U.S. Homegrown Terrorists Inspired by the Draka

Some of those things are easier than others--it's easy to become a martial artist and not all that much more difficult to engage in human-population-reduction programs (witness how common eugenics beliefs were in the West pre-Hitler and how there are programs to encourage lower birthrates in poor countries via education).

Successfully building cross-temporal technology is a different matter.

Hmmm....kung fu fighting white supremacist environmentalists? That'd be an interesting terrorist group.

Depends a lot on your starting group. Becoming a Draka (non drakensis) level martial artist is probably more difficult than developing a biowar capability if your group are mostly geeky environmental types. The average Draka citizen had probably at least 2-3 sigmas of martial/athletic ability over the average American of our time line. Unless this group got its start among, say, a disgruntled band of Olympic athletes and special forces, they're exceedingly unlikely to develop beyond a level that just barely avoids disgust in an average Draka observer (this was a serious challenge for the Alliance spies in Under the Yoke).
The molehole technology requires of course, two things...nature to cooperate to make it even possible, and the skills and resources to make it happen. Exceedingly unlikely to see any sort of success here, although you could write an amusing timeline with them attempting to subvert the Large Hadron collider, perhaps adding yet more improbable accidents to its track record.
The Draka aren't really white supremacists, they're really more of an 'our ingroup' supremacist group. They had no qualms about making Nordic serfs. Their arguments, made implicitly and sometimes explicitly in 'Drakon' about the relative 'well-offness' of people in the more failed states in our world versus theirs are very uncomfortable. Would you rather be a median person in present day Zimbabwe or a serf, possibly a homo servus in the Draka analog of same? It's a hard question involving values. What infuriates many of us about the Draka is that they do not make a pretense to any of the universalist values that most of us pay lip service to (although if one examines our actions closely, it is clear we do not truly believe them). In actual practice, my estimation is that living under a Draka yoke is about as bad as living under Roman domination, or Nazi domination when you're not a Jew, or non-Stalinist Russia. Considerably better than Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany as a Jew or the world of 1984. In short, it's pretty similar to what most people have had to live under for most of post-agriculture human history.
 
As far as Rome was concerned, I thought serfdom and restrictions on movement and jobs came around only at the end, as emergency measures when the barbarians were coming.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
"The domination", while not the best AH ever written, is a certainly a good read. Comparing the two, one easily sees that the domination storyline holds its water much, much better.

Sure...sure it's a good read and a good storyline. :rolleyes:



I'm still going to say that they're both unrealistic. The Turner Diaries had a White Nationalist homeland full of people railing against "blacks and Jews" and then they...did what? They ran to California and made a socialist state. There's no other way to describe it. They narrator talks about how happy he is to see normal people in the fields picking fruit, and things like that. Even in a White Nationalist wet dream, the best they can do is Cuba.

If either author had looked at the actual South Africa and how it really operated, then they would've seen how a "whites-only" state ends up working: militarized, ostracized by the outside world, but with a high degree of unofficial equality towards (white) subgroups because you're so outnumbered you need every person.

But, in all defense, I'm not entirely sure SM Stirling really wanted to make a realistic series. I don't think that was the literary point.
 
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As far as Rome was concerned, I thought serfdom and restrictions on movement and jobs came around only at the end, as emergency measures when the barbarians were coming.

Serfdom, yes, but Rome always had tons of slaves, which had fewer rights than serfs. The head of the household always had the power of life and death over all his slaves (and the rest of his family, for that matter---what was it called---pater familias I believe).

Modern slavery, of course, is even worse, because in the Greek/Roman eras of slavery, slaves were pretty expensive, and were thus treated much like you'd treat pricey capital machinery. Slaves these days (and there are more slaves right now in the world than there were in the classical era or in Wilberforce's day) are much cheaper, and hence treated more like disposables.
 
I'm still going to say that they're both unrealistic. The Turner Diaries had a White Nationalist homeland full of people railing against "blacks and Jews" and then they...did what? They ran to California and made a socialist state.

The term "National Socialism" isn't totally a sham. The idea is that liberty resides in the *group*, not the individual.

Just because mainstream conservatism in the U.S. is capitalistic, doesn't mean all right-wingers must be capitalist.
 
More important, is that idea far-fetched? I kinda doubt it. Then a "sect" announced (back in Jan 2003 if memory serves me right... cheese, I really need that enhancement!) announced they had sucessfully cloned people, there where calls for the childrens to be removed from their parents.
I´d bet the greatest defenders of racial equality and "human" rights would be among the first to form old-style lynch mobs if the existence of genegineered people was revealed today.

Genegineered people founding ways to make others feel sorry is far more lulzier.

Well, yes, the idea of a Homo superior who is destined to replace Homo sapiens just might be a little scary to Homo sapiens. (And certainly the last time somebody talked like that, they made a lot of trouble). This doesn't come up in the X-Men books only because the POV is focussed pretty much entirely on the X-Men. I don't think racism would be the *only* reason to be afraid of people who could mind control you, walk through walls, conjure hurricanes, or kill you just by looking at you.
 
First I must admit that I haven't read the Draka series, only the Wikipedia article and the article by that Nazi to which the original post provides a link.
Judging from these two sources I would say two things:

  • Yes, I think it is possible that some sort of cult based on the Draka novels might rise in the future, or might already exist. After all they would not be crazier than the Raelians or the Heaven's Gate cult. Imagining oneself as a part of an invincible elite probably has its attractions for some people.
  • No, I do not think that the cult would attract very many followers, perhaps a few hundreds or a few thousands at most, not enough to support a large terror network, although an attack like that by the Aum Shinrikyo on the Tokyo subway is perhaps possible.
The reason why I think that the number of adherents of the Draka cult would be so limited, is that the Draka ideology that could be fashioned from the series has its own, inbuilt disillusionment factors.
These "inbuilt disillusionment factors" have to do with a huge disparity between the type of person needed to want a Draka-like society and the type of person needed to actualy build one. First some remarks about the type of person who might want a Draka-like society.
To somehow become enamoured with Draka and to want to transfer it into reality, you have to be a white person and mean enough to want to enslave other people. Neither of these two criteria speak, in themselves, for or against the intelligence of the people who meet them. But you also have to be dumb enough to admit that you are a kind of Nazi, and at least since the discovery of the Nazis' death camps, this admission alone brings the vast majority of intelligent and decent people against you. The great majority of those people who are not deterred by this fact seem to be those who are just too dumb to care. While the Nazis who ruled Germany until 1945 had very mediocre intellects at best, they probably were geniuses compared to most people who are Nazis now in societies with a democratic tradition. On top of that, the people who believe in Draka must be totally ignorant of the fact that slave-keeper societies are far from being superior to democratic societies in their war-waging capabilities.

So to want a Draka-like society you don't have to be particularly intelligent, but to actually build one with genetic engineering, you would have to be very, very intelligent. In all probability, most people are not capable of the massive amounts of self-deception to overcome this huge gap. Perhaps it might have been possible for a Nazi in 1934 to imagine himself as an Ariyan super hero while having in fact a pot-belly and flat feet. Unfortunately it is also possible for many people to make themselves believe that the system of slavery shown in the Draka books is "all for the best of the natives" - see the Nazi to whom the original post shows a link. But it is impossible for most people to imagine themselves as genetic engineers or other kinds of super scientists while they do not even know the first thing about the science in question. The vast majority of real geneticists or of physicists trying to discover the real life equivalents of "mole holes" would consider most people who fantasize about being Draka-like slave keepers as illiterate louts, and if these scientists are not non-whites themselves, they would probably consider non-white scientists as esteemed colleagues.
So there are two possibilities for a group of Draka-cult followers. Either they don't have some real-life geneticists (or some one who can pose to them credibly as such) in their ranks - in that case most of them would have to admit to themselves that what they are doing is indulging in a fantasy. Or they would have geneticists in their ranks (or impostors who look credible to them), and in that case the great majority of would-be slave keepers would feel their inferiority to the scientists - or the impostors would make their supposed superiority felt. But feeling inferior is precisely the last thing you want to do when you fantasize about Draka - you want to make other people feel inferior. This is just ignoring the little problem that science is light years away from creating the "superior" individuals envisioned for Draka...
 
Sorry for the necroing, but I just had an idea that would be relevant to the subject.

The Draka were essentially history's (white) losers in exile in Africa, enslaving the natives and using them to build their power until they could return to their homelands and take their revenge.

A bunch of embittered social outcasts--nerds, homosexuals, followers of minority religions, etc.--could network via the Internet and form some kind of "mainstream society scorns us, we'll hate them back, and someday we'll PAY THEM ALL BACK" tribal identity.

They might not meet the racial criteria of the Draka, but they could use the "revenge of the losers" aspect, the Nietzchean slogans and ideology, and the iconography for their own ends.

(The swastika and stuff associated with Nazism has got the scary factor, but Nazism represents the dominant group persecuting minorities on a much uglier scale than, say, high school. The outcasts making those who harmed them their collective rhymes-with-rich is a different issue and needs different imagery, and the dragon-with-the-sword-and-chain will do nicely.)

Bonus points for the fact that a lot of "nerds" would be attracted to the techno-porn aspects of the Draka--the megaprojects, the genetic-engineering, etc.

That's a twisted thought: The denizens of AH.com, exchristian.net, and other sites attempting to take control of the United States and crassly triumph over people who were mean to them years if not decades before.
 
Sorry for the necroing, but I just had an idea that would be relevant to the subject.

A bunch of embittered social outcasts--nerds, homosexuals, followers of minority religions, etc.--could network via the Internet and form some kind of "mainstream society scorns us, we'll hate them back, and someday we'll PAY THEM ALL BACK" tribal identity.

They might not meet the racial criteria of the Draka, but they could use the "revenge of the losers" aspect, the Nietzchean slogans and ideology, and the iconography for their own ends.

(The swastika and stuff associated with Nazism has got the scary factor, but Nazism represents the dominant group persecuting minorities on a much uglier scale than, say, high school. The outcasts making those who harmed them their collective rhymes-with-rich is a different issue and needs different imagery, and the dragon-with-the-sword-and-chain will do nicely.)

Bonus points for the fact that a lot of "nerds" would be attracted to the techno-porn aspects of the Draka--the megaprojects, the genetic-engineering, etc.

That's a twisted thought: The denizens of AH.com, exchristian.net, and other sites attempting to take control of the United States and crassly triumph over people who were mean to them years if not decades before.

"Fans are Slans".

Certainly not using a swastika. Such a group would probably have Nazis high on their list of genetic throwbacks who must be removed. (And most likely not notice the irony).
 
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