Joshua Ding-Eagle

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Joshua Ding-Eagle (born Joshua Dingle in 1620 in Avakair, Goldshire) is the current president of the Republic of Shimmerspring and supreme commander of the Shimmerspring Republican Guard (formerly the Istvanistani Patriotic Army)

Until the Kalirion Fracture of 1671, Ding-Eagle was a member of Shireroth's Socialist Alliance and had represented the party in the Folksraad until expelled in 1665 for anti–Præta rhetoric and refusal to disavow violence. He had since the early 1660s identified the Shirerithian culture and cognition as the greatest threat to the proletariat of Shireroth. Præta, the Shirerithian language and lingua franca in most of Benacian Shireroth outside Elwynn and today's Sanama, was in his view the main conveyor of all the factors that allowed slavery and nobility to co-exist. In order for both slavery and nobility to be erradicated, Præta had to be erradicated too, along with all other symbols of slavery and nobility. Shireroth needed, he wrote in several books, a culture revolution.

After the violence of the Kalirion Fracture, he joined, and became a local leader of, the Revolutionary Army of Crisco, but left it once he realized it was a Verionist-funded guerrilla movement without true socialist ideology. He escaped to Highpass, found like-minded individuals there, where they set up the Istvanistani Patriotic Army. With Istvanistani, they group referred not only to the language, but to the ideals and values brought with it. Istvanistan was the egalitarian mythological land of the past, and the adjective signalled egalitarianism and optimism. The group, suffering in Highpass, saw the booming egalitarian state south of them, Sanama, as a threat to their work in Highpass. Rather than people there standing up and fighting for the IPA ideals, people tried to get to Sanama and be free and happy there. Membership in the IPA fell, as did funding, and the situation in Highpass grew more and more dire. Accordingly, the IPA decided to make a name of themselves for all the slaves across Shireroth, by attacking Sanama through a series of attacks. This way, people would not see Sanama as a saviour, but an enemy.

The idea backfired, however, with Sanama, once undergoing a military coup, decided to simply go in Highpass and take it (something that Sanama had not done since 1671 despite being hinted to it by Shireroth at several times that Shireroth could not and would not object to such an annexation). The IPA moved east to Shimmerspring, an area ever more impoverished and derelict than Highpass, and set up the Republic of Shimmerspring there with Ding-Eagle as leader. It was hoped that if the IPA received some legitimacy, they could be the saviour-land of all the slaves of Shireroth and become a true power to reckoned with. Once slaves had been freed in Shimmerspring, there would be no need for any more wars and fights, but rather, everyone could live happily in Shimmerspring instead, free of nobility, slavery and the bourgeois values of Shirerithian feudalism.

He is presently under arrest in Eriksburg, Drak-Modan, pending formal charges once the investigation to his alleged crimes concludes.