I love the Draka nation concept. It’s old but it’s still cool. It could’ve been a Cold War superpower with the USA, USSR, and possibly the Brazilian Empire.
I don't think the Draka could have ever worked as the books describe, and for a reason why I would point towards Sparta. Sparta was able to field a very good army--up to a point, in a very specific context of Greek hoplite warfare where most of the participants were amateurs recruited from land-owning families. The Spartan way of war was horrendously inflexible, with a very small core recruiting pool, and fell far behind the rest of the ancient world starting in the 4th century BC. They required extensive Persian assistance to win the Peloponnesian war, essentially becoming a Persian proxy state, and then almost as soon as the Persians withdrew their investment following the Spartan "victory", Sparta was crushed by Thebes, and then made completely irrelevant by the massive professional army created by Macedon and its vassals. There is a limit to how far a slave society can go even without industrialization and still be viable, and that is probably the 20-30% reflected by Athens, Rome, and antebellum US South. A state with >90% slaves would be far too tenuous and wrapped up in its own internal security to expand beyond a fifth-rate power. The Draka should be more like a right-wing North Korea than an anti-America. Really, the most plausible origin for a Draka-like society would be not as a civilization but as a barbarism, not as an eagle, but as a vulture eating the surpluses built up by a failing civilization. And once those surpluses were exhausted, the Draka society would disintegrate just as the Germanic warband societies disintegrated after blowing through the collected spoils of the Roman Empire in only a few short decades in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, leaving nothing but ruins and kin-based micro-societies behind.
In his breakthrough book, _The Forever War_ Joe Haldeman set the beginning right around 1997, but with interstellar travel so we can have interstellar war, all, as Haldeman admitted, so we could have Vietnam War Veterans leading Our Boys and Girls into another Vietnam writ large. Haldeman didn't try to explain the technological leaps, unlike Steve Stirling with his appendixes and expositions, but much of the motivation was the same: Have at least one Eurasian War veteran (Eric Von Strakenberg) around in the End Game, which occurs in _The Stone Dogs_ in the year 2000.
yep and Draka Jannissary also get the lower end of the weapons when compared to the Citizen units. Not surprised Draka jannisarry units are mostly using Holbars T-5 semi autos from the great war as compared to the T-6 the citizens are using during the Eurasian war. Also Jannisaries do not have tanks , they use APCs maybe light tanks. Jannisary units would be termed as either light infantry or motorized infantry units. Also the Jannisaries are not only the purview of the Draka army. the Draka navy also has their own Jannisaries which are used for amphibious assaults.
@@andrewpytko4773 White Supremacists country conquers the whole world and universe and enslaves the "inferior race". I don't think Liberal and Progressive Hollywood would love that kind of story Oh and also, they are so brutal that even the Nazis themselves are afraid of them
@@hafizihilmibinabdulhalim1004 They enslave other "white races" as well. They are universally bisexual. It seems to me they are progressive in their oppression.
Y'know, if Rome didn't fall when it did, would Rome become something like the Draka Domination if Rome reached something equivalent to our 20th century? Also, re: the Jannisaries, the Draka could elevate the Janissaries as overseers over the serfs but the Janissaries would themselves be subordinate to the Draka Citizen Soldiers. Y'know, divide et impera? But y'know, in Real World terms, the Draka Dominion remind clearly of what the pricks are doing now in our world except the pricks are far more insidious but are more incompetent & corrupt than the Draka. Just my observation.
They don’t “need” to. Besides-the serfdom’s also a “cultural” thing. (Think of all that the state’s official name [previously-when they were still part of the BE-a popular nickname]-brings to mind…).
It’s not a matter of labor; it’s a matter of pride, for them. To the Draka, breaking the will of another is the sole reason for their existence. They live only to perpetuate and ensure the dominance of the Race no matter the cost. To remove the human element from their society would be to go against that philosophy. In the words of their own Archon at the time, where’s the fun in ordering around brain dead drones?
Slavery is such an important part of their culture that removing it would effectively cripple them, not to mention the damage it would do to their “will to Power” philosophy.
One of the books that I read as a young man, which together with others informed my awakening, was "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek - a member of the Austrian School. I'm sure your title for this episode is an homage. Well done.
The Draka have Jannisaries? Wtf, I'm going to have to read these books. Why would the South African/Boer largely Dutch and British origin African colonist use a Turkish term for slave soldiers though. They also seem to differ from actual Jannisaries in that Jannisaries functioned largely as an elite household troop/royal guard. And their "slavery" was mostly symbolic since they could actually amas enormous wealth and power and had considerable status (far higher than the average Ottoman Turk or any of other subjects of the empire). They would often compete and fight over influence with the Timarly Sipahi (Land holding Sipahi) who were basically Ottoman knights and served a similar function as knights in feudal systems. They had their own religious cult / tarikat / order (Bektashi order) which was distinct from the Sultan / State that was Sunni Hanefi. For those of you that don't know, Jannisaries were elite soldiers who were taken from Christians families in the balkans as a type of tax. The Ottomans would take one son from each family in some village or town (provided they had more than one sons, and the child was around the age of 10). These kids would be old enough to remember their own language and home. Eventually funnily enough a lot of non Christian families tried to get their kids into the Jannisary core because it was such a prestigious order and being a Jannisary often came with enormous power, wealth and influence. These boys would often grow up and then make sure their parents / families and towns were cared for. Sokollu Mehmed Pasa (General Mehmed from Sokolovici) was a Serbian Jannisary and grand vizier that defacto ruled the empire for a while. And Jannisary was also not necessarily a soldier. The boys were assessed on their abilities and then either made into soldiers or administrators, scribes, engineers, architects (one of the most famous ones being Mimar Sinan, A Greek or Balkan origin Jannisary who was the best friend of the Sultan). Often claimed to be Armenian by western sources, but that's kinda unlikely because the Ottomans didn't take Jannisaries from the Armenians because they were considered incredibly loyal at the time. More often than not Jannisaries were taken from Serbians, Albanians etc. The practice btw came from the Mamlukes, who were in turn Turkish slave soldiers that were used by the Arabs and Persians. The reason jannisaries were a thing was because the Ottoman Sultans were super paranoid about other notable Anatolian Turkish families making a play for their crown. In fact, if the Ottoman line were to ever fall, then the next in line for the crown was the Khan of Crimea and not one of the Turkish beys in Anatolia.
The closest analogue you'd have is South Africa or America. The Ottoman empire didn't have widespread slavery. Subjegated people weren't slaves. Chattle Slavery wasn't a thing. Slavery wasn't race based. Slavery existed only really in the form of the devsirme system (Jannisaries) and other than that it was relegated to the elite. Jannisaries were only a small part of the army, mainly functionned as a house hold troop for the Ottoman Sultan who was worried that other Turkish houses might make plays for the throne (so recruiting royal guards from them was a no go). And a large part of the Jannisaries weren't soldiers but trained as scribes, administrators, achitects, engineers etc. The Ottoman economy didn't run on slave labour or serfdom. The Roman one did. America did. African colonies and most European colonies did. I mean even the non highlighted parts of the text that you give for the description of Draka Slavery mention it descending from the Carribean and South African colonies But yes, you're completely right about the Jannisaries becoming extremely powerful. Even defacto ruling the empire at times, deposing Sultans, starting rebellions. And they were in constant competition with the Turkish elite troops the landed Sipahi cavalry
There's a spectrum of slavery though, with the American/Caribbean type being (arguably) the most overt. There was a lot more gradation in the Ottoman and Roman systems, with people who were technically property able to achieve high status. The Draka kind of split the difference, with both menial laborers living in poor conditions to most of their technicians and mid-level administrators being people who are property of an individual or industrial combine. Stirling borrowed from a lot of different societies when writing this one, making it an interesting mess of influences.
@@drakashrakenburgproduction5369 I can't promise anything, but let me know an image you have in mind. Time permitting I can try it. Also I posted some of the stuff from these videos at DeviantArt, www.deviantart.com/kiltcat/gallery/83732151/draka You can use them, just credit me for it.
Speaking on the question of what our elitards are trying to accomplish, I am persistently, consistently, and systematically VERY unimpressed with their aesthetics, which on every level: their art, their architecture, their fashion, their design, their own personal appearances, and so on and so forth, tend to be shockingly and probably deliberately, ugly. One trope that occurs over and over in visual media is elitards living in massive, gleaming, but sterile, soulless, and alienating, modernist mansions, often in vast, unpeopled, wilderness preserves (or, less frequently, looming imperiously over grimy, decaying, impoverished, cityscapes) There is even a subgenre of this trope where the mansion is automated and/or staffed by robots and the automation goes haywire, turning it into a dystopian or horror scenario. So apparently even elitards, or the elitard wannabes making the entertainment, recognize their own utopian ideal is probably doomed to some kind of grisly failure. There is a major development project near me where a billionaire from a big regional metro area is trying to turn a smaller outlying town into a significant bedroom community. To that end, he has bought up thousands of acres outside the small town and plans to construct over 20,000 homes, along with all the businesses and other infrastructure to serve them. Based on what has been built so far, the homes, generally speaking, are fine. They are traditional and tasteful in appearance, if somewhat overpriced for what they are. The urban planning and layout is also thoughtful and considerably above average in conception and execution. All of the commercial, apartment, and public buildings, however, are shiny, cuboid, glass and steel, modernist, garbage, revealing the ideological and aesthetic predilections of those behind the project or tasked with carrying it out. I have a hard time believing anyone can truly be motivated and inspired by aesthetic modernism, at least in its two most prevalent and widespread strains (the same boring, ugly, uninspired, glass and steel, box every modernist has been building for over 100 years; but still acting like it's somehow fresh and new, and the even more monstrous perversities that actually ARE fresh and new because they are so stupid and weird that nobody in their right mind has ever built them before) leading me to believe the motives for propounding and employing modernist aesthetics are essentially malevolent in nature, to alienate, to demoralize, to humiliate; deliberate gestures of disrespect, disregard, and contempt. But even if this is uncharitable and their motives aren't fundamentally malevolent. Something is clearly very wrong with them as people. Either they somehow find this garbage appealing despite its total lack of merit and the utter bankruptcy of all of the arguments in its favor (its supposed elegance, efficiency, novelty, utility, economy, etc...) or they are simply pretending to find it appealing despite finding it as intrinsically unappealing and repulsive as normal people always invariably do. Either possibility presents profound and worrying implications around how and why our societies have come to be so totally dominated by such bizarre, and alien, and untrustworthy, creatures...
There has been a notable uglification over the past few decades, accelerating in recent years. Modern architecture strikes me as "Soviet in glass" more than anything.
You're just saying you don't like most modern architecture or at least not the type you're talking about. That's got nothing to do with politics or even wealth class. You're politicising your own aesthetic preferences to hate on rich people.
@@maxkozak9702 are you saying modern architecture isn't garbage or that it doesn't matter? Also, while the main focus of my rant was indeed architecture, I specified aesthetics more broadly and listed some other domains. But there are plenty of other reasons to hate the rich as well. Bottom line, the rich are the people with the most power and influence so if everything is terrible they are the most to blame, and everything is terrible. It can be reasonably inferred that everything is terrible because the rich want it that way or at least don't care enough to want it any other way...
@@maxkozak9702 love them or hate them, elites at least used to be majestic and awe inspiring. They're not even that anymore, now they're boring, stupid, and ugly...
I don't know this universe, but how does family and reproduction work here? I ask because, in medieval times, they had sort of the opposite problem the Draka. Real world, the medieval gentry-slash-aristocracy had, since about 1000, accepted primogeniture to stop the bloodshed that came with sons fighting over their fathers' title and lands. So second and third sons frequently had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and they ended up terrorizing people in gussied-up robber bands on too regular a basis, which was a known social problem. Sometimes, those second and third sons went into the priesthood, and sometimes they basically converted themselves to freedmen and lived in the towns, taking up a trade. The Draka should have a similar problem, although in their case, it would actually be a solution to their Janissary problem. They should have a LOT of potential citizen soldiers. That should be happening. The Draka, if they subscribed to family fecundity as a value along with conquest as most warrior aristocracies have, shouldn't be just 7% citizen. They should have lots of offspring in the upper classes, where wealth isn't a problem and their semi-collectivism can allow for institutional benefits in raising their children. Really, how would procreation of the serf class be higher than procreation for the citizen class? Is this just not addressed in the book?
Honestly, we have hundreds of thousands in the USA who are homeless. We have millions with too little food. There are vast cities of Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Cleveland, and the rest where millions live in extremely poor housing . Yes, the Drake are overlords but how is that much different than Nancy Pelosi type politicians gaming the system? I regard the Serf system of the Draka superior to what we have now. We live in a polluted, drug infested, and poverty filled dystopia.
Fiat Currency has replaced the Gold Standard for a reason: the Gold Standard sucked. The thing that matters in an economy is economic productivity. This ranges from the big things such as how much grain, coal, iron and electricity a nation produces to the reputation of the restaurant and artistic scene in a city. Even the general mood of a country has an effect on the economic situation, after all if you are confident that things will be fine or better 20 years down the line your more willing to invest in long term projects while if people believe that there will be a civil war in 20 years they're more likely to live fast and splurge on bunkers. This human economic activity does not correlate to the value of the amount of gold that has been mined. There is seriously no reason to think that this is the case. Gold worked okay-ish in the classical world and the middle ages, but then you have to realize that most people did not use it regularly. If Paul the Peasant wanted his roof repaired, he'd ask Theodore the Thatcher to do it. In return, come autumn Paul would give him a smoked pig leg and a basket of apples, or some other roughly comparable form of recompense in goods or labour rather than in cash. They knew what a coin was and would get them and spend them from time to time, but they were not major parts of the cash economy. People just doing favours for each other and since you basically never travelled more than 20km from your place of birth people knew who owed who what in small rural communities where 80-90% of the population lived. Money as a day to day thing was the domain of travelling merchants, inn keepers, nobles and city dwellers. Then the Industrial revolution happened, people moved to cities in vast numbers, the population skyrocketed, mechanical power catapulted productivity and more and more people lived off wages. This meant that the number of people drawing wages spiked while the money supply could not grow to match it which lead to deflation. Deflation is something which is great if your rich, but sucks if you're not. You get paid 20 pence a day, which is just enough to cover food, shelter and heating, then the currency deflates to 90% what it was. As such your boss drops your wage saying that since prices have gone down you can buy just as much with 18 pence and there was no real loss in wages. He on the other hand had 4,500 pounds in cash which are now worth 5,000 in old money. Or worse still, you could be in debt. You owe Jimmy the Weasel 10 pounds plus 10% interest each year. You could have paid him back at the old rate, but now instead of owing him 11 pounds you effectively owe him 12.222 pounds instead. Which leaves you with 1.222 pounds of debt that you owe interest on. That's a debt you can pay off, imagine one you can't. And if deflation continues to happen this keeps getting worse. In the 19th century there was major pushes against the Gold Standard Orthodoxy because it self evidently made the rich richer and kept the poor poorer. Especially after the 1929 stock market crash. Though there were numerous crashes beforehand which got worse and worse throughout the 19th century.
Your misunderstanding fiat and gold standard policy the gold doesn't make money unprintable it just makes gold worth more printed money to a single measurement of gold . The problem with the bosses paying less penance is no different than current contract work, so having minimum wage constantly updated to keep wages from being stagnant is important for not having rich people take advantage of deflation/inflation.
@@d.o.a7552 Deflation pretty much automatically transfers money from the poor to the rich, and it's also makes things very difficult if there is a need for crash spending. War is one example, but there are others such as natural disasters, pandemics, economic stimulus in the face of a major recession, etc. Seriously, most economists agree that the Gold Standard is not a good system.
All Fiat currencies collapse inside of 40 years. You've seen it yourself in 2008 with the near collapse of the banking system with roots going back to only the early 1970s with the Brenton-Woods agreement. Right now we're in a federalized monitized debt. You honestly don't think that a nation that's adding $1 Trillion dollars of new debt every 100 days is going to function past $50 Trillion of debt? If you thing the USA has productivity you're on acid. It's dying of bureaucracy. Elon Musk was fined $600,000 for using fresh water as a sound suppressant for his rockets, the FAA said water could pollute a nearby wetland.
@@Easy-Eight while I’m not disagreeing with the main thrust of your comment, water being the universal solvent has a tendency to absorb combustion byproducts from rocket plumes and I think that this is the cause of the contamination problem rather than the use of water causing issues itself. However, it could be that using fresh water is disrupting the salinity of the wetland and causing ecological impacts as there is often a very narrow ‘goldilocks’ zone for salinity in wetland ecosystems. This said I’m not sure what else they could use for sound suppression other than fresh water but I guess that’s just another engineering problem for Space X to solve.
It's socialist if we take the Draka perspective that the massive serf population are just a resource, not "people" in the fullest sense. A common problem in the more robust socialist states of our own history.
I love the Draka nation concept. It’s old but it’s still cool. It could’ve been a Cold War superpower with the USA, USSR, and possibly the Brazilian Empire.
The thing stopping Brazil from becoming a superpower is Brazilians
I don't think the Draka could have ever worked as the books describe, and for a reason why I would point towards Sparta. Sparta was able to field a very good army--up to a point, in a very specific context of Greek hoplite warfare where most of the participants were amateurs recruited from land-owning families. The Spartan way of war was horrendously inflexible, with a very small core recruiting pool, and fell far behind the rest of the ancient world starting in the 4th century BC. They required extensive Persian assistance to win the Peloponnesian war, essentially becoming a Persian proxy state, and then almost as soon as the Persians withdrew their investment following the Spartan "victory", Sparta was crushed by Thebes, and then made completely irrelevant by the massive professional army created by Macedon and its vassals. There is a limit to how far a slave society can go even without industrialization and still be viable, and that is probably the 20-30% reflected by Athens, Rome, and antebellum US South. A state with >90% slaves would be far too tenuous and wrapped up in its own internal security to expand beyond a fifth-rate power. The Draka should be more like a right-wing North Korea than an anti-America.
Really, the most plausible origin for a Draka-like society would be not as a civilization but as a barbarism, not as an eagle, but as a vulture eating the surpluses built up by a failing civilization. And once those surpluses were exhausted, the Draka society would disintegrate just as the Germanic warband societies disintegrated after blowing through the collected spoils of the Roman Empire in only a few short decades in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, leaving nothing but ruins and kin-based micro-societies behind.
The population of Spartiatai declined over the course of the late 5th and 4th centuries BC.
Really love the content, can’t ever find much about this book series since it’s older and not very popular
Thanks, good to hear. There's another Draka vid in the pipeline that should be out . . . soon. ish.
@@feralhistorian Great news! I thought Jim Baen has stopped publishing pemanantly because he personally hated them.
That last question is pure gold! What is in fact the goal of our societies?
not dying
In his breakthrough book, _The Forever War_ Joe Haldeman set the beginning right around 1997, but with interstellar travel so we can have interstellar war, all, as Haldeman admitted, so we could have Vietnam War Veterans leading Our Boys and Girls into another Vietnam writ large. Haldeman didn't try to explain the technological leaps, unlike Steve Stirling with his appendixes and expositions, but much of the motivation was the same: Have at least one Eurasian War veteran (Eric Von Strakenberg) around in the End Game, which occurs in _The Stone Dogs_ in the year 2000.
Just because there’s social stability doesn’t mean it isn’t a hell scape.
yep and Draka Jannissary also get the lower end of the weapons when compared to the Citizen units. Not surprised Draka jannisarry units are mostly using Holbars T-5 semi autos from the great war as compared to the T-6 the citizens are using during the Eurasian war. Also Jannisaries do not have tanks , they use APCs maybe light tanks. Jannisary units would be termed as either light infantry or motorized infantry units. Also the Jannisaries are not only the purview of the Draka army. the Draka navy also has their own Jannisaries which are used for amphibious assaults.
I love these books. Netflix should make a series out of them.
A show half as bloody and rapey as the Draka series would make Game of Thrones look like something from PBS Kids.
Would be too politically incorrect for this day and age!
@@heretowatchvideos100 How so?
@@andrewpytko4773 White Supremacists country conquers the whole world and universe and enslaves the "inferior race". I don't think Liberal and Progressive Hollywood would love that kind of story
Oh and also, they are so brutal that even the Nazis themselves are afraid of them
@@hafizihilmibinabdulhalim1004 They enslave other "white races" as well. They are universally bisexual. It seems to me they are progressive in their oppression.
"There's no way the Draka could be THAT bad," says the Allaiance
"Lol" says the Draka "Lamao"
The sting is at the end of the video, "we should probably ask what our's is trying to do".
The road was long ago. Its all on tracks now.
Historian and good books!! I am in listening heaven
I am surprised that Stirling used the term Janissary for the serf soldiers rather than what I would think the more natural term askari.
Y'know, if Rome didn't fall when it did, would Rome become something like the Draka Domination if Rome reached something equivalent to our 20th century? Also, re: the Jannisaries, the Draka could elevate the Janissaries as overseers over the serfs but the Janissaries would themselves be subordinate to the Draka Citizen Soldiers. Y'know, divide et impera? But y'know, in Real World terms, the Draka Dominion remind clearly of what the pricks are doing now in our world except the pricks are far more insidious but are more incompetent & corrupt than the Draka. Just my observation.
You’d think they’d automate menial labor asap and just reduce the numbers of serfs
They don’t “need” to.
Besides-the serfdom’s also a “cultural” thing. (Think of all that the state’s official name [previously-when they were still part of the BE-a popular nickname]-brings to mind…).
The Draka believe mankind was put on earth to husband the world. And the Draka were put on earth to husband Mankind.
The purpose of power is to have power. "The Will to Power" they call it.
It’s not a matter of labor; it’s a matter of pride, for them. To the Draka, breaking the will of another is the sole reason for their existence. They live only to perpetuate and ensure the dominance of the Race no matter the cost.
To remove the human element from their society would be to go against that philosophy. In the words of their own Archon at the time, where’s the fun in ordering around brain dead drones?
Slavery is such an important part of their culture that removing it would effectively cripple them, not to mention the damage it would do to their “will to Power” philosophy.
Vlad Dracula: "You know I'm something of a janissary myself..."
One of the books that I read as a young man, which together with others informed my awakening, was "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek - a member of the Austrian School. I'm sure your title for this episode is an homage. Well done.
The Draka have Jannisaries? Wtf, I'm going to have to read these books. Why would the South African/Boer largely Dutch and British origin African colonist use a Turkish term for slave soldiers though. They also seem to differ from actual Jannisaries in that Jannisaries functioned largely as an elite household troop/royal guard. And their "slavery" was mostly symbolic since they could actually amas enormous wealth and power and had considerable status (far higher than the average Ottoman Turk or any of other subjects of the empire). They would often compete and fight over influence with the Timarly Sipahi (Land holding Sipahi) who were basically Ottoman knights and served a similar function as knights in feudal systems. They had their own religious cult / tarikat / order (Bektashi order) which was distinct from the Sultan / State that was Sunni Hanefi. For those of you that don't know, Jannisaries were elite soldiers who were taken from Christians families in the balkans as a type of tax. The Ottomans would take one son from each family in some village or town (provided they had more than one sons, and the child was around the age of 10). These kids would be old enough to remember their own language and home. Eventually funnily enough a lot of non Christian families tried to get their kids into the Jannisary core because it was such a prestigious order and being a Jannisary often came with enormous power, wealth and influence. These boys would often grow up and then make sure their parents / families and towns were cared for. Sokollu Mehmed Pasa (General Mehmed from Sokolovici) was a Serbian Jannisary and grand vizier that defacto ruled the empire for a while. And Jannisary was also not necessarily a soldier. The boys were assessed on their abilities and then either made into soldiers or administrators, scribes, engineers, architects (one of the most famous ones being Mimar Sinan, A Greek or Balkan origin Jannisary who was the best friend of the Sultan). Often claimed to be Armenian by western sources, but that's kinda unlikely because the Ottomans didn't take Jannisaries from the Armenians because they were considered incredibly loyal at the time. More often than not Jannisaries were taken from Serbians, Albanians etc. The practice btw came from the Mamlukes, who were in turn Turkish slave soldiers that were used by the Arabs and Persians. The reason jannisaries were a thing was because the Ottoman Sultans were super paranoid about other notable Anatolian Turkish families making a play for their crown. In fact, if the Ottoman line were to ever fall, then the next in line for the crown was the Khan of Crimea and not one of the Turkish beys in Anatolia.
The closest analogue you'd have is South Africa or America. The Ottoman empire didn't have widespread slavery. Subjegated people weren't slaves. Chattle Slavery wasn't a thing. Slavery wasn't race based. Slavery existed only really in the form of the devsirme system (Jannisaries) and other than that it was relegated to the elite. Jannisaries were only a small part of the army, mainly functionned as a house hold troop for the Ottoman Sultan who was worried that other Turkish houses might make plays for the throne (so recruiting royal guards from them was a no go). And a large part of the Jannisaries weren't soldiers but trained as scribes, administrators, achitects, engineers etc. The Ottoman economy didn't run on slave labour or serfdom. The Roman one did. America did. African colonies and most European colonies did. I mean even the non highlighted parts of the text that you give for the description of Draka Slavery mention it descending from the Carribean and South African colonies
But yes, you're completely right about the Jannisaries becoming extremely powerful. Even defacto ruling the empire at times, deposing Sultans, starting rebellions. And they were in constant competition with the Turkish elite troops the landed Sipahi cavalry
There's a spectrum of slavery though, with the American/Caribbean type being (arguably) the most overt. There was a lot more gradation in the Ottoman and Roman systems, with people who were technically property able to achieve high status. The Draka kind of split the difference, with both menial laborers living in poor conditions to most of their technicians and mid-level administrators being people who are property of an individual or industrial combine. Stirling borrowed from a lot of different societies when writing this one, making it an interesting mess of influences.
wait you do fan art for the Draka?
I did a few pieces of concept art for these videos just to have some visuals. There's not a lot of Draka stuff out there it seems.
@@feralhistorian I would love it if you make some more for my fan fiction crossover
@@drakashrakenburgproduction5369 I can't promise anything, but let me know an image you have in mind. Time permitting I can try it. Also I posted some of the stuff from these videos at DeviantArt,
www.deviantart.com/kiltcat/gallery/83732151/draka
You can use them, just credit me for it.
Speaking on the question of what our elitards are trying to accomplish, I am persistently, consistently, and systematically VERY unimpressed with their aesthetics, which on every level: their art, their architecture, their fashion, their design, their own personal appearances, and so on and so forth, tend to be shockingly and probably deliberately, ugly.
One trope that occurs over and over in visual media is elitards living in massive, gleaming, but sterile, soulless, and alienating, modernist mansions, often in vast, unpeopled, wilderness preserves (or, less frequently, looming imperiously over grimy, decaying, impoverished, cityscapes) There is even a subgenre of this trope where the mansion is automated and/or staffed by robots and the automation goes haywire, turning it into a dystopian or horror scenario. So apparently even elitards, or the elitard wannabes making the entertainment, recognize their own utopian ideal is probably doomed to some kind of grisly failure.
There is a major development project near me where a billionaire from a big regional metro area is trying to turn a smaller outlying town into a significant bedroom community. To that end, he has bought up thousands of acres outside the small town and plans to construct over 20,000 homes, along with all the businesses and other infrastructure to serve them. Based on what has been built so far, the homes, generally speaking, are fine. They are traditional and tasteful in appearance, if somewhat overpriced for what they are. The urban planning and layout is also thoughtful and considerably above average in conception and execution. All of the commercial, apartment, and public buildings, however, are shiny, cuboid, glass and steel, modernist, garbage, revealing the ideological and aesthetic predilections of those behind the project or tasked with carrying it out.
I have a hard time believing anyone can truly be motivated and inspired by aesthetic modernism, at least in its two most prevalent and widespread strains (the same boring, ugly, uninspired, glass and steel, box every modernist has been building for over 100 years; but still acting like it's somehow fresh and new, and the even more monstrous perversities that actually ARE fresh and new because they are so stupid and weird that nobody in their right mind has ever built them before) leading me to believe the motives for propounding and employing modernist aesthetics are essentially malevolent in nature, to alienate, to demoralize, to humiliate; deliberate gestures of disrespect, disregard, and contempt.
But even if this is uncharitable and their motives aren't fundamentally malevolent. Something is clearly very wrong with them as people.
Either they somehow find this garbage appealing despite its total lack of merit and the utter bankruptcy of all of the arguments in its favor (its supposed elegance, efficiency, novelty, utility, economy, etc...) or they are simply pretending to find it appealing despite finding it as intrinsically unappealing and repulsive as normal people always invariably do.
Either possibility presents profound and worrying implications around how and why our societies have come to be so totally dominated by such bizarre, and alien, and untrustworthy, creatures...
There has been a notable uglification over the past few decades, accelerating in recent years. Modern architecture strikes me as "Soviet in glass" more than anything.
You're just saying you don't like most modern architecture or at least not the type you're talking about. That's got nothing to do with politics or even wealth class. You're politicising your own aesthetic preferences to hate on rich people.
@@maxkozak9702 are you saying modern architecture isn't garbage or that it doesn't matter? Also, while the main focus of my rant was indeed architecture, I specified aesthetics more broadly and listed some other domains. But there are plenty of other reasons to hate the rich as well. Bottom line, the rich are the people with the most power and influence so if everything is terrible they are the most to blame, and everything is terrible. It can be reasonably inferred that everything is terrible because the rich want it that way or at least don't care enough to want it any other way...
@@maxkozak9702 love them or hate them, elites at least used to be majestic and awe inspiring. They're not even that anymore, now they're boring, stupid, and ugly...
@@eliharman Ah they're just too dull to understand true beauty.
Were do the illustrations come from?
Some of them are my own work, and the less specific ones are mostly Stable Diffusion.
@@feralhistorian Thank you.
Economics is always downstream of politics, which is always downstream of culture.
I don't know this universe, but how does family and reproduction work here? I ask because, in medieval times, they had sort of the opposite problem the Draka. Real world, the medieval gentry-slash-aristocracy had, since about 1000, accepted primogeniture to stop the bloodshed that came with sons fighting over their fathers' title and lands. So second and third sons frequently had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and they ended up terrorizing people in gussied-up robber bands on too regular a basis, which was a known social problem. Sometimes, those second and third sons went into the priesthood, and sometimes they basically converted themselves to freedmen and lived in the towns, taking up a trade. The Draka should have a similar problem, although in their case, it would actually be a solution to their Janissary problem. They should have a LOT of potential citizen soldiers.
That should be happening. The Draka, if they subscribed to family fecundity as a value along with conquest as most warrior aristocracies have, shouldn't be just 7% citizen. They should have lots of offspring in the upper classes, where wealth isn't a problem and their semi-collectivism can allow for institutional benefits in raising their children. Really, how would procreation of the serf class be higher than procreation for the citizen class? Is this just not addressed in the book?
Questions are decadent, fast hands mean less whipping.
Honestly, we have hundreds of thousands in the USA who are homeless. We have millions with too little food. There are vast cities of Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Cleveland, and the rest where millions live in extremely poor housing . Yes, the Drake are overlords but how is that much different than Nancy Pelosi type politicians gaming the system? I regard the Serf system of the Draka superior to what we have now. We live in a polluted, drug infested, and poverty filled dystopia.
Cool
Fiat Currency has replaced the Gold Standard for a reason: the Gold Standard sucked.
The thing that matters in an economy is economic productivity. This ranges from the big things such as how much grain, coal, iron and electricity a nation produces to the reputation of the restaurant and artistic scene in a city. Even the general mood of a country has an effect on the economic situation, after all if you are confident that things will be fine or better 20 years down the line your more willing to invest in long term projects while if people believe that there will be a civil war in 20 years they're more likely to live fast and splurge on bunkers. This human economic activity does not correlate to the value of the amount of gold that has been mined. There is seriously no reason to think that this is the case.
Gold worked okay-ish in the classical world and the middle ages, but then you have to realize that most people did not use it regularly. If Paul the Peasant wanted his roof repaired, he'd ask Theodore the Thatcher to do it. In return, come autumn Paul would give him a smoked pig leg and a basket of apples, or some other roughly comparable form of recompense in goods or labour rather than in cash. They knew what a coin was and would get them and spend them from time to time, but they were not major parts of the cash economy. People just doing favours for each other and since you basically never travelled more than 20km from your place of birth people knew who owed who what in small rural communities where 80-90% of the population lived. Money as a day to day thing was the domain of travelling merchants, inn keepers, nobles and city dwellers.
Then the Industrial revolution happened, people moved to cities in vast numbers, the population skyrocketed, mechanical power catapulted productivity and more and more people lived off wages. This meant that the number of people drawing wages spiked while the money supply could not grow to match it which lead to deflation. Deflation is something which is great if your rich, but sucks if you're not. You get paid 20 pence a day, which is just enough to cover food, shelter and heating, then the currency deflates to 90% what it was. As such your boss drops your wage saying that since prices have gone down you can buy just as much with 18 pence and there was no real loss in wages. He on the other hand had 4,500 pounds in cash which are now worth 5,000 in old money. Or worse still, you could be in debt. You owe Jimmy the Weasel 10 pounds plus 10% interest each year. You could have paid him back at the old rate, but now instead of owing him 11 pounds you effectively owe him 12.222 pounds instead. Which leaves you with 1.222 pounds of debt that you owe interest on. That's a debt you can pay off, imagine one you can't. And if deflation continues to happen this keeps getting worse.
In the 19th century there was major pushes against the Gold Standard Orthodoxy because it self evidently made the rich richer and kept the poor poorer. Especially after the 1929 stock market crash. Though there were numerous crashes beforehand which got worse and worse throughout the 19th century.
Your misunderstanding fiat and gold standard policy the gold doesn't make money unprintable it just makes gold worth more printed money to a single measurement of gold . The problem with the bosses paying less penance is no different than current contract work, so having minimum wage constantly updated to keep wages from being stagnant is important for not having rich people take advantage of deflation/inflation.
@@d.o.a7552 Deflation pretty much automatically transfers money from the poor to the rich, and it's also makes things very difficult if there is a need for crash spending. War is one example, but there are others such as natural disasters, pandemics, economic stimulus in the face of a major recession, etc.
Seriously, most economists agree that the Gold Standard is not a good system.
All Fiat currencies collapse inside of 40 years. You've seen it yourself in 2008 with the near collapse of the banking system with roots going back to only the early 1970s with the Brenton-Woods agreement. Right now we're in a federalized monitized debt. You honestly don't think that a nation that's adding $1 Trillion dollars of new debt every 100 days is going to function past $50 Trillion of debt? If you thing the USA has productivity you're on acid. It's dying of bureaucracy. Elon Musk was fined $600,000 for using fresh water as a sound suppressant for his rockets, the FAA said water could pollute a nearby wetland.
@@Easy-Eight while I’m not disagreeing with the main thrust of your comment, water being the universal solvent has a tendency to absorb combustion byproducts from rocket plumes and I think that this is the cause of the contamination problem rather than the use of water causing issues itself. However, it could be that using fresh water is disrupting the salinity of the wetland and causing ecological impacts as there is often a very narrow ‘goldilocks’ zone for salinity in wetland ecosystems.
This said I’m not sure what else they could use for sound suppression other than fresh water but I guess that’s just another engineering problem for Space X to solve.
@@Gilberto90 "Salinity of the Wetlands"... must be hell when it merely rains.
Janesseries where strong because they where made up or magyars,Germans,Greeks,and Slavs
That's not even remotely socialism, more like idealized, herrenvolk fascism. Otherwise, great series.
It's socialist if we take the Draka perspective that the massive serf population are just a resource, not "people" in the fullest sense. A common problem in the more robust socialist states of our own history.
Stop froding people