Sotirian State of Marirana
Sotirian State of Marirana Stato Sotirico d'Marirano | |||||||||
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| 1905–1936 | |||||||||
 Flag
 Coat of arms
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Motto: Dio, Patria, Tradizione God, Fatherland, Tradition | |||||||||
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| Capital | Aquinas | ||||||||
| Common languages | Etrurian | ||||||||
| Religion | Solarian Catholic Church | ||||||||
| Government | Integralist corpratist one-party dictatorship | ||||||||
| Duce | |||||||||
• 1905-1936 | Ottaviano Castello | ||||||||
• 1936 | Enzo Sanmartino | ||||||||
| Legislature | Assembly of Clergy and Corporations | ||||||||
| History | |||||||||
• Establishment | 17th July 1905 | ||||||||
| 1905-1907 | |||||||||
| 1908-1913 | |||||||||
| 1927-1936 | |||||||||
• Disestablished | 18th March 1936 | ||||||||
| Population | |||||||||
• 1906 | 12,000,000 | ||||||||
• 1916 | 14,000,000 | ||||||||
• 1926 | 22,500,000 | ||||||||
• 1936 | 23,587,000 | ||||||||
| Currency | Lira | ||||||||
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The Sotirian State of Marirana (Etrurian: Stato Sotirico d'Marirano) was the state that ruled Marirana from 1902 to its dissolution in 1936. Dominated by Duce Ottaviano Castello the Sotirian State was a one-party dictatorship under the far-right Integrated Union of the Traditionalist Right.
The Sotirian State emerged following Red December and the 1902 presidential election which saw the rise of military officer Ottaviano Castello. Castello subsequently undermined Mariranan democracy abolishing political parties, creating a secret police force the Bureau for the Defence of the Fatherland (commonly known as the Uditria) and eventually abolishing the Free State creating the Sotirian State. The Sotirian State was based on the principles of integralism corporatism, national Catholicism and authoritarianism.
Upon coming to power Castello led the White Terror killing or imprisoning over 300,000 political opponents, turning Marirana into a totalitarian state. Censorship was imposed and a cult of personality around Castello was constructed, presenting him as a semi-monarchical figure.
The government imposed corporatist economic policies in place of the then existing laissez-faire model as well as embracing autarky over free trade. Whilst there was industrial growth, the policy of autarky resulted in a famine known as the "Great Hardship" from 1908-1913 which saw the death of between 500,000-2 million people. The government also launched evangelisation and ethnic cleansing plans to downplay and remove the native aspects of Mariranan culture.
Whilst initially striving for a neutral foreign policy following the rise of Gaullica's National Functionalist regime Castello pivoted to back a clear pro-Gaullican foreign policy whilst exhibiting revanchist goals over territory Marirana had historically lost to Roeselle. Marirana sided with the Entente during the Great War where with assistance from Satucin they led invasions into Roeselle and Asteria. Marirana however was unable to win the conflict and was by 1936 occupied by Alliance forces resulting in the Sotirian State to be dissolved in 1936.
History
Castello's seizure of power
Since 1884 Marirana had been ruled by an oligarchy of republican military officers, southern industrialists and coffee farmers' supported by the Asterian Cocoa Company with the government supporting anti-clerical, free trade and federalism. An attempt to appropriate Asterian cocoa plantations under President Joaquim Durão de Azevedo in 1897 resulted in Asteria to invade Marirana and install a more friendly government under Serafino Minuto-Rizzo. Political instability however continued with Minuto-Rizzo's successor Luigi Balsamo being assassinated in 1903. In mid-1904 a dispute over land ownership in northern Catacosi led to peasant uprising across Asterian-owned plantations. President Giovanni Lombardi requested Asterian military assistance which helped put down the uprising (known as the Catacosi Mission in Asteria).
In both the Cocoa War and the Catacosi Incident a lieutenant general, Ottaviano Castello, had become a national hero for his military exploits having defeated Asterian forces in the Battle of Fort di Maria during the Cocoa War and effectively repressing peasant unrest in Ritaldi during the Catacosi Incident, utilising a militia group known as the Front for the Defence of Marirana (FDM). Castello's charisma and well cultivated relationship with both the clergy and the Conservative Party meant he soon became the dominant figure of Mariranan right-wing politics.
In 1905 Castello consolidate the Conservative Party and the FDM into a new organisation, the Integrated Union of the Traditionalist Right (UIdDT), to contest the election that year. Elections under the Liberals had been for the most part uncontested due to the well entrenched practice of electoral fraud and traditionally high levels of political violence. The creation of the UIdDT was less of an electoral vehicle but more a concentrated by conservative sections of the military and the church to concentrate support for Castello and set the groundwork for a body to later seize power.
Predictably the liberal candidate, Ettore Carozza won the 1905 election with an implausibly high 80% of the popular vote and secure the entirety of the electoral college. However Carozza never took office - on the 20th February Mariranan officers stormed the presidential palace, imprisoning president Lombardi whilst using artillery to shell the national congress. Castello declared himself the legitimate president, stating Carozza had only won the 1905 election due to electoral fraud and that he would endeavour to oversee a return to normalcy in the state.
Consolidation of power
As Castello was supported by a loose heterogeneous coalition of right-wing groups who had differing aims, Castello's assumption of power prompted these groups to start jockeying for power. Right-wing liberals and moderate conservatives wished to restore a business friendly, anti-socialist government, whilst more reactionary elements of the conservatives alongside the clergy aimed for a theocratic state or the retention of presidential dictatorship. The FDM wanted a radical national syndicalist state and the armed forces a military dictatorship.
Castello's response to his weak political position was to appoint a broad section of moderate conservatives and right-wing liberals to his cabinet whilst ensuring military officials such as Amedeo de Rossi occupied roles such as Army and Interior Ministers. One of the first acts of the Castello government was to organise a rural police force, the Department for the Repression of Banditry (DRB), ostensibly to ensure peace in the countryside but which in reality had already begun rounding up political opponents and executing them. Castello also dismissed the entirety of the Supreme Court for being pawns of the Liberal party and appointed loyal judges.
This move led to the moderate faction of the UIdDT to withdraw support for Castello. In response to this Castello with military backing forcibly dissolved the national congress and called an election, which was neither free nor opponents. Liberal and moderate conservatives were beaten at polling stations with voting being held in public. This resulted in the UIdDT to score a landslide supermajority taking almost every seat in congress. With his hand strengthened, Castello dismissed moderates from his cabinet and filled it with loyalists. Having control over the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government Castello on the 30th July 1905 passed the dissoluzione decree which abolished much of the institutions of republic and created the Sotirian State of Marirana, a single-party Catholic dictatorship centred around Castello.
White Terror
The new regime upon taking power faced numerous opponents - loyalists to the fifth republic, liberals, the nascent socialist, anarchist and cooperativist movements; Protestant Sotirians, freethinkers and intellectuals; and native peasants. As well as this, Marirana's neighbours - most prominently the Federation of Asteria - were wary of the new regime due to a worry of the possibility of a revival in revanchist sentiment in Marirana. Partly as a strategy to consolidate his own power Castello declared in July 1905 that another peasant uprising "fuelled by socialistic atheism imported from Marolevia" was imminent and that the DRB would be deployed to "root out subversive activity". By framing this repression as preventing a potential peasant uprising - similar to the one that occurred in 1904 - Asterian cocoa companies gave cautious support to the new government.
The announcement of measures to curb this supposed peasant rebellion is commonly seen to be the beginning of the "White Terror" in Marirana. With the support of the Solarian Catholic Church who justified repressive measures on the basis Castello was defending Sotirianity and endorsed a national crusade against "the vices of republicanism, liberalism and socialism" Castello ordered the DRB - now numbering one thousand members, organised in forty-two squads - to enter cities, towns and villages to root out enemies of the state. According to Massimiliano Travaglio, who would later become head of the DRB, "the masses are no better than animals and you can't expect them not to become infected with the virus of socialism and atheism. After all, rats and lice carry the plague. Our duty is simply to clean the nation of disease". There was a concentrated effort by the church, landowners and the military to dehumanise those of lower social standing (peasants and the growing working class).
A contemporary Asterian journalist, Pierre Compère-Morel, described the modus operandi of the DRB as the following after visiting the country in 1906 -
"A band of these so-called anti-banditry brigades - usually brutish men with hard faces and cruel eyes - would enter a village or a town. They would immediately gather the local clergymen to identify who was they would call a traitor where they would go around houses, dragging out those who the priests stated were enemies of the state or God. Of course they would often "widen" these searches to find others who fitted the description. These poor souls would be hauled into the town hall, where they would be subject to the most dreadful torture to "cleanse them of their sins". One would of course be unable to see this torture, but you would hear the animal like howls that accompanied them throughout the night. It would be the next mourning when the church bells would ring and these people were brought into the town square. You could see now their missing fingers, their teeth rearranged, their bloodstained scalps. They would then be shot in front of the town into a pre-dug pit, and the townsfolk told to bury the bodies. If you refused, you too would be shot. The men would than mount their horses and move onto the next town."
Higher ranking dissidents, including former liberal politicians such as Ettore Carozza, were formally tried in military courts where they were often sentenced to death. In March 1906 in order to formalise the structure of repression Castello ended the DRB's indiscriminate raiding of towns instead setting up 6 concentration camps around the country. In these camps human experimentation - especially relating to the idea of "atavistic born criminals" - was common, with lobotomy particularly embraced in order to "remove socialistic, atheistic influence" from the populace. Babies were also confiscated from their mothers to be adopted by families designated patriotic Sotirians or placed in the hands of the church.
The White Terror was eased slowly between 1907-1910 as many of the real and imagined opponents of Castello faded from the political scene and the regime became secure. In 1910 Castello ordered for the concentration camps to be converted into conventional prisons as the states repressive mechanisms had become effective in of themselves in suppressing dissent. Its estimated between the 1905-1910 period 60,000-100,000 people died as a result of the White Terror.
Autarky
Great Hardship
<imgur thumb="yes" w="250" comment="Native people fleeing famine areas during the Great Hardship.">poDjhE6.png</imgur>
"Glorious Decade"
Military build-up
Alliance with Gaullica
Great War
Invasion of Roeselle
Expansion of the war
Defeat
Government
The Sotirian State was an autocratic regime built around the figure of Ottaviano Castello who served as leader of the government, military and the sole legal party the Integrated Union of the Traditionalist Right (UldDT) which respectively served as the executive, coercive and ideological arms of the state. The government was operated on a "pyramid" model in which Castello as Il Duce was at the "apex" of the pyramid and delegated power to other organs that were reliant on his authority.
The Sotirian State did not possess a codified constitution. The dissoluzione decree of 1905 served as a de facto governing document, stipulating that the head of state was the Duce and that the previous organs of state were permanently dissolved. Further decrees outlawed political parties, created the Assembly and stipulated that the UldDT was the single legal political party. The post of il Duce served as the head of state and the head of government heading the executive and serving as commander-in-chief of the military. The Duce was elected in a "popular consultation" every five years - voters would be asked to approve of extending Castello's term by five years in a yes/no referendum. This was the only election that took place in the Sotirian State, and voting was done in public; those who recorded a no vote would often be subject to negative repercussions. The legislature was the Assembly of Clergy and Corporations which consisted of appointed clerics and the heads of the national corporations designed by the government. The Assembly was a purely advisory body and only met once a year. All members of government were required to be members of the UldDT.
In practice governance was exercised by two entities - the military high command and the official cabinet, which were both represented within the UldDT's Executive Bureau. Castello refused to appoint a military officer to cabinet after 1907 instead appointing technocrats to head ministries; however cabinet ministries often shared responsibility over certain matters with the military bureau's set up in 1906 to co-currently direct government affairs.
The system created as a result from this structure encouraged competition between military and civilian officials; ministers and bureaucrats were dependent on personal patronage with Castello to exercise effective power. This ensured that the system retained an autocracy as power laid ultimately with the personal authority of Castello.
Ideology
In a speech to the Assembly of Clergy and Corporations in 1907 Castello stated his government was based "on the principles of order, God and fatherland". The UldDT, which functioned as the ideological arm of the regime, had ideological basing in integralism, authoritarianism, national Catholicism, anti-socialism and anti-liberalism. Although his government was part of the Entente, historian Pat Cook states that Castello "is not in the academic sense considered a national functionalist, being perhaps better described as proto-functionalist."
Historian Carlo Gentolini stated that the Castello regime was "hardly an ideological monolith" pointing to the UldDT as being relatively heterogeneous in ideological terms and many government members straddling a wide range of right-wing thought. Whilst there were extreme members of the government who preached irredentist or ethnic nationalism such as foreign minister Roberto Fico others such as Finance Minister Alcidi Prodi were considered to be continuing the conservative tradition of former president Luigi Balsamo.
Military
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The military of the Sotirian state was known as the Armed Forces of Marirana, consisting of an army, navy and after 1916 an airforce. The military was considered one of the pillars of the regime, with its members swearing an oath to Castello and being under his command, with the general staff being seen as one of the most powerful political actors in the state.
Prior to the rise of the Sotirian state military spending already took up the majority of government spending importing weapons from the Federation and Gaullica. However under the former system the officer class was oversized, with officers being appointed on the basis of balancing between liberal and conservative factions rather than merit. Upon coming to power Castello and his conservative allies in the military purged the liberal officer class and began to focus on more meritocratic officer progression, especially under the chief of staff Costanzo D'Annunzio from 1919-1932. Conscription was introduced for all males between the ages of 16-64 in 1914.
During the leadup to the great war, Marirana increased its military spending and expanded its military capabilities, buying modern naval vessels from Gaullica. At the declaration of war Marirana had mobilised over 2 million soldiers into 5 field armies of 250,000 men, putting a significant strain on its at the time 30 million population. By the end of the war over 2.5 million men total had been mobilised into the Mariranan army. Mariranan sustained 2,337,000 causalities (of which 474,525 were killed) meaning 82% of those mobilised were causalities.