readers will note that this was not his first foray into electoral politics. Previous to his election at the age of 25, he had been a distinctly unspectacular candidate for a fascist party which he had joined during the course of his career as an Economics student at University College Dublin. This period in his life was, even so, a step forward from his adolescence as a volunteer in what was left of the IRA, in which he followed his father and uncles. Both of these facts, of course, were later excused as immature indiscretions.
Be that as it may, Mulligan's career in Dail Eireann was not notable for its productivity, the new TD being stymied in his desire to be a gadfly on the Government's posterior by the inconvenient fact that his own party, the left-Republican Clann na Poblachta, was part of the very broad Government coalition, and seemed determined to squander its policies (Mulligan later claimed that he'd been mainly attracted by CnaP's endorsement of monetary reform) as a blood sacrifice to the egos of its major figures, Sean MacBride and Noel Browne. In the inevitable rupture between the two leviathans of narcissism, Mulligan sided with MacBride on the flip of a coin, and spent the ensuing years in Opposition alongside his leader, pouring a barrage of invective on Fianna Fail which was cheapened by the fact that he'd been a compliant backbencher in the last Government.
But Mulligan grew somewhat over his time in the Dail: although starting as a knee-jerk radical Republican, he presented an unusually moderate and statesmanlike image during his 1953 speaking tour of Northern Ireland (which perhaps contributed to poor ticket sales), and finally broke with MacBride over the issue of internment - MacBride brought down the Second Inter-Party Government in protest at the prospect of his old IRA mates being locked up merely for being involved in the Border Campaign. Mulligan found this distasteful and won his seat as an Independent, going on to sit with Noel Browne and then to join his new party. However, Browne was just as arrogant and domineering as MacBride, and forced Mulligan to identify more and more as an outright Socialist - a label which he had previously done his best to avoid, in view of his rather provincial constituency. He was defeated in 1961 by Stephen Coughlan, who was a Labour member but at least had the decency not to discuss such a disturbing disability within 50 miles of Limerick. Of course, it would later emerge that Coughlan was even more of a fascist than Mulligan had ever been.
The next stop on Mulligan's list was the same as the destination of many Irishmen of the period: England. In the early 1960s, he had the visionary idea of organising a party to fight English constituencies in solidarity with the Welsh and Scottish nationalists and the Anti-Partition League. This new 'Radical Party', which borrowed liberally from the contemporary manifestos of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, attracted the endorsement of both the CND and the Liverpool-based Social Credit Secretariat - which was very impressive, considering the Secretariat was entirely predicated upon the idea that contesting elections was for chumps. By some fluke, a pearl of a by-election sprang up in 1964 when the Labour MP for Liverpool Scotland died - a seat formerly held by the Irish Nationalist T. P. O'Connor. Although attracting a decent proportion of the Irish migrant vote, Mulligan failed to make it stick and the Radical Party was virtually moribund by the time of the general election a few months later. The Social Credit Secretariat's conclusion was that electoral contests were, indeed, for chumps, and the chump Pronsias Mulligan was so ashamed that he fled the country again.
Thereafter, he did not trouble the scorers to any great extent for twenty years, although he did parlay his active management of an Irish pub in central Whanganui into a reliable third place in the local seat, standing for Social Credit and holding some national-level positions within the League for want of anyone more suitable. After campaigning successfully for opening hours to be extended from 6 to 10pm in 1966, Mulligan did not win an important vote until 1987, when he narrowly unseated Education Minister Russell Marshall to become the NZ Democrats' sole MP. He was a forthright opponent of the Fourth Labour Government's foolhardy privatisation policy, albeit usually lampooned as a crotchety old drunkard in the cartoons of the day. He was re-elected by his constituents amid a massive swing to the Nats, and subsequently joined forces with a more orthodox left-winger, Jim Anderton, as one of the 'terrible twosome' of Alliance MPs.
After retiring from public life and publicanry in 1993, Mulligan made a final move to live with his son in British Columbia, where he was manipulated into making a final, unwise bid for office on the rather small bandwagon of ex-Minister Paul Hellyer.
Pronsias Mulligan never came into his own, either as a serious politician or as a parliamentary trouble-maker, always being overshadowed by more dominant egos and lacking the staying power to really build a reputation. By temperament, he was a good, if unexceptional, team player, and would have made an acceptable junior minister - his ambition, however, was to be a maverick, and in this respect his only success lies in the bald facts of his CV.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Some Uruguayan elections from the middle of last century.
By the 1950s, the New Liberal-slash-Social Democratic settlement of Batllismo had become entrenched, which of course meant that everyone agreed with the basic principles even as the state bureaucracy became ever more obviously flawed - all the familiar stories of everyone having a pointless government job where they did nothing of any use to society except to collect their paycheck and make things inconvenient for each other, all while inflation mounted. Add to this the fact that the country had been governed by a single party for approximately a century, you get a very stale and jobs-for-the-boys-ish body politic. So keen, indeed, were the governing Colorados to expand the payroll of the state sector that they replaced the single President with a nine-member Council to serve as head of state. This had been the dreamchild of President Jorge Batlle y Ordonez after a visit to Switzerland: he did the very SLP Dot Com thing of seeing that Switzerland was doing well for itself and assuming that this was because of their precise constitutional formula. Anyway, Batlle achieved the requisite reform, but it didn't really work and was replaced with a Presidency, and then in 1952 the Colorados were running very short of ideas, so they tried it out again.
In 1954, the Colorado Party won (six of the nine Council seats went to the winning faction of the winning party; two the winning faction of the losing party; and one to the second-largest faction of the losing party), which was, in many ways, a bad move on their part. The bipartisan governing system had been reimposed precisely to minimise the statist, protectionist and 'authoritarian' Luis Batlle Berres, whose own faction had now beaten out another List controlled by his cousins - who were left with nothing. The following years were economically difficult, with agricultural exports plummeting in value due to the decline in demand from armies in Korea. Combined with the newfound sense that the Blancos could be trusted in government, the 1958 election revealed a huge swing to the Nationalist Party, who had also gained a rural faction of the Colorados through defection.
For the next eight years, the Blancos held power, and generally tried to tighten the purse-strings - but their own factional divisions and the continued economic stagnation began to tell in the end. By 1966, some generals were beginning to muse about giving democracy a "holiday", while the Montevideo-based guerilla movement, the Tupamaros, were becoming active. In 1966, not only were the Nationalists turfed out of office, but a plebiscite was held at the same time to return the country to a Presidential system. Thus, Council and Presidential ballots were held at the same time, and with the passing of the plebiscite the Council votes were thrown out. The conservative wing of the Colorados returned to office, and began to suppress left-wing dissidents, give increased responsibility to the Army, and impose economic shock tactics in ways which sowed the seeds for the subsequent military junta.
The minor parties:
- The Communists developed in this period from an essentially Stalinist party to something a bit more palatable. In 1956 de-Stalinisation began under Rodney Arismendi, who pushed the Uruguayan Road to Socialism - a plan which involved participation in broader worker politics and the formation of fronts, ultimately resulting in the PCU coming to power as part of the Frente Amplio in the 21st century. As for the 1950s and 60s, however, they merely pulled together some dissidents from the traditional parties to form the Left Front for Liberation - the acronym spelled FIDEL, because of course it did. Five seats in 1966 formed their best showing in the pre-junta days.
- The Socialists had long been the plaything of Emilio Frugoni, who was inspired by European Social Democrats and led his followers out of the original PSU when it voted to join the Third International and become the Communist Party. Now elderly and crotchety, he was shifted aside by a more nationalist, anti-imperialist generation who brought the PSU into an alliance ('Popular Unity') with some left-wing dissident Blancos in 1962. Frugoni left the party in disgust, the younger man who'd masterminded the deal ended up losing his seat, and the Socialists were entirely wiped out at the next election.
- The Civic Union was a Catholic Christian Democratic Party of similar vintage to the Socialists and Communists, and with a concern towards the Social Question which mirrored Uruguayan preoccupations at the time. They changed their name to the Christian Democrats in 1962 alongside a more pronounced turn to the left, which prompted a few members to split off and form their own Christian Democratic micro-parties.
- The Independent Nationalists had split off from the main body of Blancos in the 1930s when the dominant faction co-operated with a Colorado dictatorship. Their reintegration with the Nationalist Party in 1956 paved the way for the return to power of the reunited party - and they were part of the faction which won six seats in the 1962 Council election.
- All I can find out about the Democratic Reformist Union is that it was a splinter from the Colorado Party led by Alberto Demichelli. This guy was later installed as President by the military junta, so was presumably quite right-wing, although he was almost immediately removed on account of not doing everything the Generals told him to do, so idk.
By the 1950s, the New Liberal-slash-Social Democratic settlement of Batllismo had become entrenched, which of course meant that everyone agreed with the basic principles even as the state bureaucracy became ever more obviously flawed - all the familiar stories of everyone having a pointless government job where they did nothing of any use to society except to collect their paycheck and make things inconvenient for each other, all while inflation mounted. Add to this the fact that the country had been governed by a single party for approximately a century, you get a very stale and jobs-for-the-boys-ish body politic. So keen, indeed, were the governing Colorados to expand the payroll of the state sector that they replaced the single President with a nine-member Council to serve as head of state. This had been the dreamchild of President Jorge Batlle y Ordonez after a visit to Switzerland: he did the very SLP Dot Com thing of seeing that Switzerland was doing well for itself and assuming that this was because of their precise constitutional formula. Anyway, Batlle achieved the requisite reform, but it didn't really work and was replaced with a Presidency, and then in 1952 the Colorados were running very short of ideas, so they tried it out again.
In 1954, the Colorado Party won (six of the nine Council seats went to the winning faction of the winning party; two the winning faction of the losing party; and one to the second-largest faction of the losing party), which was, in many ways, a bad move on their part. The bipartisan governing system had been reimposed precisely to minimise the statist, protectionist and 'authoritarian' Luis Batlle Berres, whose own faction had now beaten out another List controlled by his cousins - who were left with nothing. The following years were economically difficult, with agricultural exports plummeting in value due to the decline in demand from armies in Korea. Combined with the newfound sense that the Blancos could be trusted in government, the 1958 election revealed a huge swing to the Nationalist Party, who had also gained a rural faction of the Colorados through defection.
For the next eight years, the Blancos held power, and generally tried to tighten the purse-strings - but their own factional divisions and the continued economic stagnation began to tell in the end. By 1966, some generals were beginning to muse about giving democracy a "holiday", while the Montevideo-based guerilla movement, the Tupamaros, were becoming active. In 1966, not only were the Nationalists turfed out of office, but a plebiscite was held at the same time to return the country to a Presidential system. Thus, Council and Presidential ballots were held at the same time, and with the passing of the plebiscite the Council votes were thrown out. The conservative wing of the Colorados returned to office, and began to suppress left-wing dissidents, give increased responsibility to the Army, and impose economic shock tactics in ways which sowed the seeds for the subsequent military junta.
The minor parties:
- The Communists developed in this period from an essentially Stalinist party to something a bit more palatable. In 1956 de-Stalinisation began under Rodney Arismendi, who pushed the Uruguayan Road to Socialism - a plan which involved participation in broader worker politics and the formation of fronts, ultimately resulting in the PCU coming to power as part of the Frente Amplio in the 21st century. As for the 1950s and 60s, however, they merely pulled together some dissidents from the traditional parties to form the Left Front for Liberation - the acronym spelled FIDEL, because of course it did. Five seats in 1966 formed their best showing in the pre-junta days.
- The Socialists had long been the plaything of Emilio Frugoni, who was inspired by European Social Democrats and led his followers out of the original PSU when it voted to join the Third International and become the Communist Party. Now elderly and crotchety, he was shifted aside by a more nationalist, anti-imperialist generation who brought the PSU into an alliance ('Popular Unity') with some left-wing dissident Blancos in 1962. Frugoni left the party in disgust, the younger man who'd masterminded the deal ended up losing his seat, and the Socialists were entirely wiped out at the next election.
- The Civic Union was a Catholic Christian Democratic Party of similar vintage to the Socialists and Communists, and with a concern towards the Social Question which mirrored Uruguayan preoccupations at the time. They changed their name to the Christian Democrats in 1962 alongside a more pronounced turn to the left, which prompted a few members to split off and form their own Christian Democratic micro-parties.
- The Independent Nationalists had split off from the main body of Blancos in the 1930s when the dominant faction co-operated with a Colorado dictatorship. Their reintegration with the Nationalist Party in 1956 paved the way for the return to power of the reunited party - and they were part of the faction which won six seats in the 1962 Council election.
- All I can find out about the Democratic Reformist Union is that it was a splinter from the Colorado Party led by Alberto Demichelli. This guy was later installed as President by the military junta, so was presumably quite right-wing, although he was almost immediately removed on account of not doing everything the Generals told him to do, so idk.
This explains some of the tropes in Mario Benedetti's novels.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
The Plague of 2021
We didn't think it could possibly get any worse, but it did. March 2020 was the start of the Coronavirus pandemic in many parts of the West, and for the next twelve months our lives became dominated by fear and anxiety - we were repeatedly locked down in our homes, we were forbidden to hug our grandparents, and we became increasingly aware of the fragility of the global market and of our national governments in the face of such a threat. For years, it had been obvious that the classes which managed our society were only just managing to maintain some form of stability. Nowadays, they weren't managing at all: the care homes filled with corpses.
The ironic thing was that, if we'd been able to stick it just a little bit longer, we'd have come out of the pandemic with just a few million 'excess deaths' (what a phrase!) and without any particularly devastating impacts that couldn't be ascribed to other causes. The Covid crisis was a battle against tedium more than a crusade against an existential threat. But then, as I say, it got worse. Something in the human psyche just snapped.
People blamed TikTok for the rapid transmission of the 'dancing mania', but this could not have been further from the truth: the dances that people posted on social media were planned and rehearsed in the schoolyards of the nations, while the jerky spasms which emanated like ectoplasm from the cities of Western Europe were uncontrolled and unintentional. They were not designed to be beautiful; they were, indeed, ugly in a way that only the truly demonic can achieve. The stress of our times, concentrated and sublimated by a year (in fact, a lifetime) of constant crisis, brought people out onto the streets - and not in the form of a popular revolution, as the Marxists had predicted, but as a very human and very inhuman cri-de-coeur. They could not stand to be cooped up any more, so the nervous twitches grew and grew until the citizens of London (and Paris, and Amsterdam, and wherever else) lurched out of the door like zombies, unable to control their movements, and gathered in the squares and plazas of the cities, where they danced until they could dance no more.
Marx had predicted that the revolution would come, not as a voluntary act of bourgeois will, but as a necessary result of the iron laws of sociology. He failed to foresee that this scientific, this biological revolution could not, therefore, take on the form of any sort of political action. No slogans were chanted. It was not solidarity which poured out of the souls of the people, but a cacophony of individuality that looked, from afar, like the chaotically beautiful unity of a swarm of ants. But very few people looked from afar. Most of us were dancing. We couldn't escape the mania: some were jerking about in a state of catatonia; others laughed until they suffocated; others spat rabid foam and, eventually, blood.
In particular, I feel for the anxious introverts - those individuals who were not themselves taken over by the social virus, but who took their only opportunity to dance with people who they knew would not reject them. Others who escaped the neurological revolution simply joined in with the rest, and found that they couldn't stop. Within hours, the streets were full of corpses: dancers bashed into each other, or spasmed in the wrong way and snapped a rib or a spine, and proved unable to stop themselves from mashing their insides into a fine paste. Some of those who had retained some sort of detached consciousness, even as their bodies rebelled against their orders, showed in their eyes an unimaginable level of horror at such sights - and danced faster. This was even before the thirst and the hunger set in. To cut a long story short, the first epicentres were denuded of life within three weeks - and Lisbon, which did not see a single rain-shower to nourish the dancers, was a charnel-house within three days. The rest of the world soon joined in the craze, and the estimates indicate a death rate of 97%. Humanity's biggest mass extinction since the ice age, and all it took was a year of Zoom calls. Did the chattering teeth of Homo Erectus erupt into a similar bout of hysteria?
I do not dance - it is not in my constitution to do so. Even so, it took a supreme effort of will to pummel with my left fist the insubordinate fingers which were beginning to snap in time with a beat which no jazzman had ever envisaged in his wildest nightmares.
I write this into the ether, as the servers on which the Internet is inscribed wink out, one by one, their neglected power sources rattling to a halt, and their failsafes failing. We were told that what we wrote online would be visible forever to future employers. Well - there are no employers now. If a tree falls in the forest and no capitalist is there to hear it, does it truly make a sound? Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was the first to fall over, with the surge of panicked posting overwhelming their infrastructure - then the news sites, Twitter, and almost everything else, in time. With some exceptions.
These days, I spend most of my time watching videos posted by dead teenagers on TikTok.
We didn't think it could possibly get any worse, but it did. March 2020 was the start of the Coronavirus pandemic in many parts of the West, and for the next twelve months our lives became dominated by fear and anxiety - we were repeatedly locked down in our homes, we were forbidden to hug our grandparents, and we became increasingly aware of the fragility of the global market and of our national governments in the face of such a threat. For years, it had been obvious that the classes which managed our society were only just managing to maintain some form of stability. Nowadays, they weren't managing at all: the care homes filled with corpses.
The ironic thing was that, if we'd been able to stick it just a little bit longer, we'd have come out of the pandemic with just a few million 'excess deaths' (what a phrase!) and without any particularly devastating impacts that couldn't be ascribed to other causes. The Covid crisis was a battle against tedium more than a crusade against an existential threat. But then, as I say, it got worse. Something in the human psyche just snapped.
People blamed TikTok for the rapid transmission of the 'dancing mania', but this could not have been further from the truth: the dances that people posted on social media were planned and rehearsed in the schoolyards of the nations, while the jerky spasms which emanated like ectoplasm from the cities of Western Europe were uncontrolled and unintentional. They were not designed to be beautiful; they were, indeed, ugly in a way that only the truly demonic can achieve. The stress of our times, concentrated and sublimated by a year (in fact, a lifetime) of constant crisis, brought people out onto the streets - and not in the form of a popular revolution, as the Marxists had predicted, but as a very human and very inhuman cri-de-coeur. They could not stand to be cooped up any more, so the nervous twitches grew and grew until the citizens of London (and Paris, and Amsterdam, and wherever else) lurched out of the door like zombies, unable to control their movements, and gathered in the squares and plazas of the cities, where they danced until they could dance no more.
Marx had predicted that the revolution would come, not as a voluntary act of bourgeois will, but as a necessary result of the iron laws of sociology. He failed to foresee that this scientific, this biological revolution could not, therefore, take on the form of any sort of political action. No slogans were chanted. It was not solidarity which poured out of the souls of the people, but a cacophony of individuality that looked, from afar, like the chaotically beautiful unity of a swarm of ants. But very few people looked from afar. Most of us were dancing. We couldn't escape the mania: some were jerking about in a state of catatonia; others laughed until they suffocated; others spat rabid foam and, eventually, blood.
In particular, I feel for the anxious introverts - those individuals who were not themselves taken over by the social virus, but who took their only opportunity to dance with people who they knew would not reject them. Others who escaped the neurological revolution simply joined in with the rest, and found that they couldn't stop. Within hours, the streets were full of corpses: dancers bashed into each other, or spasmed in the wrong way and snapped a rib or a spine, and proved unable to stop themselves from mashing their insides into a fine paste. Some of those who had retained some sort of detached consciousness, even as their bodies rebelled against their orders, showed in their eyes an unimaginable level of horror at such sights - and danced faster. This was even before the thirst and the hunger set in. To cut a long story short, the first epicentres were denuded of life within three weeks - and Lisbon, which did not see a single rain-shower to nourish the dancers, was a charnel-house within three days. The rest of the world soon joined in the craze, and the estimates indicate a death rate of 97%. Humanity's biggest mass extinction since the ice age, and all it took was a year of Zoom calls. Did the chattering teeth of Homo Erectus erupt into a similar bout of hysteria?
I do not dance - it is not in my constitution to do so. Even so, it took a supreme effort of will to pummel with my left fist the insubordinate fingers which were beginning to snap in time with a beat which no jazzman had ever envisaged in his wildest nightmares.
I write this into the ether, as the servers on which the Internet is inscribed wink out, one by one, their neglected power sources rattling to a halt, and their failsafes failing. We were told that what we wrote online would be visible forever to future employers. Well - there are no employers now. If a tree falls in the forest and no capitalist is there to hear it, does it truly make a sound? Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was the first to fall over, with the surge of panicked posting overwhelming their infrastructure - then the news sites, Twitter, and almost everything else, in time. With some exceptions.
These days, I spend most of my time watching videos posted by dead teenagers on TikTok.
Terrifying. Simply terrifying. Great work.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Elektronaut
Effectively Stood Down
- Location
- The Legendarium of Gentleman Julius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
St. Twinkle's Dance
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
The PoD for this is that the Great White Fleet doesn't call in at New Zealand, yes, really.
I was told this story by my father, who went to his grave insisting that it was false.
This was in 1909, during the long dry legislative holiday which came about when none of the men in power could decide whether shop workers deserved a half-day to themselves in a week, and when young Aloysius O’Leary was working on the railway. The railway, you understand – the one between Wellington and Auckland through the volcano-blasted plateaus and the engineer-blasted cuttings in the hills. Some of the navigation-men would say that to build a railway through an almost unpopulated and almost certainly impassable section of the interior was a monument to Man’s arrogance, but even they did not realise quite how arrogant He was until they shook hands with the Minister of Roads and Bridges.
The Hapuawhenua Viaduct was, in point of fact, under the purview of the Minister of Public Works, but the Minister of Roads and Bridges was on a legislative holiday, and he wanted to be photographed near as many roads and bridges as he could find. Presumably he would display the slides at a magic lantern show in Wellington as an endurance challenge for his colleagues.
My father also liked to point out that the Minister of Roads and Bridges was simultaneously the Minister of Labour, but never showed any interest in being photographed next to labourers. But then, Dad was a bit of a Commo.
In any case, Aloysius O’Leary, as the weakest and most expendable member of his gang (and, although this ought not to cast doubt on the story, a young man heavily in hock to Jack Lee, the man who bootlegged spirits into the camp), was directed to look after the Minister during his visit, and to stay out of shot if at all possible.
The Viaduct was a masterpiece, even in its unfinished state. Rising above the gorge in a symphony of iron, it was the only viaduct on the line which was so beautifully curved. Somehow, all the straight lines of the girders and the rails were able to combine to create something graceful and constant – save, of course, for the gap in the middle where the final stage of construction was taking place. It provided a fine backdrop, as all the pressmen agreed before they returned, shivering from the wind, to the not-so-secret grog shop in the camp. This was the King Country, the land that was held by the Maori King until 1885, when the Government persuaded him to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage: or rather, for a local liquor ban and a free lifetime pass on the new railway that was to open his upland fastness to closer settlement.
The Maori themselves called it the Rohe Potae: supposedly ‘the land of the hat’, the story being that the King had dropped his top hat down on a map and claimed all the territory within the brim as his own.
Yes, the pressmen retreated to the camp, but the Minister of Roads and Bridges remained, staring out into the gorge like a man pondering whether or not to jump.
“Will you come back to the camp, sir?” asked Aloysius O’Leary, a touch of worry in his voice.
Wordlessly, the Minister moved, jerkily – as if being pulled by invisible hooks – in precisely the opposite direction. He stepped out towards the middle of the viaduct, his feet constantly tripping over rails and tools and sleepers. But he didn’t fall over, although he was a well-fed man with the red cheeks of a hipflask-owner. Aloysius, scared for the safety of his charge, rushed forward to support the Minister, but found that he was virtually weightless. He then tried to persuade him physically back to terra firma – but found that he was rigid and implacable. Our man had little choice but to go along with the decision that had been made, although he was not sure who was in charge of matters.
There should have been construction men working on the middle span, but they were occluded by a sudden fog that swelled unnoticed up the valley. All was muffled and unworldly, as commonly happens in such climactic conditions, and before long it seemed as if the only people in the world were Minister in his trance, and Aloysius O’Leary in his fear.
And a figure on the other side, who skipped and tiptoed along lengths of wooden scaffolding, and the occasional sleeper.
The Minister stopped on the very edge of the bridge, much to the relief of Aloysius, and so did the other figure (who seemed to be just as at home on the viaduct as anybody else) ten yards across the void. A greater contrast there could not have been: where the Minister of Roads and Bridges was well-built, the other was subtly sharp and wispy; where one was ruddy, the other’s skin (if you could call it skin) had a greenish pallor; where one was clad in waistcoat and watch-chain, the other wore either knightly armour, or barks and furs, or nothing at all, depending on your precise outlook on things. The Minister had a beard which Aloysius would, until that day, have described as ‘bushy’ - but the figure on the other side had thorns and flowers in his hair.
“I am,” announced the Minister with a jolt of awakening, “the Minister of Roads and Bridges in His Majesty’s Government.”
“What a coincidence” replied the figure, or perhaps it was simply the wind in the trees on the valley floor. “Which King do you serve?”
“Why, King Edward, of course!” bellowed the Minister across the aching gap in the jaw of the viaduct. “The Seventh.”
To this last word the other took instinctive exception. It yelped in pain (or was it a bird of prey diving on a possum?) and covered its ears with hands that might well have been covered in lace gloves; them or spiderwebs. Recovering its composure, it adopted a mocking tone of voice which bore more malice than humour. “My, you people do get through them, don’t you? A remarkably careless species – you misplaced the fifth one four hundred years ago and you still haven’t asked us how he’s getting on.”
The Minister ignored the historical trivia and, as a true politician, brought his focus to bear on the salient questions of the matter at hand. “Who the devil are you and what do you want?” he screamed.
“I am, in a manner of speaking, your opposite number in the Court of King Oberon of Faerie, and I want you to abdicate your pretensions upon both his realm, and upon my portfolio.”
“Your portfolio?” Aloysius had been shocked by the revelation that his grandmother’s tales had had some basis in fact; the Minister seemed to take all in his stride except for the assault upon his job security. “We are the only builders of roads and bridges in this country, I’ll have you know! We have spent seventy years building up this colony, opening up the land, and developing it for productive uses – and this is all underpinned by a scaffold of surveyors, bridge-builders and road-makers. The best the Maoris could ever manage is tracks and portages, and I don’t think there’s a ministerial portfolio in that sort of thing!”
“Roads and bridges, roads and bridges,” mused the faerie with a pensive and imponderable smile on what, for want of a better word, we shall call his face, “they’re all a matter of perspective. Has it not occurred to you, Minister, that this is the sort of bridge that trolls live under? That the next one up the line might be the sort of bridge that is guarded by an old man who will ask three riddles before he lets you cross? Or that the roads you’ve built up in this high country are mazy, and rambling, and beguiling, and likely to lure a traveller from the straight and narrow? The mere workaday fact of who might or might not have built the bridge is irrelevant – what matters is who made it.”
Aloysius was slightly offended by this remark. He had been quite proud of what labour he had managed to accomplish, and was almost certain that no trains would fall into the gorge on account of any of his riveting.
“Excuse me, my lord,” it seemed most appropriate to address him as such, “if you don’t mind me interrupting – on what basis does Oberon claim this land? I thought the fairies lived at the bottom of English gardens, and in the misty bogs of Ireland, if they existed at all.”
“This is the King Country,” said the faerie, with a simple shrug, “it belongs to the King. Whether that King is named Tawhiao, or Edward, or Oberon, is essentially immaterial. And if you enter the King Country with the right frame of mind, you might very well end up at the bottom of a garden in England – although I do not recommend it. I haven’t visited there in centuries, but even so I can’t wring the damp from my soul. Oh – and no, it would be very foolish of you to imagine that any of our folk would do anything as tawdry as to exist.”
“For the sake of argument,” the Minister said, “what would you have me do? All this talk of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and abdicating pretensions is all very fine and dandy, but what of the hard tack? Set out your demands, and we shall negotiate – although be warned, Sir, for I am also the Minister of Labour, and I have a certain set of skills in this regard.”
The figure opposite snorted in a manner reminiscent of a geyser going off several miles away. “There shall be no negotiation. You shall tear up these twin swords of iron with which you assault our domain, or we will take a tithe.”
“A tithe?” asked Aloysius.
“Forty-four years from now, on one of your hallowed days, we shall deny passage into the Land of the Pot of Gold to one of your iron horses. The Whangaehu River will rise up against your invasion. Many will die.”
Now it was the turn of the Minister of Roads and Bridges to laugh. Unlike the simpering, sinister smiles of his opposite number, the Minister was given to guffaws. “Ha! One major accident in forty-four years is most certainly a price worth paying for progress! Now, if you’d threatened to derail a train before the next election, I might have been willing to talk business. But instead, fairy, I’ll give you a threat in return: this very moment, to the north, in the very heart of what you erroneously call your realm, our surveyors are plotting out a spiral of track, a great twisting mass of metal, with two tunnels and – best of all – as many horseshoe bends as you can count. You don’t like iron horseshoes, do you, fairy? Haha! That’s told him, I’ll wager!”
“It has indeed,” said the inhuman figure, “I grow bored of this discussion.” It gave a flick of a hand (or a swing of a supple branch) and the Minister of Roads and Bridges was suddenly transformed into a grunting, filthy pig. It snorted in surprise and lost its footing on the edge of the half-finished viaduct, and Aloysius O’Leary watched it fall slowly to the ground, uselessly trying to grasp girders and scaffolding with its trotters. He was powerless to do anything, although he suspected that the Minister would reach the ground in one piece, and would perhaps be turned back into a man by the kiss of a Princess.
The faerie shook his head sadly. He retreated into the mist without moving in any perceptible way. Aloysius, meanwhile, turned and picked his way back to more solid ground. The camp, and the grog-shop, and – presumably – his debts, had all disappeared. And when he turned behind him to look at the gap in the viaduct, it wasn’t there: the bridge was complete, and a train came across it which (by some bizarre witchcraft) produced no smoke. Not knowing what else to do, Aloysius O’Leary held his arm out, and was picked up by a befuddled but not unsympathetic driver.
Ever since, the southbound passenger trains on the North Island Main Trunk have customarily kept a seat empty for young Aloysius O’Leary, while drivers of the freight trains are welcome of the company in the cab, now that two-man running is a thing of the past. He’s always going south, is Aloysius O’Leary, but he never gets past Tangiwai. And although they now serve wine and beer on the Northern Explorer (the King Country voted to ‘go wet’ in the 1960s), he never touches a drop.
That’s what Dad told me, anyway.
The Minister of Roads and Bridges
I was told this story by my father, who went to his grave insisting that it was false.
This was in 1909, during the long dry legislative holiday which came about when none of the men in power could decide whether shop workers deserved a half-day to themselves in a week, and when young Aloysius O’Leary was working on the railway. The railway, you understand – the one between Wellington and Auckland through the volcano-blasted plateaus and the engineer-blasted cuttings in the hills. Some of the navigation-men would say that to build a railway through an almost unpopulated and almost certainly impassable section of the interior was a monument to Man’s arrogance, but even they did not realise quite how arrogant He was until they shook hands with the Minister of Roads and Bridges.
The Hapuawhenua Viaduct was, in point of fact, under the purview of the Minister of Public Works, but the Minister of Roads and Bridges was on a legislative holiday, and he wanted to be photographed near as many roads and bridges as he could find. Presumably he would display the slides at a magic lantern show in Wellington as an endurance challenge for his colleagues.
My father also liked to point out that the Minister of Roads and Bridges was simultaneously the Minister of Labour, but never showed any interest in being photographed next to labourers. But then, Dad was a bit of a Commo.
In any case, Aloysius O’Leary, as the weakest and most expendable member of his gang (and, although this ought not to cast doubt on the story, a young man heavily in hock to Jack Lee, the man who bootlegged spirits into the camp), was directed to look after the Minister during his visit, and to stay out of shot if at all possible.
The Viaduct was a masterpiece, even in its unfinished state. Rising above the gorge in a symphony of iron, it was the only viaduct on the line which was so beautifully curved. Somehow, all the straight lines of the girders and the rails were able to combine to create something graceful and constant – save, of course, for the gap in the middle where the final stage of construction was taking place. It provided a fine backdrop, as all the pressmen agreed before they returned, shivering from the wind, to the not-so-secret grog shop in the camp. This was the King Country, the land that was held by the Maori King until 1885, when the Government persuaded him to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage: or rather, for a local liquor ban and a free lifetime pass on the new railway that was to open his upland fastness to closer settlement.
The Maori themselves called it the Rohe Potae: supposedly ‘the land of the hat’, the story being that the King had dropped his top hat down on a map and claimed all the territory within the brim as his own.
Yes, the pressmen retreated to the camp, but the Minister of Roads and Bridges remained, staring out into the gorge like a man pondering whether or not to jump.
“Will you come back to the camp, sir?” asked Aloysius O’Leary, a touch of worry in his voice.
Wordlessly, the Minister moved, jerkily – as if being pulled by invisible hooks – in precisely the opposite direction. He stepped out towards the middle of the viaduct, his feet constantly tripping over rails and tools and sleepers. But he didn’t fall over, although he was a well-fed man with the red cheeks of a hipflask-owner. Aloysius, scared for the safety of his charge, rushed forward to support the Minister, but found that he was virtually weightless. He then tried to persuade him physically back to terra firma – but found that he was rigid and implacable. Our man had little choice but to go along with the decision that had been made, although he was not sure who was in charge of matters.
There should have been construction men working on the middle span, but they were occluded by a sudden fog that swelled unnoticed up the valley. All was muffled and unworldly, as commonly happens in such climactic conditions, and before long it seemed as if the only people in the world were Minister in his trance, and Aloysius O’Leary in his fear.
And a figure on the other side, who skipped and tiptoed along lengths of wooden scaffolding, and the occasional sleeper.
The Minister stopped on the very edge of the bridge, much to the relief of Aloysius, and so did the other figure (who seemed to be just as at home on the viaduct as anybody else) ten yards across the void. A greater contrast there could not have been: where the Minister of Roads and Bridges was well-built, the other was subtly sharp and wispy; where one was ruddy, the other’s skin (if you could call it skin) had a greenish pallor; where one was clad in waistcoat and watch-chain, the other wore either knightly armour, or barks and furs, or nothing at all, depending on your precise outlook on things. The Minister had a beard which Aloysius would, until that day, have described as ‘bushy’ - but the figure on the other side had thorns and flowers in his hair.
“I am,” announced the Minister with a jolt of awakening, “the Minister of Roads and Bridges in His Majesty’s Government.”
“What a coincidence” replied the figure, or perhaps it was simply the wind in the trees on the valley floor. “Which King do you serve?”
“Why, King Edward, of course!” bellowed the Minister across the aching gap in the jaw of the viaduct. “The Seventh.”
To this last word the other took instinctive exception. It yelped in pain (or was it a bird of prey diving on a possum?) and covered its ears with hands that might well have been covered in lace gloves; them or spiderwebs. Recovering its composure, it adopted a mocking tone of voice which bore more malice than humour. “My, you people do get through them, don’t you? A remarkably careless species – you misplaced the fifth one four hundred years ago and you still haven’t asked us how he’s getting on.”
The Minister ignored the historical trivia and, as a true politician, brought his focus to bear on the salient questions of the matter at hand. “Who the devil are you and what do you want?” he screamed.
“I am, in a manner of speaking, your opposite number in the Court of King Oberon of Faerie, and I want you to abdicate your pretensions upon both his realm, and upon my portfolio.”
“Your portfolio?” Aloysius had been shocked by the revelation that his grandmother’s tales had had some basis in fact; the Minister seemed to take all in his stride except for the assault upon his job security. “We are the only builders of roads and bridges in this country, I’ll have you know! We have spent seventy years building up this colony, opening up the land, and developing it for productive uses – and this is all underpinned by a scaffold of surveyors, bridge-builders and road-makers. The best the Maoris could ever manage is tracks and portages, and I don’t think there’s a ministerial portfolio in that sort of thing!”
“Roads and bridges, roads and bridges,” mused the faerie with a pensive and imponderable smile on what, for want of a better word, we shall call his face, “they’re all a matter of perspective. Has it not occurred to you, Minister, that this is the sort of bridge that trolls live under? That the next one up the line might be the sort of bridge that is guarded by an old man who will ask three riddles before he lets you cross? Or that the roads you’ve built up in this high country are mazy, and rambling, and beguiling, and likely to lure a traveller from the straight and narrow? The mere workaday fact of who might or might not have built the bridge is irrelevant – what matters is who made it.”
Aloysius was slightly offended by this remark. He had been quite proud of what labour he had managed to accomplish, and was almost certain that no trains would fall into the gorge on account of any of his riveting.
“Excuse me, my lord,” it seemed most appropriate to address him as such, “if you don’t mind me interrupting – on what basis does Oberon claim this land? I thought the fairies lived at the bottom of English gardens, and in the misty bogs of Ireland, if they existed at all.”
“This is the King Country,” said the faerie, with a simple shrug, “it belongs to the King. Whether that King is named Tawhiao, or Edward, or Oberon, is essentially immaterial. And if you enter the King Country with the right frame of mind, you might very well end up at the bottom of a garden in England – although I do not recommend it. I haven’t visited there in centuries, but even so I can’t wring the damp from my soul. Oh – and no, it would be very foolish of you to imagine that any of our folk would do anything as tawdry as to exist.”
“For the sake of argument,” the Minister said, “what would you have me do? All this talk of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and abdicating pretensions is all very fine and dandy, but what of the hard tack? Set out your demands, and we shall negotiate – although be warned, Sir, for I am also the Minister of Labour, and I have a certain set of skills in this regard.”
The figure opposite snorted in a manner reminiscent of a geyser going off several miles away. “There shall be no negotiation. You shall tear up these twin swords of iron with which you assault our domain, or we will take a tithe.”
“A tithe?” asked Aloysius.
“Forty-four years from now, on one of your hallowed days, we shall deny passage into the Land of the Pot of Gold to one of your iron horses. The Whangaehu River will rise up against your invasion. Many will die.”
Now it was the turn of the Minister of Roads and Bridges to laugh. Unlike the simpering, sinister smiles of his opposite number, the Minister was given to guffaws. “Ha! One major accident in forty-four years is most certainly a price worth paying for progress! Now, if you’d threatened to derail a train before the next election, I might have been willing to talk business. But instead, fairy, I’ll give you a threat in return: this very moment, to the north, in the very heart of what you erroneously call your realm, our surveyors are plotting out a spiral of track, a great twisting mass of metal, with two tunnels and – best of all – as many horseshoe bends as you can count. You don’t like iron horseshoes, do you, fairy? Haha! That’s told him, I’ll wager!”
“It has indeed,” said the inhuman figure, “I grow bored of this discussion.” It gave a flick of a hand (or a swing of a supple branch) and the Minister of Roads and Bridges was suddenly transformed into a grunting, filthy pig. It snorted in surprise and lost its footing on the edge of the half-finished viaduct, and Aloysius O’Leary watched it fall slowly to the ground, uselessly trying to grasp girders and scaffolding with its trotters. He was powerless to do anything, although he suspected that the Minister would reach the ground in one piece, and would perhaps be turned back into a man by the kiss of a Princess.
The faerie shook his head sadly. He retreated into the mist without moving in any perceptible way. Aloysius, meanwhile, turned and picked his way back to more solid ground. The camp, and the grog-shop, and – presumably – his debts, had all disappeared. And when he turned behind him to look at the gap in the viaduct, it wasn’t there: the bridge was complete, and a train came across it which (by some bizarre witchcraft) produced no smoke. Not knowing what else to do, Aloysius O’Leary held his arm out, and was picked up by a befuddled but not unsympathetic driver.
Ever since, the southbound passenger trains on the North Island Main Trunk have customarily kept a seat empty for young Aloysius O’Leary, while drivers of the freight trains are welcome of the company in the cab, now that two-man running is a thing of the past. He’s always going south, is Aloysius O’Leary, but he never gets past Tangiwai. And although they now serve wine and beer on the Northern Explorer (the King Country voted to ‘go wet’ in the 1960s), he never touches a drop.
That’s what Dad told me, anyway.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Outline for a novel that should never be written
We open on unemployed East Sussex everyman Everett Manning being kicked repeatedly in the dick and balls by his wife's boyfriend. Mobile phone footage of the incident is shown on the local news, eliciting a small wave of sympathy which in turn draws attention to Everett's political life: he is running in the 2019 European elections as lead candidate for the 'Europa Movement'. In a running gag which immediately becomes wearisome, Everett takes pains to tell people that he doesn't actually have any firm opinions on Brexit - it's a microparty campaigning for the rights of women to have sex with cattle.
Despite his best efforts on this front, Everett is elected as a nine-month MEP. He immediately finds himself to be out of his depth as a politician, and instead of exposing his opinions to ridicule, he hires a secretary to translate his reviews of Dad's Army episodes into Esperanto - a move which brings him much applause from people who think he's making some sort of Point.
Everett's cushy number is challenged, however, when further footage of the Drubbing Incident comes to light, and the NHS judges that the fight was in fact his own fault, and that Everett's genital restoration surgery is therefore elective and will cost him thousands of pounds. To maximise his income from the only job he's ever had, Everett joins the Technical Group of MEPs to take advantage of certain special allowances accruing to the 38 co-chairs of the Group.
The Technical Group is made up of three dozen misfits and weirdos, all conforming to broad national stereotypes. Everett's closest ally is Ingrid Centraleuropeanname, MEP for the Czechoslovak Anti-Romani Party - a GRT person herself, she was elected as part of an arcane system of minority ethnic quotas. Ingrid describes herself as a 'Traveller Exclusionary Radical Feminist' and as 'Gypsy Critical'.
Everett and Ingrid stumble across a seamy criminal conspiracy and spend a couple of hundred pages rushing around Brussels, climbing out of the upstairs windows of gay orgies and skiing down the Butter Mountain and that sort of thing. Ultimately, they save the day five minutes before Everett is due to be escorted off the premises of the European Parliament on Brexit Day.
The option of a sequel is left open, but never commissioned.
We open on unemployed East Sussex everyman Everett Manning being kicked repeatedly in the dick and balls by his wife's boyfriend. Mobile phone footage of the incident is shown on the local news, eliciting a small wave of sympathy which in turn draws attention to Everett's political life: he is running in the 2019 European elections as lead candidate for the 'Europa Movement'. In a running gag which immediately becomes wearisome, Everett takes pains to tell people that he doesn't actually have any firm opinions on Brexit - it's a microparty campaigning for the rights of women to have sex with cattle.
Despite his best efforts on this front, Everett is elected as a nine-month MEP. He immediately finds himself to be out of his depth as a politician, and instead of exposing his opinions to ridicule, he hires a secretary to translate his reviews of Dad's Army episodes into Esperanto - a move which brings him much applause from people who think he's making some sort of Point.
Everett's cushy number is challenged, however, when further footage of the Drubbing Incident comes to light, and the NHS judges that the fight was in fact his own fault, and that Everett's genital restoration surgery is therefore elective and will cost him thousands of pounds. To maximise his income from the only job he's ever had, Everett joins the Technical Group of MEPs to take advantage of certain special allowances accruing to the 38 co-chairs of the Group.
The Technical Group is made up of three dozen misfits and weirdos, all conforming to broad national stereotypes. Everett's closest ally is Ingrid Centraleuropeanname, MEP for the Czechoslovak Anti-Romani Party - a GRT person herself, she was elected as part of an arcane system of minority ethnic quotas. Ingrid describes herself as a 'Traveller Exclusionary Radical Feminist' and as 'Gypsy Critical'.
Everett and Ingrid stumble across a seamy criminal conspiracy and spend a couple of hundred pages rushing around Brussels, climbing out of the upstairs windows of gay orgies and skiing down the Butter Mountain and that sort of thing. Ultimately, they save the day five minutes before Everett is due to be escorted off the premises of the European Parliament on Brexit Day.
The option of a sequel is left open, but never commissioned.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Map of the buffer state that the British wanted to create between Brazil and Argentina during the Wars of Independence and Argentine Civil Wars.Some sources also include Santa Fe province and the Chaco territory, but I think this looks more natural.
Needless to say, it was never likely to happen in this form, and only resulted in the independence of Uruguay as a smaller and more pointless buffer.
Needless to say, it was never likely to happen in this form, and only resulted in the independence of Uruguay as a smaller and more pointless buffer.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Once again, I am doing Uruguayan election maps - the Chamber of Deputies maps in the following posts are taken from higher up in the page, but I've now added the results of the lists within the major parties themselves.
For the uninitiated: Uruguay used to have an electoral system which allowed voters to choose their favourite faction within their favourite party. Political clubs would print ballot papers listing candidates to the Senate, Chamber, and lower bodies, and these would also have the names of the club's preferred candidates for President or the Collegiate Executive, depending on when exactly we're talking about. Voters would place one of these in an envelope and hand it over to be counted (if you didn't care which faction won out, you could put two or more ballots from the same party into the envelope, which would be considered to be 'voting for the motto'). All the votes for each party were pooled and then seats were allocated to factions proportionally within the party. Overall, this had the effect of encouraging each party to be as ideologically broad as possible, with factions aiming to pull in votes from the right and the left and hopefully change the balance of power within the party.
Obviously, if you have a President, you can't really split the role up between loads of different factions, so the job simply went to the top vote-winner of the most popular party, even if he didn't enjoy the support of a majority, or even a plurality, of the electorate. You might think that the introduction of a nine-person Colegiado would allow for proportional representation, but no - the first election to the new Executive in 1954 was held according to compromise rules. Six of the nine seats went to the largest faction in the largest party, while the other three went to the second party. If one faction in the second party was predominant, it would get all three, but if the second faction in the second faction got at least 12% of the total vote, the seats would be split 2-1.
There was no mechanism for the six majority seats to be split in this way, so in 1954 the top faction (Colorado List 15, with 29% of the vote) got 6 seats, while the second faction (Colorado List 14, 20%) came away with nothing. The third faction was the (Blanco) Herreristas, on 18% and 2 Executive seats, and the fourth was the (Blanco) National Popular Union, with 13% and one more seat than List 14.
List 14 was the 'traditionalist' wing of Batllismo, itself a social-liberal or social-democratic tendency within the relatively liberal Colorado Party. Batlle himself had been a progressive outlier within a family of moderate members of the political elite (his father had been President, and his Pacheco in-laws had been leading members of the conservative side of the Colorados since the party was formed in the 1830s), so it was unsurprising that his sons, the Batlle Pacheco brothers, would revert to type. They were generally uninterested in social welfare or class compromise, but maintained their links with Colorado traditions by vocally espousing the Colegiado first seriously proposed by their father after a trip to Switzerland. Meanwhile, their cousin, Luis Batlle Berres, started his own faction, List 15, which was more populist, more socially radical, and more willing to spend generously on import substitution in the finest traditions of post-war orthodoxy. And in the 1940s, Batlle Berres out-witted his cousins by coming out in favour of their one distinctive policy - the Colegiado.
Boosted by Batlle Berres and tolerated by the Blanco opposition, the proposal won out in a referendum and an all-Colorado Executive held office transitionally until the 1954 election. Batlle Berres now had to fend off both the 14 and the Blancos to win, but if he did so he'd remain in charge of the Executive just as strongly as if he'd still been President. Across the aisle, the Blancos (more properly the National Party) had been excluded from high office since the 1860s and from more informal power-sharing agreements since 1942, when the Blanco leader Luis Alberto de Herrera and his right-wing Batllista puppet dictator Gabriel Terra were ousted in a pro-democratic coup by Terra's brother-in-law. (I should point out that the word 'Batllista' didn't actually mean anything at any point). Herrera had dallied with the Axis in his day, but had also beaten Batlle himself to presenting Uruguay's first bill to regulate the eight-hour working day. Now he was an old man, and the introduction of the Colegiado meant that his rural, conservative 'Herrerismo' would regain the credibility it had lost in the 1930s and 40s.
Opposing Herrera within the National Party were two new factions challenging his all-powerful stature within the tribe. One was a portion of the pro-Allies, anti-dictatorship 'Independent National Party' which was slowly losing its raison-d'etre with the return of peace and democracy - this was led by Washington Beltran Mullin, son of a journalist who had been killed in a duel by the original Batlle. The other was the Popular Nationalist Movement of Daniel Fernandez Crespo, a popular and relatively progressive Montevideo politician with an efficient and slightly dirty machine. In the event, the MPN managed to win the final seat in the Colegiado for Fernandez Crespo.
Batlle Berres was the other winner on the day, topping the poll within the Colorado party and convincingly defeating List 14, the Blancos, and a tiny right-wing Colorado faction. His strongest support came from Montevideo, plus the interior departments which had benefited considerably from state investment (particularly Paysandu, site of a number of state-subsidised factories). The traditionalists of List 14, meanwhile, did well in the old-fashioned ex-colonial town of Colonia in the south-west (yes, the colonists just called it Colonia), and also the Montevideo satellite towns in Canelones, where they had a very strong local machine.
These voters would put Batlle Berres over the line in the Colegiado. But they were represented proportionally in the Senate and Chamber, meaning that although the Colorados had a majority in both houses, the Executive would have to negotiate with the Batlle Pacheco brothers to get anything passed.
For the uninitiated: Uruguay used to have an electoral system which allowed voters to choose their favourite faction within their favourite party. Political clubs would print ballot papers listing candidates to the Senate, Chamber, and lower bodies, and these would also have the names of the club's preferred candidates for President or the Collegiate Executive, depending on when exactly we're talking about. Voters would place one of these in an envelope and hand it over to be counted (if you didn't care which faction won out, you could put two or more ballots from the same party into the envelope, which would be considered to be 'voting for the motto'). All the votes for each party were pooled and then seats were allocated to factions proportionally within the party. Overall, this had the effect of encouraging each party to be as ideologically broad as possible, with factions aiming to pull in votes from the right and the left and hopefully change the balance of power within the party.
Obviously, if you have a President, you can't really split the role up between loads of different factions, so the job simply went to the top vote-winner of the most popular party, even if he didn't enjoy the support of a majority, or even a plurality, of the electorate. You might think that the introduction of a nine-person Colegiado would allow for proportional representation, but no - the first election to the new Executive in 1954 was held according to compromise rules. Six of the nine seats went to the largest faction in the largest party, while the other three went to the second party. If one faction in the second party was predominant, it would get all three, but if the second faction in the second faction got at least 12% of the total vote, the seats would be split 2-1.
There was no mechanism for the six majority seats to be split in this way, so in 1954 the top faction (Colorado List 15, with 29% of the vote) got 6 seats, while the second faction (Colorado List 14, 20%) came away with nothing. The third faction was the (Blanco) Herreristas, on 18% and 2 Executive seats, and the fourth was the (Blanco) National Popular Union, with 13% and one more seat than List 14.
List 14 was the 'traditionalist' wing of Batllismo, itself a social-liberal or social-democratic tendency within the relatively liberal Colorado Party. Batlle himself had been a progressive outlier within a family of moderate members of the political elite (his father had been President, and his Pacheco in-laws had been leading members of the conservative side of the Colorados since the party was formed in the 1830s), so it was unsurprising that his sons, the Batlle Pacheco brothers, would revert to type. They were generally uninterested in social welfare or class compromise, but maintained their links with Colorado traditions by vocally espousing the Colegiado first seriously proposed by their father after a trip to Switzerland. Meanwhile, their cousin, Luis Batlle Berres, started his own faction, List 15, which was more populist, more socially radical, and more willing to spend generously on import substitution in the finest traditions of post-war orthodoxy. And in the 1940s, Batlle Berres out-witted his cousins by coming out in favour of their one distinctive policy - the Colegiado.
Boosted by Batlle Berres and tolerated by the Blanco opposition, the proposal won out in a referendum and an all-Colorado Executive held office transitionally until the 1954 election. Batlle Berres now had to fend off both the 14 and the Blancos to win, but if he did so he'd remain in charge of the Executive just as strongly as if he'd still been President. Across the aisle, the Blancos (more properly the National Party) had been excluded from high office since the 1860s and from more informal power-sharing agreements since 1942, when the Blanco leader Luis Alberto de Herrera and his right-wing Batllista puppet dictator Gabriel Terra were ousted in a pro-democratic coup by Terra's brother-in-law. (I should point out that the word 'Batllista' didn't actually mean anything at any point). Herrera had dallied with the Axis in his day, but had also beaten Batlle himself to presenting Uruguay's first bill to regulate the eight-hour working day. Now he was an old man, and the introduction of the Colegiado meant that his rural, conservative 'Herrerismo' would regain the credibility it had lost in the 1930s and 40s.
Opposing Herrera within the National Party were two new factions challenging his all-powerful stature within the tribe. One was a portion of the pro-Allies, anti-dictatorship 'Independent National Party' which was slowly losing its raison-d'etre with the return of peace and democracy - this was led by Washington Beltran Mullin, son of a journalist who had been killed in a duel by the original Batlle. The other was the Popular Nationalist Movement of Daniel Fernandez Crespo, a popular and relatively progressive Montevideo politician with an efficient and slightly dirty machine. In the event, the MPN managed to win the final seat in the Colegiado for Fernandez Crespo.
Batlle Berres was the other winner on the day, topping the poll within the Colorado party and convincingly defeating List 14, the Blancos, and a tiny right-wing Colorado faction. His strongest support came from Montevideo, plus the interior departments which had benefited considerably from state investment (particularly Paysandu, site of a number of state-subsidised factories). The traditionalists of List 14, meanwhile, did well in the old-fashioned ex-colonial town of Colonia in the south-west (yes, the colonists just called it Colonia), and also the Montevideo satellite towns in Canelones, where they had a very strong local machine.
These voters would put Batlle Berres over the line in the Colegiado. But they were represented proportionally in the Senate and Chamber, meaning that although the Colorados had a majority in both houses, the Executive would have to negotiate with the Batlle Pacheco brothers to get anything passed.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
Now we turn to the second election under the Colegiado system, 1958, which was one of the most pivotal elections in Uruguayan history. The electorate were disappointed by the failure of the new system to deliver either efficient or consensual administration, and much more importantly, there were growing worries about the sustainability of the 'neobatllista' import-substitution model.
Things were afoot in the National Party. Luis Alberto de Herrera formed an alliance with Benito Nardone, impassioned radio orator and spokesman for the Liga Federal de Accion Ruralista. Ruralismo essentially consisted of rural elements of the Colorado Party who were whipped up into a populist frenzy by Nardone, and they never sat particularly comfortably with the Herreristas - but it worked for the moment. And it is important to remember that Ruralismo wasn't an uncomplicatedly right-wing movement: one of the Senators elected for the National Party, it is true, was Juan Maria Bordaberry, who went on to be President in the Colorado interest, launch a military coup, and try to pass a corporatist constitution; on the other hand, some members went over to the Union Popular in the 1960s, which was based around unquestioning support for the Cuban Revolution.
The transference of Colorado votes to the Blancos through the Ruralista movement was one of the two means by which the Nacionalistas hoped for victory. The other was the unification of the Blanco vote. As mentioned before, the National Party had been split since the 1930s, when the elements forming the Partido Nacional Independiente attempted to start a pro-democratic rebellion against Terra and Herrera. Since then, the PNI had lost its purpose and had declined in every election. Before 1954, Washington Beltran Mullin had led a faction back home, but the rest followed suit in 1956 to merge with the Beltran group and the urban ex-Herrerista elements behind Daniel Fernandez Crespo. The new faction was called the Union Blanca Democratica, and used the slogan "Either the UBD wins, or everything stays the same". Suddenly, the Blancos had a significant liberal wing ,based in the city of Montevideo and the up-and-coming towns along the Argentine border.
At the polls, the Blancos defeated the Colorados for the first time in 93 years. But would the Herrera-Nardone alliance get the benefit, or would the old man lose the majority seats on the Colegiado to the Ubedistas? On election night, it looked like an upset, but by morning the Herreristas pulled ahead by just 11,000 votes. Herrera himself died a year later, embittered by the fact that he'd still only managed to deliver three seats to his faction, with the rest being filled by Nardone's ex-Colorados - who, predictably, weren't as obedient as Herrera had hoped. Although both were united by the aspiration to dismantle the social security and state-interventionist bases of Batlle Berres' government, there were so many arguments and compromises that they couldn't deliver any real policy. The much vaunted removal of import controls was, in the event, paired with the enaction of a new system that did pretty much the same thing.
An important feature of the election was the fact that the Blancos even won the city of Montevideo - and if you look at the share of votes internal to the Blanco party, you will see that the most popular faction in the city was the Ubedistas. As the ballots cast for national elections were also counted for departmental elections, this meant that the liberals took control of the city administration, headed up by Fernandez Crespo.
In the Colorado camp, the progressive List 15 kept two seats on the Colegiado and dominated both the city and the hinterland within the Colorado electorate. They were joined by Cesar Batlle Pacheco of List 14 (which gained a seat in the Executive despite losing votes, because of the different rules applying to the first and second parties in terms of seat distribution). The power of the Quatorcista machine in Canelones (Montevideo satellite towns) looks even starker now that everywhere else was deserting them.
The last piece of the puzzle was the Union Democrata Reformista, a short-lived party likewise representing ex-Colorado Ruralista interests, although refusing to merge into the Blanco tribe (they would be regarded as holding the balance of power in the Chamber of Deputies, and used it to vote through the Herrerista budget). Due to the vagaries of the electoral system, 50% of the seats won by this rural party were in Montevideo - this seat was held by a member of the prominent Manini Rios family, who are now represented by General Guido Manini Rios, leader of the right-wing Cabildo Abierto party.
Things were afoot in the National Party. Luis Alberto de Herrera formed an alliance with Benito Nardone, impassioned radio orator and spokesman for the Liga Federal de Accion Ruralista. Ruralismo essentially consisted of rural elements of the Colorado Party who were whipped up into a populist frenzy by Nardone, and they never sat particularly comfortably with the Herreristas - but it worked for the moment. And it is important to remember that Ruralismo wasn't an uncomplicatedly right-wing movement: one of the Senators elected for the National Party, it is true, was Juan Maria Bordaberry, who went on to be President in the Colorado interest, launch a military coup, and try to pass a corporatist constitution; on the other hand, some members went over to the Union Popular in the 1960s, which was based around unquestioning support for the Cuban Revolution.
The transference of Colorado votes to the Blancos through the Ruralista movement was one of the two means by which the Nacionalistas hoped for victory. The other was the unification of the Blanco vote. As mentioned before, the National Party had been split since the 1930s, when the elements forming the Partido Nacional Independiente attempted to start a pro-democratic rebellion against Terra and Herrera. Since then, the PNI had lost its purpose and had declined in every election. Before 1954, Washington Beltran Mullin had led a faction back home, but the rest followed suit in 1956 to merge with the Beltran group and the urban ex-Herrerista elements behind Daniel Fernandez Crespo. The new faction was called the Union Blanca Democratica, and used the slogan "Either the UBD wins, or everything stays the same". Suddenly, the Blancos had a significant liberal wing ,based in the city of Montevideo and the up-and-coming towns along the Argentine border.
At the polls, the Blancos defeated the Colorados for the first time in 93 years. But would the Herrera-Nardone alliance get the benefit, or would the old man lose the majority seats on the Colegiado to the Ubedistas? On election night, it looked like an upset, but by morning the Herreristas pulled ahead by just 11,000 votes. Herrera himself died a year later, embittered by the fact that he'd still only managed to deliver three seats to his faction, with the rest being filled by Nardone's ex-Colorados - who, predictably, weren't as obedient as Herrera had hoped. Although both were united by the aspiration to dismantle the social security and state-interventionist bases of Batlle Berres' government, there were so many arguments and compromises that they couldn't deliver any real policy. The much vaunted removal of import controls was, in the event, paired with the enaction of a new system that did pretty much the same thing.
An important feature of the election was the fact that the Blancos even won the city of Montevideo - and if you look at the share of votes internal to the Blanco party, you will see that the most popular faction in the city was the Ubedistas. As the ballots cast for national elections were also counted for departmental elections, this meant that the liberals took control of the city administration, headed up by Fernandez Crespo.
In the Colorado camp, the progressive List 15 kept two seats on the Colegiado and dominated both the city and the hinterland within the Colorado electorate. They were joined by Cesar Batlle Pacheco of List 14 (which gained a seat in the Executive despite losing votes, because of the different rules applying to the first and second parties in terms of seat distribution). The power of the Quatorcista machine in Canelones (Montevideo satellite towns) looks even starker now that everywhere else was deserting them.
The last piece of the puzzle was the Union Democrata Reformista, a short-lived party likewise representing ex-Colorado Ruralista interests, although refusing to merge into the Blanco tribe (they would be regarded as holding the balance of power in the Chamber of Deputies, and used it to vote through the Herrerista budget). Due to the vagaries of the electoral system, 50% of the seats won by this rural party were in Montevideo - this seat was held by a member of the prominent Manini Rios family, who are now represented by General Guido Manini Rios, leader of the right-wing Cabildo Abierto party.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
What were the first thirteen lists, out of curiosity?
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
You will no doubt be as distressed as I was to learn that it didn't work that way. Factions would use a one or two digit number or a letter, and while these were usually consistent across all or most departments in a given election, they didn't get properly standardised until after WWII. I'm not sure where 14 came from, but I know that Batlle Berres chose 15 both because it was one more than 14 and because it was sort of similar to the 5 used by Original Flavour Batlle.
Someone could write a thesis about all the ways ballot numbers were used to associate groups with their ideological forebears - for instance, a splinter from List 99 called itself List 9988. And the banned Communist Party (List 1001) put up a clean front in 1984 under 10001.
The largest number I've seen is '2010808' for a sector within the Frente Amplio.
- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
If you were looking at Wikipedia, you might think that the 1962 election in Uruguay was a fairly simple matter of the Partido Nacional holding onto power with a reduced share of the vote, as you would naturally expect of a governing party.
And you would be right - here's the ma
Quite a lot had changed since 1958. Fairly quickly Herrera and Nardone had fallen out, and then Herrera had died, bringing to a close an entire era of Uruguayan history - forty years in which he had been the predominant figure in the Blanco Party. More immediately, it put the Herreristas in a minority position within the Colegiado, depending on two factions of Colorados and one of ex-Colorados not to make things too difficult for them. Any hopes around this were quickly dashed, as rebellious Ministers took advantage of the lack of Executive leadership to spout off on questions that had yet to be resolved (such as the matter of whether or not to recognise the revolutionary regime in Cuba, with Foreign Minister Ariel Collazo coming down very strongly for 'yes' and ultimately defecting from the Blancos to his own tiny left-wing party), and the Colegiado opposition delaying decisions on anything they liked. It was this era that entrenched the idea that the whole system was simply unworkable, although as we have seen, it only worked out this way on account of some very particular circumstances.
The minor parties had all made massive changes since 1958, which are covered up by their pretty average vote tallies. A Herrerista Industry Minister, Enrique Erro, had suddenly come out against the pro-market reforms demanded by the IMF and left the Party, ultimately joining up with the old Socialist Party to form the 'Union Popular', which proved not to be. Erro assumed the mantle of a radical Marxist to ride the crest of the Castro wave, which put him on a collision course with the grand old man of the Socialists, Emilio Frugoni, whose thinking was firmly of a European social-democratic flavour. The younger generation in the party was taking over, though, including Vivian Trias (posthumously revealed to be a Czech spy) and Raul Sendic, who was the party's first operative to make a concerted attempt to organise agricultural workers in the interior of the country. In his particular case, it was the cane-cutters of Artigas, who formed the initial nucleus of the Tupamaro guerrilla army when Sendic radicalised beyond constitutional activity. Here and now, the UP struggled to manage expectations of smashing the old party system, and only came out with two seats. The pre-election agreement had provided for an equal distribution of mandates between Erro's people and the Socialists, but as it happened, both of the men elected were of the former group, and refused to resign as they had promised.
Both of the other minor parties also changed their names: the Communist Party had renewed itself during the Hungarian crisis and now resolved to form a broad front (to coin a phrase). They failed to win over the Socialists, so all they managed to cobble together was a narrow front of the PCU, a few obvious front organisations, and Ariel Collazo's pro-Cuban gang. The Communists were a bit sniffy about Castro, but in deference to the craze of the moment, they called the new body 'FIDEL'. In the other corner, the Civic Union (Catholics who had rejected the secularism of Batlle's ideas) became subject to winds from Chile, and renamed themselves the Christian Democrats for good measure.
Change had also come to the Colorados. List 14, the relatively conservative liberals who had defined themselves by their pro-Colegiado stance, had collapsed and been replaced by a more openly right-wing 'Colorado and Batllista Union' (yet again, I have to emphasise that Batllismo doesn't actually mean anything). Meanwhile, the left-wing elements of Lists 14 and 15 split off to form a new faction under List 99, co-led by the Quincista Zelmar Michelini and the Quatorcista Renan Rodriguez. These won 6% of the total vote, but centre-left Colorado voters clearly still trusted List 15 as the internal contest was far from close. The UCB only won the departments which had been won by 14 in 1958.
As the Blancos won the election as a whole (by 2% of the vote) they supplied the majority of the Colegiado, while the other three seats were split between List 15 and the UCB. The six majority seats, however, went to the liberal Ubedistas within the National Party. In a very real sense, this was a change of government - from an alliance of conservatives and ruralists to a faction of liberals who had a certain amount of urban support and promised to implement the developmentalism now coming into vogue at the UN and the World Bank. This platform was essentially a return to the neo-Batllista policy of Batlle Berres, although with more rural subsidies envisaged, as a reflection of the Blanco voter base. The UBD beat the Herreristas not only in the city, the towns and the agricultural departments such as Artigas, but also in a number of departments characterised by livestock raising. This was a national vote of confidence in a faction which would implement all the economic ideas of Batllismo but without the silly distractions of a Colegiado system that clearly didn't work.
And you would be right - here's the ma
Quite a lot had changed since 1958. Fairly quickly Herrera and Nardone had fallen out, and then Herrera had died, bringing to a close an entire era of Uruguayan history - forty years in which he had been the predominant figure in the Blanco Party. More immediately, it put the Herreristas in a minority position within the Colegiado, depending on two factions of Colorados and one of ex-Colorados not to make things too difficult for them. Any hopes around this were quickly dashed, as rebellious Ministers took advantage of the lack of Executive leadership to spout off on questions that had yet to be resolved (such as the matter of whether or not to recognise the revolutionary regime in Cuba, with Foreign Minister Ariel Collazo coming down very strongly for 'yes' and ultimately defecting from the Blancos to his own tiny left-wing party), and the Colegiado opposition delaying decisions on anything they liked. It was this era that entrenched the idea that the whole system was simply unworkable, although as we have seen, it only worked out this way on account of some very particular circumstances.
The minor parties had all made massive changes since 1958, which are covered up by their pretty average vote tallies. A Herrerista Industry Minister, Enrique Erro, had suddenly come out against the pro-market reforms demanded by the IMF and left the Party, ultimately joining up with the old Socialist Party to form the 'Union Popular', which proved not to be. Erro assumed the mantle of a radical Marxist to ride the crest of the Castro wave, which put him on a collision course with the grand old man of the Socialists, Emilio Frugoni, whose thinking was firmly of a European social-democratic flavour. The younger generation in the party was taking over, though, including Vivian Trias (posthumously revealed to be a Czech spy) and Raul Sendic, who was the party's first operative to make a concerted attempt to organise agricultural workers in the interior of the country. In his particular case, it was the cane-cutters of Artigas, who formed the initial nucleus of the Tupamaro guerrilla army when Sendic radicalised beyond constitutional activity. Here and now, the UP struggled to manage expectations of smashing the old party system, and only came out with two seats. The pre-election agreement had provided for an equal distribution of mandates between Erro's people and the Socialists, but as it happened, both of the men elected were of the former group, and refused to resign as they had promised.
Both of the other minor parties also changed their names: the Communist Party had renewed itself during the Hungarian crisis and now resolved to form a broad front (to coin a phrase). They failed to win over the Socialists, so all they managed to cobble together was a narrow front of the PCU, a few obvious front organisations, and Ariel Collazo's pro-Cuban gang. The Communists were a bit sniffy about Castro, but in deference to the craze of the moment, they called the new body 'FIDEL'. In the other corner, the Civic Union (Catholics who had rejected the secularism of Batlle's ideas) became subject to winds from Chile, and renamed themselves the Christian Democrats for good measure.
Change had also come to the Colorados. List 14, the relatively conservative liberals who had defined themselves by their pro-Colegiado stance, had collapsed and been replaced by a more openly right-wing 'Colorado and Batllista Union' (yet again, I have to emphasise that Batllismo doesn't actually mean anything). Meanwhile, the left-wing elements of Lists 14 and 15 split off to form a new faction under List 99, co-led by the Quincista Zelmar Michelini and the Quatorcista Renan Rodriguez. These won 6% of the total vote, but centre-left Colorado voters clearly still trusted List 15 as the internal contest was far from close. The UCB only won the departments which had been won by 14 in 1958.
As the Blancos won the election as a whole (by 2% of the vote) they supplied the majority of the Colegiado, while the other three seats were split between List 15 and the UCB. The six majority seats, however, went to the liberal Ubedistas within the National Party. In a very real sense, this was a change of government - from an alliance of conservatives and ruralists to a faction of liberals who had a certain amount of urban support and promised to implement the developmentalism now coming into vogue at the UN and the World Bank. This platform was essentially a return to the neo-Batllista policy of Batlle Berres, although with more rural subsidies envisaged, as a reflection of the Blanco voter base. The UBD beat the Herreristas not only in the city, the towns and the agricultural departments such as Artigas, but also in a number of departments characterised by livestock raising. This was a national vote of confidence in a faction which would implement all the economic ideas of Batllismo but without the silly distractions of a Colegiado system that clearly didn't work.