Masks Of Conquest Quotes

But my mother, Theia, used the time she served the Daglan to learn all she could about their instruments of conquest. The Dread Trove, we called it in secret. The Mask, the Harp, the Crown, and the Horn.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.

It's a lovely mask," Sara said, toying with the narrow black silk ribbons before tying it in place. Monique had artfully fashioned it out of black silk and lace, and glinting blue sapphires that matched her gown. "I'm not nervous at all." It was true. She felt as if some reckless stranger had replaced her usual cautious self. The midnight-blue gown molded to her figure, cut so low that her breasts seemed ready to spill from the meager bodice. A broad satin sash fastened with a gold buckle emphasized her small waist. The mask covered the upper half of her face but revealed her lips, which Monique and Lily had insisted on darkening with the faintest hint of rouge. Laboriously they had arranged her hair in a cluster of curls on top of her head, allowing a few ringlets to dangle teasingly against her cheeks and neck. A perfume that reminded Sara of roses blended with some deeper foresty scent had been applied sparingly to her bosom and throat. "A triumph," Monique had declared, gloating over the transformation. "Beautiful, worldly, but still fresh and young... ah, chérie, you will make many conquests tonight!" "Stunning," Lily had said, beaming with delight. "What a stir she'll cause.

Bryce stared at the hard-faced, beautiful female who could have rivaled the Hind for sheer badassery and beauty. Theia. Silene’s next words only confirmed how alike the ancient Fae Queen and the Hind were: But my mother, Theia, used the time she served the Daglan to learn all she could about their instruments of conquest. The Dread Trove, we called it in secret. The Mask, the Harp, the Crown, and the Horn. From the corner of her vision, Bryce spied Nesta glancing her way at the last word. The Horn had been sister to the Mask, and the Harp Nesta had mentioned. It had come from here, and worse, was part of some deadly arsenal of the Asteri— And Theia. The carving in the tunnel of the crowned, masked queen—Theia—flashed in Bryce’s memory. She’d been holding two instruments: a horn and a harp. The Daglan, Silene went on, always quarreled over who should control the Trove, so more often than not, the Trove went unused. It was their downfall.

The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.

LaForche's never-was has-never been emaciated spirit was now as it had always been, hole’ up by vapidity and things intangible. Yet it looked so common and ordinary, blenting into the masses using the trogs as a mask to hide itself (later Christina recalled Thomas saying that the sleuth Man said there was nothing unnatural like the common, and the detective was right. “The Fork” was a four-star pronged pointless entity, a spirit without form or life, except now it was evident, his external body displaying to all the leftovers of his empty writhing, splastic visage. Short of sheet and simply put, the girl had out-foiled him—. With the wolves of humiliation tearing the meat right off of his soul, he continued in his loner power mongering ways. Once formidable, they now reeked of rancid mal-diminishment. This is all he had left–and knew it, an armload of empty conquests, but the prize, the one he had desired and wanted so much, had eluded his hounding dogmatic futile, empty and sterile grasp. The power of powerlessness tonned his shoulders, gashing him and his god of pride apart. He shot a quick glarance toward the wall phone thinking of “The Bix,” Kerta’s # 1 Ace problem solving “mechanic.” --OnFelipe LaForche , Villain The lady and the Samurai

She stayed away from gender politics because, in her own words, she was still “broken” in that area, but worked on new rooms chronicling and displaying the rise of the new “identitarian” far right, the arrival in America of the European ultraist movement whose birthplace was the French youth movement, the Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire, and programming events around racial and national identity, a series she called Identity Crisis, dealing in general with racial and religious issues, but focusing, above all, on the schismatic convulsion that had gripped America following the triumph of the cackling cartoon narcissist America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans’ masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath. Sixty million. Sixty million. And ninety million more too uncaring to vote. .... At some later point when we were in bed together I added more prosaic thoughts to the magic of the song. It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you. There was only the holding of hands and slowly learning not to be afraid of the dark. Shut up, she said, and drew me toward her.