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Published: 2012-10-29 23:46:39 +0000 UTC; Views: 22324; Favourites: 104; Downloads: 260
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This is a request map from ElViceJeffe, showing the world of the Draka-screw fanfics "Proof Through the Night" and "Breaking Strain" ( [link] and [link] )In this world, the US made a negotiated peace with Japan to turn their full attention to the Draka, and launched a nuclear first strike against their homeland while they had their hands full in Europe. After some serious messiness, the Drakan Empire collapsed, and the US, the British Empire, and South America - about the only parts of the globe _not_ fucked over or Japanese - set about picking up the pieces.
In the middle east reestablishing states wasn't too hard - where the locals hadn't been exterminated, the occupation was only a generation old, and the locals were able to recall what things had been like before, although hampered by a serious shortage of former local leadership (all exterminated). In Africa, however, much of the area had been under Draka control for a lifetime or more, and state reconstruction was more often state creation: the US did it's best, and smacked the UK's fingers when they started talking protectorates and stages of self-government, but things were often pretty muddled. The new African states launched into the future with better infrastructure and more industry than OTL (even after the nukings) and with a trained class of engineers, agriculturalists, etc., but not a soul trained in banking, politics, economics, history, administration, etc., and peoples deeply scarred by often generations of slavery.
Some African tribes were almost exterminated or entirely displaced from their homelands: a great deal of fuss and bother took place as a result of millions trying to "return home" only to find other people living there. The Somalis were fortunate in having a chunk of largely worthless desert to return home to: other peoples (see, Afghanistan on the map) were less fortunate. Some areas were so ethnically messed up and culturally crushed that entirely new multiethic states were created, usually with the Draka version of English as a common language given the lack of anything else.
(There was some talk of creating a unified black free Africa, but the international authorities felt that the results would most likely be bloody chaos, and if it worked, well, then you would get a new great power composed of angry, anti-white black people, no? Can't have anyone controlling that much of the world's raw materials, anyway: not in the US/British/Brazilian/whatever interest...)
Another ethnic hodgepodge was Madagascar, which made it more justifiable to "return" the non-Draka locals to the mainland to create a Draka "reservation" there (dickish to the Malagasy blacks and asians? Yes, but the trouble is that with Draka around everyone else looks so civilized they have trouble realizing that they are being dicks when they're not, say, impaling babies). The Draka were dumped there to sink or swim, and embargoed for a wide variety of technical and industrial goods. In spite of basic food aid, some starved in the early years.
Europe, invaded by the Draka as well as overrun by *Nazis [1], was even more devastated than in our WWII, taking nearly two decades to get up to speed economically, although it was spared the further joys of Communism in the east, and is a bit poorer in the west than OTL relative to the US, although without said joys Eastern Europe is actually relatively a good bit wealthier. France and the Low countries were only briefly Draka-occupied, and Spain and Portugal weren't occupied at all (they were nuked during the Draka's abortive invasion, but those were little Hiroshima-type bombs with limited radius of destruction and fallout). Having also missed out on Franco's nastiness, Spain is close to France in standards of living and ahead of either Italy.
Germany was more thoroughly de-*Nazified than OTL, and this leads to a certain resentment of Americans in the older generations, who lost parents and brothers and friends to US and UK-run trials. Still, there is no *Nazi revival in Germany, and Germans are often ostentatiously anti-racist and internationalist, to the point of being rather annoying.
The former USSR, overrun first by Nazis and then by Draka, lost another 15 million or so over the OTL losses, and was reconstituted by fragments of the Red Army and Party holding out in Siberia: starting off as a "pinkish" military regime in the postwar period, it has developed into a Russian-nationalist regime with a few threadbare remnants of Socialism (it still calls itself the "Union of Socialist Republics", the "Soviet" having been dropped somewhere along the way) with a standard relative to the US comparable to OTL South Korea: not having suffered the demographic collapse of OTL, in spite of its even larger losses it is only slightly less populous than the same area OTL, with perhaps 190 million inhabitants. The regime managed to extend its control temporarily into the chaotic post-Draka south Caucuses (Baku in particular) but later withdrew to consolidate its Slavic core.
India is a struggling Great Power to Be, with a multiethnic and multireligious internal politics of byzantine complexity.
The most noteable political process of the last half-century was the almost-cold-war between Japan and the US, between racist imperialism (often accused of being "Draka lite") and US democratic assimilationism. The Japanese cooperated with the US in the postwar era, helped set up this world's equivalent of the UN, helped bring order to the chaotic post-Draka situation, etc. But once the Japanese had their own atomic bomb and the means to deliver it to the US, they began to compete ferociously for influence with the US, world wide. If their population and capacity for supporting a vastly bloated military were less than than of the USSR, they were also better at converting pure science into useable products and weapons, and kept up with the US technologically rather better than the USSR. Although the arms race never got as intense as between the US and USSR (there never was a Fulda Gap to worry about), it got rather unpleasant at times, especially with the "Madagascar missile crisis" of 1964, in which extremist elements of the Drakan population allied with the Japanese to make Madagascar Japan's regional catspaw.
Fortunately the situation was resolved, in part due to the Draka government itself defeating the accompanying coup attempt and carrying out some ferocious purges: and Japan in the end found the project a total propaganda flop, since any Japanese-Draka alliance was a red flag to both Africans and Middle Easterners: it took _decades_ for Japan's reputation to recover.
As of 2012, a tepid Detente exists between the Japanese and the US, Japan finding paying the bills for a proper Cold War increasingly difficult as their population grow goes negative (if later than OTL: traditional mores continued longer with no US occupation) and productivity gains drop. Japan was driven out of China by protracted guerilla warfare supported both by independent China and the Russians, and hangs on grimly in Korea: Taiwan is fairly quiet so far (at this statement millions of Japanese knock on wood). The Japanese have a number of allies, but they are mostly third-world dictatorships of one sort or another.
China has had a different experience than OTL, if just as messy. The Tai'ping were rather more successful and for a while ruled over almost all of China, but their empire fell apart messily, and Japan and other European nations moved in. Currently a Tai'ping remnant surives in the south, allied to Japan to avoid being swallowed by China proper. In a world with the Draka and the mega-USA, people still think conquest and imperialism _works_: the idea that Tai'ping China (majority God-followers nowadays) might be unassimilable is out of place.
The US is effin' huge: it has assimilated most of America north of the southern continent, as well as the Philippines. Catholics are the single largest denomination, although a plurality rather than a majority: economic convergence has meant an early demographic transition (although Filippinos still like kids) and there has been a fair amount of conversion from Catholicism to evangelic Christianity. It is by far the world's largest economy, and is some 60% richer than Europeans on a per capita level, and it has been long enough since the Draka were destroyed that the gratitude has largely faded.
Technology is more advanced than OTL: there was more of a "first world" and the Japanese were higher-tech compeditors than the USSR. It has not gone wizzing off into the empirian as in the baseline Drakaverse, though. There is working fusion power and genetically engineered guard-bears and bases on the Moon and advanced cancer-fighting gene therapy and even the internet (the rather insanely security-conscious computer systems of the Drakaverse did not develop), but nobody is genetically re-engineering themselves into supermen or building conversion drive starships (although the Japanese are screwing around with antimatter, somewhere in the north of Sakhalin island).
And what of the Draka? The Madagascar Missile Crisis made a lot of people go "oh, there go the Draka again", but the fact that the radical faction ended up crushed by the legitimate government made people thoughtful. It is nowadays seen as a turning point: people came to note the Draka's real grudge as to raids and terrorist attacks by African mainlanders and the eternal "Malagasy Liberation Front" which technological restrictions limited their ability to defend against. And others noted with a certain grudging admiration the extraodinary efforts the Draka had made to make Madagascar support their twenty-plus millions (lack of those black nursemaids plus the simple problem of feeding new mouths had put a serious wrench in the Draka drive for large families).
The Draka move to redemption in US and other American eyes was slow, slower for Europeans (the Japanese authorities had rarely given a crap about Draka atrocities). But over five decades, there has been a slow normalization and removal of the more onerous restrictions on the Drakan economy and military. Today, in 2012, although the Draka are bound by international law from developing nuclear weapons, its navy and airforce can see off any African invader. A regular form of republican government is in place, and the standard of living is comparable to, say, Spain. The Draka republic is increasingly seen as a "normal" state, at least in places they didn't invade.
And yet...
The Draka are still a people "few, and not liked." They are still loudly loathed and condemned in a vast swathe of land from Italy to Iran, from the Black Sea Straits to the Cape. Birth rates are up, and there are now 35 million people in Madagascar. Military service remains universal. The Draka do not trust the rest of the world to let them be normal. Stregnth and the ability to defend themselves are still important. The modern generation is fascinated by technology, and like the oddball Arabians, seek to make their nation a center of high tech. There is a fascination with space travel, with cybernetics, with genetic engineering and transhumanism...
(Note I have made a few changes from the baseline scenario, so don't come complaining about Newfoundland not being British or something).
[1] Nazis, with a divergence a century and a half earlier? Later Stirling said something re Hitler being blond and having an eyepatch, but meh.
Related content
Comments: 32
Whiteshore1 [2015-08-23 05:59:41 +0000 UTC]
Here are a few points about a realistic Draka
1.Β upload.wikimedia.org/wikipediaβ¦
Here is a map of the Communist world at it's height which means that a "realistic" Draka doesn't need to be an Afro-Eurasia spanning empire to be a global threat to the "Free World".
2. Have them be pragmatic enough to figure out the term "puppet state".
3. Have them use carrot in treating serfs
4. And finally, please have a free underclass of people ala Colonial subjects OTL who are either too white or too troublesome to enserf (if not both)
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Eheucaius17 [2015-05-10 15:21:07 +0000 UTC]
What on earth are the draka? Are they aliens or something?
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ChowHound37 In reply to Eheucaius17 [2015-06-02 12:54:43 +0000 UTC]
Ultra-militaristic Γbermensch white supremacist slavers hellbent on Aryan world domination descended from Revolutionary War Crown Loyalists and a bunch of other white people who somehow managed to conquer half the world without anyone so much as batting an eye and then enslaving everybody not one of "their" stock and nuking/ethnically cleansing entire civilian populations in response to even the most trivial of resistance attacks. They even make the NAZIS look good.
Details here (spoilers though):Β en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domiβ¦
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husk55 [2012-11-02 14:53:44 +0000 UTC]
Read 'Proof through the Night,' and I was a little disappointed by the lack of view points from the occupied Europeans, but whatever.
I'd like to ask about the fates of the various European Resistance Organizations (as well as whatever count's as 'bushmen' in the middle east) and the Janissaries left behind who would have undoubtedly fought it out to decide who now ruled the now Drakanless Europe and the Middle East. In the epilogue, 'Proof through the Night' there was a enclave in La Spezia that was taken over by the Master Sergents, and I wonder what became of them.
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ChaserGrey In reply to husk55 [2012-11-05 14:56:39 +0000 UTC]
Hey there,
There's a discussion thread going on over at [link] about the story. I have some notes on the state of Europe before the nuclear strikes, but after is never anything I mapped out in detail...which, of course, means it's open for someone to write.
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00idiot [2012-11-01 01:44:10 +0000 UTC]
I would like to add that I seem to recall the original story having the USSR still broken up and the various rumps in Siberia, etc. being puppets for Japan and/or quarrel-pieces in the Cold War
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QuantumBranching In reply to 00idiot [2012-11-01 04:03:52 +0000 UTC]
Er, no. I read the original story and the author thinks the USSR's territory would be reunited by local forces: just that they'd be too weak to play a role in the Cold War save as a puppet or a battleground.
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ChaserGrey In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-11-01 17:46:17 +0000 UTC]
That's correct.
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00idiot [2012-10-31 21:23:24 +0000 UTC]
Great-my only complaint is that the US should have control of Panama-it's stated to have such as part of it's integral territory in the series.
Also, I wouldn't be too sure about Manchuria and Mongolia being pulled out of the Japanese sphere-They were pretty well entrenched there even in OTL. In Draka-verse, where they controlled Manchuria since 1905, it would be even harder to break. Korea, I can see, though. There was ALWAYS resistance there. Taiwan would probably stay in, it almost did OTL, and with a little more time, I would call them basically assimilated (albiet with a little bit of persecution). As for Japan being pushed back by an independent China-WHAT independent China? China was basically split between the Draka and the IJA. Then the Japanese pushed the Draka out in 1945, in Through the Night. They might well have a larger part of the mainland.
Also, it's hard to tell the Japanese allies due to the color being similar to the base color, and some of the borders are too small to see-could you make this bigger?
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QuantumBranching In reply to 00idiot [2012-11-01 04:08:41 +0000 UTC]
If all of China is occupied by the Japanese, then they bleed and bleed and bleed...why don't you ask the original author about the 1965 details? Or can't you see ChaserGrey's posts?
As for Panama, I changed a few things deliberately to lessen the horrible butterfly immunity the Draka TL often has. Gran Columbia is going to be harder to push around and steal territory from than our Columbia (in the books, heck, it includes south Peru as well), and the US already has Nicaragua, so they can make a Nicaragua canal instead, no?
Make the map bigger for your convenience? Sure! How do you want to pay me? Check or paypal?
Happy Halloween!
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ChaserGrey [2012-10-31 00:51:06 +0000 UTC]
I'm ChaserGrey, and I approve this message! Always bowls me over that people are interested in my little efforts, fueled by equal parts love for Naval Aviation and absolute hatred for how the Draka turned out in canon.
This is really fascinating, the kind of thing I always wanted to sit down and do, but didn't have enough confidence in my own knowledge of African and Asian history. Awesome job, dude. Some things that stick out at me:
1) Good call on the Draka Republic and the position of the Draka in general, it's pretty much what I envisioned at the end of Breaking Strain. The Draka are earning back a measure of trust, they'll be allowed more leeway for self-defense, but it'll take literally centuries before people are willing to really *accept* them again.
2) Interesting question: is the Quarantine still there? If so, what about the extraterritorial base at Venta Bellagrium (aka East London, SA)? Could be an interesting flashpoint as the new Africans states flex their muscles.
And on your note 7: What Ukrainians? After Stalin, the Nazis, and the Draka, I can very easily see there just not being enough of them *left* to form their own country. Probably also true of the other Soviet minority groups to an extent, but the Ukrainians in particular were in everybody's crosshairs.
Note 25: You read my mind on this one. As you probably guessed, the Sultanate did not long survive the events of Breaking Strain. The Sultan tried to cater to the kill-the-Draka faction with covert Japanese support, then switched horses at the last minute and tried to stop things when it became clear he might otherwise be visited by Reprisal and company. Not a very smart move. I had him penciled in for a military coup, which fits here- after all, "Republic" can cover a lot of territory...
Once again, really awesome, thanks! There's still a thread on alternatehistory.com, you might want to post a link there. I think folks would be interested.
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QuantumBranching In reply to ChaserGrey [2012-10-31 02:27:06 +0000 UTC]
Glad you liked it! But re the destruction of the Ukranians, I'm a bit puzzled: the Draka want slaves, right? Can't have slaves if you kill everyone. Sure, they're always happy to kill 50% to persuade the other half to submit, but they're not there for the genocide, unlike the Germans. Why would there be a worse death toll from Draka occupation than from Nazi occupation? (Save incidentally, due to collapse of internal distribution networks and resulting famine...)
(Re 25, I was thinking "republic" in the sense of having a president, a political party, and regular voting for that aformentioned one legal political party )
I'd imagine the base is still there: judging from OTL, the US is awfuly reluctant to abandon military bases once they have them...
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ChaserGrey In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-31 03:42:59 +0000 UTC]
I was thinking that a) the Draka would be an additional winnowing down on top of the Nazis and b) while they do want slaves, by the end of the Eurasian War they expect to have more slaves than they can absorb, or not be around to worry about having slaves. The Ukraine is in the Draka's rear area during the European campaign, so I'd expect them to be...heavy handed about suppressing any problems. You can always repopulate from the Police Zone later.
Re: 25, Yeah, sounds about right. You're free to vote for anyone on the ballot...of course, there's only one guy on the ballot. But still!
On the base: That was my thought as well. Like I said, interesting flashpoint. There'll probably be a forward-deployed carrier there for at least a bit longer to keep an eye on the Draka, similar to what the US now does with Japan. In '64 _United States_ had just been relieved on that duty by _Reprisal_, and good thing too...
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kyuzoaoi [2012-10-30 15:51:06 +0000 UTC]
The Draka at least "reformed", and didn't want an empire anymore, just concerned that their ethnic group survives.
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mdc01957 [2012-10-30 13:48:35 +0000 UTC]
I'm a little bit surprised the Draka were even TREATED that well, given how incredibly screwed up they were.
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QuantumBranching In reply to mdc01957 [2012-10-30 15:40:00 +0000 UTC]
Well, over a third of their entire population died, either from instant sunshine or at the hands of vengeful slaves and recent conquests or in hopeless battle, and the rest essentially went to become pennyless refugees in an overcrowded prison island. The US doesn't do genocide, save for American Indians. And amusing as the idea of the Draka being reduced to hamburger-flippers might be, nobody wanted the Draka resettled in _their_ nation, so an Assyrian solution was out.
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mdc01957 In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-30 16:04:02 +0000 UTC]
Still you'd think the Americans were smart enough to "De-drakafy" the Draka right?
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QuantumBranching In reply to mdc01957 [2012-10-30 17:49:36 +0000 UTC]
How do you do that, though? The Draka state wasn't a new ideological imposition like the Nazis in Germany: it was a well-developed slave society, with anti-liberal ideals and views being entirely the social norm. There was no Draka version of the socialists and social democrats in Germany: de-Drakifying the Draka would be like de-Confederatizing the Confederacy, and you know how well Reconstruction worked out OTL. (Heck, the South remains a culturally distinct area in the US till today.) Seperating them from their victims seems as good a method of reform as any: can't be a slave society without slaves.
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mdc01957 In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-31 03:15:04 +0000 UTC]
You got me there, admittedly.
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ChaserGrey In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-31 00:56:32 +0000 UTC]
That was more or less my thought. The Draka were essentially confined to Madagascar sans any servants, and had it made *extremely* clear to them that any attempt to re-arm or reinstitute slavery would result in them being nuked down to bedrock. Said lesson reinforced, of course, when Louise Gayner's remnant was annihilated in '46.
Further impetus for change came from the conditions on Madagascar when they arrived- no tolerance for "I'm a Citizen, I won't work the fields" when you're trying to avert famine. Especially in a world where everybody's hungry, and you've got a sneaking suspicion you're not at the top of anyone's list for aid...
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LavanyaSix [2012-10-30 11:44:48 +0000 UTC]
Very cool. I'd read this fic, and was always curious about how the post-Draka world would be divided up given that the sequel doesn't go into tremendous detail.
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ChaserGrey In reply to LavanyaSix [2012-10-31 00:57:13 +0000 UTC]
That's because I didn't have the a) historical knowledge and b) guts to do something like this. I'm blown away.
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ElViceJeffe [2012-10-30 04:55:27 +0000 UTC]
This is impressive. Thanks for looking into it, being as its one of my favorite AH stories.
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ChaserGrey In reply to ElViceJeffe [2012-10-31 03:43:39 +0000 UTC]
Aw, shucks. Glad you liked it.
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AmongTheSatanic [2012-10-30 00:37:51 +0000 UTC]
And now, you must make a Draka scenario where they are the hyperpower, but not wanked
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QuantumBranching In reply to AmongTheSatanic [2012-10-30 02:04:54 +0000 UTC]
Any scenario where the Draka are _the_ (as in only one) hyperpower is one where they go on to enslave the rest of the world, or die trying...
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AmongTheSatanic In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-30 02:36:44 +0000 UTC]
Depends on the strength of the opposition; sure, the Draka were more advanced than anyone else, but they didn't just engage in unending wars of conquest from the middle of the 18th century when they handed out all that money to inventors, did they?
If not for the Domination of the Draka, I'd never have had my fancy struck for alternate history, and we'd not be having this discussion. I understand that Stirling certainly wanked the Draka ridiculously, but is it any different than Jared's DoD United States, just on a different continent? Stirling tried to parallel it as the opposite of OUR United States, but the perfect example of how to make a strong dystopian power without having it enslave the entire planet is Jared's Decades of Darkness, and I know for a fact that you have either read it, or know quite a bit, considering the splendid map you made for it
You could easily do the same for the Draka
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QuantumBranching In reply to AmongTheSatanic [2012-10-30 05:48:36 +0000 UTC]
The USA in Decades of Darkness started out in a much stronger position than South Africa would have, more people, a much better climate than any of Africa save the far south, and much more territory readily accessible because of the whole natives-dying-like-flies-from-disease thing: and they still ended up only dominating the Americas while the Russian Federation is probably Number One Power by the end of the 20th century. You can probably get a Greater South Africa from the POD Stirling gives, but a hyperpower? You need an early historical divergence, I think. Here's one guy's effort, BTW...
[link]
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AmongTheSatanic In reply to QuantumBranching [2013-04-03 04:30:13 +0000 UTC]
Well certainly a greater South Africa could contain at least 70% or more of Africa, and probably the Hejaz/Holy Lands up into Ottoman Anatolia at some point. Maybe just stretching from South Africa along the Congo and then up along the Nile into the Middle East?
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QuantumBranching In reply to AmongTheSatanic [2013-04-08 03:46:51 +0000 UTC]
Perhaps...I will keep it in mind.
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AmongTheSatanic In reply to QuantumBranching [2012-10-30 22:39:35 +0000 UTC]
But but but you could totally do it
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