A Drakaesque "Anti-America"

[Deleted member 109224]

The Domination series (which I actually haven't read) basically involved the premise of a South Africa-based anti-America. I actually really like thinking about the concept - it makes you think about the values that were supposed to underlie the American experiment, the historical hypocrisy, how the contradiction was semi-corrected by the Civil War and Civil Rights movement, and what a society organized around the opposite of American liberal principles would look like.


The US, at least in ideology and rhetoric, was obsessed with notions of liberty and equality. The Draka in contrast had a Naziesque mindset oriented around dominance and superiority. But, unlike the Nazis who believed superiority was granted by their race, the Draka believed that superiority required effort to be maintained.

The history of the Draka parallels the US. The British capture the Dutch Cape during the revolution, send loyalists there, and they develop a frontier-settler society through the 19th Century just as the US did - albeit on drastically different lines.

The Drakans even had some weird orientalist tendencies, which makes me think the idea of an amoral melting pot in South Africa popping up. A big part of the history of US racism was that new groups would often prove their Americanness by being racist towards American blacks. Looking at the history of South Africa, there seemed to be a similar experience with how many Natal Indians were unhappy with being clumped with Africans rather than Whites - there's some interesting Gandhi quotes on this (him being pretty racist).


So what would it require to create a Draka-esque Aristocratic-Republican Anti-America in South Africa that rises to Great Power or even Superpower Status? The idea of this polity taking over the Continent the way the Draka do in the Domination series seems a bit far fetched.



What I'm thinking is

-The British capture the Cape Colony during the Revolution
-The Americans establish their northern border at the Nippising line, giving them South Ontario.
-The British offer loyalists lands in the Caribbean and Cape instead of Southern Ontario
-The British give Hessian Mercenaries lands in the Cape and Caribbean
-The British accept the historic Danish proposal to exchange Iceland and Greenland for Vieques. When The volcano in Iceland erupts, the British ship the whole population of Iceland to the Cape. This leads to increased settlement early on and early population pressures necessitating expansion.
-The British use the Cape as a penal colony and never colonize Australia. Convicts who went to Australia and New Zealand instead are sent to South Africa.
-Wars against Shaka Zulu create a mindset in Cape Colonists that African inferiority is a product of circumstance and poor leadership rather than anything inherent.
-During the Napoleonic Wars Cape Colonists are used in the occupation of Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. It becomes a norm afterwards for administrators in Ceylon to be Capeish. Cape Colonists develop a greater interest in the Dutch East Indies as well.
-The Anglo-Dutch Treaty results in the Dutch Keeping Malacca and getting dominance over Johor, but Britain getting Sumatra and Singapore due to the Capelanders pushing for holding Sumatra. Sumatra and Singapore over time end up colonies that are more Capeish than British.
-Brazil's independence from Portugal is a product of Republican revolt in European Portugal due to the Portuguese Monarchy enjoying Brazil too much and sticking around there rather than the historic split. Portugal's colonies here end up split between Britain and Brazil (Republican Portugal gets zilch). Britain gets Mozambique, which the Capeish take advantage of.
-North Haiti (which was a semi-successful Kingdom) remains separate from the South and conquers the Dominican Republic. The Black-led Kingdom of Haiti remains strong and the Mulatto-led Republic of Haiti is conquered by France.
-The 1830s Baptist War in Jamaica ends with Jamaica becoming the second post-slavery Black Republic in the Americas due to support from Royal Haiti. Slaveholders in the Caribbean and other whites in slaveholding parts of the British Caribbean, fearing future insurrection in the region, relocate to South Africa.
-The British don't conquer the Sikhs. The result is that when the Sepoy Mutiny occurs, the Sikhs take advantage of the instability to conquer British India. Anglo-Indians, Pro-British Indians, HEIC members, and more flee to Ceylon and then the Cape and Mozambique. The revolt further imprints the idea of a need for dominance in the minds of folks in the Cape.
-The British send the victims of the highland clearances and those suffering during the Highland Potato famine and Irish potato famine to South Africa.
-The US has a much more thorough process of reconstruction. A great many confederates opt to just relocate to the Cape.

The borders of this polity would roughly be South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Southern Angola (including the Planalto), Sumatra, Ceylon, Singapore, Mauritius, Seychelles, and perhaps Madagascar.

The Cape Country, like the US, is largely uninterested in the affairs of European politics and is more interested in what it considers more local activities - the Indian Ocean Trade.

 

[Maoistic]

The US, at least in ideology and rhetoric, was obsessed with notions of liberty and equality

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Such "liberty" and "equality".

 

[Deleted member 109224]

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Such "liberty" and "equality".

I write a whole long post - including pointing out the US was highly hypocritical - and that's all you've got?

 

[RiverDelta]

I'd be interested to see this as a timeline, personally. I like your timeline a lot, though I'd be more interested to see a proper TL written about it - while Draka Redux has been done, I'm sure that it could be done well and differently given a twist or two early on. I have written for 'anti-Americas' before, once helping to contribute to Southern Aggression's USA and once in my own timeline, Undying Sun. Neither were in South Africa, but both had strong elements of the Draka and toyed with American ideals. Here's how we went about it in Southern Aggression, and here's what I have so far for California in Undying Sun. This might give some ideas on what could be done with an anti-Draka, or at least ways to play with and invert American ideals.

Southern Aggression's USA: I put a lot of effort into this one, though it wasn't entirely mine. Starting out as essentially 'What if the US still had slaves", the USA by its end was elaborated on heavily. Essentially, the USA still believed in rhetoric and ideology in freedom, equality, and democracy, and many of the white inhabitants genuinely believed in these things. They weren't idiots, the country was roughly as democratic for whites as our US, though with a powerful secret police apparatus and leaders at times off their meds. Nonetheless, the problem with this society was that it was a sociological nightmare.

The contradiction between "all men are equal" and "we keep black slaves" was long since papered over by arguing that blacks weren't people. Society, largely on its own, perpetuated this message, and while dissent in terms of 'acceptable' subjects was tolerated, going on about the rights of black people would make you seem weird and kind of stupid. Slavery was seemingly rational in the country. There was, of course, dissent, and the like, but most people kept it to themselves, as everything from movies to podcasts reinforced a culture of slavery and inequality - not because it was propaganda, but because it's all created by TTL's Americans who often believed these things themselves. In terms of an anti-USA, this is probably as literal as you're going to get, in the sense that it's a USA that genuinely believes in the ideals of the founders, it just misinterprets them culturally into something abhorrent to that which the USA stands for.

Undying Sun's California: One of the countries in my current TL, California also serves as an anti-US, though it exists in a timeline where the US consists mostly of the Deep South these days for various reasons. After the US balkanized during a more brutal alt-Civil War between a Free Soil American Federation in the North and the USA in the South, California emerged as a power that proceeded to start to take land from the US and turn it into puppet states over time, during several wars. Given that there's no Fascism or Communism per se in this universe, due to the earlier PoD, California follows an ideology known as Social Futurism, something that vaguely resembles a mix of Strasserism, Technocracy Inc, Italian Fascism, a bit of positive and genuinely good artistic ideals, and a bit of OTL Futurism.

I have jokingly dubbed them the Art Nazis in my notes, and here's the summary of them if you're curious, but California as of the modern era in the universe is a totalitarian apartheid state obsessed with the future and with groundbreaking, avante-garde art. It's a country of nightmares that, due to being so singularly obsessed with artistic freedom and technological growth, has developed on the one freedom it does have - freedom of artistic expression. It's rigid, hierarchical, incredibly racist, imperialist, and generally the worst parts of the USA mixed with this disastrous Social Futurist ideology. However, for obvious reasons, it still has Hollywood.

So what's the point of this whole ramble? Well, it's that there's more than one way to skin a cat, or to interpret the phrase 'anti-America'. For example, you can have a country that tries to follow the ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality straight but that fails horrifically, like the USA mentioned, you can have a country that's America's worst qualities mixed with incredibly un-American ideals, though with one or two familiarly American concepts, like Undying Sun's California, you can go for what the Draka was, which was just a straight inversion of everything America is intended to represent, or you can mix and match these approaches.

At least, that's how I'd see the project. If you do do a timeline, please link it. I hope this helps.

 

[FleetMac]

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Such "liberty" and "equality".

Wow, one pithy example regarding a contemporary existential threat with evidence to back it up, you must've been the pride of your debate team. That or a master fruit farmer, for all that expert cherry-picking. Prithee, are you going to say anything relevant here?

To respond to the OP, @Municipal Engines did a pretty cool "realistic" take on the Draka in THIS TL that was sadly never finished. It might a bit too far-reaching for your tastes, but I think the intent and effort both warrant a look

That being said, there's several routes you can take, but IMHO the POD should be earlier than the OTL Revolutionary War.

Edit: ninja'd!

 

[RodentRevolution]

-The British give Hessian Mercenaries lands in the Cape and Caribbean
-The British accept the historic Danish proposal to exchange Iceland and Greenland for Vieques. When The volcano in Iceland erupts, the British ship the whole population of Iceland to the Cape. This leads to increased settlement early on and early population pressures necessitating expansion.
-The British use the Cape as a penal colony and never colonize Australia. Convicts who went to Australia and New Zealand instead are sent to South Africa.

The problem with a lot of S.M Stirling's Draka origins was both the array of multiple unlikely P.O.D stacked one atop another but some blatant populist history errors thrown in for good measure.

For example the "Hessians" were not mercenaries but the soldiers and subjects of the Princes of their respective German states who were fighting as allies under the British. The arrangement underpinning those alliances was highly mercenary in nature but legally they were still regular soldiers and subjects. The British are both under no obligation to grant them land and are in fact acting awfully undiplomatically if they attempt to do so.

Even with British suzerainty over Iceland it is probably cheaper to ship in food rather than move the entire population some six and a half thousand miles.

Why give up on Australia and New Zealand?

These are each major points that you need to think about here.

 

[Maoistic]

Wow, one pithy example regarding a contemporary existential threat with evidence to back it up, you must've been the pride of your debate team. That or a master fruit farmer, for all that expert cherry-picking. Prithee, are you going to say anything relevant here?

To respond to the OP, @Municipal Engines did a pretty cool "realistic" take on the Draka in THIS TL that was sadly never finished. It might a bit too far-reaching for your tastes, but I think the intent and effort both warrant a look

That being said, there's several routes you can take, but IMHO the POD should be earlier than the OTL Revolutionary War.

Edit: ninja'd!

Wow, a general leading natives to fight for his wars, that surely means US ideology didn't mean depriving them of liberty and that it regarded them as equal. Also, this is hardly "pithy" since it's the founding document of the United States, its Declaration of Independence. It is the foundation of US ideology.

 

[Maoistic]

I write a whole long post - including pointing out the US was highly hypocritical - and that's all you've got?

Because it's not hypocritical, it was inherent to its guiding ideology. The US did what it said, not in spite of it.

 

[FleetMac]

Wow, a general leading natives to fight for his wars, that surely means US ideology didn't mean depriving them of liberty and that it regarded them as equal. Also, this is hardly "pithy" since it's the founding document of the United States, its Declaration of Independence. It is the foundation of US ideology.

Even though we have proof of several of the Founding Fathers doing just that, regarding friendly tribes as equals instead of damning the whole lot. Now here's where you make references to Andrew Jackson's awfulness, despite him not even being present at the formulation of the Constitution, let alone the DoI. Now here's where I refer you to the Second Trade and Intercourse Act of 1793 for proof of non-violent government relations and civility with said friendly tribes well before the 1830s.

Such acts couldn't be passed if the country's raison d'etre totally dismissed the Natives as hostile, despite what your one non sequitur pretends to present; the actions of later administrations do not speak for the US government's original approach. Now either be useful in this thread and contribute, or kindly go away. This isn't useful dialogue here.

 

[RiverDelta]

Can we please put this conversation aside and get back to discussing the idea of creating a country which is meant to be an inversion of the US's stated ideals?

Whatever you think of the US, this really isn't the place to be grinding ideological axes.

 

[FleetMac]

I had two questions about the OP;

-Why would this not-Drakia not take all of Angola, just the southern portion? And,

-Why would the Zulu campaigns lead them to conclude their inferiority as being incidental rather than inherent, given what it means to be a Drakan in the lore? A means of differentiating the two?

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

Wow, a general leading natives to fight for his wars, that surely means US ideology didn't mean depriving them of liberty and that it regarded them as equal. Also, this is hardly "pithy" since it's the founding document of the United States, its Declaration of Independence. It is the foundation of US ideology.

It’s very clear you’re less interested in making a point than you are in being inflammatory on your pet subjects. You’ve got a history of being way more rude than is called for in discussion, so take a week off and get that chip off your shoulder.

 

[Deleted member 109224]

I had two questions about the OP;

-Why would this not-Drakia not take all of Angola, just the southern portion? And,

-Why would the Zulu campaigns lead them to conclude their inferiority as being incidental rather than inherent, given what it means to be a Drakan in the lore? A means of differentiating the two?

The main benefit of Angola for a settler society like this not-Draka would be the temperate planalto. Brazil meanwhile would want Angola primarily for Luanda and its ability to get slaves. Selling the southern half made sense to me.

As for the Zulu, I didn't actually read The Domination. The idea of locals becoming organized and providing a real challenge to the settler society - thus proving their intelligence and equality in a sense - just sort of made sense to me. It's not that different from how many in the United States saw Native Americans as equal in human capacity but were horribly racist in their opinions on blacks.

 

[Deleted member 109224]

The problem with a lot of S.M Stirling's Draka origins was both the array of multiple unlikely P.O.D stacked one atop another but some blatant populist history errors thrown in for good measure.

For example the "Hessians" were not mercenaries but the soldiers and subjects of the Princes of their respective German states who were fighting as allies under the British. The arrangement underpinning those alliances was highly mercenary in nature but legally they were still regular soldiers and subjects. The British are both under no obligation to grant them land and are in fact acting awfully undiplomatically if they attempt to do so.

Even with British suzerainty over Iceland it is probably cheaper to ship in food rather than move the entire population some six and a half thousand miles.

Why give up on Australia and New Zealand?

These are each major points that you need to think about here.

Thanks for the explanation regarding the Hessians.

Iceland's a fair point. I'm thinking maybe as an alternative the Icelanders are sent to Canada (Today's Quebec and Maritimes) leading to the prospect of settling there not being an option for many agricultural settlers.

The British colonized New South Wales because they needed a penal colony following American independence and the colony of New South Wales pushed for the colonization of Tasmania and New Zealand. The British could go for Australia later, but there wouldn't be a need to colonize the place at the same time as historically. Another power could come in. Think of how the French were sniffing around still-unclaimed West Australia as late as the 1820s.

North Island of New Zealand became British via request by the Maori. I like the idea of that remaining British, the Dutch getting West Australia, and the French getting East Australia and South Island. Tasmania could be British or French.

 

[RodentRevolution]

Thanks for the explanation regarding the Hessians.

Iceland's a fair point. I'm thinking maybe as an alternative the Icelanders are sent to Canada (Today's Quebec and Maritimes) leading to the prospect of settling there not being an option for many agricultural settlers.

The British colonized New South Wales because they needed a penal colony following American independence and the colony of New South Wales pushed for the colonization of Tasmania and New Zealand. The British could go for Australia later, but there wouldn't be a need to colonize the place at the same time as historically. Another power could come in. Think of how the French were sniffing around still-unclaimed West Australia as late as the 1820s.

North Island of New Zealand became British via request by the Maori. I like the idea of that remaining British, the Dutch getting West Australia, and the French getting East Australia and South Island. Tasmania could be British or French.

Well I think the British moved on Australia primarily to stop another power coming and then came up with the penal colony notion when they could not get enough willing colonists initially to make a go of it.

However I am not trying to nitpick so much as make sure you are thinking carefully why you do something. It seems to me as it seems to RiverDelta, that there is more than one way to create an "Anti-America". It might be worth considering an early, wealthy and stable South Africa could both be a horrible place to live in for anyone not of the colonial elite but also have a profoundly less than positive impact on British thinking through the 'subsidising' of British politicians, even if it never become some kind of super hegemon or domination. Still go with what you think best but in many ways the more deviation from the Stirling model the better.

 

[RiverDelta]

Well I think the British moved on Australia primarily to stop another power coming and then came up with the penal colony notion when they could not get enough willing colonists initially to make a go of it.

However I am not trying to nitpick so much as make sure you are thinking carefully why you do something. It seems to me as it seems to RiverDelta, that there is more than one way to create an "Anti-America". It might be worth considering an early, wealthy and stable South Africa could both be a horrible place to live in for anyone not of the colonial elite but also have a profoundly less than positive impact on British thinking through the 'subsidising' of British politicians, even if it never become some kind of super hegemon or domination. Still go with what you think best but in many ways the more deviation from the Stirling model the better.

There's a lot you could do with this, not just with South Africa, to be honest, but the more you deviate from the books, the more interesting your country will likely be. I'm happy to help with whatever you need.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Tasmania could be British or French.

An interesting idea could be to attach it to the Cape country, as their economic ties via the Clipper Route would likely be quite significant.

 

[Deleted member 109224]

An interesting idea could be to attach it to the Cape country, as their economic ties via the Clipper Route would likely be quite significant.

I was thinking of that actually - mostly due to how much of the world's opium production today is in Tasmania. I was wondering if cinchona could grow there.

 

[pattontank12]

I'd suggest checking out a crack at the Draka TL.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-crack-at-draka-mes-attempt-at-a-better-tl.201595/

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

-The British capture the Cape Colony during the Revolution
-The Americans establish their northern border at the Nippising line, giving them South Ontario.
-The British offer loyalists lands in the Caribbean and Cape instead of Southern Ontario
-The British give Hessian Mercenaries lands in the Cape and Caribbean

Just curious, but why not have the Americas just conquer all of "Canada" in the revolution. They will have a larger territory to occupy/control, so to speak, stretching from Florida to Quebec, it could be harder to tie that together and solidify control of it. Now of course this could eventually include the Louisiana Purchase and also the Hudsons Bay/Prince Ruperts land region.

Now of course you can always argue with the absolutist/determinate/fated/destiny POV that the US was always going to go west regardless, so that California and Texas will fall under their sphere of influence, but I would argue that Texas/California is just as likley to remain either Mexican or gain independence and be independent from this larger US is just as likely. Should not be hard to argue that if the US gains Canada/Northern North America, that it could lose its ability for South/South-Western expansion.

Anyway, point being that it ensures the British will look elsewhere than the North Americas for their loyal population.