Well i must say that this ending was better than i had hoped for. Finally, a bit of resolution, finality, and still trouble to come. I will admit, like other fans of this series....it seems that end is coming sooner rather than later. After year 7....i will be one of the first to admit that i will be sad that after the final chapter of year 7, there will be no more alexandra quick books to read. All great works must come to an end, but this will be the 3rd time that I will mourn the loss of a classic. I can always re-read them or have them put into a hardback form to read later and pass them on to my kids when they need a good distraction from this terrible world. Ive rather grown quite attached to many of the characters in this series and will miss them when its all said and done.😥😥😥
But the end is NOT HERE YET!!! We have one more epic to enjoy before the final curtain call. Make it the best of all Inverarity. If you are pleased with it, to hell with people who don't like it. Ive been a fan of this series since AQATLB was released....and that was after i DEVOURED "Hogwarts Houses Divided" and after i took a shot at reading AQATTC; and consequently, devouring that book as well. And attending the first and i think only Quick-e con in Maryland. Be well Inverarity, may the holidays light up your life with love from family and us "Quick" fans. Until the final book, Be well
You have clearly studied the issues that occur at the end of a civil war or when a constitutional settlement is overthrown. In our country we had a situation like that at the end of the second world war; made more complicated by the fact that, as with Medea and the Dark Convention, some of the liberators were hardly better than the monsters they overthrew. About half the Italian partisan army was Communist, and these were the real thing, who took their orders straight from Stalin. Their designated leader, Palmiro Togliatti, had been one of the most servile and swinish of Stalin's bureaucratic henchmen before the war. From a couple of my answers on Quora:
"The partisan armies changed directly into parties, of which five went on to become the backbone of Italian politics: Liberals (conservative), Catholics, Republicans (liberal). Socialists (later split into Social Democrats and Socialists proper), and Communists. The Italian Parliament was full of ex-Partisans, as were local administrations and other institutions. The political and intellectual climate of the post-war years was largely shaped by these forces, of which the three largest - Communists, Catholics, and Socialists - had always been excluded from Italian government until then, both under the liberal government of united Italy and under Fascism. It was a genuine revolution, though a fairly silent one.
While Italy was not remotely comparable with Germany and Japan, there had been some pretty horrendous war crimes, especially in Yugoslavia - where the hatred between Italians and Slavs went back to Hasburg times - and in the conquest of Ethiopia, where the monstrous Rodolfo Graziani, a man with nothing to envy to Hitler and Stalin's worst henchmen, had been Viceroy for two bloodstained years. (His replacement, sent when even Mussolini realized that homicidal brutality was not the key to success, was the royal Duke of Aosta, a gentleman whom everyone respected, to the extent that once Haile Selassie had re-conquered the country, he showed him signal regard.)
Part of the issue is actually Communist machinations; the Communist leader Togliatti, briefly Minister of the Interior in the first post-war Italian government, issued a decree of amnesty for all war crimes - which, at the time most Italians thought were high treason and supporting the Nazis during the last few years of war. Stalin and Togliatti hoped to take over Italy by legal means, and actually had quite a few ex-Fascists in their ranks. And the public in general knew little, and still does not know enough, about Italian behaviour in Yugoslavia. One manRodolfo Graziani, who absolutely should have been hanged, was not even tried because of squalid jurisdictional quarrels between Italian and English military courts; another, Roatta, was a collaborator of Pietro Badoglio, the army officer who was called to replace Mussolini, and while Badoglio was himself a despicable failure, his protection was enough to avoid any close investigation into Roatta’s activities. Many Fascist leaders had been executed during the last two years of war. And Italy’s change of front in 1943 had been genuine and heartfelt, proved by the death of over 60,000 partisans and 40,000 army regulars fighting on the allied side. Among the Western allies, there was no such bitterness against Italy as there was against Germany and Japan, whose populations had supported their leaderships to the last man and to the last inch of ground.
But at the end of the day, Fascism was not properly eradicated. There was barely any effort. A few thousand hardliners left for Argentina, and the rest of the veterans of the puppet Fascist regime of 1943-45, and millions of party members from the previous twenty years, just settled down under the new democratic government. After Togliatti's amnesty, most of those who had served Mussolini went on to work for the Republic. Some of them did well, others were scum. There even was a small legacy Fascist party, tolerated for the sake of civil peace, from which eventually Giorgia Meloni's party sprang up.
The worst case was in science, because it could so easily have been redressed. It was not a matter of people who had been in the job for decades, but of a recent wave of opportunist nobodies who could have been turfed out to everyone’s positive advantage. In 1938, the nazi-imitation Race Laws devastated Italian science, sending dozens of the finest Italian scientists into exile or ruin. These men were replaced by careerist nobodies one of whom showed in public that he was not even able to consult encyclopedia entries in his supposed specialist subject. The blow to Italian science was devastating, but it only really became irreparable when nobody, after 1945, though of getting these men out of their undeserved places. The result is that science was one area where the remarkable and long-lasting burst of profitable creativity experienced by post-war Italy did not happen. Italian Nobel prizewinning scientists after the war can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over, and all of them worked in foreign, usually American, universities. Italy remained a scientific Third World, and the scientific ignorance among the Italian public is scary. The fact is that, in other areas of learning (history and archaeology, for instance) the people who had been Fascist were, at least, highly competent, not infrequently world-class; but the scientists appointees of 1938 were none of these things.
Other areas in which Fascist personnel remained in service include the police, with the results you can imagine. When Alessandro Pertini, then Speaker of the House of Deputies, former partisan chief and future President, visited Milan in 1969 in the aftermath of a horrible terrorist outrage, he refused to shake the hand of the local chief of police, whom he recognized as the man who had tortured him during the war.
Equally important, in my view, is the number of people with fascist roots who have had significant, and even major, careers in the arts. Fascism certainly did not exclude talent, and a good few of the best post-war artists in many fields from children’s comics to classic theatre - including Nobel Prizewinner Dario Fo - had Fascist backgrounds. The Fascist doctrine and period are all but universally condemned, but these men could not help but take a certain set of attitudes to their work which tended to make for recognizable Fascist views and forms of behaviour, from the machismo devil-may-care of Vasco Rossi’s Vita Spericolata to the authoritarian and communitarian undertones of some really beautiful children’s comics stories (the Reginella stories in Topolino,, for instance)
That's all a very interesting topic, but is this here the right place to talk about it? Inverarity is a very good fanfic writer, but not the man who has the power to repair what's broken in Italy.
And I'm saying that as someone who isn't a fan of "comrade" Stalin either. (In some alt-historical text I'm working on, I have one character comment: "People tawking about how great Stalin was 'defending his country' just don't get it. He wasn't! The first days after Barbarossa started, he sat around uselessly in his Dacha, crying like a lovesick finicchio 'How could Adolf hurt me like that!' And when he finally got around leading a war as he was supposed to: His fans don't get that they have to wonder what anyone else in his position would have done. Do they believe that any other leader of Russia but Stalin would have dropped over and surrendered the moment the first Wehrmacht soldier crossed the border?")
I am a historian. I have hundreds of sources, plus the stuff I know from my own experience; I am 62 and I lived most of my life in Italy. I met people who served under Mussolini, people who knew the bastard, and people who were still faithful to his memory and thought that was a honourable thing.
As for the purpose of these comments, it was just to show how what Inverarity imagined for his wizarding America really does reflect what happens, time and again, in actual history. I saw it happen among white South Africans in 1994, and among Russians three years earlier. But my country is what I know best, of course.
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inverarity) wrote2024-11-15 08:36 am
A fitting end
But the end is NOT HERE YET!!! We have one more epic to enjoy before the final curtain call. Make it the best of all Inverarity. If you are pleased with it, to hell with people who don't like it. Ive been a fan of this series since AQATLB was released....and that was after i DEVOURED "Hogwarts Houses Divided" and after i took a shot at reading AQATTC; and consequently, devouring that book as well. And attending the first and i think only Quick-e con in Maryland.
Be well Inverarity, may the holidays light up your life with love from family and us "Quick" fans.
Until the final book,
Be well
-wodcdre
Congratulations!
Re: Congratulations!
When civil wars end
"The partisan armies changed directly into parties, of which five went on to become the backbone of Italian politics: Liberals (conservative), Catholics, Republicans (liberal). Socialists (later split into Social Democrats and Socialists proper), and Communists. The Italian Parliament was full of ex-Partisans, as were local administrations and other institutions. The political and intellectual climate of the post-war years was largely shaped by these forces, of which the three largest - Communists, Catholics, and Socialists - had always been excluded from Italian government until then, both under the liberal government of united Italy and under Fascism. It was a genuine revolution, though a fairly silent one.
While Italy was not remotely comparable with Germany and Japan, there had been some pretty horrendous war crimes, especially in Yugoslavia - where the hatred between Italians and Slavs went back to Hasburg times - and in the conquest of Ethiopia, where the monstrous Rodolfo Graziani, a man with nothing to envy to Hitler and Stalin's worst henchmen, had been Viceroy for two bloodstained years. (His replacement, sent when even Mussolini realized that homicidal brutality was not the key to success, was the royal Duke of Aosta, a gentleman whom everyone respected, to the extent that once Haile Selassie had re-conquered the country, he showed him signal regard.)
Part of the issue is actually Communist machinations; the Communist leader Togliatti, briefly Minister of the Interior in the first post-war Italian government, issued a decree of amnesty for all war crimes - which, at the time most Italians thought were high treason and supporting the Nazis during the last few years of war. Stalin and Togliatti hoped to take over Italy by legal means, and actually had quite a few ex-Fascists in their ranks. And the public in general knew little, and still does not know enough, about Italian behaviour in Yugoslavia. One manRodolfo Graziani, who absolutely should have been hanged, was not even tried because of squalid jurisdictional quarrels between Italian and English military courts; another, Roatta, was a collaborator of Pietro Badoglio, the army officer who was called to replace Mussolini, and while Badoglio was himself a despicable failure, his protection was enough to avoid any close investigation into Roatta’s activities. Many Fascist leaders had been executed during the last two years of war. And Italy’s change of front in 1943 had been genuine and heartfelt, proved by the death of over 60,000 partisans and 40,000 army regulars fighting on the allied side. Among the Western allies, there was no such bitterness against Italy as there was against Germany and Japan, whose populations had supported their leaderships to the last man and to the last inch of ground.
(continued below)
Re: When civil wars end
The worst case was in science, because it could so easily have been redressed. It was not a matter of people who had been in the job for decades, but of a recent wave of opportunist nobodies who could have been turfed out to everyone’s positive advantage. In 1938, the nazi-imitation Race Laws devastated Italian science, sending dozens of the finest Italian scientists into exile or ruin. These men were replaced by careerist nobodies one of whom showed in public that he was not even able to consult encyclopedia entries in his supposed specialist subject. The blow to Italian science was devastating, but it only really became irreparable when nobody, after 1945, though of getting these men out of their undeserved places. The result is that science was one area where the remarkable and long-lasting burst of profitable creativity experienced by post-war Italy did not happen. Italian Nobel prizewinning scientists after the war can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over, and all of them worked in foreign, usually American, universities. Italy remained a scientific Third World, and the scientific ignorance among the Italian public is scary. The fact is that, in other areas of learning (history and archaeology, for instance) the people who had been Fascist were, at least, highly competent, not infrequently world-class; but the scientists appointees of 1938 were none of these things.
Other areas in which Fascist personnel remained in service include the police, with the results you can imagine. When Alessandro Pertini, then Speaker of the House of Deputies, former partisan chief and future President, visited Milan in 1969 in the aftermath of a horrible terrorist outrage, he refused to shake the hand of the local chief of police, whom he recognized as the man who had tortured him during the war.
Equally important, in my view, is the number of people with fascist roots who have had significant, and even major, careers in the arts. Fascism certainly did not exclude talent, and a good few of the best post-war artists in many fields from children’s comics to classic theatre - including Nobel Prizewinner Dario Fo - had Fascist backgrounds. The Fascist doctrine and period are all but universally condemned, but these men could not help but take a certain set of attitudes to their work which tended to make for recognizable Fascist views and forms of behaviour, from the machismo devil-may-care of Vasco Rossi’s Vita Spericolata to the authoritarian and communitarian undertones of some really beautiful children’s comics stories (the Reginella stories in Topolino,, for instance)
Re: When civil wars end
And I'm saying that as someone who isn't a fan of "comrade" Stalin either. (In some alt-historical text I'm working on, I have one character comment: "People tawking about how great Stalin was 'defending his country' just don't get it. He wasn't! The first days after Barbarossa started, he sat around uselessly in his Dacha, crying like a lovesick finicchio 'How could Adolf hurt me like that!' And when he finally got around leading a war as he was supposed to: His fans don't get that they have to wonder what anyone else in his position would have done. Do they believe that any other leader of Russia but Stalin would have dropped over and surrendered the moment the first Wehrmacht soldier crossed the border?")
Back to your text: Which sources are you using?
Re: When civil wars end
As for the purpose of these comments, it was just to show how what Inverarity imagined for his wizarding America really does reflect what happens, time and again, in actual history. I saw it happen among white South Africans in 1994, and among Russians three years earlier. But my country is what I know best, of course.