@@zackarysullivan9019 in the book where they controlled Europe there was an American, the Draka female lead was explaining how her maid was well a just to
When I first read it (scary to think how long ago that was) I went with "Drah-ka" Now I very consciously go with "Dray-ka" on the logic that SIr Francis Drake led to Drakia, condensed to Draka down the line. I suspect if we asked Stirling he'd give different answers just to mess with us, like Lovecraft did when asked how to pronounce Cthulu.
They’re legitimately epic. Try and get the original 3 books separately, not the omnibus. They leave whole sections out in the omnibus and don’t include the appendices. Well worth the extra money.
@@flyingsquirrell6953 Winston Churchill said that Democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the others. Ie highly flawed but still the best.
@@simontmn He never got to see what it became. The Managed Democracy of Britain and the United States was very different back in the day. When you read the books by Winston Churchill, he gives a deep dive to how the British political system worked back then. Very different. Very different indeed.
Can never go wrong with more Draka content. I remember a lot of the older criticisms of the Alliance was just how dumb and short-sighted it acted, even letting the Draka get away with invading India and basically doing nothing about it. Clearly, real countries, especially those at the apex of their power, never act so idiotic. Right. That perception sure has aged well.
And the Domination was prepped and ready to roll as soon as the secession happened while the Alliance needed months to prep, ship stuff and deploy. Just like the USA today in a major conflict. Also, like in multiple brushfire wars against the Communists, they feared escalating into a nuclear conflict.
Your videos on the Draka have always been my favourite; perhaps just because hierarchy and agrarianism are aesthetically very pleasing to me. There's something most relaxing about listening to an American's sage ramblings about this particular book series. If it's possible to milk more content out of the Draka, please do!
Every time I think about the Draka books something new occurs to me and I haven't even covered Drakon yet. I think it's safe to say there will be more Draka.
I don't think anyone else has the panache to do the Draka books. If someone else were to do it they'd ether decry the novels as fascist fanfare, or come off looking like a "windmill enthusiast" themselves. FH found the very small, safe, middle ground. -----End thought If you keep making videos your going to blow up I never heard about you a month ago now I beckon at your every UA-cam post.
@@The_violet_lord The Author does not like this creation of his. Remember AC Doyle came to hate Sherlock Holmes. I wish there is a place for Draka fan fic. I have a story for it all but written.
it was on purpose. Stirling set out to create a crapsack world where everything went to hell in a handbasket. To do that he needed an evil bastard villain-sue.
He likes those evil villain empires it seems. In Peshawar Lancers an asteroid devastates the planet and the Russian Empire devolves into a satanic cannibalistic regime, opposed to the Angrezi Raj.
The whole premise of the Draka was 'what if I weighed the dice, _all_ the dice. How bullshit and depraved can I make these guys while remaining in newtonian physics?" The result? John Galt does the Druchii.
If you get a chance I imagine many people would love a video on the Orville Especially after the recent stark trek video I've started thinking about the similarities and differences also I love the videos!! Keep up the good work
Sir Francis Drake; the Aristocratic Stone Age Murder Monkey who started it all! Thank you SM Stirling for these novels. I have wondered what you think of the "Dies the Fire" Series.
To anyone who hasn't read these yet: I would strongly recommend you get the versions with the appendices in the back. Lots of cool, albeit bleak, world-building hidden in there. Also, I'm going to sound like a sicko for saying this, but I found the world of the Draka to be such an over-the-top grimdark Hellscape, and the Draka themselves so cartoonishly evil, that reading the series was perversely, morbidly really "Fun" in a WATCH IT ALL BURN!!! sort of way.
you may be interested in the alt-hist "For All Time". Want to see the Presidential Election between Jim Jones (D) and Charles Manson (R)? There's how we get there.
Seriously fuck off with the whole "because of wokeness" schtick. The Boys. GoT. The Expanse. Woke? Or is it just "woke" if you happen to disagree with it. Come to think of it, please define "woke" in this instance for me. I dare you.
Something similar in tone nearly happened at the hands of the Game of Thrones show runners. They wanted to do a series about the Confederacy defeating the North and the society that results from that happening. But there were no takers from the big networks and media companies. No one wanted to be associated with such a project due to the current climate.
@@kylejamesdalzell2839 Considering that the villains are white with an almost Southern accent, I am surprised that Hollywood has not already grabbed it.
This is fantastic. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this series or Stirling - and I wrote my dissertation about the rhetoric of dystopian fiction. 😳 Thank you for this. I’m going to read the Domination of Draka series ASAP. This is the kind of content that makes UA-cam essential.
I recommend finding the original volumes, they have extensive appendices about the world that Stirling set the story in. The series was later collecting into a single volume titled "The Domination" but it's abridged and has some other editorial decisions that detract from it a bit.
If I recall right, most famously Jim Baen was not a big fan at all of the series and this eventually led to him and Stirling cutting ties. Baen just couldn't get behind the overwhelming negative endings where basically, even if they lost a fight the "bad guys won" (e.g Draka!). For myself, I read them all as they came out and certainly, there's a context there you can't ignore...we were at the height of the Cold War (I just finished my first tour in the FRG). It takes something to get you to sympathize with the Soviets especially in those times but I surely did when you understood what awaited those people when the Great War ended. At the end of the day though, and I think also some of Baens issue with the series, was that the Draka could only exist in that universe. by Stirling's own admission he purposely created the absolute worst version of America imaginable, turned up to even more horrific nightmare levels, and gave them all the breaks to boot. He put them in a world that made no sense in that no one reacted to their existance like history has shown how nation states react. After the domination of Africa, there would have been no doubt how the other powers of tthe world would have viewed/treated the Draka in reality. They might have been left to the continent (not really, more than likely other countries would have intervened/interfered for the resources alone). Stirling purposely wrote them into a geopolitical/military environment where everyone else blindly ignored the looming cancerous threat in their midst and did nothing about it until it was too late. And don't get me started on the the invasion and domination of India... A marry sue among fictional nations. It's always been a weak point among the books imo.
This is the kind of quality commentary/discussion that should be in our zeitgeist, as opposed to the dreck in "Mainstream Media". Feel like I should maybe tip my fedora, but I do mean what I typed.
The Draka series is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers meets Harry Hurtledoves Alternative History storytelling, with a tad of the Turner Diaries thrown into it, but it's meant to be negative, not positive unlike the last example given. March through Georgia was awesome. I have not gone around to reading the other two books of the series.
Many people vehemently disagree with me on this, but I think book 2 (Under the Yoke) is the weakest of the trilogy. Not bad, but not as good as Marching Through Georgia or Stone Dogs.
How is it negstive when it's the grandiose goal of every white nationalist to be recognised as the finest specimen of human evolution whose bounty is the entire earth itself?
@@chrisferatu1793 Steve is actually quite willing to discuss his Emberverse and Black Chamber books, perhaps even his Shadow Spawn as well, but the Draka books are another thing.
@@ryan.1990 I'm very curious how you're going to avoid politics when talking about an alternate history of the United States centered around its "evil twin." Just calling it that brings a lot to unpack because I'm positive there's a number of fans who would have called it a utopia (that's just statistics). See where it might get a little hard for things not to get heated? I don't blame him for preferring not to discuss it with others.
@@grimnir2922 I mean references to current politics, the tired attempts to draw comparisons with villain X and your politician of choice, the tribalism, the insufferable witch hunts to find "racists" under every rock, etc. ad nauseam. I've yet to finish the books so I can't comment but the Draka are an improvement on current SAfrica at least!
I loved your videos on the trilogy when I found your videos on the last summer, and I got me to read them. So I was very excited when I saw this on my subscription.
Overall an excellent analysis, including elements I had overlooked when I read them in my youth. However, your comparison of Draka "serfdom" to the USSR under Stalin is ahistorical. While the latter certainly included fear of the state it was largely driven by pride in the supranational project.
2:02 the last vestiges in practice… you mean how it’s still legal to employ prisoners as legal slaves? The entire for profit prison system is just rebranded slavery alive and thriving in America in 2024.
I remember finding this series through a Wikipedia rabbit hole back in high school and it always seems to resurface in my conscience every couple of years. It’s nice to see someone finally cover it.
Lots to think about in this video. As always, I appreciate your perspective and its compelling fusion of (right-ish) libertarian values with left-wing analysis. The lesbian sex thing was surprising and made me think of another “ironic but not-really dystopia” the late capitalist hell of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway. I’d love to see a Feral Historian take on that one, someday.
Superb as always. I have seen all the videos on this channel. Most books discussed I have read, but I have not touched the Draka novels. Future vistas rather than alternate histories are generally my interest (Heinlein being my all time favourite author). I wander if I want to give these a cautious go. Are they well written?
They're definitely worth a read. Each book is quite different from the previous. Marching Through Georgia is a straight war story, though with a lot of digressions. Under The Yoke is all about consolidating conquests, resistance movements, and it takes a lot of jabs at exploitive shlock fiction. By book three, The Stone Dogs, it turns into sci-fi, with both major power blocs holding territory throughout the Solar System. Space battles, genetically modified fighting apes, all kinds of crazy stuff. Drakon, which I think of as the fourth book a trilogy, has alot of sci-fi elements, but it's in a parallel world set roughly contemporary to ours (at least back when it was written) and has a very different feel.
Love your work. Can you do a video on Harry S. Turtledove’s Southern Victory series? It’s an interesting series I’ve been meaning to get into and it would make a good video. 👍
That's a possibility. I never finished reading that series, it starts off really strong but the later books fall into that one-for-one equivalency that Turtledove does sometimes. My impressions of it are a little mixed.
@@feralhistorian Turledove has a bad habit of being repetitive over and over again. To the point where you find yourself saying to yourself, I've read this chapter, but it was in another series.
@@feralhistorian My favorite book of his is _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump,_ because half the point is the one-for-one equivalency. The other half (and what the plot eventually hinges on) are the little fillips that result from the exchange. For example, flying carpets replace cars, and the City of Angels consequently has a lint problem from all the carpets, but a fly-by assassination attempt is done by tossing an earth elemental at the target's carpet; the elemental's earth negates the air enchantment on the carpet, leading to a (hopefully) fatal crash. It worked less well for his 'WWII only magic' series, because he'd written two or three mildly alternate WWIIs by that point, and it was mostly more of the same. It never really mattered that the 'Japanese' were blonds with really bushy beards or that they were armed with magic staves rather than rifles; it was just Turtledove's take on WWII _again._
Another thing that I got from your description is that. Now mind you I just now heard about this series. Is that I can’t help notice how it parallels another historical event. The Peloponnesian war. To give a brief explanation before getting into some specifics. The Peloponnesian war was between Athens and Sparta for control over all of Greece. The first and most obvious example is that of the rough comparison between the Spartan caste system and the Drakan caste system. Both are systems with an upper class of foreign conquerors ruling over a massive slave class that is kept in line through fear and is maintained by the fear of a slave uprising. There is also the comparison between the Alliance and Athens with the Pan-Hellenic league. While Athens was the “birthplace of democracy” it didn’t share its democracy with others. Often treating those who even slightly hindered them rather tyrannically. The most famous example of this is Melinan dialogue. Where the Athenians threaten the people of Melos to either surrender and become a tribute state to Athens or be destroyed with the Athenian general uttering the famous phrase: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The war also ended the same way with oppressive forces that had a authoritarian slave economy defeating the “democracy”. Hell, you can say that the ww2 of this series echoes the Persian wars as these 2 forces ally together in defeating a common enemy. So it can be interpreted as seeing in these books, a retelling of that story fought in that rocky peninsula; expanded to encompass the whole world.
in the end the Draka power entropy thought time as seen on the Drakon novel as the people on that New American generation ship manage to give the Draka a bloody nose.
Eugh... probably one of the worst book series written. Sterling liked to defend the series with "well it's fiction, so criticizing it for being unrealistic doesn't make sense" only for the fans to talk about how "realistic" it is... such a frustrating series.
If anybody needs a post-Draka palette cleanser, I recommend the fanfic “Proof Through the Night” by ChaserGray. It shows what might have happened if FDR had had a little more sense in how to deal with the Domination. “Oh, we sentimentalize, and wrap it in Hollywood glamour, but we don’t think. We don’t think about an entire continent crushed under a boot, and the promise of more to follow. And we don’t think of a people- my people- caught in a web of terrible choices and crimes that had forced them on a never ending cycle of conquest, oppression, and human misery. We don’t think of all the human beings wasting their potential as slaves or slavemasters, and of the few dozen men who woke them from two centuries of nightmare and gave them the one thing they thought they would never have. Choices. They must have made a mighty roar, those Allison turboprops, thundering over the Mediterranean and the African veldt that night. They must have, for their echoes have yet to vanish from this Earth.” -Yolande Ingolfsson, Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, 1984”
I keep looking into these books and being fascinated by the thought process behind them and what they were trying to say, and I have to say your explanation about Draka being America’s dark twin makes a lot of sense, and is also a nuanced rebuttal of the surface level criticisms of the Draka’s (still pretty) unrealistic serfdom even I had. Therefore I have subscribed (though I would caution you to not use AI images quite so much- they were distractingly bad 😂 and I will always criticize their use as a shortcut) and will eagerly watch your videos as I make my own amateur history content. In particular I’ll try to make as thoughtful and informative a response as I can to your point about “America not having a national identity anymore” which feels somewhat true but also not, yet is thought provoking. That having been said, even reading these books in high school I knew they were terrible, more like historical fantasy than alternate history. If your alternate history relies on everyone else conveniently ignoring an entire continent that was well fought over in real history just to allow your author’s pet to win while having mostly the exact same people doing the exact same things, you’ve already lost any suspension of disbelief by me, regardless of interesting commentary under the surface. Sometimes I feel like the rise in the late oughts, early 10s of faux-knowledgeable Internet nitpick culture (which I wasn’t immune to) has destroyed a lot of creative risk taking but this isn’t a nitpick- it’s a semi-truck sized hole in your worldbuilding that the More Realistic Draka Timeline that’s been archived corrected years and years ago. These kinds of things are easier to accept in Eric Flint’s 1632 series or Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar because they a.) diverge at ONE point and b.) are very fantastical in their premise then grounded in execution.
Sorry, Boba Fett just came to mind. Have you seen the actor's family ? ! In legends and when the Prequels recon him, and bits of Disney, Boba Fett had a lot of brothers .. in the millions. Pardon the phase, but Boba Fett is Legend in the Star Wars mythos. So is Baron Fel, who Thrawn mass cloned. The Vong war could have been better. As for overall regards to Book of Boba Fett, soon as Mando learn he is still alive. Dozens of Boba's nieces & nephews would show up. But it is a film with a budget, along with all the background B and C rated characters be to much to handle unlike a novel. South Pacific islanders are just way cool.
I have a few Draka pics up at a Deviantart page, www.deviantart.com/kiltcat/gallery I don't have any of the heavily AI-assisted stuff up there, but I think the older pics I did without those tools are the best ones anyway.
Yup, I gotta read Marching through Georgia now. I know this is sorta off subject, but Feral Historian have you ever read Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel? If you have, what do you think of Jared Diamond and his other works?
I read Guns, Germs and Steel wayyy back. I remember thinking he made a lot of good points, but that he tried a little too hard to make everything fit his thesis. But he did make me think about some things I hadn't considered before, for example how the availability of animals that can be domesticated both for food and labor affects a society's development versus those who don't have them. Can't plow a field with pigs after all.
I loved Guns, Germs n Steel. Fascinated by the anecdote of the people on (I think New Guinea) building landing strips to intice cargo planes to land, like they'd seen American soldiers do.
Small correction, but the Soviet Union collapse because of the constant revolutions from Soviet citizens. They didn't accept it and Soviet citizens were far better off than slaves, even if they lived in an oppressive society. The Draka premise also fails with its colonization of Africa and all of Asia/enormous swathes of land whilst never getting overextended. The British were only able to colonize Africa through Protectorates, eventually beating the armies of the rulers of African kingdoms and then negotiating vassalhood. They could never succeed in subduing the actual civilian population, for example, after the British defeated Zulu King Cetshwayo in the Anglo-Zulu war, they deposed him, but had to reinstall him after the entirety of Zululand erupted in rebellion. The British made a lot of concessions to local leaders as well as heavily restricted education to natives that it worked with as administrators to keep their empire and even with all this manipulation as well as a ton of violence and war crimes, they still couldn't suppress independence movements and eventually had to give most of their empire. The Draka could not have enslaved two entire continents as shown in the books.
In the first book, set in WWII, Draka tech is at a late 40s or maybe early 50s level. I've seen a lot of people compare the Draka Hond III tank to an Abrams, but really it's more like a heavier M48 or Centurion. It's advanced enough compared to everyone else to strain credulity, but not so much as to be absolutely fantastical.
In Tokugawa Japan there were the Four Orders: Samurai, Peasants, Artisans and Merchants, plus an informal class of outcasts who did a bunch of mucky jobs and the small and powerless court nobility hovering around the Emperor in Kyoto. Samurai were in charge. They held effectively all formal positions of power in the Tokugawa state. They ruled the provinces, the cities, the districts. They were police, inspectors, overseers and more. Commoners had to bow before Samurai, if they failed to do so the Samurai could draw his katana and chop off their heads. Never the less, beneath the Samurai the various subordinate classes did not merely acquiesce. They pushed against them in numerous small ways. The merchant class in particular grew powerful in the shadow of the Samurai and despite efforts to keep it in line. They became adept at working around the formal limits of their station. When the Meiji Restoration happened, many non samurai joined up with the Imperials specifically to topple the Shogunate and the Four Orders were abolished by the Meiji Constitution. The important thing to know is that No Man Rules Alone. In the case of the Domination, no class rules alone. The Draka in the books would have to hand over considerable power to key serfs to keep things operating. Restrictions on Education would in truth only make this more difficult. You can fire an accountant if they use their position to line their own pockets. We train lots of people to do these jobs and they have a broad base. A Serf Accountant who does the same thing may be executed, but that causes it's own problems as there are not many educated serfs and since Draka education is narrow you can't just transfer in someone from IT or Records. Definitely not just an illiterate plantation hand. The Snakes can play a game of Wack-A-Mole trying to suppress them (which has costs including corruption, investigations, buying and training replacements and opportunity costs from vacant positions not easily filled) or you might try raising the standards of living for serf accountants and other such essential functionaries (and incidentally increase the size of that class, since this will require more goods for serf accountants, which will require new factories to make them and by extension produce more serf accountants, technicians, etc). Either way, you can have substantial power blocks beneath the Citizen body which can in aggregate exert influence. Especially when they realize that while they might be able to get minor bribes and favours on their own, they could reap major gains working together.
Please make a video on Doctor Strange Love. You brought the point where we are just letting the USSR and today China do evil things and we are wishy washy about destroying them. All the while we wither and die. General Buck Turgidson said we could have destroyed the USSR in a surprise attack and they couldn’t do anything. Yet we didn’t. Now we are the one on decline and our enemies hunger for power and status.
The hell are you talking about? The United States is the greatest threat to global peace and democracy through its countless imperial campaigns of domination throughout the third world. Imposing dictators and extracting resources at gunpoint. All while it encroaches upon sovereign nations through its NATO alliance. Makes sense you would have a profile picture with black face. Your view of history is highly idealistic and has no contextual grounding. Pure anti communist nonsense.
I think you migh be interested in Code Geass. A mecha anime with an imperialist state similar to the Draka, called the Holy Britannian Empire. Baiscally what if America lost the revolutionary war. But Britain gets invaded by republican france, so the british monarchy and other european nobles flee to British America. The empire had conquered all of the Americas, similar to how the Draka conquered all of Africa. I recomend watching the series, its really good.
There is one major problem with the Draka concept that makes it impossible, or at least unsustainable in the real world, and that problem is the Draka's economic dependence upon slavery and conquest. The Confederacy really could not win the Civil War on its own under its own power. It was poor, had very limited manpower, and did not generally innovate very much. The plantation owners were not even that rich either, having dug themselves deep into debt via drink and gambling that some abolitionist could have started a plantation in competition that operated entirely upon wage labour, even hiring slaves from neighbouring estates who could use the wages to buy their freedom eventually. But nobody ever thought about that, because of a certain conceit against wealth, namely that wealth is invariably built via immoral behaviour. Indeed, free market capitalism was already undermining the Southern economy and giving the North all the power it needed to win the civil war when it came, and barring serious help from abroad or a change of government in Washington, the Confederacy was truly a lost cause.
I read this series back in high school and there is one thing that stuck with me, when one of the characters tells another: "The citizens ARE the state" referring to the amount of power every citizen in the domination wielded, especially when dealing with serfs. We think of democracies as having the best possible standard of living for citizens, but in a system where every citizen is a master in a slave/serf society you never have to worry about anything. Unless you piss off a higher-ranked citizen.
I'm only 24, I was forced to attend a BIA owned and operated boarding school very young, where I had my mouth washed out with soap, and was forced to keep hot sauce or juice from jars of peppers in my mouth whenever I spoke my language. When I expressed my cultural beliefs I was beat, I have a crooked nose due to a break that was never set properly and I even got my hands beat with a hatchet handle because I was playing Navajo string-games. My hands are arthritic from that. I won't even get into the rampant sex abuse that a lot of my peers had experienced at the hands of faculty members. All the boarding schools on my reservation are still BIA owned and operated, you can see for yourself on the BIA gov website. My great grandfather ran away from a boarding school similar to mine when he was 17, 'bout to be 18, just to join the Marines during WW2. The fact that he'd enlist and become a codetalker, rather than stay in that place, should give you a good idea of how shitty those places are and historically have been for us. Throughout the 1960s and 70s up until 1981, the US goverment allowed what were essentially forced sterilizations through the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, which subsidized sterilizations for Indian Health Service patients, majority of which are obviously Indigenous folk. Many of my aunts cannot bear children due to operations they didn't consent to and that were forced upon them when they were young and attending BIA boarding schools during the 70s and 80s. This is classified as ethnic cleansing now, and even today this is still a big problem in Canada. In 2018 over 100 indigenous women received forced sterilization procedures in Saskatchewan hospitals, there are pending lawsuits for them which you can look up. Look at the uranium mining and radioactive waste the US government has left to fester on our reservations in the Southwest US. Many in my family have died and continue to die from cancer due to radioactive pollution from the mines around Black Mesa and Kayenta. That spill in Church Rock, New Mexico upended the lives of nearby residents, who had to grapple with toxic groundwater, contaminated livestock and a lifetime of illnesses. They are still waiting for it to be cleaned up and the government isn't likely to be the ones to do it. No, it will be likely be a federally funded workforce of Navajos or indigenous folks from their respective reservations who will have to clean it up, because we're expandable and the government is incapable of being responsible for their foul-ups. Keep in mind most of us don't even have running water, electricity, gas, and we live hours away from cities, grocery stores, EMS, etc. Lot of us herd sheep, hunt, grow our own food and haul water everyday to survive. New Mexico and the reservations there are treated like sacrifice zones, with indigenous peoples and impoverished communities bearing the brunt of the toxic waste and permanently altered environments. Legacies of nuclear waste and testing in New Mexico are full of lies, malicious intent, racism, and complete disregard for human life and the land. The mining corporations get away with taking all the profit and leaving the mess for the the American tax payer and us to clean up. This is after we let them mine our resources almost for free. The drive to irradicate us indigenous people and lay waste to our communities has never fully ceased for some people. So many government entities in the US are corrupt and maliciously incompetent to the extent they are not capable of delivering fair governance to us indigenous folks or even you citizens, nothing but corruption trickles down in this country and it's soured everything. Today my tribe numbers around 400,000 and about 100,000 of our tribal members speak Diné bizaad; we're one of, if not the largest extant indigenous societies left in North America. Despite the US military and BIA actively trying to destroy our cultural identity, language, etc. for over a century, we've survived with far more intact than any other indigenous peoples can say for themselves. We're the richest tribe in the US, but I can tell you, we don't get anything from casinos around our reserves or whatever people think. I don't even think we own the casinos around our reservation. There is a lot of corruption and nepotism within our tribal goverment. My parents grew up with no running water, no eletricity, as did I. My wife's family still lives like that back on the rez and so does my extended family and inlaws, yet we've never seen a dime, nickle or penny of handouts. Yeah, I'm real lucky.
@@Bister_Mungle yeah, I agree the reservations were a horrible thing to do. Do you people we should’ve just forced you to integrate. the tribes that get the least amount of government assistance are normally the best off and historically you’re lucky you weren’t enslaved or wiped out that’s just historical realism. Yeah it’s sucks Your tribe so miss managed.
@@0944clayton I disagree, you fail to understand the nuances of our different tribes and reservations. Seems like it may be too complex for your understanding. Normally, you'd be correct, but we indigenous people have very unique circumstances that vary a lot from tribe to tribe. Some tribes aren't even recognized and they're usually worse off. Reservations are good and bad, I think people who think we should be rid of them aren't thinking it through 100%. I guess if you wanted to totally wipe out our cultures and create more blood debts between Indigenous folls and everyone else then yeah, force us to integrate, like that's gonna solve anything. You'd literally just create a shitshow like Russia/Ukraine or Palestine/Israel. Reservations wouldn't be so bad if the BIA and US government didn't totally control the tribal governments.
@@Bister_Mungle I think y’all should’ve never been put in the reservations your culture probably should have been wiped out or integrated. And the tribes of the government recognition tend to do a lot better and be more equipped for the modern world. I believe John Stossel has a whole video about it.
@@0944clayton Have you ever been on any reserves? It's a lot more complicated than you or John Stossel thinks, and that's a ridiculous notion. Your sentiments on this subject just shows how little you actually know of this yourself. Tribes that aren't recognized by the govermment are less protected than those of us that are and are much worse off. Hell, the 2nd amendment doesn't even apply to those tribes, so what makes you think that'd be better for them? My tribe and the Muskogee tribes are walking proof that what you say is bullshit. Unless you just straight up suppprt ethnic cleansing and on-paper genocide, I don't see how you could think that's for the best. You biligaánas want to propose all these solutions without evee fully understanding anything or even experiencing it for yourself. Like, are you even indigenous? What do you personally know of it?
For most of it, I sketch it in Photoshop or Krita, then run it through a local install of Stable Diffusion to add detail. If it's something not too strange or specific (like the Draka landowners) I skip the sketch and make the AI do it. Which still requires some touch-up but saves a lot time. The image in the title card was more complex, using photo-bashing, a lot of digital painting, and I don't even know how many layers. It was started as a commission piece for a crossover fan-fic some guys at the alt-history forum have been working on, with the Draka fighting the Chimera from Resistance : Fall of Man. I bashed it back to a remake of the Marching Through Georgia cover for this.
My problem with Stirling and the Draka series is that the Draka may be a dystopia but it's a dystopia that Stirling seems to be in love with. It reminds me more of John Norman's love of his dystopia. I appreciate the review but I just don't like this series.
I didn't get that from it at all. None of the Draka are heroes. Eric sent his (serf) daughter to America. rather than have her be a serf. He wants to kill himself (through reckless combat) rather than be a part of it, but he succumbs at the end of the first book. And it's for love of his friends. Not country. I found it quite tragic.
Yeah which is why I don’t totally buy the “it’s a dystopia you twit!” He did something similar in “Conquistador.” I think Stirling believes that some beautiful things can only be preserved by brutal autocracy.
@@Detson404 Stirling seems to hold those with antiquated or anti-progressive beliefs in a very low regard. With a few exceptions, the Draka are pretty antiquated. The Alliance meanwhile is a neoconservative superstate that exists to destroy the Draka. Once you look past the dystopian narrative, it’s clear Stirling’s ideal state would be much closer to the Alliance than the Domination.
Though this book series provides interesting political commentary the story attacked to it diminishes it for me since it's so absurd. The Draka feel like that one kid on the play grounds OC who was just immune to everything and which nothing can go bad for. Really gives off the vibe of a person trying to say Batman can beat Goku which I don't really want in my serious political commentary.
I think part of the problem is that the Draka books (with the exception of Drakon) are essentially dystopian fiction, but they're presented as alternate history, so they get torn apart on that basis because they do constantly buff the Draka in order to feed the dystopia. We don't go after the worldbuilding of 1984 or Brave New World with anywhere near the same vigor because the backstory isn't the point in those book, but backstory is the entire point of alt-hist.
Slave-based economies do not survive indefinitely because slavery is an unsustainable system which leads to class conflict and technological stagnation. I remember this alternate history, I found it very naive. It's also extremely revisionist from a neoliberal point of view.
Have you ever read "The Fall of a Nation"? It was an invasion novel, not too different from the concept of the Draka series, but about European monarchies forming a global league after the Pope ends WW1 and then invading America in order to eliminate democracy and exploit America economically. It was written in 1916 by Thomas Dixon, the man who wrote the book that was the basis of Birth of a Nation, so it'd be kinda controversial I think to make anything about it, but it's useful to read to understand what motivated a lot of Americans back then. Here's an interesting quote: “The American Republic is but a little over a hundred years old. We reckon in years, they reckon by centuries. The founding of this nation was one of the happiest accidents in the history of the world. But it was an accident. The kings were too busy fighting one another in the stirring years of the American Revolution to give their attention to you. Your fathers won on a lucky fluke. And thanks to the barriers of two vast oceans you grew and waxed strong with incredible rapidity. You were safe as long as these oceans protected you and no longer. The genius of man has abolished the ocean barrier. There is no more sea. The ocean is now the world’s highway and transport by water is swifter and safer than by land. The oceans no longer protect you. They are a constant menace to your existence-”
What about France? One of the more powerful European nations, and a republic itself. Nevermind that by that point the United Kingdom was more democracy than kingdom. Heck, the only major Papist monarchy participating in that war was Italy; France wasn't a monarchy, and the rest of the monarchs weren't Catholic. One can only assume the divergence begins earlier than implied.
Oh please. The Draka is one of the most unrealistic alt histories ever written and Stirling got extremely butt hurt when this was pointed out to him 😂😂😂
Marching through Georgia was one of my favorite Alt history books when I was fourteen. As I got older though I realized his claim that 'it's a dystopia you twit' when picked apart his novels didn't hold up because it was more the flaws in his world building that broke suspension of disbelief. Politically Draka relies on everyone else in the world being idiots and not acting anywhere close to what they would remotely do in a semi-plausible scenario (Draka would have been crushed by the British Empire in the 19th century if someone else didn't get to it eventually). His tech is utterly laughable...their tech literally relies on doing things that failed and were far too expensive OTL even if they were semi-workable. Economics...sigh...not to mention Draka's geo-strategic position & demographics. Africa is a hard mode continent to develop. It has crap navigable waterways into the interior, it's missing some key resources (which the Americans are not), it has lest coastline than Europe and lacks deep water ports. Not to mention disease affecting both people and livestock, and the fact they are vastly outnumbered by a native population (and other European powers interested in grabbing a piece of Africa). Lacking money, demographics, and resources with terrain working against them as well makes industrializing Draka an expensive (and unrealistic) proposition...especially with a massive agrian based slave population. They were modeled after the Spartans and much like the Spartans they would be stuck in an trap of spending the blood and treasure of it's citizens keeping the helots in their place.. Draka's dystopia relies on plot armor to develop with somehow other powers either ignoring them or ignoring their own best interests. The British for example would never let the slavery issue go in one of their colonies...it'd either end or the folks trying to keep it would have to revolt (and likely lose since unlike the Americans they just can't as easily smuggle in contraband due to Africa's geo-strat problems). Not to mention South Africa was a key station for building and maintaining the British Empire ...to India, Australia, Asia, and most importantly China. It breaks all suspension of disbelief the rest of the world sort of follows the same OTL tune but ignores developments in Draka or more implausibly doesn't apply Draka 'early tech advancements' to there ATL development at all.
The Draka still using slaves in the British Empire after 1833 isn't as problematic as you might think. The East India Company had obtained an exemption from the Slavery Abolition Act until 1843. And even after that, the de facto slavery of the native Indian caste system was largely left unchallenged.
@@SirHarryFlashman EIC got the exemption not so it could maintain a slave trade but so the huge Hindu and Muslim populations in the region could continue with their customs of slavery and banning it would upset the applecart (and threaten the EICs tentative control of EIC clients) as they cited banning slavery would be seen as 'interference in traditional social structures'. Slavery would be banned in India in 1843 with the Indian Slavery Act anyway. Slavery in ATL Drakia colony would probably be worse than the West Indies and the primary slave holders would be British, (or boer/loyalists) not natives. No way the evangelical abolitionists are just going to ignore the condition in South Africa...those British slave owners at best would have to submit to a lesser form of slavery like a regulated debt-bondage rather than outright chattel slavery. Good luck keeping the native African populations from overthrowing the minority in that case (because they'd still have to ease up the boot and at least some of the local black population would be freemen and debt-bonded workers still have more rights than outright slaves making it harder to keep control of them).
There is a story that's Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Domination of the Drakas called Separated at Birth: America and Drakia which is a pretty good take on the Drakas, it's a pretty good story that fixes a lot of problems that The Drakas have, I highly recommend it because of how good it is and has a ending where Drakia collapses due a combination of mistreating it's allies and subject it calls Princely States.
The Draka is what the Enclave from Fallout wished they could be.
And the Austrian Painter
or the Legion
I don't really thing that the Enclave, Funny mustache man or The Legion are that comparable to the Draka outside of a surface view.
lol no
the Enclave and the Draka are one and the same
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
― Hilaire Belloc
But the real question is... is it *really* a Stirling book without super-fit lesbians having sex?
I haven't read it in years, but under the yoke I think it had slave girls preforming that service
Well, the Draka weren’t short of that; that’s for sure.
I don’t mind the SA lesbians 🇿🇦
Do you mind listing some examples for…research?
@@zackarysullivan9019 in the book where they controlled Europe there was an American, the Draka female lead was explaining how her maid was well a just to
"No one wants to lead the charge because the first rank dies."
Exactly the dilemma we're in.
How so?
I hear that, man.
And the eternal question - is it ‘Drayker’ or ‘Drahkah’.
I favour the latter as it sounds more Afrikaans.
When I first read it (scary to think how long ago that was) I went with "Drah-ka"
Now I very consciously go with "Dray-ka" on the logic that SIr Francis Drake led to Drakia, condensed to Draka down the line.
I suspect if we asked Stirling he'd give different answers just to mess with us, like Lovecraft did when asked how to pronounce Cthulu.
@@feralhistorian .. his usual answer in the mailingl ist is "heh-heh-heh" 8)
I'd just go with regional differences in pronunciation.
You convinced me to go and actually read all of the books
They’re legitimately epic. Try and get the original 3 books separately, not the omnibus. They leave whole sections out in the omnibus and don’t include the appendices. Well worth the extra money.
They’re good, but Stirling has a bad habit of “writing with one hand” if you catch my meaning.
The author, SM Stirling aka S&M Stirling does not realize what a grand ( though disturbing) work of art he has created.
he knows .. we tell him so evewry third day [ok .. that is a slight hyperbole] or so in our mailing list (where he is a member, even somtiomes active)
He posted a response to this video so I think he knows!
@@markusbaur2128
( 😬!! 😮!…[ 😏!!] )
@@Albemarle7 IMO, he knows and regrets Jim Baen's directive that the bad guys cannot win.
So true, someone came up with all of this without imagining it having any significance.
From a non American perspective, the USA is the worst possible world empire - except for all the others.
As an American, that makes sense. We were never supposed to be this globally influential.
Idk what that means, sorry 😭
@@flyingsquirrell6953 Winston Churchill said that Democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the others. Ie highly flawed but still the best.
@@simontmn He never got to see what it became. The Managed Democracy of Britain and the United States was very different back in the day.
When you read the books by Winston Churchill, he gives a deep dive to how the British political system worked back then.
Very different. Very different indeed.
@@Hugebull so I was using Churchill's phrase, but referring to imperialism not democracy.
Can never go wrong with more Draka content.
I remember a lot of the older criticisms of the Alliance was just how dumb and short-sighted it acted, even letting the Draka get away with invading India and basically doing nothing about it. Clearly, real countries, especially those at the apex of their power, never act so idiotic.
Right. That perception sure has aged well.
From 1775 on up to 11/22/1963 the USA had the luck of the Draka.
Our timeline is as implausible as their's is.
🤷♂️ Well-to be fair, India did secede from the Alliance…
Not in the 1700s or 1800s. This is an era where Britain went to war with China over China not letting them bring in Opium.
Bad parallel, go learn about the genocide Ukraine was perpetuating on its own people and who was enabling it.
And the Domination was prepped and ready to roll as soon as the secession happened while the Alliance needed months to prep, ship stuff and deploy. Just like the USA today in a major conflict. Also, like in multiple brushfire wars against the Communists, they feared escalating into a nuclear conflict.
Your videos on the Draka have always been my favourite; perhaps just because hierarchy and agrarianism are aesthetically very pleasing to me. There's something most relaxing about listening to an American's sage ramblings about this particular book series. If it's possible to milk more content out of the Draka, please do!
Every time I think about the Draka books something new occurs to me and I haven't even covered Drakon yet. I think it's safe to say there will be more Draka.
@@feralhistorian thank goodness. i thought the series was over on the draker
I don't think anyone else has the panache to do the Draka books. If someone else were to do it they'd ether decry the novels as fascist fanfare, or come off looking like a "windmill enthusiast" themselves. FH found the very small, safe, middle ground.
-----End thought
If you keep making videos your going to blow up I never heard about you a month ago now I beckon at your every UA-cam post.
@@feralhistorian If I may ask, what is your educational background? You strike me as extremely well educated.
@@The_violet_lord The Author does not like this creation of his.
Remember AC Doyle came to hate Sherlock Holmes.
I wish there is a place for Draka fan fic.
I have a story for it all but written.
I remember The Draka... man they were such.... villain-sues
No they weren't
it was on purpose. Stirling set out to create a crapsack world where everything went to hell in a handbasket. To do that he needed an evil bastard villain-sue.
He likes those evil villain empires it seems. In Peshawar Lancers an asteroid devastates the planet and the Russian Empire devolves into a satanic cannibalistic regime, opposed to the Angrezi Raj.
The whole premise of the Draka was 'what if I weighed the dice, _all_ the dice. How bullshit and depraved can I make these guys while remaining in newtonian physics?"
The result? John Galt does the Druchii.
@@JoshSweetvale Druchii are actually an excellent comparison that I;'d never thought of before
Discovered the Draka novels around 2009, always thought they were criminally underrated. So happy to see someone examining them in detail!
As an Afrikaans South African, it's kinda surreal that thinking about my ethno-linguistic group being assimilated into something like the Draka.
I recall Moldbug posting a link to "De La Rey" to emphasise his point that the Boer War was an "American Revolution" that failed.
I’ve been looking forward to you covering this again
If you get a chance I imagine many people would love a video on the Orville
Especially after the recent stark trek video I've started thinking about the similarities and differences
also I love the videos!! Keep up the good work
I concur. A video on The Orville would be good. 👍
Sir Francis Drake; the Aristocratic Stone Age Murder Monkey who started it all! Thank you SM Stirling for these novels. I have wondered what you think of the "Dies the Fire" Series.
I've been meaning to cover Dies the Fire for a long time. I don't know why it's taking so long to get it together.
I remember ignoring this series, now I'm going to have to read this. Thanks for you insights. Lots to think about.
To anyone who hasn't read these yet: I would strongly recommend you get the versions with the appendices in the back. Lots of cool, albeit bleak, world-building hidden in there.
Also, I'm going to sound like a sicko for saying this, but I found the world of the Draka to be such an over-the-top grimdark Hellscape, and the Draka themselves so cartoonishly evil, that reading the series was perversely, morbidly really "Fun" in a WATCH IT ALL BURN!!! sort of way.
Yes, the world building is really its strength.
you may be interested in the alt-hist "For All Time". Want to see the Presidential Election between Jim Jones (D) and Charles Manson (R)? There's how we get there.
The trilogy could make dominating miniseries.
It would. But the series would be given the Man in the High Castle treatment... because of it's themes + Wokeness.
Seriously fuck off with the whole "because of wokeness" schtick.
The Boys. GoT. The Expanse. Woke? Or is it just "woke" if you happen to disagree with it.
Come to think of it, please define "woke" in this instance for me.
I dare you.
Something similar in tone nearly happened at the hands of the Game of Thrones show runners. They wanted to do a series about the Confederacy defeating the North and the society that results from that happening. But there were no takers from the big networks and media companies. No one wanted to be associated with such a project due to the current climate.
@@kylejamesdalzell2839 Considering that the villains are white with an almost Southern accent, I am surprised that Hollywood has not already grabbed it.
This is fantastic. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this series or Stirling - and I wrote my dissertation about the rhetoric of dystopian fiction. 😳 Thank you for this. I’m going to read the Domination of Draka series ASAP. This is the kind of content that makes UA-cam essential.
I recommend finding the original volumes, they have extensive appendices about the world that Stirling set the story in. The series was later collecting into a single volume titled "The Domination" but it's abridged and has some other editorial decisions that detract from it a bit.
@@feralhistorian you can find the appendices online
If I recall right, most famously Jim Baen was not a big fan at all of the series and this eventually led to him and Stirling cutting ties. Baen just couldn't get behind the overwhelming negative endings where basically, even if they lost a fight the "bad guys won" (e.g Draka!).
For myself, I read them all as they came out and certainly, there's a context there you can't ignore...we were at the height of the Cold War (I just finished my first tour in the FRG). It takes something to get you to sympathize with the Soviets especially in those times but I surely did when you understood what awaited those people when the Great War ended.
At the end of the day though, and I think also some of Baens issue with the series, was that the Draka could only exist in that universe. by Stirling's own admission he purposely created the absolute worst version of America imaginable, turned up to even more horrific nightmare levels, and gave them all the breaks to boot. He put them in a world that made no sense in that no one reacted to their existance like history has shown how nation states react.
After the domination of Africa, there would have been no doubt how the other powers of tthe world would have viewed/treated the Draka in reality. They might have been left to the continent (not really, more than likely other countries would have intervened/interfered for the resources alone). Stirling purposely wrote them into a geopolitical/military environment where everyone else blindly ignored the looming cancerous threat in their midst and did nothing about it until it was too late.
And don't get me started on the the invasion and domination of India...
A marry sue among fictional nations. It's always been a weak point among the books imo.
Ah, at last someone really gets it!
Simeon and Joat are characters from an Anne McCaffrey book that she did with S. M. Stirling. You are a long time fan I guess?
@@gregmita - * cashirecatsmile *
@@gregmita The proper answer to that question should be “heh heh heh” :-)
@@gregmita Smartass. 🤔
@@gregmitaThat’s the man himself
This is the kind of quality commentary/discussion that should be in our zeitgeist, as opposed to the dreck in "Mainstream Media".
Feel like I should maybe tip my fedora, but I do mean what I typed.
The Draka series is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers meets Harry Hurtledoves Alternative History storytelling, with a tad of the Turner Diaries thrown into it, but it's meant to be negative, not positive unlike the last example given. March through Georgia was awesome. I have not gone around to reading the other two books of the series.
Many people vehemently disagree with me on this, but I think book 2 (Under the Yoke) is the weakest of the trilogy. Not bad, but not as good as Marching Through Georgia or Stone Dogs.
@@feralhistorian I'll check them out and see for myself.
How is it negstive when it's the grandiose goal of every white nationalist to be recognised as the finest specimen of human evolution whose bounty is the entire earth itself?
Because of toxic fandom, SM Stirling refuses to discuss his Draka stories, in person or online. Shame.
It’s also a shame that accusations of “toxic fandom” are increasingly used to justify creators’ refusal to meaningfully engage with their audiences.
@@chrisferatu1793 Steve is actually quite willing to discuss his Emberverse and Black Chamber books, perhaps even his Shadow Spawn as well, but the Draka books are another thing.
People are way too politicised these days
@@ryan.1990 I'm very curious how you're going to avoid politics when talking about an alternate history of the United States centered around its "evil twin." Just calling it that brings a lot to unpack because I'm positive there's a number of fans who would have called it a utopia (that's just statistics). See where it might get a little hard for things not to get heated? I don't blame him for preferring not to discuss it with others.
@@grimnir2922 I mean references to current politics, the tired attempts to draw comparisons with villain X and your politician of choice, the tribalism, the insufferable witch hunts to find "racists" under every rock, etc. ad nauseam.
I've yet to finish the books so I can't comment but the Draka are an improvement on current SAfrica at least!
I loved your videos on the trilogy when I found your videos on the last summer, and I got me to read them. So I was very excited when I saw this on my subscription.
I need to read these novels now. Also happy subscription, this channel is severely underrated.
Overall an excellent analysis, including elements I had overlooked when I read them in my youth. However, your comparison of Draka "serfdom" to the USSR under Stalin is ahistorical. While the latter certainly included fear of the state it was largely driven by pride in the supranational project.
Still want to hear about the Founder Effect and the Emberverse.
I was writing on that a bit yesterday as a matter of fact. The more I think about it, the more there is to say.
Love seeing the draka get some cultural currency. My current stellaris game is playing as the Draka, and I’m secretly hoping to lose lol.
I play the Draka in Stellaris too lol
Genetic Ascendancy FTW lol
@@morganharvey2041 right? Coupled with syncretic evolution and it’s pretty spot on.
I hate the draka and I hope you lose too, no disrespect
I actually want to read the books now. That’s fascinating.
Also the draka are Basically the Enclave (Fallout)
2:02 the last vestiges in practice… you mean how it’s still legal to employ prisoners as legal slaves? The entire for profit prison system is just rebranded slavery alive and thriving in America in 2024.
I remember finding this series through a Wikipedia rabbit hole back in high school and it always seems to resurface in my conscience every couple of years. It’s nice to see someone finally cover it.
Lots to think about in this video. As always, I appreciate your perspective and its compelling fusion of (right-ish) libertarian values with left-wing analysis. The lesbian sex thing was surprising and made me think of another “ironic but not-really dystopia” the late capitalist hell of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway. I’d love to see a Feral Historian take on that one, someday.
Superb as always. I have seen all the videos on this channel. Most books discussed I have read, but I have not touched the Draka novels. Future vistas rather than alternate histories are generally my interest (Heinlein being my all time favourite author). I wander if I want to give these a cautious go. Are they well written?
They're definitely worth a read. Each book is quite different from the previous. Marching Through Georgia is a straight war story, though with a lot of digressions. Under The Yoke is all about consolidating conquests, resistance movements, and it takes a lot of jabs at exploitive shlock fiction. By book three, The Stone Dogs, it turns into sci-fi, with both major power blocs holding territory throughout the Solar System. Space battles, genetically modified fighting apes, all kinds of crazy stuff.
Drakon, which I think of as the fourth book a trilogy, has alot of sci-fi elements, but it's in a parallel world set roughly contemporary to ours (at least back when it was written) and has a very different feel.
They could use a going over by an editor to clean up some of the prose.
They are "yesterday's world of tomorrow."
Stirling always does a good job. If his writing has faults, it’s never his prose.
Wait a second are we not living in this Draka dystopia as peons right now ?
Naw. Not even close lol.
This is why democracy is bad. You're probably allowed to vote
This was a very interesting discussion. I stopped reading Sterling awhile ago but its nice to be reminded of an author I use to really enjoy.
Seeing this reminded me I offered to help with the research a while back. Completely forgot - damnit!!!
Love your work. Can you do a video on Harry S. Turtledove’s Southern Victory series? It’s an interesting series I’ve been meaning to get into and it would make a good video. 👍
That's a possibility. I never finished reading that series, it starts off really strong but the later books fall into that one-for-one equivalency that Turtledove does sometimes. My impressions of it are a little mixed.
@@feralhistorian Okay thanks for the response. If you do plan to make a video, no rush.
@@feralhistorian Turledove has a bad habit of being repetitive over and over again. To the point where you find yourself saying to yourself, I've read this chapter, but it was in another series.
@@feralhistorian My favorite book of his is _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump,_ because half the point is the one-for-one equivalency. The other half (and what the plot eventually hinges on) are the little fillips that result from the exchange. For example, flying carpets replace cars, and the City of Angels consequently has a lint problem from all the carpets, but a fly-by assassination attempt is done by tossing an earth elemental at the target's carpet; the elemental's earth negates the air enchantment on the carpet, leading to a (hopefully) fatal crash.
It worked less well for his 'WWII only magic' series, because he'd written two or three mildly alternate WWIIs by that point, and it was mostly more of the same. It never really mattered that the 'Japanese' were blonds with really bushy beards or that they were armed with magic staves rather than rifles; it was just Turtledove's take on WWII _again._
Guns of the South is a fun read, maybe that’s an alternative?
Have you ever considered making content about Serenity/Firefly. I think some of its worldbuilding aspects are very interesting to analyze.
He made a video about how the message of Serenity no longer works
Another thing that I got from your description is that. Now mind you I just now heard about this series. Is that I can’t help notice how it parallels another historical event. The Peloponnesian war. To give a brief explanation before getting into some specifics. The Peloponnesian war was between Athens and Sparta for control over all of Greece. The first and most obvious example is that of the rough comparison between the Spartan caste system and the Drakan caste system. Both are systems with an upper class of foreign conquerors ruling over a massive slave class that is kept in line through fear and is maintained by the fear of a slave uprising. There is also the comparison between the Alliance and Athens with the Pan-Hellenic league. While Athens was the “birthplace of democracy” it didn’t share its democracy with others. Often treating those who even slightly hindered them rather tyrannically. The most famous example of this is Melinan dialogue. Where the Athenians threaten the people of Melos to either surrender and become a tribute state to Athens or be destroyed with the Athenian general uttering the famous phrase: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The war also ended the same way with oppressive forces that had a authoritarian slave economy defeating the “democracy”. Hell, you can say that the ww2 of this series echoes the Persian wars as these 2 forces ally together in defeating a common enemy. So it can be interpreted as seeing in these books, a retelling of that story fought in that rocky peninsula; expanded to encompass the whole world.
in the end the Draka power entropy thought time as seen on the Drakon novel as the people on that New American generation ship manage to give the Draka a bloody nose.
Holy shit… Well this made me hit the subscribe button. Looking forward to more videos and I’ll be checking out your Fallout content also 🤘
14:28 This of course forgets that no such commitment survives entropy. Just ask Gorbochov.
Eugh... probably one of the worst book series written.
Sterling liked to defend the series with "well it's fiction, so criticizing it for being unrealistic doesn't make sense" only for the fans to talk about how "realistic" it is... such a frustrating series.
If anybody needs a post-Draka palette cleanser, I recommend the fanfic “Proof Through the Night” by ChaserGray. It shows what might have happened if FDR had had a little more sense in how to deal with the Domination. “Oh, we sentimentalize, and wrap it in Hollywood glamour, but we don’t think. We don’t think about an entire continent crushed under a boot, and the promise of more to follow. And we don’t think of a people- my people- caught in a web of terrible choices and crimes that had forced them on a never ending cycle of conquest, oppression, and human misery. We don’t think of all the human beings wasting their potential as slaves or slavemasters, and of the few dozen men who woke them from two centuries of nightmare and gave them the one thing they thought they would never have. Choices.
They must have made a mighty roar, those Allison turboprops, thundering over the Mediterranean and the African veldt that night. They must have, for their echoes have yet to vanish from this Earth.”
-Yolande Ingolfsson, Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, 1984”
Just found it. I'll give it a look.
Brilliant thesis. You earned a sub.
I keep looking into these books and being fascinated by the thought process behind them and what they were trying to say, and I have to say your explanation about Draka being America’s dark twin makes a lot of sense, and is also a nuanced rebuttal of the surface level criticisms of the Draka’s (still pretty) unrealistic serfdom even I had. Therefore I have subscribed (though I would caution you to not use AI images quite so much- they were distractingly bad 😂 and I will always criticize their use as a shortcut) and will eagerly watch your videos as I make my own amateur history content. In particular I’ll try to make as thoughtful and informative a response as I can to your point about “America not having a national identity anymore” which feels somewhat true but also not, yet is thought provoking.
That having been said, even reading these books in high school I knew they were terrible, more like historical fantasy than alternate history. If your alternate history relies on everyone else conveniently ignoring an entire continent that was well fought over in real history just to allow your author’s pet to win while having mostly the exact same people doing the exact same things, you’ve already lost any suspension of disbelief by me, regardless of interesting commentary under the surface. Sometimes I feel like the rise in the late oughts, early 10s of faux-knowledgeable Internet nitpick culture (which I wasn’t immune to) has destroyed a lot of creative risk taking but this isn’t a nitpick- it’s a semi-truck sized hole in your worldbuilding that the More Realistic Draka Timeline that’s been archived corrected years and years ago. These kinds of things are easier to accept in Eric Flint’s 1632 series or Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar because they a.) diverge at ONE point and b.) are very fantastical in their premise then grounded in execution.
My version of Draka has it set in a mythical land called Lemuria. It does have its conquest origins with its native warrior groups.
Sorry, Boba Fett just came to mind.
Have you seen the actor's family ? !
In legends and when the Prequels recon him, and bits of Disney, Boba Fett had a lot of brothers .. in the millions.
Pardon the phase, but Boba Fett is Legend in the Star Wars mythos.
So is Baron Fel, who Thrawn mass cloned. The Vong war could have been better.
As for overall regards to Book of Boba Fett, soon as Mando learn he is still alive. Dozens of Boba's nieces & nephews would show up. But it is a film with a budget, along with all the background B and C rated characters be to much to handle unlike a novel.
South Pacific islanders are just way cool.
Great Draka video, very though-provoking.
Have you saved the images somewhere? It's hard to find any draka images online.
I have a few Draka pics up at a Deviantart page, www.deviantart.com/kiltcat/gallery I don't have any of the heavily AI-assisted stuff up there, but I think the older pics I did without those tools are the best ones anyway.
Yup, I gotta read Marching through Georgia now.
I know this is sorta off subject, but Feral Historian have you ever read Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel?
If you have, what do you think of Jared Diamond and his other works?
I read Guns, Germs and Steel wayyy back. I remember thinking he made a lot of good points, but that he tried a little too hard to make everything fit his thesis. But he did make me think about some things I hadn't considered before, for example how the availability of animals that can be domesticated both for food and labor affects a society's development versus those who don't have them. Can't plow a field with pigs after all.
I loved Guns, Germs n Steel. Fascinated by the anecdote of the people on (I think New Guinea) building landing strips to intice cargo planes to land, like they'd seen American soldiers do.
19:38 you just drop that hint to read the book? You should have led with that.
Small correction, but the Soviet Union collapse because of the constant revolutions from Soviet citizens. They didn't accept it and Soviet citizens were far better off than slaves, even if they lived in an oppressive society.
The Draka premise also fails with its colonization of Africa and all of Asia/enormous swathes of land whilst never getting overextended. The British were only able to colonize Africa through Protectorates, eventually beating the armies of the rulers of African kingdoms and then negotiating vassalhood. They could never succeed in subduing the actual civilian population, for example, after the British defeated Zulu King Cetshwayo in the Anglo-Zulu war, they deposed him, but had to reinstall him after the entirety of Zululand erupted in rebellion.
The British made a lot of concessions to local leaders as well as heavily restricted education to natives that it worked with as administrators to keep their empire and even with all this manipulation as well as a ton of violence and war crimes, they still couldn't suppress independence movements and eventually had to give most of their empire. The Draka could not have enslaved two entire continents as shown in the books.
Good video, interesting analysis.
I have subscribed.
never stop
Where’d you film this? I think I’d like to go hike there (thanks for sharing these sick books with us)
The Black Hills of South Dakota, just a few miles from the Wyoming border.
@@feralhistorian thanks 🙏
I’ve always loved the Dakotas
This bears no resemblance to Stalinism.
totalitarian control of a conscript population?
Very perceptive commentary, my compliments! 🫡
Interesting analysis.
Hard to follow. Missed whatever point of divergence from our history and the books’
Can someone explain something to me?
Is Drakan technology 80s tech and the other factions still have 40s tech?
Or Drakan tech more like 50s tech?
In the first book, set in WWII, Draka tech is at a late 40s or maybe early 50s level. I've seen a lot of people compare the Draka Hond III tank to an Abrams, but really it's more like a heavier M48 or Centurion.
It's advanced enough compared to everyone else to strain credulity, but not so much as to be absolutely fantastical.
In Tokugawa Japan there were the Four Orders: Samurai, Peasants, Artisans and Merchants, plus an informal class of outcasts who did a bunch of mucky jobs and the small and powerless court nobility hovering around the Emperor in Kyoto. Samurai were in charge. They held effectively all formal positions of power in the Tokugawa state. They ruled the provinces, the cities, the districts. They were police, inspectors, overseers and more. Commoners had to bow before Samurai, if they failed to do so the Samurai could draw his katana and chop off their heads.
Never the less, beneath the Samurai the various subordinate classes did not merely acquiesce. They pushed against them in numerous small ways. The merchant class in particular grew powerful in the shadow of the Samurai and despite efforts to keep it in line. They became adept at working around the formal limits of their station. When the Meiji Restoration happened, many non samurai joined up with the Imperials specifically to topple the Shogunate and the Four Orders were abolished by the Meiji Constitution.
The important thing to know is that No Man Rules Alone. In the case of the Domination, no class rules alone. The Draka in the books would have to hand over considerable power to key serfs to keep things operating. Restrictions on Education would in truth only make this more difficult. You can fire an accountant if they use their position to line their own pockets. We train lots of people to do these jobs and they have a broad base. A Serf Accountant who does the same thing may be executed, but that causes it's own problems as there are not many educated serfs and since Draka education is narrow you can't just transfer in someone from IT or Records. Definitely not just an illiterate plantation hand. The Snakes can play a game of Wack-A-Mole trying to suppress them (which has costs including corruption, investigations, buying and training replacements and opportunity costs from vacant positions not easily filled) or you might try raising the standards of living for serf accountants and other such essential functionaries (and incidentally increase the size of that class, since this will require more goods for serf accountants, which will require new factories to make them and by extension produce more serf accountants, technicians, etc). Either way, you can have substantial power blocks beneath the Citizen body which can in aggregate exert influence. Especially when they realize that while they might be able to get minor bribes and favours on their own, they could reap major gains working together.
Lore of The Draka : An American Dystopia momentum 100
Please make a video on Doctor Strange Love. You brought the point where we are just letting the USSR and today China do evil things and we are wishy washy about destroying them. All the while we wither and die. General Buck Turgidson said we could have destroyed the USSR in a surprise attack and they couldn’t do anything. Yet we didn’t. Now we are the one on decline and our enemies hunger for power and status.
I really hope he makes that video
You are wishy washy because you can't destroy them now
The hell are you talking about? The United States is the greatest threat to global peace and democracy through its countless imperial campaigns of domination throughout the third world. Imposing dictators and extracting resources at gunpoint. All while it encroaches upon sovereign nations through its NATO alliance. Makes sense you would have a profile picture with black face. Your view of history is highly idealistic and has no contextual grounding. Pure anti communist nonsense.
So are the "Black Chamber" novels next.
I've been meaning to read those.
They're not bad and gave me a different perspective on Teddy
Awesome video brah
I think you migh be interested in Code Geass. A mecha anime with an imperialist state similar to the Draka, called the Holy Britannian Empire. Baiscally what if America lost the revolutionary war. But Britain gets invaded by republican france, so the british monarchy and other european nobles flee to British America. The empire had conquered all of the Americas, similar to how the Draka conquered all of Africa. I recomend watching the series, its really good.
It's not left vs. right. It's the algorithm vs. you.
I couldn't help but try and listen for the bombers passing by in the background as he spoke about the american empires industrial military complex.
Never heard of this before but Kwang is interested.
There is one major problem with the Draka concept that makes it impossible, or at least unsustainable in the real world, and that problem is the Draka's economic dependence upon slavery and conquest. The Confederacy really could not win the Civil War on its own under its own power. It was poor, had very limited manpower, and did not generally innovate very much. The plantation owners were not even that rich either, having dug themselves deep into debt via drink and gambling that some abolitionist could have started a plantation in competition that operated entirely upon wage labour, even hiring slaves from neighbouring estates who could use the wages to buy their freedom eventually. But nobody ever thought about that, because of a certain conceit against wealth, namely that wealth is invariably built via immoral behaviour. Indeed, free market capitalism was already undermining the Southern economy and giving the North all the power it needed to win the civil war when it came, and barring serious help from abroad or a change of government in Washington, the Confederacy was truly a lost cause.
I read this series back in high school and there is one thing that stuck with me, when one of the characters tells another: "The citizens ARE the state" referring to the amount of power every citizen in the domination wielded, especially when dealing with serfs. We think of democracies as having the best possible standard of living for citizens, but in a system where every citizen is a master in a slave/serf society you never have to worry about anything. Unless you piss off a higher-ranked citizen.
The Native Americans are lucky they still exist at all. Historically any other people would enslaved them, and exterminated them.
I'm only 24, I was forced to attend a BIA owned and operated boarding school very young, where I had my mouth washed out with soap, and was forced to keep hot sauce or juice from jars of peppers in my mouth whenever I spoke my language. When I expressed my cultural beliefs I was beat, I have a crooked nose due to a break that was never set properly and I even got my hands beat with a hatchet handle because I was playing Navajo string-games. My hands are arthritic from that. I won't even get into the rampant sex abuse that a lot of my peers had experienced at the hands of faculty members. All the boarding schools on my reservation are still BIA owned and operated, you can see for yourself on the BIA gov website.
My great grandfather ran away from a boarding school similar to mine when he was 17, 'bout to be 18, just to join the Marines during WW2. The fact that he'd enlist and become a codetalker, rather than stay in that place, should give you a good idea of how shitty those places are and historically have been for us.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s up until 1981, the US goverment allowed what were essentially forced sterilizations through the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, which subsidized sterilizations for Indian Health Service patients, majority of which are obviously Indigenous folk. Many of my aunts cannot bear children due to operations they didn't consent to and that were forced upon them when they were young and attending BIA boarding schools during the 70s and 80s. This is classified as ethnic cleansing now, and even today this is still a big problem in Canada. In 2018 over 100 indigenous women received forced sterilization procedures in Saskatchewan hospitals, there are pending lawsuits for them which you can look up.
Look at the uranium mining and radioactive waste the US government has left to fester on our reservations in the Southwest US. Many in my family have died and continue to die from cancer due to radioactive pollution from the mines around Black Mesa and Kayenta. That spill in Church Rock, New Mexico upended the lives of nearby residents, who had to grapple with toxic groundwater, contaminated livestock and a lifetime of illnesses. They are still waiting for it to be cleaned up and the government isn't likely to be the ones to do it. No, it will be likely be a federally funded workforce of Navajos or indigenous folks from their respective reservations who will have to clean it up, because we're expandable and the government is incapable of being responsible for their foul-ups. Keep in mind most of us don't even have running water, electricity, gas, and we live hours away from cities, grocery stores, EMS, etc. Lot of us herd sheep, hunt, grow our own food and haul water everyday to survive.
New Mexico and the reservations there are treated like sacrifice zones, with indigenous peoples and impoverished communities bearing the brunt of the toxic waste and permanently altered environments.
Legacies of nuclear waste and testing in New Mexico are full of lies, malicious intent, racism, and complete disregard for human life and the land. The mining corporations get away with taking all the profit and leaving the mess for the the American tax payer and us to clean up. This is after we let them mine our resources almost for free.
The drive to irradicate us indigenous people and lay waste to our communities has never fully ceased for some people. So many government entities in the US are corrupt and maliciously incompetent to the extent they are not capable of delivering fair governance to us indigenous folks or even you citizens, nothing but corruption trickles down in this country and it's soured everything.
Today my tribe numbers around 400,000 and about 100,000 of our tribal members speak Diné bizaad; we're one of, if not the largest extant indigenous societies left in North America. Despite the US military and BIA actively trying to destroy our cultural identity, language, etc. for over a century, we've survived with far more intact than any other indigenous peoples can say for themselves.
We're the richest tribe in the US, but I can tell you, we don't get anything from casinos around our reserves or whatever people think. I don't even think we own the casinos around our reservation. There is a lot of corruption and nepotism within our tribal goverment. My parents grew up with no running water, no eletricity, as did I. My wife's family still lives like that back on the rez and so does my extended family and inlaws, yet we've never seen a dime, nickle or penny of handouts. Yeah, I'm real lucky.
@@Bister_Mungle yeah, I agree the reservations were a horrible thing to do. Do you people we should’ve just forced you to integrate. the tribes that get the least amount of government assistance are normally the best off and historically you’re lucky you weren’t enslaved or wiped out that’s just historical realism. Yeah it’s sucks Your tribe so miss managed.
@@0944clayton I disagree, you fail to understand the nuances of our different tribes and reservations. Seems like it may be too complex for your understanding. Normally, you'd be correct, but we indigenous people have very unique circumstances that vary a lot from tribe to tribe. Some tribes aren't even recognized and they're usually worse off. Reservations are good and bad, I think people who think we should be rid of them aren't thinking it through 100%. I guess if you wanted to totally wipe out our cultures and create more blood debts between Indigenous folls and everyone else then yeah, force us to integrate, like that's gonna solve anything. You'd literally just create a shitshow like Russia/Ukraine or Palestine/Israel. Reservations wouldn't be so bad if the BIA and US government didn't totally control the tribal governments.
@@Bister_Mungle I think y’all should’ve never been put in the reservations your culture probably should have been wiped out or integrated. And the tribes of the government recognition tend to do a lot better and be more equipped for the modern world. I believe John Stossel has a whole video about it.
@@0944clayton Have you ever been on any reserves? It's a lot more complicated than you or John Stossel thinks, and that's a ridiculous notion. Your sentiments on this subject just shows how little you actually know of this yourself. Tribes that aren't recognized by the govermment are less protected than those of us that are and are much worse off. Hell, the 2nd amendment doesn't even apply to those tribes, so what makes you think that'd be better for them? My tribe and the Muskogee tribes are walking proof that what you say is bullshit. Unless you just straight up suppprt ethnic cleansing and on-paper genocide, I don't see how you could think that's for the best. You biligaánas want to propose all these solutions without evee fully understanding anything or even experiencing it for yourself. Like, are you even indigenous? What do you personally know of it?
Decent breakdown, Stirling made similar comments.
Make Draka Great Again
This is wierd but I'd wonder what Feral would think of Godzilla, the OG or Minus One but honestly any of them.
man, u should have a million subs
If that ever happens I'll hire an artist and let the AI assistant rest.
@@feralhistorian - screw it, make it a billion, let ur AI assistant rest now - u r doing excellently well!!!
who is doing the artwork you show in the video? The Alliance uniforms, the Draka landowners, etc?
For most of it, I sketch it in Photoshop or Krita, then run it through a local install of Stable Diffusion to add detail. If it's something not too strange or specific (like the Draka landowners) I skip the sketch and make the AI do it. Which still requires some touch-up but saves a lot time.
The image in the title card was more complex, using photo-bashing, a lot of digital painting, and I don't even know how many layers. It was started as a commission piece for a crossover fan-fic some guys at the alt-history forum have been working on, with the Draka fighting the Chimera from Resistance : Fall of Man. I bashed it back to a remake of the Marching Through Georgia cover for this.
My problem with Stirling and the Draka series is that the Draka may be a dystopia but it's a dystopia that Stirling seems to be in love with. It reminds me more of John Norman's love of his dystopia.
I appreciate the review but I just don't like this series.
I didn't get that from it at all. None of the Draka are heroes. Eric sent his (serf) daughter to America. rather than have her be a serf. He wants to kill himself (through reckless combat) rather than be a part of it, but he succumbs at the end of the first book. And it's for love of his friends. Not country. I found it quite tragic.
Yeah which is why I don’t totally buy the “it’s a dystopia you twit!” He did something similar in “Conquistador.” I think Stirling believes that some beautiful things can only be preserved by brutal autocracy.
Based upon Stirling’s political opinions, I suspect he is in love with the Alliance.
@@SirHarryFlashman I think Mr. Stirling would prefer the Alliance win. Not quite the same thing.
@@Detson404 Stirling seems to hold those with antiquated or anti-progressive beliefs in a very low regard. With a few exceptions, the Draka are pretty antiquated.
The Alliance meanwhile is a neoconservative superstate that exists to destroy the Draka. Once you look past the dystopian narrative, it’s clear Stirling’s ideal state would be much closer to the Alliance than the Domination.
Though this book series provides interesting political commentary the story attacked to it diminishes it for me since it's so absurd. The Draka feel like that one kid on the play grounds OC who was just immune to everything and which nothing can go bad for. Really gives off the vibe of a person trying to say Batman can beat Goku which I don't really want in my serious political commentary.
I think part of the problem is that the Draka books (with the exception of Drakon) are essentially dystopian fiction, but they're presented as alternate history, so they get torn apart on that basis because they do constantly buff the Draka in order to feed the dystopia. We don't go after the worldbuilding of 1984 or Brave New World with anywhere near the same vigor because the backstory isn't the point in those book, but backstory is the entire point of alt-hist.
I wish Drakon was a movie
Is Georgia the country as flammable as Georgia the state?
Per the novel, yes. Yes it is.
Slave-based economies do not survive indefinitely because slavery is an unsustainable system which leads to class conflict and technological stagnation. I remember this alternate history, I found it very naive. It's also extremely revisionist from a neoliberal point of view.
Have you ever read "The Fall of a Nation"? It was an invasion novel, not too different from the concept of the Draka series, but about European monarchies forming a global league after the Pope ends WW1 and then invading America in order to eliminate democracy and exploit America economically. It was written in 1916 by Thomas Dixon, the man who wrote the book that was the basis of Birth of a Nation, so it'd be kinda controversial I think to make anything about it, but it's useful to read to understand what motivated a lot of Americans back then. Here's an interesting quote:
“The American Republic is but a little over a hundred years old. We reckon in years, they reckon by centuries. The founding of this nation was one of the happiest accidents in the history of the world. But it was an accident. The kings were too busy fighting one another in the stirring years of the American Revolution to give their attention to you. Your fathers won on a lucky fluke. And thanks to the barriers of two vast oceans you grew and waxed strong with incredible rapidity. You were safe as long as these oceans protected you and no longer. The genius of man has abolished the ocean barrier. There is no more sea. The ocean is now the world’s highway and transport by water is swifter and safer than by land. The oceans no longer protect you. They are a constant menace to your existence-”
What about France? One of the more powerful European nations, and a republic itself. Nevermind that by that point the United Kingdom was more democracy than kingdom. Heck, the only major Papist monarchy participating in that war was Italy; France wasn't a monarchy, and the rest of the monarchs weren't Catholic.
One can only assume the divergence begins earlier than implied.
Ironically, that’s what the west has tried to do to Russia at least three times.
The Draka: An American Dystopia
Da Dakka: A WAAAGH Utopia
Simple as
Oh please. The Draka is one of the most unrealistic alt histories ever written and Stirling got extremely butt hurt when this was pointed out to him 😂😂😂
It is not about plausibility, Art is about drama.
Sounds like the Republicans' dream society.
Marching through Georgia was one of my favorite Alt history books when I was fourteen. As I got older though I realized his claim that 'it's a dystopia you twit' when picked apart his novels didn't hold up because it was more the flaws in his world building that broke suspension of disbelief. Politically Draka relies on everyone else in the world being idiots and not acting anywhere close to what they would remotely do in a semi-plausible scenario (Draka would have been crushed by the British Empire in the 19th century if someone else didn't get to it eventually). His tech is utterly laughable...their tech literally relies on doing things that failed and were far too expensive OTL even if they were semi-workable.
Economics...sigh...not to mention Draka's geo-strategic position & demographics. Africa is a hard mode continent to develop. It has crap navigable waterways into the interior, it's missing some key resources (which the Americans are not), it has lest coastline than Europe and lacks deep water ports. Not to mention disease affecting both people and livestock, and the fact they are vastly outnumbered by a native population (and other European powers interested in grabbing a piece of Africa). Lacking money, demographics, and resources with terrain working against them as well makes industrializing Draka an expensive (and unrealistic) proposition...especially with a massive agrian based slave population. They were modeled after the Spartans and much like the Spartans they would be stuck in an trap of spending the blood and treasure of it's citizens keeping the helots in their place..
Draka's dystopia relies on plot armor to develop with somehow other powers either ignoring them or ignoring their own best interests. The British for example would never let the slavery issue go in one of their colonies...it'd either end or the folks trying to keep it would have to revolt (and likely lose since unlike the Americans they just can't as easily smuggle in contraband due to Africa's geo-strat problems). Not to mention South Africa was a key station for building and maintaining the British Empire ...to India, Australia, Asia, and most importantly China. It breaks all suspension of disbelief the rest of the world sort of follows the same OTL tune but ignores developments in Draka or more implausibly doesn't apply Draka 'early tech advancements' to there ATL development at all.
The Draka still using slaves in the British Empire after 1833 isn't as problematic as you might think.
The East India Company had obtained an exemption from the Slavery Abolition Act until 1843. And even after that, the de facto slavery of the native Indian caste system was largely left unchallenged.
@@SirHarryFlashman EIC got the exemption not so it could maintain a slave trade but so the huge Hindu and Muslim populations in the region could continue with their customs of slavery and banning it would upset the applecart (and threaten the EICs tentative control of EIC clients) as they cited banning slavery would be seen as 'interference in traditional social structures'.
Slavery would be banned in India in 1843 with the Indian Slavery Act anyway. Slavery in ATL Drakia colony would probably be worse than the West Indies and the primary slave holders would be British, (or boer/loyalists) not natives. No way the evangelical abolitionists are just going to ignore the condition in South Africa...those British slave owners at best would have to submit to a lesser form of slavery like a regulated debt-bondage rather than outright chattel slavery. Good luck keeping the native African populations from overthrowing the minority in that case (because they'd still have to ease up the boot and at least some of the local black population would be freemen and debt-bonded workers still have more rights than outright slaves making it harder to keep control of them).
Great video, although your use of AI detracts from its value
This sounds suspiciously like the World Economic Forum.....🤔
The best part about fiction is that it's all lies.
I misread the title and thought it said "The Drake"
Wow
Well, it wasn't supposed to be a blueprint. They never are.
There is a story that's Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Domination of the Drakas called Separated at Birth: America and Drakia which is a pretty good take on the Drakas, it's a pretty good story that fixes a lot of problems that The Drakas have, I highly recommend it because of how good it is and has a ending where Drakia collapses due a combination of mistreating it's allies and subject it calls Princely States.
Reading it now. So far it's well done.
interesting.
Actually the real message of the Draka books is that there is so such thing as White South African who isn't violently racist
Based
So racist that they’d even hold non-South African Whites in [genocidal-]contempt?
@@paxvictori2385"I've never met a nice South African."
They call it the American dream because you have to be a sleep to believe it
Alot of Moaist chatter from someone who "doesn;'t want to go all Moaist on us". (?)
Okay fine, you made your sale. I'll read the stupid books I never heard of until today. 😅
Drake's America