Let's Read The Domination of the Draka - Currently: Crimes Against Combat Engineering (The Draka Need More Rip Its)

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The whole "never support a war" thing is so insane I'm still having trouble parsing it. Like…there was a huge portion of Americans who thought the Nazis were great, but there was a most as big chunk that read about Hitler in the newspapers and wanted to kick his ass!
 
I know one of the major complaints of the alternate history side of the Draka is that every other nation is bizarrely unconcerned about them, even as the Draka are letting off literally every sign (and then some) that they are a threat to the entire world. Before this story, I just took it as "Sterling needed an evil Uber-South Africa to win for his story" and left it at that.

While that is still true, seeing how horny the story is has made me realize something else; the nations are acting like they're in a porn setting. In any form of porn that tries to have long-term story (especially if it panders to kinks), the characters and narrative all tend to act really unnatural and unconcerned about objectively horrible things that happen in the story, often well pass the point where rational actors would have called the FBI (much less the cops). The weirdness of the Draka is just from moving this blase mindset from pornography into what is supposedly an alternate history war story.
 
DragonCobolt said:
The whole "never support a war" thing is so insane I'm still having trouble parsing it. Like…there was a huge portion of Americans who thought the Nazis were great, but there was a most as big chunk that read about Hitler in the newspapers and wanted to kick his ass!
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Not only that, but the whole Draka issue is extremely personal for the Americans. They literally supplied heavy artillery to the Confederates, and almost all the southern slave owners fled there after the end of the Civil War! Why the hell would the average American want to support a bunch of washed-up traitor slave owners, especially since they explicitly state that they want to conquer all of Europe?

Eukie said:
Y'know, like the Waffen-SS.
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Wait, seriously?
 
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Honestly I could buy an America generations later being like "literally who, oh yeah those losers, they didn't die yet? Huh, weird.", especially if you like actually built up heat for the intensely traumatic hard fought victory of separating from the British Empire and the formative listless chaos and parish status of the Draka birthing its ultra will to power master race fascism. The Draka as like an initially secondary extra member of the Axis, building themselves up feeding Nazi Germany the resources it needs to actually start destroying the USSR while in the background sinisterly completing their unfinished work taking British possessions in the Middle East and annihilating Turkey and what not, before dramatically kicking off their own Operation Pearl Barbarossa Harbor betraying all the other fascists, and striking simultaneously at the Caspian and Black Seas and at Italy's somewhat sad sphere in the Balkans and so on.
 
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Scrivener said:
Wait, seriously?
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The Waffen-SS was an outsider too, and saw themselves as separate and different from, the aristocratic, Prussian military and its heritage. This included a (partial) rejection of the class divisions inherent in the enlisted/officer divide and a celebration of intrasoldier camaraderie, which makes sense when you remember that the Nazis grew out of the freikorps, which were similarly homosocial soldiers' organisations of largely NCOs and enlisted men. This is why the Waffen-SS have separate ranks from the Wehrmacht, with the rank names being very descriptive, like "sturmbannführer": simply the leader of a group of assult troops. Etymologically that's the source of basically all ranks, but armies that seek to escape the clutches of tradition and become more "egalitarian/meritocratic" often use new terms like that without so much tradition assigned to them. (It's a kind of antecendant of "herrenvolk democracy": an equal, good society for the herrenvolk and nobody else, just with the "good society" accomplished through a führerprinzip embodying the racial will of the true German people rather than actually counting the votes.)

It's a very interesting approach to creating a better, more egalitarian military and then, oh yeah, the purpose of creating a better military was to more efficiently shove Jews and slavs into industrial ovens.

(I also won't say the Waffen-SS somehow accomplished the equitable military: it's just something moved towards. And I think that kind of makes it clear how hollow it rings that the Draka is doing this, as if it makes them any different. It's like the thing about the Draka having an appreciation for art. Like yeah, and so did the nazis. They were big on neo-classical architecture and sad porcelain puppies made by slave labour. The Draka are no better than the nazi general who enjoys the company of beutiful vimen and listening to classical music with mine eyes shut. "You see, captain, ve are not all barbians." How compelling. Now please face the wall.)
 
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Isn't Stirling supposed to be some kind of socialist? I'm begging, begging for an ounce of material analysis here. Like a little bit, as a treat.

I mean like-

At times I found myself longing even for the provincial drabness, prudery, piety, and hypocrisy that had driven me to New York and then Europe in the first place. Here were a people genuinely without bourgeois sentimentality or moralism, and I found I liked the result far less than I might have expected.
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Okay? I'm all for shit-talking "bourgeois" cultural trappings but that's not the reason why the class hierarchy is a problem. I expect this kind of all feels no reals analysis from any non-leftist author and can swallow it. But coming from someone from more socialist viewpoints he may as well be talking about the hypocrisy of the high elves compared to the zero fucks given amorality of the dark elves or whatever.
 
I think it was Eric Flint (rest in peace) who was once the like token Baen socialist, Stirling I think has kinda Heinlein Necon-y vibes going on.
 
Yeah, Eric Flint is the guy who wrote the book series about "if a single coal mine union arrived in 1600, it would create the greatest socialist nation ever seen"
 
Geckonator said:
Twenty years, he reminded himself. Twenty years of scientific diet and a carefully graduated exercise program; they had been running assault courses since before puberty.
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This also describes basically every military of the 20th century! The 1900's was the century dedicated to utopian social reformism and a total mobilization of society! Everyone was experimenting with perfectly scientific diets and exercise routines and indoctrinating people from birth to be perfect citizens and soldiers just describes the Hitlerjugend!
Of course, knowing this would have required Stirling to engage with the dreaded effete liberal claptrap that is "The humanities"
 
Squidfam said:
This also describes basically every military of the 20th century! The 1900's was the century dedicated to utopian social reformism and a total mobilization of society! Everyone was experimenting with perfectly scientific diets and exercise routines and indoctrinating people from birth to be perfect citizens and soldiers just describes the Hitlerjugend!
Of course, knowing this would have required Stirling to engage with the dreaded effete liberal claptrap that is "The humanities"
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If Stirling's logic applied to people who aren't the Draka, Marching Through Georgia would be a tale about how some old veteran of the Russian Civil War killed over a hundred Draka paratroopers while out hunting for deer before passing away in his sleep
 
Squidfam said:
This also describes basically every military of the 20th century! The 1900's was the century dedicated to utopian social reformism and a total mobilization of society! Everyone was experimenting with perfectly scientific diets and exercise routines and indoctrinating people from birth to be perfect citizens and soldiers just describes the Hitlerjugend!
Of course, knowing this would have required Stirling to engage with the dreaded effete liberal claptrap that is "The humanities"
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That's a point, rural poverty and malnutrition leading to problems with manpower being up to the physical demands of soldiering were massive problems for most nations in the early 1900s, you've really got to wonder how they're getting actual no joke slaves fed well enough to avoid nutrient deficiencies.
 
Reveen said:
Isn't Stirling supposed to be some kind of socialist? I'm begging, begging for an ounce of material analysis here. Like a little bit, as a treat.
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bookwyrm said:
I think it was Eric Flint (rest in peace) who was once the like token Baen socialist, Stirling I think has kinda Heinlein Necon-y vibes going on.
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Right, of the three Grand Old Men of AH you have:

SM Stirling (paleocon freak)
Eric Flint (Trot union organizer)
Harry Turtledove (Boomer resist lib)

Not coincidentally, these remain the three main tendences in the genre to this day.

DragonCobolt said:
Yeah, Eric Flint is the guy who wrote the book series about "if a single coal mine union arrived in 1600, it would create the greatest socialist nation ever seen"
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And he was based for this!
 
Geckonator said:
That's... that's not how fucking anything works. This whole fucking outfit should be collapsing into a weird right-wing mirror of the stereotypical anarchist militia. Can you fucking imagine the mess in a Draka barracks? The fucking insane petty interpersonal beefs over who fucked who or who touched whose stuff in the kitchen?
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This would be darkly funny and have verisimilitude as a weakness the Draka might have; the Draka are exactly the sort of people I could see being fiercely protective of their many privileges and entitlements and demanding something approximating continued full enjoyment of them even in the barracks and at the war front.

CAN YOU PEOPLE STOP BEING REPULSIVE FOR TEN FUCKING SECONDS IN FRONT OF THE GUY WHO IS TRYING TO LITERALLY WRITE PROPAGANDA FOR YOU.

Oh my God, can you fucking imagine the conversations when Bill gets home to his editor/OSS handler?
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Thinking again that Dreiser would be much more sympathetic if his real purpose is documenting how awful the Domination is to turn US public sentiment against them and he feels like he's in a lion's den the whole time.

Again, thinking gender-flipping him might help with that; imagine how all that creepy rapey stuff might hit different if we're looking at it from the PoV of a woman who's acutely conscious that a lot of her spectacularly evil "hosts" would probably love to sexually abuse her too and the only thing that protects her is the American passport in her pocket and their calculation that doing so wouldn't be worth the possible blowback (or, heck, if those SDN Drakafics were anything to judge Draka proclivities by you could totally do that kind of horror with guy Dreiser too, but the bits I've seen quoted here seem mostly focused on sleazy Nazisploitation style depictions of sexual abuse of women).

Also, instead of having her last assignment be getting embedded with the fucking Nazis, have her last assignment be getting embedded with the Soviets trying to fight off Operation Barbarossa, at some point have her give basically Londo Mollari's description of human resistance against the Minbari modified to be about the doomed Soviet resistance against the Nazis she witnessed, and have her be extremely angry that her own government gave basically no help to people who were trying to resist enslavement and annihilation. Bonus: give her a Jewish parent and make her very aware of the implications for what would have happened to her if she'd gotten captured by the Nazis.

Like, if watching spectacularly evil baddies win is supposed to be about horror and tragedy this seems like it'd convey it much better.
 
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As I see it, a fundamental flaw in this alt history and it realising any potential is that it seems to have come from a feeling like "Look at how liberalism could have been pwned and owned by stuff they'd hate, and how some hypothetical liberal will shed liberal tears when seeing how liberalism could totally have been pwned by reactionism, how weak and challenged it would make them feel as they cry", like that would be the selling point.

I'd attribute some of the contradictions in the draka to that, to the direction shaping them being "What might let a reader imagine a imaginary liberal grinding their teeth?", regardless of how the different aspects of that fit together.
 
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Geckonator said:
That's... that's not how fucking anything works. This whole fucking outfit should be collapsing into a weird right-wing mirror of the stereotypical anarchist militia. Can you fucking imagine the mess in a Draka barracks? The fucking insane petty interpersonal beefs over who fucked who or who touched whose stuff in the kitchen?
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Sooooo... a right wing militia? The right wing is already like that, there's a reason why The Night of The Wrong Wives happened after all, they're just less open about their vast plethora of sexuality related complexes.
 
Probably the "traditionalist workers party" collapsing after it's leader got caught cheating on his wife with the spokesman's wife.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I'm not sure what this is referring to.
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So there was an Incident that tore the Traditional Workers Party (Neo-Nazi group) apart where the leader, who was married to the spokesman's stepdaughter got caught cheating with the spokesman's wife, and after being confronted got caught again.

The details of how the event actually went down are exactly as sordid and pathetic as SM Stirling pretends the Draka aren't. The spokesman and his stepdaughter (the leader's wife) set up the spokesman's wife and leader in a trailer where the two of them did in fact have sex, upon which the spokesman confronted the leader and wound up in a fight that he lost embarassingly, upon which he called the cops from a walmart he fled to.

Small group dynamics with sex and power are always going to be fraught, doubly so in a society so self-conscious about domination, control and the aesthetic of being labored for.
 
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xthetenth said:
How does a society with only a tiny number of people privileged enough to own a radio have world leading walkie talkies? How does a society have a huge deliberately immobilized slave class and world-leading gas piston engine technology?
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It's great man theory all the way down. Science and engineering edition this time!
xthetenth said:
...Oh goddammit I just realized this is another fucking authorial assumption that liberal societies are weak and effete. Where did Baen find this guy, the fucking 1940 IJN war plans division? Somebody tell him how the war ends. I'm starting to think that this is heavily influenced by the conservative hangover from Vietnam and feeling bad about losing that, without actually paying attention to why or how the actual US was reacting to that and what the effects were. I'm starting to realize that this is a time capsule of pre desert storm chickenhawk thought.
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The fremen mirage strikes again. Lots of those people all through history, sadly.
 
Honestly, the way the Draka are organized almost give me RTS faction vibes. Like it all just works too smoothly and cleanly.
 
In specific regards to Citizen-Woman's Rights in the Domination, Stirling does give a reasonable justification for that. The high degree of mobilization among Drakian/Draka Men in the 19th century lead to a wider employment of women in traditionally male administrative and economic roles that they did not want to have Serfs do.

Zor
 
ScottishMongol said:
My favorite is Separated at Birth.
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Link? I'm already getting invested in this wackiness and I'd love to see some alternate takes.

ScottishMongol said:
The Draka being sexually liberated just doesn't make sense to me, nor does their relative gender equality. I guess it's a Sparta thing, but - no, the Spartans did not allow women to train in war, they were expected to be physically fit so that they could be healthy childbearers. In a society with constant concerns about your tiny ruling class, the job of women should be to pump out as many children as possible. In a society obsessed with racial purity, reproduction will be tightly controlled.
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On that same note, terrified/fascinated to see what queer politics in Draka looks like; will the state supply me with femme'n'ms if my boot stamps on enough human faces forever? The relative ease of men and women's combat integration (and apparently a female head of state if I'm reading this right??) makes me wonder about trans women and lesbians especially in this society.


ScottishMongol said:
This stuff is extremely gross by the way, it's wayyyy worse than I thought it would be. It mostly seems to suggest that lesbianism is something that women are into, like, as a fetish and not an actual sexuality? Hate it, hate it, burning these books.
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Ough, if a straight dude can get away with writing this kind of blatant fetish fuel in the 1980s, I guess I have no choice but to begin writing my "Red Alert-level femdom parody of actual communism where KGB fembots step on innocent transfem NATO POWs for their counter-revolutionary thought" book. Coming to bookshelves NEVER because I'm not that much of a loon.

Moving from the quotes to my actual questions: why the hell aren't the Snakes part of the WWII Axis outside of author fiat? Their participation in the Great War on the Entente side is presumably out of their status as a British colony and later a Canada-style dominion, but it's clear by the interwar period that immediately precedes this book that home rule is well and truly entrenched, and that they bear no fealty to the Brits. Italy and Japan's militarist governments flipped from the "side of the angels" within the same few decades, so why wouldn't the Draka? It'a hard to imagine a bunch of Central European neo-pagans wouldn't be down for artifact hunting and Himmler's bullshit blood rituals down at Wewelsburg, even if their form of genocidal racism and slavery isn't as explicitly vile and exterminationist as Nazi Germany.

Or am I just overthinking this??
 
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