While Keir Starmer and the current Labour Frontbench seem almost scared to even consider announcing new party policies, I wanted to raise a discussion on whether or not it is finally time that the Labour Party formally backs Proportional Representation as our new voting system.
It is no secret that the current electoral system is a flawed two party system and favours the Conservative Party too much, which will now be made worse by the upcoming electoral boundary changes that are essentially gerrymandering in all but name.
Labour have been out of power for over ten years now and the party faces a mammoth task to try and gain around 120 seats in the next election if they want to have a majority of just one. Landslides like this have happened in the past with the likes of Tony Blair, however the odds are very slim and I feel the stakes are too high to gamble on the small chances of Labour managing to pull this off.
Henceforth I believe it is time that Labour backs Proportional Representation and encourages the smaller parties of Westminster - namely the Liberal Democrats and the Greens - to lend them their votes in the next election and stand aside in key target sides in order to ensure Labour wins a majority in the next election so that they can roll through Proportional Representation.
This is in Labour's interest in order to finally get the murderous Conservatives out of Westminster, end austerity after eleven years of it and put through a more progressive and representative voting system.
The political union has also been greatly threatened in recent years following strong support for Scottish Independence and Northern Ireland being threatened with different treatment to the rest of the UK in recent Brexit talks. With much of the United Kingdom feeling more disunited, having a more balanced voting system in Proportional Representation could help to restore faith in our democracy and truly make all votes across the entire country count, with all voices of the UK - English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish - being included.
After years of political instability and uncertainty, coupled with the diminished odds of Labour securing a majority in the next General Election and thousands being indirectly murdered by the Conservatives through austerity and deliberate Lockdown in-competencies, I feel that it is in the national interest for the voting system to be changed to Proportional Representation and that Labour are the only ones who can deliver it.

Welcome to part two of my two-part series comparing American democracy with the rest of the world, based on the modern classic of comparative politics Patterns of Democracy (2nd edition) by Arend Lijphart (rhymes with pipe-heart), published in 2012. Yes, part one is very long (and very fascinating, I’m told), but you don’t need to read it unless you want to, because I’ll briefly summarize the parts you need to understand.
In his book, Lijphart classifies democracies into two broad categories, based on the question: who should the government be responsive to when the people are in disagreement? The answer provided by the majoritarian model of democracy is that government should be responsive to a majority of the people, or often in practice, a plurality of the people. In contrast, the consensus model of democracy accepts support from the majority as only a minimum requirement, and instead seeks to foster broad participation in government and broad agreement on policies.
There are two complementary approaches to building a consensus democracy (or building a majoritarian democracy, if the antithesis of each approach is used). The first, the joint-power approach, seeks to broadly share power within institutions, for example multiparty systems, proportional representation, and coalition cabinets. In contrast, the divided-power approach diffuses power across separate institutions, for example across central and regional governments (federalism), upper and lower houses of the legislature (bicameralism), independent central banks, and constitutional courts with the power of judicial review.
Note that these two approaches are complementary, not mutually exclusive. A democracy can embrace both joint-power and divided-power approaches, reject both, or embrace one while rejecting the other. As such, every democracy can be roughly divided into one of 4 quadrants. Here is a table displaying a prototypical democracy from each quadrant.

	joint-power	non-joint-power
non-divided-power	Israel	UK
divided-power	Switzerland	USA

The United States’ approach to democracy almost uniformly rejects joint-power, while embracing divided-power, so we sit somewhere between a majoritarian democracy like the UK and a consensus democracy like Switzerland. In the last post I discussed non-joint-power in the United States, and in this post I’ll be covering divided-power.
At the end, I’ll finish up with Lijphart’s conclusions on the effectiveness of consensus democracy vs. majoritarian democracy in general (spoiler: consensus democracy is better), and I’ll give my thoughts on the future of democratic institutional reform in the United States.

Divided-power in the United States

Let’s take another look at Lijphart’s conceptual map of democracy (democracies further to the left embrace the joint-power approach, while those toward the bottom embrace divided-power). As you can see from the conceptual map, out of the 36 sufficiently large and long-lived democracies in Lijphart’s sample, the United States ranks as a very close second to Germany in its strong approach to divided-power. Other notable divided-power democracies include Australia, Argentina, Canada, and Switzerland, with Switzerland being the joint-power black sheep of the group (Germany is also joint-power, but not to the same extent).
Lijphart describes five institutions that can be used to build a divided-power democracy, and the United States has fine examples of all of them.

A federal government instead of a unitary government
A bicameral legislature instead of a unicameral legislature.
A rigid constitution that can only be changed by an extraordinary majority, as opposed to a flexible constitution that can be changed by a simple majority.
A Supreme Court with the power to review legislation, rather than the legislature having the final say on the constitutionality of its own legislation.
A central bank that is independent from the executive, as opposed to a central bank that is controlled by the executive.

Let’s talk about each of these aspects of divided-power, and how they are implemented in the United States in comparison to the rest of the world.

An exceptionally strong federalism

At its most basic, federalism means that there is a guaranteed division of power between central and regional governments. But how do we guarantee that such a division of power remains stable? There are typically three institutions that serve that purpose. Notice that these are the same as 2, 3, and 4 in the list of divided-power institutions above.

A bicameral legislature with a strong second chamber dedicated to representing the regions of the federation.
A written constitution outlining the federal division of power. To keep the division of power stable this constitution needs to be rigid, meaning that it should be difficult to amend.
A supreme or constitutional court that can protect the constitution with the power of judicial review, meaning that the court has the final say on the constitutionality of executive and legislative actions.

What is federalism good for though? Federalism is particularly well suited to very large countries (in terms of both population and geographic size), and to very diverse countries (in terms of religions, ethnic groups, languages spoken, etc.).
The United States is the second most populous democracy in the world, with the first being India, which is also federal. The least populous federation is Switzerland, though it is still relatively large, being approximately in the middle of Lijphart’s 36 countries ranked by population.
In terms of diversity, the US is only semi-diverse according to Lijphart’s classification, and in any case, state lines are not and probably could not be drawn with regard to separate racial, ethnic, and religious groups, as they can be in some other countries.
In the case of India, a highly diverse society, British colonial authorities drew administrative lines without regard for linguistic differences, an unfortunate situation which was not corrected until the 1950’s, providing additional representation for linguistic minorities. Canada and Switzerland are other examples of federations with regional lines drawn (at least roughly) to contain cultural and linguistic minorities.
It’s not common, but for diverse societies it’s also possible to have federal territories that are not defined geographically, for example Belgium’s three cultural communities.
There is another possible purpose of federalism, and that is to allow the regions to experiment with different forms of government. In practice, however, regional governments tend to be extremely similar to the central government. If you’ve ever wondered why almost every US state has a bicameral legislature, even though state governments are not federal and some states are extremely small, then there’s your answer: there is no good reason, except that it mirrors the form of the central government. Presidentialism, too, has leaked into the states, with governors essentially acting as presidents for each state, despite the flaws of presidentialism I went over in the first post.
There has been some experimentation with electoral systems among the states, for example ranked choice voting for congressional and presidential elections in Alaska and Maine and for local elections in many other states. There has only been one notable exception when it comes to majority/plurality electoral systems, in the state of Illinois, which used cumulative voting (a semi-proportional method) for its lower house from 1870 to 1980.
Another notable case outside of the USA is Australia, with the state of Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory using the single-transferable-vote form of proportional representation for electing their regional assemblies, unlike the Australian House of Representatives and the regional lower houses of every other Australian state which all use ranked choice voting, a majority/plurality voting method. However, single-transferable-vote is far from unheard of in Australia, as it is also used to elect the national Senate.
Of course, in the United States there has been a great degree of experimentation with state laws, including of taxation, drug prohibition, environmental regulations, etc. This has allowed some states to learn from the experiments of others, and at times has allowed certain states to lag far behind the others, depending on your perspective.

Bicameralism taken too far?

Bicameralism, meaning the division of the legislature into two differently constituted chambers, is closely associated with federalism, as the purpose of the second chamber is typically to give additional representation to the regions of the federation. In Lijphart’s sample, all 9 of the federal countries are bicameral, while only about half of the 27 remaining non-federal countries are bicameral. The unicameral countries tend to have smaller populations. Worldwide, about ⅔ of countries are unicameral.
Typically, the first chamber tends to be the more important of the two, with the second chamber in a subordinate role, though there are notable exceptions: the United States, Argentina, Italy, Switzerland, and Uruguay all have chambers with approximately equal powers, or arguably in the case of the United States, greater powers. Second chambers that are directly elected tend to be more powerful, as direct election gives the second chamber additional democratic legitimacy and thus greater political influence, which is true for the five countries with powerful second chambers except for Switzerland, where most but not all members of the second chamber are directly elected.
Some less important differences are that the first chamber also tends to be the larger one (with the only exception being the British House of Lords). Terms of office tend to be longer in second chambers, and second chambers tend to have staggered elections.
One of the most important differences is that second chambers are often designed to overrepresent certain minorities, the most common example being the overrepresentation of regions with smaller populations, as seen in federalism. In this table you can see the degree to which different countries overrepresent the smaller regions.
The three countries with the greatest degree of overrepresentation of smaller regions are Argentina, the United States, and Switzerland. These are also countries where all regions have equal representation in the second chamber regardless of population size. The same is true of Australia, which ranks 5th on the chart. In the United States, a staggering 10% of the best represented voters control 39.7% of the seats in the Senate. Other countries like Germany and Canada give greater, but not equal, representation to smaller regions, while Belgium gives only slight overrepresentation to its French and German-speaking minorities.
In the United States the second chamber has some unique powers, such as ratifying treaties and confirming members of the federal judiciary, that the first chamber does not have. This, combined with the Supreme Court being one of the most powerful activist courts in the world, has produced an unusual situation where a minority controls an arguably more powerful second chamber. And the situation is only getting worse: by 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by only 30% of the Senate.
Having a bicameral legislature with special representation for smaller regions is an important guarantor of federalism, but as we can see from other countries like Canada, Australia, and Germany, the amount of overrepresentation seen in the United States is not necessary to maintain a strong form of federalism. Only time will tell whether the United States can maintain a stable and legitimate government in a state of continually strengthening minority rule.

The most rigid constitution in the world

A rigid federal constitution is another important guarantor of federalism, and the United States has the least flexible constitution in the world, with two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate as well as the approval of 3/4ths of the states being required to pass a constitutional amendment. There are several other countries where supermajorities are required, as you can see in this table, but not to the same degree as in the United States. It is one of the reasons the United States has the shortest written constitution in the world at 4,400 words, despite being one of the oldest constitutions.
Having a constitution is not itself enough to guarantee federalism, an institution is also needed to defend the constitution. Independent courts with the power of judicial review fulfill that purpose, and the United States has one of the most vigorous federal courts, as you can see in this table. The German Constitutional Court arguably ranks in second place. Judicial review is particularly strong in several other countries besides the USA and Germany: India, and recently, Canada, Costa Rica, and Argentina. When it comes to the United States, Lijphart notes that, “The activist American courts and the Supreme Court in particular have been accused of forming an ‘imperial judiciary.’”
A rigid constitution and the courts with independent review to back it up are an important anti-majoritarian device, while having a flexible constitution and no judicial review allow unrestricted majority rule. The UK is a prime example of majority rule, and is also one of only 3 democracies of Lijphart’s 36 with no written constitution, the other 2 being New Zealand and Israel. Switzerland is an odd outlier, being an otherwise completely consensual democracy with no judicial review, despite having a strong form of federalism. Perhaps this demonstrates that judicial review is helpful, but not essential, to maintaining federalism.

The paradox of the US Supreme Court

As explained in the last section, activist courts with the power of judicial review are an anti-majoritarian device, but the US Supreme Court is majoritarian in its makeup in almost every respect, in contrast to the German Constitutional Court and the Indian Supreme Court which follow a more consensual pattern.
One example of the Supreme Court’s majoritarianism is its small number of justices, only 9, compared with 16 in Germany and 29 in India. This places a hard limit on the amount of broad representation of different population groups on the Supreme Court. A second majoritarian aspect is that justices are chosen by majority in the Senate, unlike the two-thirds majorities required in both German chambers. The court itself makes decisions by majority, which increases the power of the court to make decisions, but decreases the consensual nature of the decision-making.
There are a couple more reasons the Supreme Court is majoritarian in its makeup: one is that vacancies are filled as they occur, allowing majorities to sequentially pick their favorites, whereas if justices were chosen as a group it would be more likely for minorities to be chosen. A second reason is that US justices have very long terms, which tends to be an obstacle to broad representation in an evolving society. In Germany and India, justices have mandatory retirement ages of 68 and 65, respectively, and in Germany they are chosen to 12 year non-renewable terms.
This paradox of a consensual institution with majoritarian rules is seen not only in the Supreme Court, but in many other institutions of American democracy. The presidency, for example, represents a division of power between the executive and legislative, an expression of divided-power, while the presidency itself, a single person elected by majority, is the antithesis of consensus decision making.

One of the most independent central banks… at least until the 90’s.

Central banks are crucial policy-making institutions, particularly when they are strong and independent. Having a strong and independent central bank is an important aspect of the divided-power approach to building a consensus democracy (recall that an independent central bank is one of the five divided-power institutions enumerated above).
The most important duty of central banks is making monetary policy – the regulation of interest rates and the supply of money, which in turn has effects on price stability, inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and the business cycle.
According to the Cukierman Index of Independence, central banks are at their most independent when they have exclusive jurisdiction over monetary policy and their only or primary task is to maintain price stability. Central banks may be less strong when they have multiple, possibly conflicting goals, such as both price stability and full employment. Other important aspects of bank independence are the independence of the bank’s governor from the executive, and when the bank is in full control of the terms of lending to the central government.
Until around 1994, central bank independence was strongly correlated with federalism, another important divided-power institution, and the five central banks with the greatest independence were all federal systems: Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Austria, and Canada. As you can see in this table (continued here), these five banks reigned supreme as the most independent central banks in the world for 50 years, from 1945 to 1994.
After 1994, many European central banks became remarkably more independent as a condition for participating in the euro, per the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, for example the Spanish, French, and Italian central banks which all increased by approximately .5 on the Cukierman Index in 1994, easily surpassing the United States. The establishment of the European Central Bank in 1998 and the adoption of the euro transformed the central bank for those countries into an element of the international system. After that, the correlation between federalism and central bank independence shrank considerably, as the central bank was no longer a domestic institution, following the same divided-power approach as the rest of the domestic government.
The United States, in contrast, has remained completely static from 1945 until the present day, with a Cukierman Index of .56, putting it in 17th place among Lijphart’s 36 major democracies as of 2010. It’s beyond the scope of Lijphart’s book, and my own expertise, to say whether this has had any effect on economic growth or the ability of the Federal Reserve to maintain price stability, compared to EU countries.

Categorizing democracies using joint-power and divided-power

I want to talk about how majoritarian and consensus democracies perform in practice in the next section, but first, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention what Liphart describes as “one of the most important general findings of this book”, which is that the five variables representing divided-power tend to be clustered with one another, and also the five variables representing joint-power tend to be clustered with one another.
For example, democracies which are federalist also tend to have bicameralism, constitutional rigidity, judicial review, and central bank independence (that last one only prior to 1994), all examples of divided-power institutions. Likewise, democracies with a lower percentage of minimal winning one-party cabinets also tend to have more political parties, less executive dominance, more proportional election systems, and greater interest group pluralism, all important divided-power institutions. Take a look at this factor analysis for a more precise picture. The numbers may be thought of as the correlation coefficient between the variable and factor 1 and 2, which represent joint-power and divided-power, respectively.
Meanwhile, between the two approaches, joint-power and divided-power, there is very little correlation, for example federalism is not well correlated with the number of political parties. The United States is a perfect example of mixing the two approaches, as it closely adheres to the divided-power approach, while rejecting joint-power. These correlations are of immense interest to comparative political scientists, because it represents a useful way to categorize democracies along two dimensions.
How is it that democracies end up embracing either of the two approaches? Taking another look at the conceptual map, one of the most striking patterns is that countries on the right side, the non-joint-power side, tend to be former British colonies, with some exceptions such as Argentina, Costa Rica, Greece, Spain, South Korea, and France. As Lijphart notes: “France is an especially interesting exceptional case: in view of French president de Gaulle’s deeply felt and frequently expressed antagonism towards les anglo-saxons, it is ironic that the republic he created is the most Anglo-Saxon of any of the continental European democracies.” The left side of the map, in contrast, includes most of the continental European democracies, and all five of the Nordic countries, which have a common Scandinavian cultural heritage of consensus decision making and arbitration.
There are some exceptions on the left side as well (the joint-power side): Ireland, India, Israel, and Mauritius all were formerly under British colonial rule, the difference is that these are highly plural societies, where majoritarianism and its associated non-joint-power approach just do not work well in practice, often leading to sectarian violence, as I explained in the first post.
What about the divided-power approach, signified by the bottom of the conceptual map? As explained earlier in this post, the size of the country (both in terms of population and geographic size), as well as diversity, are significantly correlated with the divided-power approach. In other words, the countries embracing divided-power tend to be larger and more diverse.

Wrapping up: majoritarian vs. consensus democracy

So how do majoritarian and consensus democracies stack up in practice? The conventional wisdom is that majoritarian democracies are less representative of the population, but are more decisive, and therefore better at governing effectively. Lijphart argues that faster decisions are not always wiser decisions, in fact the opposite is often true, and policies that are supported by broad consensus are more likely to be successfully implemented. He also observes that non-joint-power democracies like the United States have the disadvantage of frequently flip-flopping between contrasting policies whenever government control changes hands from one party to the other.
Lijphart runs a regression on 17 indicators of government performance, such as government effectiveness, rule of law, and control of corruption, and finds that the joint-power approach is favorably correlated to a statistically significant degree with 9 out of 17 of them, while non-joint-power is only correlated with economic growth, but not to a statistically significant degree. In general, all of the correlations with economic variables are weak, such as with unemployment, budget balance, and economic freedom. Divided-power, meanwhile, has such weak correlations with all of the government performance variables that no firm conclusions can be drawn.
Lijphart concludes that while joint-power democracies are not necessarily proven better than majoritarian democracies at all aspects of governing, they are almost certainly not worse, as the conventional wisdom goes, and along many aspects they are significantly better.
One major exception is that when it comes to the control of violence, joint-power is very strongly correlated with a lower degree of violence, an intuitive result considering the discussion in my first post of the incompatibility between majoritarianism and diverse societies, as exemplified by Northern Ireland.

Consensus democracy: the “kinder, gentler” democracy

Consensus democracies may not always be superior decision makers, but Lijphart is able to draw other conclusions on the tendencies of joint-power democracies, but not so much on divided-power. He finds that joint-power democracies are more likely to be welfare states, have a better record of protecting the environment, put fewer people in prison and are less likely to have the death penalty, and are more generous with economic assistance to developing nations.
When it comes to putting people in prison, the United States is such an extreme outlier among other democracies that Lijphart found it necessary to remove it from the analysis, but still, the effect of joint-power on incarceration rates was strongly negative and statistically significant. The USA has 743 prisoners per hundred thousand people, twice as many as the next democracy in Lijphart’s analysis, the Bahamas. Even extending the analysis to non-democracies, the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with either Russia or China in second place, depending on the survey.
When it comes to government effectiveness and “kinder, gentler” policies in general, the problem with all of these correlations, as Lijphart points out, is that culture may be a confounding variable, and “consensus democracy may not be able to take root and thrive unless it is supported by a consensual political culture.” But he offers hope that the cause-and-effect may go both ways: consensual democratic institutions may have the effect of making an adversarial political culture more consensual. Switzerland and Austria have not always had a consensual culture, their histories being marked by violent strife, while today Belgium, India, and Israel have adversarial cultures and consensual institutions. One hopes that over time those country’s institutions will have a positive effect on their contentious political cultures.

Where does the United States go from here?

The bad news is that the United States is probably not going to change one bit along the joint-power and divided-power dimensions. Some few countries have made a move towards federalism over time, and even more rarely a handful of countries such as New Zealand have moved towards proportional representation and a joint-power approach, but in general all democracies have been extremely stable along the joint-power and divided-power dimensions from 1945 to 2010, especially the United States, with its exceptionally rigid constitution. The bottom line: if you’re an American looking for a relatively “kinder, gentler” democracy with more proportional political representation, your best bet is to pack your bags.
However, if you are ever in the extraordinary position of framing a new constitution or amending one, my advice is to learn from our experience and the experience of other democracies around the world: avoid presidentialism like the plague, embrace the parliamentary system, and adopt a proportional electoral system. This advice is doubly important for highly diverse societies, where majoritarianism (particularly of the non-joint-power variety) frequently leads to violence.

WHEN confronted with a problem involving the use of the reasoning faculties, individuals of strong intellect keep their poise, and seek to reach a solution by obtaining facts bearing upon the question. Those of immature mentality, on the other hand, when similarly confronted, are overwhelmed. While the former may be qualified to solve the riddle of their own destiny, the latter must be led like a flock of sheep and taught in simple language. They depend almost entirely upon the ministrations of the shepherd. The Apostle Paul said that these little ones must be fed with milk, but that meat is the food of strong men. Thoughtlessness is almost synonymous with childishness, while thoughtfulness is symbolic of maturity.
There are, however, but few mature minds in the world; and thus it was that the philosophic-religious doctrines of the pagans were divided to meet the needs of these two fundamental groups of human intellect--one philosophic, the other incapable of appreciating the deeper mysteries of life. To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations. In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. While the ignorant multitudes brought their offerings to the altars of Priapus and Pan (deities representing the procreative energies), the wise recognized in these marble statues only symbolic concretions of great abstract truths.
In all cities of the ancient world were temples for public worship and offering. In every community also were philosophers and mystics, deeply versed in Nature's lore. These individuals were usually banded together, forming seclusive philosophic and religious schools. The more important of these groups were known as the Mysteries. Many of the great minds of antiquity were initiated into these secret fraternities by strange and mysterious rites, some of which were extremely cruel. Alexander Wilder defines the Mysteries as "Sacred dramas performed at stated periods. The most celebrated were those of Isis, Sabazius, Cybele, and Eleusis." After being admitted, the initiates were instructed in the secret wisdom which had been preserved for ages. Plato, an initiate of one of these sacred orders, was severely criticized because in his writings he revealed to the public many of the secret philosophic principles of the Mysteries.
Every pagan nation had (and has) not only its state religion, but another into which the philosophic elect alone have gained entrance. Many of these ancient cults vanished from the earth without revealing their secrets, but a few have survived the test of ages and their mysterious symbols are still preserved. Much of the ritualism of Freemasonry is based on the trials to which candidates were subjected by the ancient hierophants before the keys of wisdom were entrusted to them.
Few realize the extent to which the ancient secret schools influenced contemporary intellects and, through those minds, posterity. Robert Macoy, 33°, in his General History of Freemasonry, pays a magnificent tribute to the part played by the ancient Mysteries in the rearing of the edifice of human culture. He says, in part: "It appears that all the perfection of civilization, and all the advancement made in philosophy, science, and art among the ancients are due to those institutions which, under the veil of mystery, sought to illustrate the sublimest truths of religion, morality, and virtue, and impress them on the hearts of their disciples.* * * Their chief object was to teach the doctrine of one God, the resurrection of man to eternal life, the dignity of the human soul, and to lead the people to see the shadow of the deity, in the beauty, magnificence, and splendor of the universe."
With the decline of virtue, which has preceded the destruction of every nation of history, the Mysteries became perverted. Sorcery took the place of the divine magic. Indescribable practices (such as the Bacchanalia) were introduced, and perversion ruled supreme; for no institution can be any better than the members of which it is composed. In despair, the few who were true sought to preserve the secret doctrines from oblivion. In some cases they succeeded, but more often the arcanum was lost and only the empty shell of the Mysteries remained.
Thomas Taylor has written, "Man is naturally a religious animal." From the earliest dawning of his consciousness, man has worshiped and revered things as symbolic of the invisible, omnipresent, indescribable Thing, concerning which he could discover practically nothing. The pagan Mysteries opposed the Christians during the early centuries of their church, declaring that the new faith (Christianity) did not demand virtue and integrity as requisites for salvation. Celsus expressed himself on the subject in the following caustic terms:

"That I do not, however, accuse the Christians more bitterly than truth compels, may be conjectured from hence, that the cryers who call men to other mysteries proclaim as follows: 'Let him approach whose hands are pure, and whose words are wise.' And again, others proclaim: 'Let him approach who is pure from all wickedness, whose soul is not conscious of any evil, and who leads a just and upright life.' And these things are proclaimed by those who promise a purification from error. Let us now hear who those are that are called to the Christian mysteries: Whoever is a sinner, whoever is unwise, whoever is a fool, and whoever, in short, is miserable, him the kingdom of God will receive. Do you not, therefore, call a sinner, an unjust man, a thief, a housebreaker, a wizard, one who is sacrilegious, and a robber of sepulchres? What other persons would the cryer nominate, who should call robbers together?"

It was not the true faith of the early Christian mystics that Celsus attacked, but the false forms that were creeping in even during his day. The ideals of early Christianity were based upon the high moral standards of the pagan Mysteries, and the first Christians who met under the city of Rome used as their places of worship the subterranean temples of Mithras, from whose cult has been borrowed much of the sacerdotalism of the modem church.
The ancient philosophers believed that no man could live intelligently who did not have a fundamental knowledge of Nature and her laws. Before man can obey, he must understand, and the Mysteries were devoted to instructing man concerning the operation of divine law in the terrestrial sphere. Few of the early cults actually worshiped anthropomorphic deities, although their symbolism might lead one to believe they did. They were moralistic rather than religionistic; philosophic rather than theologic. They taught man to use his faculties more intelligently, to be patient in the face of adversity, to be courageous when confronted by danger, to be true in the midst of temptation, and, most of all, to view a worthy life as the most acceptable sacrifice to God, and his body as an altar sacred to the Deity.
Sun worship played an important part in nearly all the early pagan Mysteries. This indicates the probability of their Atlantean origin, for the people of Atlantis were sun worshipers. The Solar Deity was usually personified as a beautiful youth, with long golden hair to symbolize the rays of the sun. This golden Sun God was slain by wicked ruffians, who personified the evil principle of the universe. By means of certain rituals and ceremonies, symbolic of purification and regeneration, this wonderful God of Good was brought back to life and became the Savior of His people. The secret processes whereby He was resurrected symbolized those cultures by means of which man is able to overcome his lower nature, master his appetites, and give expression to the higher side of himself. The Mysteries were organized for the purpose of assisting the struggling human creature to reawaken the spiritual powers which, surrounded by the flaming.

A FEMALE HIEROPHANT OF THE MYSTERIES
From Montfaucon's Antiquities.
This illustration shows Cybele, here called the Syrian Goddess, in the robes of a hierophant. Montfaucon describes the figure as follows: "Upon her head is an episcopal mitre, adorned on the lower part with towers and pinnacles; over the gate of the city is a crescent, and beneath the circuit of the walls a crown of rays. The Goddess wears a sort of surplice, exactly like the surplice of a priest or bishop; and upon the surplice a tunic, which falls down to the legs; and over all an episcopal cope, with the twelve signs of the Zodiac wrought on the borders. The figure hath a lion on each side, and holds in its left hand a Tympanum, a Sistrum, a Distaff, a Caduceus, and another instrument. In her right hand she holds with her middle finger a thunderbolt, and upon the same am animals, insects, and, as far as we may guess, flowers, fruit, a bow, a quiver, a torch, and a scythe." The whereabouts of the statue is unknown, the copy reproduced by Montfaucon being from drawings by Pirro Ligorio.
ring of lust and degeneracy, lay asleep within his soul. In other words, man was offered a way by which he could regain his lost estate. (See Wagner's Siegfried.)
In the ancient world, nearly all the secret societies were philosophic and religious. During the mediæval centuries, they were chiefly religious and political, although a few philosophic schools remained. In modern times, secret societies, in the Occidental countries, are largely political or fraternal, although in a few of them, as in Masonry, the ancient religious and philosophic principles still survive.
Space prohibits a detailed discussion of the secret schools. There were literally scores of these ancient cults, with branches in all parts of the Eastern and Western worlds. Some, such as those of Pythagoras and the Hermetists, show a decided Oriental influence, while the Rosicrucians, according to their own proclamations, gained much of their wisdom from Arabian mystics. Although the Mystery schools are usually associated with civilization, there is evidence that the most uncivilized peoples of prehistoric times had a knowledge of them. Natives of distant islands, many in the lowest forms of savagery, have mystic rituals and secret practices which, although primitive, are of a decided Masonic tinge.

THE DRUIDIC MYSTERIES OF BRITAIN AND GAUL

"The original and primitive inhabitants of Britain, at some remote period, revived and reformed their national institutes. Their priest, or instructor, had hitherto been simply named Gwydd, but it was considered to have become necessary to divide this office between the national, or superior, priest and another whose influence [would] be more limited. From henceforth the former became Der-Wydd (Druid), or superior instructor, and [the latter] Go-Wydd, or O-Vydd (Ovate), subordinate instructor; and both went by the general name of Beirdd (Bards), or teachers of wisdom. As the system matured and augmented, the Bardic Order consisted of three classes, the Druids, Beirdd Braint, or privileged Bards, and Ovates." (See Samuel Meyrick and Charles Smith, The Costume of The Original Inhabitants of The British Islands.)

The origin of the word Druid is under dispute. Max Müller believes that, like the Irish word Drui, it means "the men of the oak trees." He further draws attention to the fact that the forest gods and tree deities of the Greeks were called dryades. Some believe the word to be of Teutonic origin; others ascribe it to the Welsh. A few trace it to the Gaelic druidh, which means "a wise man" or "a sorcerer." In Sanskrit the word dru means "timber."
At the time of the Roman conquest, the Druids were thoroughly ensconced in Britain and Gaul. Their power over the people was unquestioned, and there were instances in which armies, about to attack each other, sheathed their swords when ordered to do so by the white-robed Druids. No undertaking of great importance was scatted without the assistance of these patriarchs, who stood as mediators between the gods and men. The Druidic Order is deservedly credited with having had a deep understanding of Nature and her laws. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that geography, physical science, natural theology, and astrology were their favorite studies. The Druids had a fundamental knowledge of medicine, especially the use of herbs and simples. Crude surgical instruments also have been found in England and Ireland. An odd treatise on early British medicine states that every practitioner was expected to have a garden or back yard for the growing of certain herbs necessary to his profession. Eliphas Levi, the celebrated transcendentalist, makes the following significant statement:

"The Druids were priests and physicians, curing by magnetism and charging amylets with their fluidic influence. Their universal remedies were mistletoe and serpents' eggs, because these substances attract the astral light in a special manner. The solemnity with which mistletoe was cut down drew upon this plant the popular confidence and rendered it powerfully magnetic. * * * The progress of magnetism will some day reveal to us the absorbing properties of mistletoe. We shall then understand the secret of those spongy growths which drew the unused virtues of plants and become surcharged with tinctures and savors. Mushrooms, truffles, gall on trees, and the different kinds of mistletoe will be employed with understanding by a medical science, which will be new because it is old * * * but one must not move quicker than science, which recedes that it may advance the further. " (See The History of Magic.)

Not only was the mistletoe sacred as symbolic of the universal medicine, or panacea, but also because of the fact that it grew upon the oak tree. Through the symbol of the oak, the Druids worshiped the Supreme Deity; therefore, anything growing upon that tree was sacred to Him. At certain seasons, according to the positions of the sun, moon, and stars, the Arch-Druid climbed the oak tree and cut the mistletoe with a golden sickle consecrated for that service. The parasitic growth was caught in white cloths provided for the purpose, lest it touch the earth and be polluted by terrestrial vibrations. Usually a sacrifice of a white bull was made under the tree.
The Druids were initiates of a secret school that existed in their midst. This school, which closely resembled the Bacchic and Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece or the Egyptian rites of Isis and Osiris, is justly designated the Druidic Mysteries. There has been much speculation concerning the secret wisdom that the Druids claimed to possess. Their secret teachings were never written, but were communicated orally to specially prepared candidates. Robert Brown, 32°, is of the opinion that the British priests secured their information from Tyrian and Phœnician navigators who, thousands of years before the Christian Era, established colonies in Britain and Gaul while searching for tin. Thomas Maurice, in his Indian Antiquities, discourses at length on Phœnician, Carthaginian, and Greek expeditions to the British Isles for the purpose of procuring tin. Others are of the opinion that the Mysteries as celebrated by the Druids were of Oriental origin, possibly Buddhistic.
The proximity of the British Isles to the lost Atlantis may account for the sun worship which plays an important part in the rituals of Druidism. According to Artemidorus, Ceres and Persephone were worshiped on an island close to Britain with rites and ceremonies similar to those of Samothrace. There is no doubt that the Druidic Pantheon includes a large number of Greek and Roman deities. This greatly amazed Cæsar during his conquest of Britain and Gaul, and caused him to affirm that these tribes adored Mercury, Apollo, Mars, and Jupiter, in a manner similar to that of the Latin countries. It is almost certain that the Druidic Mysteries were not indigenous to Britain or Gaul, but migrated from one of the more ancient civilizations.
The school of the Druids was divided into three distinct parts, and the secret teachings embodied therein are practically the same as the mysteries concealed under the allegories of Blue Lodge Masonry. The lowest of the three divisions was that of Ovate (Ovydd). This was an honorary degree, requiring no special purification or preparation. The Ovates dressed in green, the Druidic color of learning, and were expected to know something about medicine, astronomy, poetry if possible, and sometimes music. An Ovate was an individual admitted to the Druidic Order because of his general excellence and superior knowledge concerning the problems of life.
The second division was that of Bard (Beirdd). Its members were robed in sky-blue, to represent harmony and truth, and to them was assigned the labor of memorizing, at least in part, the twenty thousand verses of Druidic sacred poetry. They were often pictured with the primitive British or Irish harp--an instrument strung with human hair, and having as many strings as there were ribs on one side of the human body. These Bards were often chosen as teachers of candidates seeking entrance into the Druidic Mysteries. Neophytes wore striped robes of blue, green, and white, these being the three sacred colors of the Druidic Order.
The third division was that of Druid (Derwyddon). Its particular labor was to minister to the religious needs of the people. To reach this dignity, the candidate must first become a Bard Braint. The Druids always dressed in white--symbolic of their purity, and the color used by them to symbolize the sun.
In order to reach the exalted position of Arch-Druid, or spiritual head of the organization, it was necessary for a priest to pass through the six successive degrees of the Druidic Order. (The members of the different degrees were differentiated by the colors of their sashes, for all of them wore robes of white.) Some writers are of the opinion that the title of Arch-Druid was hereditary, descending from father to son, but it is more probable that the honor was conferred by ballot election. Its recipient was chosen for his virtues and
THE ARCH-DRUID IN HIS CEREMONIAL ROBES.
From Wellcome's Ancient Cymric Medicine.
The most striking adornment of the Arch-Druid was the iodhan moran, or breastplate of judgment, which possessed the mysterious Power of strangling any who made an untrue statement while wearing it. Godfrey Higgins states that this breastplate was put on the necks of witnesses to test the veracity of their evidence. The Druidic tiara, or anguinum, its front embossed with a number of points to represent the sun's rays, indicated that the priest was a personification of the rising sun. On the front of his belt the Arch-Druid wore the liath meisicith--a magic brooch, or buckle in the center of which was a large white stone. To this was attributed the power of drawing the fire of the gods down from heaven at the priest's command This specially cut stone was a burning glass, by which the sun's rays were concentrated to light the altar fires. The Druids also had other symbolic implements, such as the peculiarly shaped golden sickle with which they cut the mistletoe from the oak, and the cornan, or scepter, in the form of a crescent, symbolic of the sixth day of the increasing moon and also of the Ark of Noah. An early initiate of the Druidic Mysteries related that admission to their midnight ceremony was gained by means of a glass boat, called Cwrwg Gwydrin. This boat symbolized the moon, which, floating upon the waters of eternity, preserved the seeds of living creatures within its boatlike crescent.
integrity from the most learned members of the higher Druidic degrees.
According to James Gardner, there were usually two Arch-Druids in Britain, one residing on the Isle of Anglesea and the other on the Isle of Man. Presumably there were others in Gaul. These dignitaries generally carried golden scepters and were crowned with wreaths of oak leaves, symbolic of their authority. The younger members of the Druidic Order were clean-shaven and modestly dressed, but the more aged had long gray beards and wore magnificent golden ornaments. The educational system of the Druids in Britain was superior to that of their colleagues on the Continent, and consequently many of the Gallic youths were sent to the Druidic colleges in Britain for their philosophical instruction and training.
Eliphas Levi states that the Druids lived in strict abstinence, studied the natural sciences, preserved the deepest secrecy, and admitted new members only after long probationary periods. Many of the priests of the order lived in buildings not unlike the monasteries of the modern world. They were associated in groups like ascetics of the Far East. Although celibacy was not demanded of them, few married. Many of the Druids retired from the world and lived as recluses in caves, in rough-stone houses, or in little shacks built in the depths of a forest. Here they prayed and medicated, emerging only to perform their religious duties.
James Freeman Clarke, in his Ten Great Religions, describes the beliefs of the Druids as follows: "The Druids believed in three worlds and in transmigration from one to the other: In a world above this, in which happiness predominated; a world below, of misery; and this present state. This transmigration was to punish and reward and also to purify the soul. In the present world, said they, Good and Evil are so exactly balanced that man has the utmost freedom and is able to choose or reject either. The Welsh Triads tell us there are three objects of metempsychosis: to collect into the soul the properties of all being, to acquire a knowledge of all things, and to get power to conquer evil. There are also, they say, three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the nature of each thing, of its cause, and its influence. There are three things which continually grow less: darkness, falsehood, and death. There are three which constantly increase: light, life, and truth."
Like nearly all schools of the Mysteries, the teachings of the Druids were divided into two distinct sections. The simpler, a moral code, was taught to all the people, while the deeper, esoteric doctrine was given only to initiated priests. To be admitted to the order, a candidate was required to be of good family and of high moral character. No important secrets were intrusted to him until he had been tempted in many ways and his strength of character severely tried. The Druids taught the people of Britain and Gaul concerning the immortality of the soul. They believed in transmigration and apparently in reincarnation. They borrowed in one life, promising to pay back in the next. They believed in a purgatorial type of hell where they would be purged of their sins, afterward passing on to the happiness of unity with the gods. The Druids taught that all men would be saved, but that some must return to earth many times to learn the lessons of human life and to overcome the inherent evil of their own natures.
Before a candidate was intrusted with the secret doctrines of the Druids, he was bound with a vow of secrecy. These doctrines were imparted only in the depths of forests and in the darkness of caves. In these places, far from the haunts of men, the neophyte was instructed concerning the creation of the universe, the personalities of the gods, the laws of Nature, the secrets of occult medicine, the mysteries of the celestial bodies, and the rudiments of magic and sorcery. The Druids had a great number of feast days. The new and full moon and the sixth day of the moon were sacred periods. It is believed that initiations took place only at the two solstices and the two equinoxes. At dawn of the 25th day of December, the birth of the Sun God was celebrated.
The secret teachings of the Druids are said by some to be tinctured with Pythagorean philosophy. The Druids had a Madonna, or Virgin Mother, with a Child in her arms, who was sacred to their Mysteries; and their Sun God was resurrected at the time of the year corresponding to that at which modern Christians celebrate Easter.
Both the cross and the serpent were sacred to the Druids, who made the former by cutting off all the branches of an oak tree and fastening one of them to the main trunk in the form of the letter T. This oaken cross became symbolic of their superior Deity. They also worshiped the sun, moon, and stars. The moon received their special veneration. Caesar stated that Mercury was one of the chief deities of the Gauls. The Druids are believed to have worshiped Mercury under the similitude of a stone cube. They also had great veneration for the Nature spirits (fairies, gnomes, and undines), little creatures of the forests and rivers to whom many offerings were made. Describing the temples of the Druids, Charles Heckethorn, in The Secret Societies of All Ages & Countries, says:

"Their temples wherein the sacred fire was preserved were generally situate on eminences and in dense groves of oak, and assumed various forms--circular, because a circle was the emblem of the universe; oval, in allusion to the mundane egg, from which issued, according to the traditions of many nations, the universe, or, according to others, our first parents; serpentine, because a serpent was the symbol of Hu, the Druidic Osiris; cruciform, because a cross is an emblem of regeneration; or winged, to represent the motion of the Divine Spirit. * * * Their chief deities were reducible to two--a male and a female, the great father and mother--Hu and Ceridwen, distinguished by the same characteristics as belong to Osiris and Isis, Bacchus and Ceres, or any other supreme god and goddess representing the two principles of all Being."

Godfrey Higgins states that Hu, the Mighty, regarded as the first settler of Britain, came from a place which the Welsh Triads call the Summer Country, the present site of Constantinople. Albert Pike says that the Lost Word of Masonry is concealed in the name of the Druid god Hu. The meager information extant concerning the secret initiations of the Druids indicates a decided similarity between their Mystery school and the schools of Greece and Egypt. Hu, the Sun God, was murdered and, after a number of strange ordeals and mystic rituals, was restored to life.
There were three degrees of the Druidic Mysteries, but few successfully passed them all. The candidate was buried in a coffin, as symbolic of the death of the Sun God. The supreme test, however, was being sent out to sea in an open boat. While undergoing this ordeal, many lost their lives. Taliesin, an ancient scholar, who passed through the Mysteries, describes the initiation of the open boat in Faber's Pagan Idolatry. The few who passed this third degree were said to have been "born again," and were instructed in the secret and hidden truths which the Druid priests had preserved from antiquity. From these initiates were chosen many of the dignitaries of the British religious and political world. (For further details, see Faber's Pagan Idolatry, Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma, and Godfrey Higgins' Celtic Druids.)

THE RITES OF MITHRAS

When the Persian Mysteries immigrated into Southern Europe, they were quickly assimilated by the Latin mind. The cult grew rapidly, especially among the Roman soldiery, and during the Roman wars of conquest the teachings were carried by the legionaries to nearly all parts of Europe. So powerful did the cult of Mithras become that at least one Roman Emperor was initiated into the order, which met in caverns under the city of Rome. Concerning the spread of this Mystery school through different parts of Europe, C. W. King, in his Gnostics and Their Remains, says:

"Mithraic bas-reliefs cut on the faces of rocks or on stone tablets still abound in the countries formerly the western provinces of the Roman Empire; many exist in Germany, still more in France, and in this island (Britain) they have often been discovered on the line of the Picts' Wall and the noted one at Bath."

Alexander Wilder, in his Philosophy and Ethics of the Zoroasters, states that Mithras is the Zend title for the sun, and he is supposed to dwell within that shining orb. Mithras has a male and a female aspect, though not himself androgynous. As Mithras, he is the ford of the sun, powerful and radiant, and most magnificent of the Yazatas (Izads, or Genii, of the sun). As Mithra, this deity represents the feminine principle; the mundane universe is recognized as her symbol. She represents Nature as receptive and terrestrial, and as fruitful only when bathed in the glory of the solar orb. The Mithraic cult is a simplification of the more elaborate teachings of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the Persian fire magician.

THE GROUND PLAN OF STONEHENGE.
From Maurice's Indian Antiquities.
The Druid temples of places of religious worship were not patterned after those of other nations. Most of their ceremonies were performed at night, either in thick groves of oak trees or around open-air altars built of great uncut stones. How these masses of rock were moved ahs not been satisfactorily explained. The most famous of their altars, a great stone ring of rocks, is Stonehenge, in Southwestern England. This structure, laid out on an astronomical basis, still stands, a wonder of antiquity.
According to the Persians, there coexisted in eternity two principles. The first of these, Ahura-Mazda, or Ormuzd, was the Spirit of Good. From Ormuzd came forth a number of hierarchies of good and beautiful spirits (angels and archangels). The second of these eternally existing principles was called Ahriman. He was also a pure and beautiful spirit, but he later rebelled against Ormuzd, being jealous of his power. This did not occur, however, until after Ormuzd had created light, for previously Ahriman had not been conscious of the existence of Ormuzd. Because of his jealousy and rebellion, Ahriman became the Spirit of Evil. From himself he individualized a host of destructive creatures to injure Ormuzd.
When Ormuzd created the earth, Ahriman entered into its grosser elements. Whenever Ormuzd did a good deed, Ahriman placed the principle of evil within it. At last when Ormuzd created the human race, Ahriman became incarnate in the lower nature of man so that in each personality the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil struggle for control. For 3,000 years Ormuzd ruled the celestial worlds with light and goodness. Then he created man. For another 3,000 years he ruled man with wisdom, and integrity. Then the power of Ahriman began, and the struggle for the soul of man continues through the next period of 3,000 years. During the fourth period of 3,000 years, the power of Ahriman will be destroyed. Good will return to the world again, evil and death will be vanquished, and at last the Spirit of Evil will bow humbly before the throne of Ormuzd. While Ormuzd and Ahriman are struggling for control of the human soul and for supremacy in Nature, Mithras, God of Intelligence, stands as mediator between the two. Many authors have noted the similarity between mercury and Mithras. As the chemical mercury acts as a solvent (according to alchemists), so Mithras seeks to harmonize the two celestial opposites.
There are many points of resemblance between Christianity and the cult of Mithras. One of the reasons for this probably is that the Persian mystics invaded Italy during the first century after Christ and the early history of both cults was closely interwoven. The Encyclopædia Britannica makes the following statement concerning the Mithraic and Christian Mysteries:

"The fraternal and democratic spirit of the first communities, and their humble origin; the identification of the object of adoration with light and the sun; the legends of the shepherds with their gifts and adoration, the flood, and the ark; the representation in art of the fiery chariot, the drawing of water from the rock; the use of bell and candle, holy water and the communion; the sanctification of Sunday and of the 25th of December; the insistence on moral conduct, the emphasis placed on abstinence and self-control; the doctrine of heaven and hell, of primitive revelation, of the mediation of the Logos emanating from the divine, the atoning sacrifice, the constant warfare between good and evil and the final triumph of the former, the immortality of the soul, the last judgment, the resurrection of the flesh and the fiery destruction of the universe--[these] are some of the resemblances which, whether real or only apparent, enabled Mithraism to prolong its resistance to Christianity,"

The rites of Mithras were performed in caves. Porphyry, in his Cave of the Nymphs, states that Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was the first to consecrate a cave to the worship of God, because a cavern was symbolic of the earth, or the lower world of darkness. John P. Lundy, in his Monumental Christianity, describes the cave of Mithras as follows:

"But this cave was adorned with the signs of the zodiac, Cancer and Capricorn. The summer and winter solstices were chiefly conspicuous, as the gates of souls descending into this life, or passing out of it in their ascent to the Gods; Cancer being the gate of descent, and Capricorn of ascent. These are the two avenues of the immortals passing up and down from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth."

The so-called chair of St. Peter, in Rome, was believed to have been used in one of the pagan Mysteries, possibly that of Mithras, in whose subterranean grottoes the votaries of the Christian Mysteries met in the early days of their faith. In Anacalypsis, Godfrey Higgins writes that in 1662, while cleaning this sacred chair of Bar-Jonas, the Twelve Labors of Hercules were discovered upon it, and that later the French discovered upon the same chair the Mohammedan confession of faith, written in Arabic.
Initiation into the rites of Mithras, like initiation into many other ancient schools of philosophy, apparently consisted of three important degrees. Preparation for these degrees consisted of self-purification, the building up of the intellectual powers, and the control of the animal nature. In the first degree the candidate was given a crown upon the point of a sword and instructed in the mysteries of Mithras' hidden power. Probably he was taught that the golden crown represented his own spiritual nature, which must be objectified and unfolded before he could truly glorify Mithras; for Mithras was his own soul, standing as mediator between Ormuzd, his spirit, and Ahriman, his animal nature. In the second degree he was given the armor of intelligence and purity and sent into the darkness of subterranean pits to fight the beasts of lust, passion, and degeneracy. In the third degree he was given a cape, upon which were drawn or woven the signs of the zodiac and other astronomical symbols. After his initiations were over, he was hailed as one who had risen from the dead, was instructed in the secret teachings of the Persian mystics, and became a full-fledged member of the order. Candidates who successfully passed the Mithraic initiations were called Lions and were marked upon their foreheads with the Egyptian cross. Mithras himself is often pictured with the head of a lion and two pairs of wings. Throughout the entire ritual were repeated references to the birth of Mithras as the Sun God, his sacrifice for man, his death that men might have eternal life, and lastly, his resurrection and the saving of all humanity by his intercession before the throne of Ormuzd. (See Heckethorn.)
While the cult of Mithras did not reach the philosophic heights attained by Zarathustra, its effect upon the civilization of the Western world was far-reaching, for at one time nearly all Europe was converted to its doctrines. Rome, in her intercourse with other nations, inoculated them with her religious principles; and many later institutions have exhibited Mithraic culture. The reference to the "Lion" and the "Grip of the Lion's Paw" in the Master Mason's degree have a strong Mithraic tinge and may easily have originated from this cult. A ladder of seven rungs appears in the Mithraic initiation. Faber is of the opinion that this ladder was originally a pyramid of seven steps. It is possible that the Masonic ladder with seven rungs had its origin in this Mithraic symbol. Women were never permitted to enter the Mithraic Order, but children of the male sex were initiates long before they reached maturity. The refusal to permit women to join the Masonic Order may be based on the esoteric reason given in the secret instructions of the Mithraics. This cult is another excellent example of those secret societies whose legends are largely symbolic representations of the sun and his journey through the houses of the heavens. Mithras, rising from a stone, is merely the sun rising over the horizon, or, as the ancients supposed, out of the horizon, at the vernal equinox.
John O'Neill disputes the theory that Mithras was intended as a solar deity. In The Night of the Gods he writes: "The Avestan Mithra, the yazata of light, has '10,000 eyes, high, with full knowledge (perethuvaedayana), strong, sleepless and ever awake (jaghaurvaunghem).'The supreme god Ahura Mazda also has one Eye, or else it is said that 'with his eyes, the sun, moon and stars, he sees everything.' The theory that Mithra was originally a title of the supreme heavens-god--putting the sun out of court--is the only one that answers all requirements. It will be evident that here we have origins in abundance for the Freemason's Eye and 'its nunquam dormio.'" The reader must nor confuse the Persian Mithra with the Vedic Mitra. According to Alexander Wilder, "The Mithraic rites superseded the Mysteries of Bacchus, and became the foundation of the Gnostic system, which for many centuries prevailed in Asia, Egypt, and even the remote West."

MITHRAS SLAYING THE BULL.

From Lundy's Monumental Christianity.

The most famous sculpturings and reliefs of this prototokos show Mithras kneeling upon the recumbent form of a great bull, into whose throat he is driving a sword. The slaying of the bull signifies that the rays of the sun, symbolized by the sword, release at the vernal equinox the vital essences of the earth--the blood of the bull--which, pouring from the wound made by the Sun God, fertilize the seeds of living things. Dogs were held sacred to the cult of Mithras, being symbolic of sincerity and trustworthiness. The Mithraics used the serpent a an emblem of Ahriman, the Spirit of Evil, and water rats were held sacred to him. The bull is esoterically the Constellation of Taurus; the serpent, its opposite in the zodiac, Scorpio; the sun, Mithras, entering into the side of the bull, slays the celestial creature and nourishes the universe with its blood.

THE BIRTH OF MITHRAS.

From Montfaucon's Antiquities

Mithras was born out of a rock, which, breaking open, permitted him to emerge. This occurred in the darkness of a subterranean chamber. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem confirms the theory that Jesus was born in a grotto, or cave. According to Dupuis, Mithras was put to death by crucifixion and rose again on the third day.

A batch of information regarding Drift Nations in the Time of the Red, to be used as hook or locations in your games if you feel so inclined. The second part is already being worked on.

10 Drift Nations Peppered Across The Globe In 2045

The Centino Flotilla (Nomad Family) Area of operations: Northern and Southern Pacific Numbers and leadership: 40,000+ members, ~8,000 vessels (of various size), led by Allegria Chung
The Centino Flotilla is one of the few good things finding their roots in the Fourth Corporate War, some would say. After only months of bitter fighting between Arasaka and Militech, everyone had but forgotten the two corporations, OTEC and CINO, responsible for kicking-off the conflict. Equally, no one was surprised to hear that the two companies ended up bleeding each other to death during the Sea War, mostly in the Pacific.
As with many others, the destruction of Arasaka's headquarters in Night City by a nuclear detonation came as a wake up call. But the situation was already past the return point for both corporations and, as the commercial entities teetered over the edge, their maritime forces came to an uneasy stand-off in the Pacific. It took all the diplomatic skills of one of CINO's captain, Grant Chung, to reach over the divide and bring the two parties together. Bound by years of mutual bloodletting and tragedies, they decided to merge forces and survive together against all odds.
After pooling their last resources together, the two parties spent the next year building their flotilla and roaming the Pacific Ocean. Determined to never be a tool of corporate greed ever again, they brought their skills to help rebuilding many of the Pacific Island nations, as well as other Drift Nations such as AquaDelphi or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Now led by Grant's daughter, Allegria, the flotilla is a force to be reckoned with, its vessels flying the teal wave emblem being seen all over the Pacific. Specialized in reconstruction of seashore communities and shepherding Ghost Fleets toward places where they could be recycled, they are one of the new binding links of the Pacific ocean nations.
AquaDelphi (Fallen Coporate Dream) Location: South-West of Hawaii Estimated population and leadership: 30,000+, organized in guilds with a Central Council of 5
AquaDelphi's project came out during the corporate golden years, sprouting off OTEC's board of director's collective hubris. Not unlike Night City, AquaDelphi was designed to serve as the new standard by which future cities would be built. And no one ever blamed the OTEC heads for lack of ambition.
Mobilizing all the resources from their conglomerate, the maritime corporation set their view on a territory close to Hawaii. Buying the ownership from the fallen US federal government was a piece of cake at the time and construction began quickly. Centered around the company headquarters, the city was to hold the largest library humankind ever put together, a massive seaport complete with dry docks, and utopian housing for the corporate families among other pharaoh-like projects. The whole place was powered by harnessing geothermal energy and run by the in-house AI, Pythia.
Unfortunately, as Fate is wont to, AquaDelphi was still under construction when the Fourth Corporate War came knocking. The green spaces of the housing district and the ancient white stones of the library were the first to go when the bombings started, then it was the turn of OTEC headquarters. As long as the monstrous steel towers stood upright, most of the population tried to keep the dream alive despite Pythia's more and more frequent erratic outbursts; but it was only delaying the inevitable exodus toward Hawaii.
Nowadays, AquaDelphi is slowly being rebuilt, thanks mostly to her massive sea port becoming one of the major places for ship breaking. Refugees gradually return to a place the Kress administration would not touch with a ten foot pole and dream of renaissance, but many are wary of the corporate nightmares lying in wait, among which Pythia...
New R'lyeh (Reckoners Cthuluny) Location: South Pacific Estimated Population and Leadership: 6,000+ under the leadership of the Dunwich Congregation
A decade ago, nobody had heard of the Dunwich Congregation. Only specialist were aware of this reckoner cult, led by austere people in outmoded black suits. Anyone would have told you that their idea of a cosmic entity with far too many tentacles and consonants in its name was never going to appeal to the masses. But the community endured, centered around their faith in Lovecraft's writings.
The news then dropped one day, six years ago: the congregation had purchased a rotten weather outpost in the empty corner of Southern Pacific. Reports of a growing shanty town came back, brought by passing ships and still no one expected them to survive once again. But they did, sending more missionaries across the world, armed with the Cthulu Mythologies; and their numbers grow steadily if slowly. Their declared goal in establishing New R'lyeh is to find old R'lyeh, a sunken city supposedly holding either a sleeping Cthulu or a way to connect with them. No one will speak openly about life in New R'lyeh but rumors of cultural segregation, weird rites and human sacrifices are legion. Whatever the truth, they are there to stay and never relent.
Their deep sea explorations and general presence are not to the taste of the European Space Agency (ESA), whose Deepdown outposts have been established there for decades in order to retrieve low-orbit material brought back to Earth in the area. The assaults led by ESA's underwater elite troops, the Nemos, stay fruitless as the cultists proved to hard to remove from the area. With number swelling steadily every year, New R'lyeh keeps growing weirder and is not going anywhere.
Cape Horn Wreckers (Scavvers Union) Location: Cape Horn area Numbers and Leadership: Up to 500 members. Leadership unknown.
Many places still struggle with the aftermath of the last Corporate War. Take Cape Horn, for example. The southernmost end of South America was for centuries the standard against which sailors measured their abilities and, more recently, a strategical passage to control for commercial and military purposes. Needless to say the place saw bitter fighting during the Sea War.
Which is why everybody started clapping when Argentinians and Chileans publicly decided to put their differences aside and find ways to clear up Cape Horn for maritime shipping once peace returned. Weary of corporate task forces, they decided to hire a multitude of small operators with designated areas to work on, in exchange for advantageous prices buying back salvaged material, as well as a share of any reclaimed equipment. Little did they know this would help turn their myriad of contractors in the now infamous Cape Horn Wreckers.
After only a couple of years, the small contractor crews started to work as a cooperative, granting them better negotiating power when selling back salvaged materials; while limited oversight allowed them to keep for themselves smaller ships and various pieces of armament at they saw fit. When the shipwrecks became too scarce and maritime shipping sputtered anew, the Wreckers naturally started using scramblers to lure passing vessels aground and pillage them.
By the time Chile and Argentina decided to intervene, it was too late. The Wreckers could stand on their own against national armies and navies. The international community obligingly looked aside for years but recent incursions in the Drake Passage forced foreign powers to start face the problem more directly. As a start, a series of bounties were set for anyone able to help identify and capture the Wreckers' leaders ...
North Atlantic Trade Hub (High Seas Trade Post) Location: Midway between the Azores and Ireland Population and leadership: 127,520 under joint Corporate-European Council oversight.
It took decades in the making for this trade platform to come out of the waves two years ago in the middle of Northern Atlantic. Decades of negotiations between Kaerms, the European maritime shipping titan, and European Council representatives during which American and Asian competitors took the lead. The North Atlantic Trade Hub is supposed to the European answer to this situation. Fearing Europe loss of speed in the maritime shipping and shipbuilding areas, N.A.T.H (as most familiarly call it) was conceived with the dual purpose in mind.
NATH is in reality an atoll of starfish-shaped platforms working in close relationship. On one side you will find the state of the art Noatun shipyards, pumping out small or medium trade vessels at an increasing rhythm and with a focus set on affordability and durability, the "sea mules" of the reborn sea trade. Paired with this, you will find a constellation of piers and decentralized trading centers, hosting a wide variety of small corporation and independent traders.
To keep their edge sharp, the European Union agreed to let the platform become a de facto city state with a policy of "high wages - low taxes" for five years granted to any worker, engineer or researcher choosing to migrate there; under the condition that they move to Europe and naturalize at the end of their contract.
As for now, the NATH managed its primary objective of becoming Europe's gateway for Northern Atlantic trade. The sea mules sell decently enough but are yet to threaten the Asian shipyards, the real mastodons of the industry. In the meantime, slack standards benefited many of the grey economy operators: if you need European gear, for cheap, then head on over before time's up and the forces of regulations start to crack down!
The Nansen Nation (Stateless Society) Area of Operations: Mediterranean Sea Estimated numbers and Leadership: ~200,000 citizens; 60,000+ vessels; led by the council of 500
Saying the Mediterranean sea has a millennia-long history of serving as the interface for human commerce and migrations comes to no surprise for anyone. If commerce was said to tighten the bonds across the sea, migrations became an increasingly divisive subject for trans-Mediterranean summits during the 20^th century. Many ventured off the Mediterranean shore and tried to immigrate to Europe, often risking their lives in the process; while "Fortress Europe" focused inwardly on its own success and only offered token help to the migrants if they returned home.
The situation became a nightmare during the Middle-East meltdown of the late 90's. Hundreds of thousands of humans ended up stranded at sea, roaming the Mediterranean as ghosts, stuck between war-torn countries on one side and a paradise out of reach on the other. And Europe kept letting only a few in, openly picking and competing over whichever individuals they thought could benefit their countries the most.
By the time African states managed to open their door more widely and benefit from the influx of population, many refugees then refused to return to land. Living for many years at seas, they had learned to make a living off of the waters and to navigate the inland sea like no other nation; turning them into peerless transporters and smugglers with a central role in the Mediterranean.
After electing a council of 500 hundred captains, the multi-cultural community chose their name from the Nansen passport delivered to stateless individuals a century before that. Their counters can be found in any major port of the inland sea, under the purple Phoenician letter N, offering their services to anyone looking to move someone or something discreetly over the sea. Europeans pay double, it goes without saying.
Safaniya-Zakum (Oil Extraction Complex) Location: Persian Gulf Estimated Population and Leadership: 80,000+ inhabitants and workers led by local royals
"A technological prowess" is what the Safaniya-Zakum complex is often described as. Both proponents and opponents of the project do tip their hat to its execution. Using a blend of time-proven and cutting edge technologies, a network of oil rigs, fishing piers, gas ducts and housing blocks is now stretching out above the waves of the Persian Gulf, all the way from Kuwait to the Hormuz Strait.
Proponents of the Saf-Za complex call it "the phoenix chant of a reborn Middle-East". Many put forward the accent set on sustainability and multi-cultural society, overcoming the ancient divisions. Not only the complex's only operator, a state-run company, manages to extract oil and gas from the sea bed again, but the ancient traditions of fishing and pearl culture are brought back. Considering the desolated lands of Iran and United Arab Emirates on both coasts, it is hard not to perceive the Saf-Za network as a cry of defiance against defeatism and a sense of doom.
Opponents call it "the swan song of a dying industry", preferring to point at the predominance of CHOOH² and deploring the refusal to let go of antiquated technologies. Others underline the complex's authoritarian regime and omnipresent police. Any visitors hoping to set a foot in will have to provide a full genetic profile and suffice to say that anyone even remotely affiliated to PetroChem or SovOil will never have a chance to peek inside.
With the extremely high level of difficulty regarding the obtaining of any information from inside the complex, experts are left wondering if the Safaniya-Zakum structure will hold long enough between intern fracture lines and outside pressure; long enough to recreate the major center of trade between India and the Eastern coast of Africa the region once was.
Deep Level Recovery HQ (Artificial Corporate Island) Location: Bay of Bengal Estimated Population and Leadership: ~7,000 employees led by D.L.R CEO and Face Kanchan Bonse
When the first Deepdown bubbles experimentation appeared decades ago, nobody expected any one else than military actors or some of the largest mega-corporations of the time to take the industry's lead toward expansion into civilian markets. But during the late 2020's, such actors had their compass set on rebuilding their power and returning to pre-war balance. Which suited someone who had been swimming under the radar for a bit.
Kanchan Bonse grew up following her corporate executive mother along a wide variety of postings. She emerged from her childhood with two passions: wreck diving and corporate power play. In the following years, she worked along the Indian coastlines on maritime salvage projects or post-disaster rescue operations. During those formative years, she lost nothing of her passions but gained a thick address book filled with talented if disgruntled, under-payed workers and engineers. Deep Level Recovery had all the ingredients to come to existence.
After building the core of her future corporation using her personal fortune; Bonse focused on developing proprietary designs for underwater habitats and workshops, allowing her technicians too work longer underwater. Spending many years experimenting and enhancing their techniques during humanitarian crises in South-East Asia, DLR took no side during the Fourth Corporate War but only gained power in the aftermath by landing many lucrative contracts all over the world.
Decades later, their glass bubble headquarters sit on waters granted by the Indian government as a thankful gesture. Visitors can admire there both the company's humanitarian projects and Deepdown habitat designs destined to the richest fringe of the planet. It is said that Kanchan Bonse only dives for pleasure these days but seems to be keeping tabs on elite divers across the world.
Far Yue City (Modular Floating City State) Location: South China Sea Estimated population and Leadership: 750,000 to 1,000,000 with a Central Representative Council
The fate of Hong Kong is one of the many tragedies of our times. After years of inner fighting and outside influence, the vibrant city was trying to recover when the Fourth Corporate War hit the world. A tragedy that climaxed with a biochemical attack for Hong Kong, closing that chapter on an abrupt end and leaving the rest of the wold with nothing but the Ghost World for memories. But that was without taking in account those who had to run prior to the events...
Since 2027 it has been noted that many members of the diaspora converged towards the Spratly islands to reunite with refugees from the Fragrant Harbour. Many former cargo vessels were bought as well as the maximum amount of TEU's they could get their hands on. In a matter of years a medium size fleet assembled with its inhabitants carrying their whole lives and families aboard, amidst a tangle of TEU's whose assembly became reminiscent of Kowloon's Walled City.
Early on, the ensemble stuck together giving life to a vivid culture of community and ingenuity. Workshops found new ways of extracting the most out of their minimal space and reduced resources. Personal networks connected and shared outside connections. The place became known as Far Yue City. By that time it was already able to travel as a group, approaching the coast of neighbouring countries, engaging in trade and knowledge sharing in exchange for protection.
Nowadays Far Yue city is able to criss-cross the whole South China sea as a whole, but more often fragmented; bringing city-sized dense assemblages of shops, schools, apartments, workshops and other gambling halls to various neighboring countries despite some local grumblings. For there is no better place in the region to obtain rare information, enjoy Dim Sum, place a bet, get a light-tattoo or learn hacking techniques than one of those floating districts sporting the white orchid emblem.
Ivory Sails (Free Navy) Area of operation: Worldwide Estimated numbers and Leadership: ~20,000 troops, ~2,000 boats, led by Ian Sharpgrove
The history of the Ivory sails is a tale of danger, daring actions and glory. Or it is a litany of war crimes, greed and ruthlessness. It usually depends on which side of the conflict you were. The Ivory Sails came to the world during the harsh days of the Sea War. As Militech and Arasaka were trading blows on land, sea, in the air, and in the cyberspace; their allies and subsidiaries destroyed each other; creating opportunities for professional outfits. Some of them at sea.
In came Ian Sharpgrove, raising out of obscurity at the tail end of the conflict and bringing with him a highly-specialized crew tailored for special operations. There was no raid the Sharpgrove Unit would fear to undertake, no desperate rearguard action they would not fight, no mission dangerous enough for them. Eventually managing the dubious feat of selling their services to most of the actors on both sides of the conflict, Sharpgrove and his troops made a name for themselves and soon enough everyone was ready to pay them so they would not fight for the other side.
This "sense of realpolitik winds", as he puts it himself, was what permitted now admiral Sharpgrove and his faithful troops to emerge rich and powerful out of the conflict. But their reputation was forever stained with infamy. In a transparent laundering effort, the group was re-named Ivory Sails and oriented themselves toward "peacekeeping" and "police actions", with a sprinkling of highly-publicized humanitarian stunts to seduce the medias.
Nowadays the Ivory Sails can be found anywhere across the globe training coastguard navies, securing areas for corporate clients, escorting refugee convoys and other such actions. Each time extracting a true ransom in exchange for their presence. But Sharpgrove knows the new golden age of privateers is reaching its end and takes every opportunity to line his pockets, mercilessly resorting to piracy if needed, before someone finally "retires" him once and for all.

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Heya guys, I hope all of you are doing well because I certainly am! The series is coming to an end (finally) and I'll tie it up with the very very start by the next or definitely by the sixth part anyway :)
I'll probably write more stories set in this universe when I have way more free time like next summer so stay clued in for that if you like what I'm doing with this!
Feel free to give me any advice/tips/criticism as it's all welcome by me. Edits: added links, replaced photo-absorbent with reflective plates and edited some minor details

Sol System
Hyperspace near Sol
Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword Research Vessel
13:09 December 2, 2338 AD
Isabella was honestly mediocre in every sense of the word, with the most exotic thing about her being quite possibly her Afro-Brazilian ancestry, and she knew it. Isabella Santos had been born into a life of opulence on Earth, all money inherited from her ancestors who had been at the very top of the rung when automation really kicked in (pretty much old money at this point) and her family had been earning untold billions since then.
Automation has drastically altered certain aspects of the economic system while leaving others relatively unchanged in comparison to the economic models employed by humanity during their information age - for example, private property and corporations certainly still existed along the supply chain from extraction to manufacturing to retail (though with very few humans involved).
However, since automation and universal basic income meant incomes were no longer tied with survival and livelihoods, the UNE General Assembly passed a motion in 2157 that all software produced was to be open source and similarly all music, film & art was to be royalty-free. Copyright law ceased to apply to citizens, and only applied to corporations - where corporate activity was defined as earning income outside of their UBI in exchange for a good or service. This heralded the beginning of the human golden age of culture and arts, for removing the monetary incentive meant that content creators were driven only by their passion for the craft and their ambitions.
Isabella had gone into the field of biological research mostly as a rebellious act against her parents and the aristocracy she had been born into which had only tied her down; she was tired of having to follow the paths already trodden on by those before her and only then to join them as forgotten predecessors. Her parents were slow to come to accept the idea of their dear Isabella being a researcher but came around in the only way rich, well-connected parents knew how to, by leveraging their extensive connections to secure a lucrative UNE research grant for Isabella and her research team.
It had been a long day, having to get the ship retrofitted and then clearance to enter hyperspace but everyone on board was in high spirits after getting a few billion credits from the UNE Research Council to play around with. They were heading to a nearby solar system with a suspected habitable planet around it (of near-Earth gravity too!), and in the process were to become some of humanity’s very first xenobiologists. The research vessel had first lived life as an automated mining shuttle, before being purchased from a declining mining company by the UNE. Basic research stations, sensors and a pilot seat [1] were all fitted to the ship in preparation of being used for research purposes. The group of young xenobiologists had christened the vessel Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword after being granted it for the duration of their expedition.
However, while Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword was stationary in the endless void that was hyperspace, Isabella noticed the ship’s EM sensors detecting undecipherable static across the spectrum. She wasn’t a physicist by any means but she knew that there were no EM sources out here in hyperspace, except the very odd photon. The ship AI had found no faults with the sensors and noted that the waves were very blue-shifted. This meant only one thing: something artificial was headed straight in their direction. The research team decided not to tempt fate and sped off towards their destination while using the quantum-entangled comms system to report the anomaly to the head research office of the UNE.
For this exact reason, a hotline existed between the civilian and military branches of the UNE, especially with the existence of hyperspace, rapid response times to unknown threats meant the difference between life and death, victory and defeat, and the very survival of the human race. The anomaly was confirmed by drones sent out into hyperspace, and the reports were sent further up the hierarchy until it was astutely deemed a possible military threat by the UNE Director of Research and sent to a military commander via this very hotline. No actual physical calls were made, rather something similar to a forwarding system was used, with important alerts showing up in brain implants rather than a device meaning that they were impossible to miss.
Within 4 minutes of Isabella’s discovery, the UNE military consisting of five battle groups stationed (mostly) inside the boundaries of the Asteroid Belt was put on high alert. All military fleet exercises were postponed and fleets were to be stationed on strategic points across the system, hoping to defend against the unknowable. It would take at least 10 minutes for all detached squadrons in navy exercises to merge back with the main fleet.
Sol System
Aerosynchronous Orbit (ASO) of Mars
Battle Group Ceres
UNE Justice, Ireland -class Supercarrier
13:15 December 2, 2338 AD
Admiral Francis received the warning just two minutes prior and set the gears and cogs of the ship in motion almost immediately. Sailors were moving out to their positions along the length of the vessel [2], mechanic bots were on standby, and the various captains of the ships within Battle Group Ceres had received very clear orders from Francis: only fire once they fire the first shot, and then give them hell! Although their intentions were probably hostile, he was not about to sabotage proper first contact by having any of his subordinates get trigger happy and fire upon some innocent alien diplomats.
Officers scrambled to the different portions of the ship, ready to command the sailors and assign fighter pilots to their fighters. The result was unadulterated chaos once the enemy battle group appeared through hyperspace, by a stroke of luck, a couple of dozen kilometres away - well within firing distance. Francis could only momentarily shudder at the thought of enemy ships tunnelling their way into normalspace right on top of his ships, resulting in instant mutual annihilation as the universe realised its grave mistake.
For a fleeting moment, both fleets had stared each other off in a Mexican stand-off of sorts, orbiting at thousands of kilometres an hour around a somewhat densely populated celestial body. That was until a mass driver silently travelled the void between them with deadly accuracy directly towards the UNE Justice supercarrier. The ship AI had barely any time to even detect the 5kg of solid iron travelling at over 2% of the speed of light before putting the deflectors on full power. The deflectors worked by imparting momentum from the ship to the projectile so that it would change course, continuing its journey through space for endless aeons, or at least hit a less critical part of the ship. The AI also had to work out the positions of the other ships in the fleet to avoid inadvertently putting them in the firing line.
For the crew, the groaning of the superstructure of the ship must have been near-deafening as the entire ship’s mass was being slightly displaced to deflect a simple iron projectile that might as well have been a nuclear warhead. Newton’s 3rd law in (very dramatic) action; the ship accelerated (nearly) imperceptibly to the side and the projectile was only able to score a glancing hit on the hull.
The opening salvo that should have claimed the lives of hundreds on board instead claimed the several large external hull plates and was reduced to molten slag (a significant proportion of the projectile was atomised) travelling at nearly 1% c that was most likely going to ruin someone’s day at some point in the near or distant future [3].
Every crew member held at least a formal education that included physics, and everyone had it drilled in them that they were to either hit the target squarely or not fire at all. The AI had the firing under control but needed a human there to authorise firing the projectile (unless in exceptional circumstances and up to the discretion of the admiral or highest in command in the case of the admiral’s death or absence).
Battle Group Ceres wasted no time in returning the favour, with several of the fleet’s destroyers unleashing their own mass driver rounds at various targets and the outpouring of fighters from the flight decks of Justice being oddly reminiscent of a swarm of angry bees whizzing out of their beehives.
At that moment, two interstellar civilisations came to blows in the space just above the 35 million souls that called the red planet home. Within 5 minutes of the first shot, almost all Martians had seen videos of tiny non-moving specks of light in the sky or heard reports of a massive battle in aerosynchronous orbit of the planet [4]. The malevolent alien civilisation was unknown (assumed to be the ones who found the probe), but Battle Group Ceres was already lauded as Mars’ spear and shield that defended Mars from oblivion. Of course, nobody had a clue as to the nature of the invader’s intentions but nobody was going to assume anything but the very worst.
All 1000 of these exoatmospheric fighters had been fitted with limited hyperspace capabilities being able to travel only a few AUs in hyperspace at a time, but each had an impressive arsenal of four small antimatter tipped missiles (only 1 kg in each) and two directed energy weapons (aka lasers) effective against normal hull armour (but not against special reflective hull plates; however these could only withstand several seconds of focused laser fire before deforming and breaking down). Of course, there’s no maximum speed they could go at but typically they’d be travelling a few kilometres per second in combat.
Francis however, never liked to use up all his assets at once, that was a vulnerability that could be exploited by an accomplished and experienced enemy. He gave the order for half of the fighters to take off and move ahead striking the enemy from the top and bottom, acting as an invaluable distraction for the main fleet as well as important point defence against slower-moving projectiles. There were two other carriers each with 200 fighters at his disposal anyway, those would be his reserves.
Meanwhile, the first casualty of the battle was a Luna-class destroyer on the edge of battle group Ceres, its deflectors simply overwhelmed by mass driver rounds from the enemy. Pacific went down with all hands, all 860 of the crew perished when a lucky mass driver slammed into the core of the vessel and on its way there, directly hit a bunch of antimatter-tipped missiles - for a split second, the battlefield was illuminated by a new star in the night sky. At least their ashes would continue to orbit the red planet they died to protect.
As the populace of Mars prepared to head into underground bunkers (and in many cases, the derelict caves of abandoned automated mines) where the first colonies had set up to avoid the dangers of solar radiation, tens of thousands of personal and individual acts of heroism and bravery were taking place in the skies above Mars.
Private Kaylee Harrison
UNE Justice, Ireland -class Supercarrier
Flight Deck 08
13:18 December 2, 2338 AD
Officer Reynolds marched into the flight deck as stoically as ever. Even in the middle of a surprise attack by an enemy of unknown capabilities, his wrinkles betrayed only his experience and nothing of emotion.
This was all from behind his plasma-resistant face visor of course as we all were required to wear a modern and efficient type of space suit and wetsuit hybrid out here. I’m not clued into the exact physics or the exact way it works but the outer part is as expected from a spacesuit with all the electronics and the hard kevlar-derivative stuff while the inner part is essentially an advanced wetsuit that covers everything below the neck. The wetsuit keeps the wearer from overheating with millions of microscopic pipe-like structures in the fabric carrying cool water, when the water heats up it is cooled by a refrigerator unit and recycled back into the wetsuit. A cutting-edge catalytic converter unit within the helmet converts exhaled carbon dioxide into oxygen, and that is supplemented with an external oxygen tank.
Our radios almost crackled in anticipation. 'Stand at attention!'
We certainly didn’t need to be told twice, a mixture of dark excitement and adrenaline had the entire squad already at attention before he could begin saying attention.
'Today, we have made hostile first contact as you are all aware and considering your line of duty, you’ll either be returning home alive or you’ll end up orbiting this majestic planet underneath us for all of eternity.'
Honestly, after launching antimatter missiles to rip apart space-time, I came to realise that no matter how much at peace you are with your own mortality, nothing can ever prepare you for when you’re put in a potentially fatal scenario. Death cowers to no man, after all, my acceptance was but an illusion - but orbiting Mars for millennia to come might not be such a terrible fate, in a morbidly beautiful way.
'When I call your name out, you will head into your fighter and take off in an orderly and safe manner, am I clear?'
'Yes, officer!' The response echoed and reverberated within the deck, a vague hint to the expansive nature of the flight deck.
A minute or two passed until my name was called, 'Private Harrison!'
I could have sworn I saw a flash of regret in Officer Reynold’s eyes as I marched over to my fighter and deftly opened the cockpit before lurching into the seat of the fighter. Reynold was calling out the names of the few privates left before the sound of the MPD [5] thrusters drowned out his radio transmission.
Taking off a moving ship was simply a matter of gentle thrust until you’re floating far enough away - there was a minute risk of the deflectors squashing you with immense momentum transfer if you sped away while too close to the ship. The most vulnerable part of the whole operation, but also by far the easiest.
Technician Leopoldo Risi
UNE Excalibur, Luna -class Destroyer
Near the ship’s central AI computing core
13:30 December 2, 2338 AD
The heat was sweltering even in these specially made technician suits, adapted from the military-grade spacesuits, but bulkier with greater cooling capacity as well more sensors and electronics integrated with the ship AI. It was of no surprise, considering only 5 metres of plating and hull separated my team and several hundred degrees celsius heat banks and radiators that kept the weaponry firing nearly constantly without melting and allowed the AI to make several sextillion operations per second (mainly calculating trajectories of both enemy and friendly projectiles as well as taking into account the gravity well of Mars).
A quarter-hour of incredibly intense fighting had put all of the systems onboard to the test and of course, now we had to have a hull breach right beside the heat banks. The robots couldn’t fit down here so we were here to patch up the damage and report it to be fixed properly if we ever got out of this sticky situation alive. Luckily it was a very small breach and didn’t require the activation of energy-intensive atmospheric shields.
Through the hole, I could see exotic coloured plasma a few hundred metres in cold hard space with innumerable pieces of debris slowly spreading out as a cloud. I needed to see no more, shutting my eyes and mentally praying to whatever deity was up there that their souls would rest in peace.
I opened my eyes to red flashes of light flowing throughout the impromptu maintenance corridor. Waving away my two colleagues, Sabrina and Liang, they understood the gesture immediately - their protests against my spontaneous act of bravery restricted to surprised glares before they sprinted down the corridor. I couldn't have forgiven myself if they paid the price for having them stay here. It took several seconds for the autowelder to 3D print the exact shape of the hole and weld it in place, and mid-heel spin just before I could run-
A thunderous groan made the corridor indecipherably blurry before it all went black.
Captain Hassan Nasan
UNE Khalid ibn al-Walid , Luna -class Destroyer
Helm of vessel
13:35 December 2, 2338 AD
The battle group silently drifted forwards through the void of space, as per the orders of the Admiral, to support the vanguard of the fighters moving ahead of the fleet towards the enemy. I pondered for a moment what the existence of alien sentients would mean for Islamic and general religious theology, I’m sure most major human religions would come to accept aliens amongst as full converts but maybe religion was largely unique to humans due to a quirk in our psychology (I didn’t see the drones of hiveminds having theology for example). Would their souls go to Jannah alongside human ones? That’s a problem for future imams and theologians to deal with, I’m here to make sure there is a future for humanity after all.
A faint rumble shook the room very slightly with each mass driver that was electromagnetically propelled to ludicrous speeds, before an accompanying flash of light from the other end of the battlefield marking the enemy target. Slowly but surely, the ship AI was learning the weak points of the various enemy ship types to either disable or annihilate them from studying the light emissions from the target ship and determining the ship’s estimated efficiency relative to before it was hit with the force of a nuclear warhead.
By the grace of Allah, the enemy had (mostly) overlooked us so far in targeting the main supercarrier and axillary carrier vessels - and we would make sure they didn’t live to regret that decision. We had already fired quite a few direct shots onto enemy frigates even though I knew that the deadly capacity of direct shots, although almost certainly deadly to some capacity, was limited by the development of atmospheric shields. Assuming these vessels have them as we do, these shields could contain the atmosphere after a breach but put a surprisingly high toll on the energetic demands of the ship. Energy was a resource like any other, and draining them of it would be critical to our success.
Our directed energy weapons were much less effective at these distances, with the particle beams having an effective range of about 10-12 km. We were closing in quite fast, at a relative rate of maybe 20 kilometres per hour compared to the enemy battle group - however, we were already taking heavy casualties with the most recent reports of deceased crew members constantly updating by the dozens across the battle group. Those reinforcements coming from their postponed navy exercise would be greatly appreciated right about now.
If they had any inkling of modern human warfare doctrine, they’d have known we won wars by cutting off supply and logistics and encircling the enemy. They’d have known of our incredibly lengthy militaristic history and how empires stretched thousands of kilometres mere centuries after the Iron Age began. They’d have the historical context to understand this ship’s name, Khalid ibn al-Walid, the very Sayf Allah (Sword of God) who defeated one empire and brought the other into a centuries-long decline! They’d have known that humanity only desires peace because, in the hellscape of war, we fear what we may become.
As the ship creaked to deflect another projectile although I knew I would likely be dead if it had hit true, I found myself praying that the task force would come rushing to our aid from hyperspace at that instant. A growing number of flashes of light appeared behind enemy lines as a whole squadron of fighters raced out of hyperspace almost simultaneously with the vanguard arriving from the front. Mashallah! A smirk came to my face a mere instant before a mass driver erased it.
High Admiral Icokera
GUS Battle Group Akkurbad
Ger’kera Herra , Cadea -class Battlecruiser [6]
Command debriefing room
13:37 December 2, 2338 AD
Holographic video feeds surrounded the command room, showing the state of the battlefield from this battlecruiser as well as a few feeds from other ships. As the front half of yet another human (that was what they called themselves, even the way it sounded was somehow primitive) destroyer simply ceased to exist, I could only look on in barely contained rage at the battlefield sensor readings. A swarm of tiny, incredibly manoeuvrable vessels had come to surround us from the back - not only did this one system civilisation have a fleet that outnumbered us (thank the gods that our technology is the best in the galaxy!) but the fact that these tiny vessels came from hyperspace means they must have more of these mothercrafts!
I would have to find the fool who let this happen and deal with them later if we got out this alive that is… the only weapons we have that were effective against this strategy was our directed energy weapons and they had to be focused on a target for at least a second or 2 before melting the hull plates, these fighters were just too manoeuvrable for our weapons to track them. Our mass drivers stood no chance, they fired too slowly to even come within a kilometre of the target and had zero tracking capability being fixed to the fronts and sides of our ships.
Every civilised species that had reached space ran with the logic that larger guns were better and produced a few massive ships or vehicles to face each other in grand open battle. These deathworlders had instead swarmed their enemies using greater numbers. A part of me admired this novel tactic while the rest of me shuddered thinking of the historical conditions that could have made them employ such a strategy. Maybe we could take some of their military strategies after wiping them from existence of course.
Our sensors were practically overloaded with hundreds of red dots in all directions around us, they had encircled us in all three dimensions. A military feat that had only been accomplished as an enemy made their final stand (relatively few ships were involved in battle after all), and these upstarts had done it to a technologically advanced race. Maybe the craziest thing about it all was the fact that the human capital ships still fired into the cloud of their own fighters - such little regard for their own kind that they would take some of their own down just to strike at us.
I could only watch in horror and shock as antimatter missiles peppered and ate at the hull of ships across the battle group. It had reached a point where our ships were firing blindly, almost vainly, in the hope that the humans would fight us symmetrically. I was still alone in the command debriefing room, looking onto the reddish-green planet below and wondering what its name was since there was no harm in knowing the name of the planet which would hold my mortal body in its grasp soon.
Mars, named after a Roman god of war. Of course, the one race we decided to get rid of was one with an impossible amount of resources which had named one of their celestial bodies after warfare. My hubris had put my asphx on the sphinx [7] and quite probably the entire galaxy’s too.
I took out my holonotes and started dictating the course of the battle and my inner monologue, including my newfound respect for these humans, an exercise in futility as it was much too little, much too late. It is now of my opinion that this is indeed an existential war but not for the hum-
The structure of Ger’kera Herra simply couldn’t hold up any longer, escape was impossible with an attempted entry into hyperspace only resulting in the certain very rapid and explosive deconstruction of the entire mammoth vessel. Key struts and braces had been incinerated in multiple hundred megatons of pure annihilation - although even if the ship had survived, exposure to the gamma radiation emitted would have finished them off anyway. What was left of the ship broke off into the void, and the 5,000 souls that were still on board joined their 15,000 comrades beyond the grave.
Icokera’s last thoughts as he was ripped out of the command room into the inky, inhospitable void was those of awe and a certain kind of respect - a kind that only a military commander could give to another who had bested him in battle.
The two remaining destroyers and three frigates of Battle Group Akkurbad surrendered just as the task force came out of hyperspace where the swarm of fighters had come from. Ceres had truly paid the blood price for this pyrrhic victory and now Mars, for the first time since the fall of Rome, stood with his iconic spear and shield and turned the gears of war in the name of humanity.
Battle Group Ceres
UNE Justice, Ireland -class Supercarrier
Flight Deck 08
13:45 December 2, 2338 AD
In the heat of battle, Kaylee was a different beast entirely. To her, it must have been all a blur, distant memories of a side of herself that she only endured because she couldn’t bear anyone else doing so. It was a matter of duty, but not pride to her. The killing of sentients was morally repugnant in her eyes in every way, you’d be hard-pressed to find a less suitable person for the armed forces.
There was one single redeeming quality about her, outside of her talent as a pilot - as soon the first mass driver was fired, a switch flipped in her brain. Kaylee in battle truly embodied the 'shoot first, ask questions later' mentality,
Her confidence transformed into her breathtakingly risky manoeuvres around the capital ship of the malevolent aliens, dodging death by mere metres at times. With the gentle reminder that she was travelling at least a few kilometres a second, it was one of the closest someone could stare into the Reaper’s face and still be able to tell the story afterwards.
Her laser focus was expressed in her nearly perfectly timed release of both of her missiles into a deep hole in the hull carved by an earlier mass driver round. The missiles flew silently forwards into the hull and with the speeds she was travelling at, she put herself at almost 30 Gs of force momentarily to a hard bank to the left and avoid being a smear on the side of this gigantic ship.
A flash of gamma radiation as well as photons from all over the spectrum went in all directions - the only thing saving her from acute radiation sickness and terminal cancer was the radiation shielding of her fighter and the 24/7 work of the billions of medical nanobots in her bloodstream. In that single press of a button, the superstructure of the ship had been made even more compromised and a further 237 alien combatants had perished.
Deadliest of all, her self-sacrificing nature had very nearly shown itself, a very last resort to protect humanity at any cost. She put herself at insane levels of risk by volunteering to be the first human to enter hyperspace, and she had no qualms with being the first human to use hyperspace to annihilate an enemy fleet. And maybe irradiate half of Mars too. Humans were categorically insane but I mean that in the nicest way possible.
Now, however, she was precariously piloting her fighter back to Flight Deck 08 of UNE Justice, dodging space debris from the decisive but very deadly battle, an easy task with the advanced radar system of her fighter but regardless, she had to be careful - especially of fast-moving micro fragments that could easily pierce the fighter’s thin armour. That was the main reason why the space fighter training program had taught them to limit their speeds while flying and only go faster than 500 m/s relative to the debris around you if absolutely necessary or in the heat of battle.
The scarred supercarrier soon came into full view, while minuscule tiny corvettes with hastily made boarding groups rushed to the surrendered enemy vessels. A few fighters who had conserved their missiles continued to circle the vessels, ready to pull the trigger at any sign of foul play. The existence of the Geneva Convention certainly was of a welcome surprise to these soon-to-be alien prisoners of war (POWs), but also terrified a number of them once they learned about it (what kind of species needed rules of war, how bad were their wars and did they have unhonourable leaders?)
An interesting fact about humanity was that they had codified rules of war, rather than being based on a vague sense of honour like most militaristic species. The Union had prohibited warfare within its jurisdiction anyway, so not having rules of war made sense. The very idea of killing citizenry in warfare was either abominable or seen as a fact of life, depending on the species. The latter was only true if the species had traditionally involved every single individual in the war effort so there were, technically, 'no civilians' to harm. In many ways, humanity was brutal and dishonourable but at least humanity realised their nature and tried to contain it.
To think that she played a part in one of the briefest but most critical space dances over the increasingly green plains of Mars was astounding. The fact that she used to look up to mere navy exercises and now… it started to hit her.
As the reverse thrusters of the fighter powered on, controlled by an inflight AI, which was orders of magnitude simpler than the main ship AI. The thrusters worked in coordination with a modified deflector system deployed by the carrier to slow the fighter down and automatically guide it to Flight Deck 08. All Kaylee had to do was sit back and feel the adrenaline fading away as she slowly returned to her out of combat self. Dull throbbing aches all over her body, formerly masked by her adrenaline, appeared - turns out those G-forces did a number on her body (and joints especially) and she’d need a post-flight medical examination but at least she was one of now only 650 humans (360 from her squadron of 500 and 290 out of the 400 fighters that came out of hyperspace) who could say they fought aliens in a fighter and came back to base in one piece.
Even though the journey over to the enemy fleet took the better part of the battle, the fighters were way too spread out and tiny at that point to even suffer more than the very unfortunate few casualties due to stray mass drivers. Almost all of the casualties were from during the bombardment of the fleet with antimatter missiles, in a few collisions but mostly from antimatter detonations - the tragic first test of these barely out of prototype fighters.
Once the corvettes had docked with the enemy destroyers and frigates, the enemy ship AI was deactivated and replaced by a human ship AI - the humans were taking zero chances, holding plasma weapons at each and every crew member, tying their appendages together using forcefield handcuffs. It was here that humanity first learned that these aliens weren’t homogenous, but very far from it, with at least 26 different sapient species on board - all with similar atmospheric requirements for breathing [8].
As UNE leaders were debriefed on the situation almost as soon as it occurred, it became clear that there must have been a whole council of these civilisations, with possibly trillions or even quadrillions of individuals in total. The total absence of robots on their decks signified that they had probably avoided automation in wider society, but even then in a protracted war, humanity was guaranteed to lose. Either diplomacy would prevail or a decapitation strike at a civilisation of unknown proportions and significantly ahead technologically would be necessary. The fact that they sent what seemed like an oddly small fleet meant that they either underestimated humanity or weren’t entirely willing to wage war.
Sol System
Planet Earth
Nairobi, UNE East Africa Region
UNE General Assembly Building (Emergency Special Session)
December 5 - 10, 2338 AD
In the most divisive emergency motion passed in the UNE General Assembly since the conclusion of the Climate Catastrophe, the votes were split between 162-158 passing “Motion to seek diplomatic normalisation of relations with unknown hostiles” with important caveats such as the payment of reparations, a redrafting of the Geneva Convention as well as most other human rights legislation to include sentient non-humans, the permission to reverse engineer advanced alien technology and the permission to vastly expand the UNE military for the foreseeable period, regardless of the results of the diplomatic overtures.
The General Assembly was made up of 240 elected representatives of populations scattered across the major celestial bodies of the solar system, with the gradual dissolution of nation-states leading to the removal of individual governments picking representatives. Each colonised celestial body with over 50,000 citizens was given a single representative, and every 1,000,000 citizens after that meant an extra representative. This meant that Mars had 35 representatives, Venus had 20, Luna had 14, Titan had 5, Ceres had 3 and so on…
This left Earth with 156 representatives, which were slightly in favour of passing the motion while almost all the Mars representatives were against the motion, having come so close to oblivion now the intention of the fleet was known from the POWs. The representatives from the outer solar system, knowing that if the hostile civilisation came again that fleets may well not be in a position to defend them, voted overwhelmingly to pass the motion. Venus and Luna were slightly opposed to the motion, and all this meant that it was about as divisive as a motion could get.
The debating was fierce, with many Martian representatives just barely short of calling for the execution of all the captured combatants, but the vast majority of representatives disagreed on moral grounds as well as losing valuable intel from the POWs. A thin veneer of civility was only kept by the nonstop work of the council president, keeping order to the very best of his ability as tempers flared.
A particularly talented representative from Pluto described the very fact that this civilisation was so multicultural, that humanity had a very real chance of making peace - it seemed like a militant faction of kinds did this without the approval of the full council at least. Still, he continued, that this would not mean humanity would bend over to alien interests but would sign a peace with honour, and if this opportunity was rejected then the olive branch was to be replaced with Mars’ sword and shield once again!
The General Assembly seemed to generally agree with that sentiment, later making a statement in the formal motion that 'freedom and liberty were of paramount importance to humanity and we will take any necessary course to preserve those fundamental human rights'.
Hyperspace around the Sol System
Nairobi, UNE East Africa Region
UNE General Assembly Building (Emergency Special Session)
December 25, 2338 AD
It was going to be a long Christmas for Magnus Friedrich, flying on a ship headed towards a large region in the Perseus arm of the galaxy known as the ‘Core Worlds’ to the aliens, who are in an expansive state called the Galactic Union of Intelligent Species. This was all information extracted in a humane manner from the POWs captured from the (as it's now known) Battle for Olympus, a reference to human mythology and a slight embellishment of the battle as one for the very throne of gods!
As the lead diplomat, he had a lot of work to do and hoped the machine learning translators would do the job - they had a surprising amount of data to use by overhearing the conversations of some of the POWs with each other so they should be effective to a certain degree.
He came with a small army of an entourage: a few elite ASTRO soldiers with full power armour and the latest M64 plasma rifles capable of both anti-personnel and anti-tank capability, a few xenobiologists and linguists (who helped sort out the whole translating business, it helped that the Union had a lingua franca in almost exactly the same way humanity did with English in the 24th century - one that everyone learned as their native or second language but other major languages existed), a few junior diplomats, a few POWs to be transferred as a sign of goodwill and five corvettes accompanying them - the very first to be retrofitted with reverse-engineered tech.
Humanity was only offering this olive branch of peace because as thought by the late Hassan Nasan (posthumously given the Purple Star, the highest military award in the UNE; <> is the customary way that thoughts are transcribed into written word) [9].
References posted in the comments!

[ref]

IRISH INDEPENDENT
August 31st, 2024
POLITICS | ART & ENTERTAINMENT | SP̴̯̄O̷̲̊Ȓ̷̻TS̴̫͝ | F̵̨́͋̾̏Ơ̶̛̠͓̘̓͆̀ͅŎ̷͔̞̲̹̂͝ͅD̷̗̾̔̽͂ | BUSINESS | TECHNOLOGY

Sociologists Predicting Large Shift in Irish Demographics and Politics
By Feliks Murray
Ireland has nearly always been a nation of distinct identities. As philosophical and sociological ideas of the nation-state began to take shape in Europe, Ireland lagged behind its neighbour nations (itself being part of the British Empire until the 20th century), and, as such, many of the issues that remain in Ireland today are issues that many European, and indeed world, nations have dealt with for centuries, the largest and most looming being the question of Northern Ireland. Irish nationalism was late to the party, only really getting going during the Republic's initial independence in the early 20th century, and flaring up once again around 50 years later during the Troubles.
Ireland, as a nation, formed primarily around ethnic Irishmen, relating more to the Gaels and Celts of places such as Scotland or Wales, as well as its distinct Catholic population, ever at odds with the Protestant Anglicans. A significant portion of the Republic remains Catholic, nominally, today, with more than 3/4ths of the population stating themselves as Catholic in the latest census. This, however, has been dropping, not dissimilar to many other European nations.
This analysis has brought some sociologists to predict that, in the next few decades, Ireland (the Republic for certain, but the Isle as a whole is not an unlikely possibility) will follow the trend of historical nations and shed the identity-politic-driven, nationalistic ideas prevalent in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. "While efforts to revive Irish culture might not be affected, traditional Irish identities will be dropped", says Dr. Leary McDermott (doctorates in sociology, political science, anthropology, and history), "leading to less of the issues surrounding such items." Dr. McDermott states in his viral treatise, The Once and Future Isle, that the loss of the fervent clinging to items such as Catholic zeal will likely soothe the differences across the border with Northern Ireland.
While many on social media have claimed this as a sign that Reunification may be on the horizon, Dr. McDermott stated on his Twitter page just yesterday that while an easing of religious zeal on the part of the Republic might soothe the tension still present on the Ireland-UK border, "standing political agendas and external affairs will likely hinder such attempts". Nevertheless, McDermott's statements have opened a broader internet discussion revolving around the "Irish identity".

Lost McAlbain Crew Returns After Year-Long Disappearance
By Nioclás Tash
After over a year missing, an "exploratory crew", headed by Oisín McAlbain, son of alleged organized crime boss Darragh McAlbain, has appeared once again in Galway. While initially the entire affair made a minor blip in the general media scene, it made waves in the following days after Oisín began to speak of the expedition. According to Mr. McAlbain, the crew sailed west out of Galway, searching for a piece of land Oisín had beached on a year prior after being blown out to sea by a storm. After half a day's trip out west, they encountered the same storm, which caused one of the two vessels the "expedition" had, the St. Brendan to capsize after their second ship, the Green Whale, rammed into it due to low visibility.
McAlbain goes on to claim that once the St. Brendan had been evacuated and all crew moved to the Green Whale, the entire crew was knocked unconscious. McAlbain then claims that the Green Whale was set upon by lights, "almost like ten million fireflies, each of different colours, like reds and greens and pinks and purples", which put the rest of the crew to sleep. Upon waking, the crew found themselves on a sandy shore, completely uninhabited. After a few days' exploration, they claim to have found no evidence of it ever being inhabited. Oisín stated that he had encountered a strange man there during his first trip, but saw no sign of him on the second go-around.
While the full release is much longer, much of it including frankly ridiculous fantasies, including every cliché in the book, from mysterious dreams to bone-chilling howls in the night. Many experts have weighed in, forming a general consensus that the crew likely was blown back east, and landed in Scotland, a claim that the crew vehemently denies. Regardless of truth, the tale is certainly entertaining.

[CONTENT WARNING] A Second Horrific Murder Leaves Garda Síochána Baffled
By Samuel Smokes
Following the grisly murder a few years back, many people searched for answers, but neither civilian nor professional efforts were able to find who had committed such as a heinous crime. They were left wanting, and many residents of Cork were scared for their lives as they feared they would be the killer's next target.
Horror would strike again, as it turns out, but this time in the east, as a body was found in Dublin, matching the grotesque nature of the first death. While no photos have been released or leaked, Independent sources within the Garda Síochána have provided a brief description of the scene. Readers are advised that the description is horrific, and should not be read by those with ~~low constitutions~~ weak stomachs.
While these descriptions remain officially unconfirmed, trusted sources state that the dead is an Irish young male, found on the floor of his apartment in a pool of blood. According the source, the body appeared dysmorphic, stretching and blobbing in strange places. An autopsy of the body was performed, and the coroner discovered that the man's skeleton was somehow, without ever breaking the skin, flipped all the way around. This resulted in the feet of the skeleton being inside the man's skull, while the skull was split (almost perfectly) in half, with each half inside the "legs" of the skin. Doctors are completely baffled.
Officers are baffled, as well. According to the source, no current leads exist, as with the Cork murder. It is being added to a growing case at the situation unfolds, the Independent will continue to report as everything is brought to light.
© 2024 Mediahuis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, or redistributed.

https://policyexchange.org.uk/pxevents/on-chinas-relationship-with-the-rest-of-the-world/?fbclid=IwAR2W2jM0CQXW-b5AmRCY9uTq6kPiwLrn7Ygy43Nl7_HnBaRkgUqOsUZEB6k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCM8szICMpc&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=PolicyExchangeUK
The Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture (I)
The Importance of Being Candid: On China’s Relationship with the Rest of the World
by
Matthew Pottinger
Deputy National Security Advisor to the President of the United States
Matthew Pottinger is Assistant to the President and US Deputy National Security Advisor. Mr. Pottinger served as the Senior Director for Asia since the start of the Trump Administration in January 2017. In that role, Mr. Pottinger advised the President on Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and coordinated U.S. policy for the region.
Before joining the National Security Council staff, Mr. Pottinger ran Asia research at a New York-based investment firm and, prior to that, was the founder of a consultancy serving American investors in East Asia. Mr. Pottinger served as a U.S. Marine, with active duty in Japan and three combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by reserve duty at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Prior to military service, Mr. Pottinger lived and worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China from 1997-2005, reporting for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He is fluent in Mandarin.
INTRODUCTION
DEAN GODSON: Good afternoon, my name is Dean Godson, I’m Director of Policy Exchange, I have the privilege, pleasure of being your host for this 9th Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture. As many of you will know and remember, Colin was the much-loved Chief Constable of West Yorkshire at the time of the 7/7 bombings, the last Deputy Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and first Acting Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He was taken from us tragically early by cancer, still remembered with much fondness. We’re delighted that his widow, Lynn, is here with us today online and with other members of the family. I know you will all wish to, on behalf of everyone here, to wish them all the very best and to thank them for continuing to be patrons of this lecture which would have, I know, meant so much to Colin.
As I say, this is the 9th such lecture and our guest of honour today, our keynoter, Matt Pottinger is Deputy National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. He was previously a distinguished journalist with the Wall Street Journal and then joined the US Marine Corps and won combat decorations for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s one of the leading authorities in the US government on China and that is why uniquely today we are innovating today here at Policy Exchange because as a more than fluent Mandarin speaker, Matt’s address today will be delivered in Mandarin for the sake of audiences across the world and indicating his belief that China is not defined solely by the People’s Republic of China and its representatives, that there is a wider engagement to be had with audiences across the world, Mandarin speaking and others, so good evening to anyone coming in from the Indo Pacific region and China in particular, good morning to all of you in Washington.
Matt, as I say, will make his remarks first in Mandarin and we’ll then open the floor to questions for 35 minutes or so of questions. As I say, we are delighted to be doing this here at Policy Exchange with the importance of this subject of the wider Indo Pacific region and China in particular. We have our own Indo Pacific Commission, chaired by former Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, which will be publishing in the near future its findings and it work. Also, because of the particular importance of this subject and because of the proximity to the US Presidential election, we are having actually two Cramphorn Memorial Lectures in close succession, one obviously the one today by Matt Pottinger and the other next week by Dr Kurt Campbell of the Asia Group, one of the leading authorities on Asia from the last Democratic administration of Barack Obama, of particular significance because people are increasingly aware in this country that in an era of polarisation in America, the area of the Indo Pacific and China is one subject where discussion and even a measure of consensus is still possible in the United States. So, thank you to Matt Pottinger for honouring us in this way, we look forward to hearing your unique address and insights and then open to wider discussion, thank you Matt.
SPEECH TRANSCRIPTION
I’d like to thank Dean Godson and Policy Exchange for inviting me to deliver the ninth annual Colin Cramphorn lecture. We all look forward to a time when we can gather again in person for events like this. With new vaccines and therapeutics on the near horizon, I’m optimistic that day will soon arrive. In the meantime, let’s pretend we’re at the Red Lion pub and enjoy this convivial, trans-Atlantic video conference between Westminster and the White House. I’m betting on a lively discussion following my set remarks.
As most of you know, England and America are two countries separated by a common language. In order to bridge that divide, I’ve decided to give my remarks in Mandarin.
Truth be told, Dean Godson asked me to bust out my Chinese for the sake of higher ratings. Dean knew that a video of an earlier speech I delivered in Mandarin, about China’s May Fourth movement, was viewed more than one million times. Dean may have also known that a subsequent video I recorded in English for the Ronald Reagan Institute was, by contrast, barely noticed by even my own staff.
Naturally, Dean calculated that a white guy speaking in stilted Mandarin would be a bigger box-office draw than whatever message the white guy might be trying to convey.
So be it. As a character on The Simpsons once put it: “Come for the freak, stay for the food.”
Delivering these remarks in Mandarin has another benefit: It allows friends in China to join a conversation that is taking place with increasing regularity around the globe: A conversation about China’s relationship with the rest of the world.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN HISTORY
But first, a smidgen of history to underscore what’s at stake.
Near the end of the 18th century, across the water and many miles from England, a group of visionary men drew up a constitution. The document they framed was designed to limit the powers of government, assert the rights of the people, and chart a path toward what they hoped would be a lasting democracy.
I’m talking, of course, about… Poland.
“Poland?” you ask. Don’t be embarrassed if 1790s Poland didn’t turn up in your high-school textbooks. Unlike the more famous U.S. Constitution, which was adopted just a few years earlier and still serves as the supreme law of the American republic, the Polish experiment with constitutional government was strangled in its infancy.
The problem was foreign interference. A faction of the Polish nobility felt threatened by the influence they would lose under the new constitution. So they sought Russian help in reestablishing the old order. Catherine the Great seized the opportunity to invade and then partition Poland—she took the east and Prussia took the west.
Then, after defeating a revolt led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish military hero of the American Revolution, Russia—along with Prussia and Austria—carried out a final partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795. The young Commonwealth was erased from the map altogether.
I mention Poland’s failed experiment for two reasons: First, it’s a reminder that democracy, while unrivaled in terms of legitimacy and results, is neither invincible nor inevitable. Second, interference in the affairs of free societies by autocratic regimes is a phenomenon that is waxing, not waning.
To stave off meddling, it never hurts to have favorable geography—a luxury Poland didn’t enjoy. Poland’s 18th Century neighbors were powerful European monarchies. America’s neighbors, by contrast, were the two best friends a fledgling democracy could ever ask for—the Atlantic and the Pacific.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN THE CYBER AGE
But in the cyber age, autocratic governments can concoct disinformation, inject it into the public discourse of nations, and amplify it through self-improving algorithms from the other side of the earth. Are the blessings of oceans and channels sufficient barriers against this sort of meddling?
Not if the citizens of free and sovereign nations yield to complacency. Nations, including democracies, are undergoing the first stage of a real-life “stress test” of their ability to withstand covert, coercive, and corrupt influence by high-tech autocracies.
This may seem odd, because the autocracies are so vastly outnumbered. But they compensate by marshalling the full resources of their states, by learning from one another’s successes and failures, and sometimes by coordinating with one another.
Economic strength isn’t a prerequisite for waging cyber warfare. Thus, we see hackers tasked by Moscow and Tehran attempting to undermine confidence in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. But no regime has more riding on its ability to influence the perceptions, policies and priorities of foreign populations than the Chinese Communist Party.
THE PARTY’S “MAGIC WEAPON”
In truth, we should’ve expected this. The Communist Party’s victory in the Chinese civil war owed less to its combat prowess against superior Nationalist forces than to its ability to infiltrate and manipulate the language, thinking, and actions of its adversaries. This is why the current Party leadership is redoubling its emphasis on “United Front” work.
The defining feature of United Front work is that it’s not transparent. The clue is in the name.
China’s United Front Work system is a gigantic government function with no analogue in democracies. China’s leaders call it a “magic weapon,” and the Party’s 90 million members are required to support its activities. While the system has many branches, the United Front Work Department alone has four times as many cadres as the U.S. State Department has foreign-service officers. But instead of practicing diplomacy with foreign governments—the Chinese foreign ministry handles that—the United Front gathers intelligence about, and works to influence, private citizens overseas. The focus is on foreign elites and the organizations they run. Think of a United Front worker as a cross between an intelligence collector, a propagandist, and a psychologist.
I know that sounds like the opening line to a joke. But United Front work is serious business, and it affects you and me. After all, the raw material for psychologists is data about their patients. The Party is compiling digital dossiers on millions of foreign citizens around the world. The exposure last month of a Chinese database on at least 2.4 million people around the world—including many of us on this call—speaks to the Party’s sheer ambition to wed traditional Leninist techniques with powerful new tools of digital surveillance.
The company building these dossiers, Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co, supports what its CEO reportedly calls “psychological warfare.” Zhenhua harvests and organizes public and private data about us for exploitation by its clients, which are organs of the Chinese security apparatus, according to its website.
The dossiers Zhenhua is compiling include people in virtually every country on earth, no matter how small. They include members of royal families and members of parliament, judges and clerks, tech mavens and budding entrepreneurs, four-star admirals and the crewmembers of warships, professors and think-tankers, and national and local officials. They also include children, who are fair game under Beijing’s rules of political warfare. No one is too prominent or too obscure.
Zhenhua isn’t a particularly large or sophisticated actor in the United Front world. It may even be acting opportunistically, because it thinks the Party will reward it. Far more powerful tech firms, including famous Chinese app developers, play a much bigger role in this kind of work.
Assembling dossiers has always been a feature of Leninist regimes. The material is used now, as before, to influence and intimidate, reward and blackmail, flatter and humiliate, divide and conquer. What’s new is how easy we’ve made it for autocrats to accumulate so much intimate data about ourselves—even people who’ve never set foot in China. We leave our intellectual property, our official documents, and our private lives on the table like open books. The smart phones we use all day to chat, search, buy, view, bank, navigate, network, worship and confide make our thoughts and actions as plain to cyber spooks as the plumes of exhaust from a vintage double-decker bus.
The Chinese Communist Party has reorganized its national strategy around harnessing that digital exhaust to expand the Party’s power and reach.
THE PARTY’S GOALS
But what’s the ultimate point of all the data collection and exploitation? What is Beijing trying to influence us to do? The Party’s goal, in short, is to co-opt or bully people—and even nations—into a particular frame of mind that’s conducive to Beijing’s grand ambitions. It’s a paradoxical mindset—a state of cognitive dissonance that is at once credulous and fearful, complacent and defeatist. It’s a mindset that on Monday says “It’s too early to say whether Beijing poses a threat,” and by Friday says “They’re a threat, all right, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.” To be coaxed into such a mindset is to be seduced into submission—like taking the “blue pill” in The Matrix.
How does Beijing do it? This is where United Front propaganda and psychology come into play. The Party’s overseas propaganda has two consistent themes: “We own the future, so make your adjustments now.” And: “We’re just like you, so try not to worry.” Together, these assertions form the elaborate con at the heart of all Leninist movements.
The Kiwi scholar Anne-Marie Brady, a pioneer in sussing out United Front ploys, points to the Party’s global campaigns—“One Belt, One Road” and the “Community of Common Destiny for Mankind”—as classic specimens of the genre.
Brady calls United Front work a “tool to corrode and corrupt our political system, to weaken and divide us against each other, to erode the critical voice of our media, and turn our elites into clients of the Chinese Communist Party, their mouths stuffed with cash.”
The con doesn’t always work, of course. Facts sometimes get in the way. The profound waste and corruption of many One Belt, One Road projects is an example. When the con doesn’t induce acquiescence, the Party often resorts to intimidation and repression.
Take Hong Kong, where demonstrators took to the streets by the millions last year to protest Beijing’s efforts to undermine Hong Kong’s rule of law. If “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was the future, the demonstrators seemed to prefer staying firmly in the present.
So Beijing resorted to Plan B. It demolished Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems” framework and deprived Hong Kong of the autonomy that made it the most spectacular city in Asia.
HOW WE DEFEND OURSELVES
None of this is reason for panic, mind you. It’s true the West is going through one of its periodic spells of self-doubt, when extreme political creeds surface on the left and the right, and some ideas are so foolish that, to paraphrase George Orwell, only an intellectual could believe them. So let’s pull up our socks and get back to common sense.
On the foreign policy front, President Trump has ingrained two principles worth sharing here, because they’re designed to preserve our sovereignty, promote stability, and reduce miscalculation. They are reciprocity and candor.
Reciprocity is the straightforward idea that when a country injures your interests, you return the favor. It is eminently reasonable and readily understood, including by would-be aggressors. It’s an inherently defensive approach, rooted in notions of fair play and deterrence.
Candor is the idea that democracies are safest when we speak honestly and publicly about and to our friends, our adversaries, and ourselves. This can take some getting used to. When President Reagan was preparing to give a speech in Berlin, several of his staff tried desperately to get him to remove a phrase they found embarrassing and needlessly provocative. Luckily, President Reagan went with his gut, and delivered the most famous line of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Some will argue that confrontational rhetoric turns countries into enemies. This old chestnut of the U.S. diplomatic corps masquerades as humble policy, but is in fact quite arrogant because it presumes nations act primarily in reaction to whatever the United States says or does.
Clever adversaries use such thinking against us. By portraying truth-telling as an act of belligerence, autocrats try to badger democracies into silence—and often succeed. “This is the first and most important defeat free nations can ever suffer,” President Reagan said at Guildhall. “When free peoples cease telling the truth about and to their adversaries, they cease telling the truth to themselves.” Public candor actually promotes peace by reducing the space for strategic blunders.
Public candor applies to our internal affairs, too. There can be no double standard.
When Louis Armstrong performed in the Soviet Union as a cultural ambassador of the State Department, he spoke frankly about racial bigotry in the United States. When Reagan famously referred to the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” he explored America’s own “legacy of evil”—including anti-Semitism and slavery—in the very same speech.
XINJIANG
So it is in a spirit of friendship, reflection, and, yes, candor, that I ask friends in China to research the truth about your government’s policies toward the Uyghur people and other religious minorities. Ask yourselves why the editors of The Economist, in a cover article this week, called those policies “a crime against humanity” and “the most extensive violation in the world today of the principle that individuals have a right to liberty and dignity simply because they are people.”
As a Marine who spent three combat deployments fighting terrorists, I can tell you that what is taking place in Xinjiang bears no resemblance whatsoever to an ethical counter-terrorism strategy. Such abuses are what the Chinese diplomat P.C. Chang was trying to prevent when he helped draft the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is no credible justification I can find in Chinese philosophy, religion, or moral law for the concentration camps inside your borders.
WHAT EVIL FEARS MOST
Colin Cramphorn, for whom this lecture is named, was Chief Constable of West Yorkshire before his death from cancer in 2006. Colin worked the most notorious terrorism cases in British history, from the Omagh car-bombing to the London suicide attacks of 2005. When your day job is to confront evil, it’s hard to avoid dwelling at night on big questions about the human heart. Colin, a voracious and varied reader, sometimes consulted the writings of C.S. Lewis.
I’m told he found particular solace in The Screwtape Letters—Lewis’s brilliantly imagined monologue of a demon toiling in Satan’s bureaucracy. (John Cleese recorded a pitch-perfect rendition of the book a few decades ago, by the way. It’s on YouTube. I’m told Andy Serkis has recorded a version that gives Cleese a run for his money.)
“The safest road to Hell,” old Screwtape advises his nephew, “is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
I suspect Colin drew hope and courage from the knowledge that evil, properly identified and exposed, is frail—even farcical. And that calling it out in public—giving it “signposts”—inoculates us against temptation and liberates us from fear. As my friend Tony Dolan told me: “The great paradox of institutionalized evil is that it can be enormously powerful but also enormously fragile. Thus, it is compulsively aggressive and ultimately self-destructive. It senses its own moral absurdity. It knows it is a raft on a sea of ontological good.”
“What evil fears most is the publicly spoken truth.”
So speak up, everyone. And raise a glass tonight to the good constable Colin Cramphorn and to like-minded public servants the world over. They have our love and our thanks.
QUESTION AND ANSWER
DEAN GODSON: Matt, thank you for a truly brilliant and memorable address. You have now very kindly agreed to answer questions. Just two items of protocol here, please put your virtual hands up and please also look into the camera when you’re speaking because of the exigencies of the virtual event. The final house rule that all of you will be aware of, no question too outrageous, you just have to state your name and organisation before pronouncing. David Brunston, if you can just restate for the record your name and organisation, you wanted to ask a question. David, we can’t hear you. A number of people have been texting in to me, some of them wanted to be asked anonymously, Matt, so if I can use Chairman’s privilege to ask on their behalf. A little more detail, is the strategy, the CCP strategy of wolf diplomacy, is it too far gone now? Could you say more in a bit more detail, they ask, what in your view, the US administration’s perspective, the counter measures should be?
MATT POTTINGER: Dean, thanks so much. You know, I think in a way the wolf warrior diplomacy is an expression of a moment of a kind of desperate opportunism. In a sense, I think as many countries have caught on to the scope of Beijing’s ambitions and have started to push back where they think or the community of nations think they go too far or are damaging to countries sovereignty or interests. I think the process of pushing back has led to a bit of a dropping of the fig leaf, if you will, and this more combative approach to diplomacy, it’s a more coercive approach to diplomacy so I think that what all countries need to do – and this is for the sake of stability by the way, this is in the interest of re-establishing a kind of equilibrium and more constructive, results-oriented relationship between China and the community of nations. I think the two ideas that I talked about in the speech and that are central to President Trump’s approach, the reciprocity but also the candour, will help go quite some way in restoring that balance.
DEAN GODSON: Brilliant, thank you and I’ve been asked to ask the question on behalf of David Brunston of Reuters and the question he wants to ask is how would you expect US policy under a second Trump administration to evolve and how it would differ from a policy that the Biden administration might pursue?
MATT POTTINGER: Yes, so people advising Vice President Biden talk about what he thinks a good policy would be but in terms of President Trump’s approach, I think first you have to take stock of the fact that there is a new consensus and the forging of that new consensus about China is something that has happened under President Trump’s watch, it is in no small part because of the policies that he’s taken and the result has been that it has actually, as you alluded to in the introductory remarks, Dean, it’s a bipartisan, it’s a whole of society consensus and as you read polls popping up all over the world, you see that it’s not just an American consensus anymore either. We’ve led that consensus, that’s been President Trump’s hallmark, probably the most key legacy and shift in American foreign policy in quite some time but there are a lot of other countries that are now starting to, at a minimum, share a very similar consensus on the diagnosis of what the problem is and increasingly, a lot of countries, our European allies, allies across the Indo Pacific region and beyond, who are exploring and in some cases taking similar steps to those that President Trump has advocated for.
DEAN GODSON: Thank you. The next question is from the Right Honourable Lord Mandelson, former Deputy Prime Minister and European Commissioner. Peter, your question if you can come in.
PETER MANDELSON: Dean, thank you very much indeed and I hope you can hear me.
DEAN GODSON: Loud and clear.
RT HON LORD MANDELSON: I have been rather impressed by Matt Pottinger’s lecture and I find myself actually a supporter of both reciprocity and candour and as somebody who, when I was Trade Commissioner, was equally accused of using confrontational rhetoric towards China when I described them as a trade juggernaut out of control, I can see its usefulness. Can I ask though this question to Mr Pottinger? For China in a sense to lose, the West has to win and the West has not been winning during the last four years. With humility and self-criticism, could Mr Pottinger explain to us why he thinks the West has not been strengthened in its coherence and its unity during the last four years and why we have been less able to act in a joined-up way towards China and other international questions than we have during other periods since the Second World War?
DEAN GODSON: Thank you. Matt.
MATT POTTINGER: Thank you, that’s a great question and a great thoughtful prelude to the question as well, thank you. Look, President Trump came in following what I believe and certainly the people who elected him believed was a lengthy period of failure in American foreign policy and really more of a failure of broader foreign policy in the West. We got in lengthy wars under sort of a I think a misimpression that we would be able to inject democracy into far corners of the earth by the barrel of a gun, those have been enormously costly. Those are things that really have done damage, I think, to the West.
China’s entry into the WTO and all of the policies, really the assumptions that led to that and I shared those assumptions 20 years ago so I don’t blame or cast aspersions for what was actually very optimistic bold policy taken by the United States and the West to try to help China become more liberal, first economically and then we hoped politically as well but I think we’ve now taken stock of the fact that some of those assumptions were generous but misplaced. In fact, really the high watermark of China’s opening and liberalisation was December 11th 2001, which I think was the date China entered the WTO. After that, all of those reforms that we so eagerly anticipated by bringing China into the WTO, actually flatlined, things started to plateau for about a decade and over the course of the decade that we’ve just concluded, we saw those reforms go into reverse.
We’ve seen a far greater concentration of power in the hands of the state over the economy, over people’s lives and what we’ve learned is that optimistic period, the reform and opening period if you like, was unfortunately an interregnum, it was an interregnum between the totalitarianism of Mao’s rule and a new technologically enhanced totalitarianism under the current leadership and I’ve heard some refer to it as an attempt at so-called exquisite totalitarianism. I think that that’s a good encapsulation of what has now being attempted, this experiment that Beijing is running to see whether or not it can improve on the failed approach of all the other Leninist states of the 20th century by compensating for the failures of those systems through advanced technology and totalitarian surveillance. So, in short, I think this period that you’re referring to that you characterise as a sort of insufficient pulling together of the West, you’ve got to have a little bit of historical perspective that we’re going through a massive change from the post-Cold War era of the last few decades to a new one that takes stock of some of the failures of the last 30 years. Thanks.
DEAN GODSON: Brilliant, thank you. Next, Deborah Haynes, Foreign Editor, Sky News. Deborah, are you coming in?
DEBORAH HAYNES: Hopefully. Hi, thank you very much, thank you for letting me ask a question and thank you for that fascinating presentation. In terms of how you were describing how the United Front is implementing China’s policies, is what we’re seeing now, given that China is this rising power, a kind of a global battle over ideologies? I mean there’s no rule book that says that China has to adopt the rules based system and carry on using it if it’s the predominant power and if that’s the case, could you just spell out what the danger is if liberal democracies, who are far more fractured now than they have been, if they don’t stand together and stand up for the ideologies of free speech and human rights and all the things that we believe in, that we will see this big global division between those who side with China technologically and ideologically, and those who side with the West, much more than we’ve ever seen before?
MATT POTTINGER: That’s also a great question. So, American foreign policy has had this element, this tradition of realpolitik which, you know, there are nations that calculate on the basis of their own cold self-interest and also running in our veins is this tradition of our own revolutionary liberal democratic world view. They run in our veins like iced water and hot water and hopefully they remain in good enough balance that your blood stays at a good temperature. But you’ve hit on something, the truth is that you cannot ignore the ideological dimensions and ideology is just a fancy word for world view, right. We do have a markedly different world view from the Chinese Communist Party, a different approach to the world, different ideas about quite a lot and that’s not true of China as a whole. The Chinese Communist Party is firmly in command of China, obviously, but China is a lot of things. It is a pretty remarkable civilisation that I have devoted a huge part of my adult life to living in and studying and enjoying and I still do; the history, the culture and the unbelievable drive and energy and entrepreneurialism of the Chinese people. But that ideological dimension is unavoidable and if we try to ignore it, if we try to pretend that it’s only a matter of cold self-interest on both sides, that it’s a Thucydides trap as some like to frame it, I think we’d actually put ourselves on a path towards a more destabilised future than if we were to talk quite frankly to ourselves, our allies and yes, to our adversaries about those differences so that we can avoid miscalculation.
DEAN GODSON: Thank you, Matt. Next question from Alexander Downer, our Chairman of Trustees here at Policy Exchange and, of course, the longest serving Australian Foreign Minister in the country’s history and High Commissioner in London. Alexander.
HON ALEXANDER DOWNER AC: Thanks Dean, I hope you can hear me. I think, speaking as an Australian, it has to be said that we Australians had a fairly solid although not tension-free relationship with China for many years under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao and Australians have been really taken aback by the aggression in recent years of the Xi Jinping administration so my question is a little bit like Peter Mandelson’s, if there’s a second Trump administration what specific steps will the United States be taking to help countries like Australia which have been targeted by China, particularly Australian trade has been targeted by China, to help build a sense of collective security amongst liberal democracies in the Indo-Pacific region.
MATT POTTINGER: Yes, that’s a great remark that you made and Australia has been in some sense the canary in the coal mine. Australia – by the way, when people claim that provocative and frank, candid language is what causes China to act out in this sort of wolf warrior way, I always point to Australia as well as India as the counter examples there because India and Australia are two countries that had, really went out of their way to extend warmth to China in their people to people and commercial ties. These were countries that did seek to integrate their economies certainly, especially in the case of Australia and yet, when the Australian government just earlier this year had the temerity to ask the World Health Organisation whether there could be a general investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, China retaliated for that wholly reasonable request that Australia made. By the way, the World Health Organisation members voted in the largest majority in the organisation’s history in favour of the motion that Australia raised to investigate the origins, how is it that millions of us now have been infected with this disease? China retaliated by putting tariffs on Australian barley, cancelling beef exports and describing … their arch-propagandist said that Australia is chewing gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe and it is time to scrape it off. So, there you have a pretty good counter-argument to the notion that by being extra-friendly to China and hiding some of our candour, that that would lead to a happier bilateral relationship doesn’t stand up.

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