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Proof Through The Night

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This is a request map from ElViceJeffe, showing the world of the Draka-screw fanfics "Proof Through the Night" and "Breaking Strain" ( [link] and [link] )

In this world, the US made a negotiated peace with Japan to turn their full attention to the Draka, and launched a nuclear first strike against their homeland while they had their hands full in Europe. After some serious messiness, the Drakan Empire collapsed, and the US, the British Empire, and South America - about the only parts of the globe _not_ fucked over or Japanese - set about picking up the pieces.

In the middle east reestablishing states wasn't too hard - where the locals hadn't been exterminated, the occupation was only a generation old, and the locals were able to recall what things had been like before, although hampered by a serious shortage of former local leadership (all exterminated). In Africa, however, much of the area had been under Draka control for a lifetime or more, and state reconstruction was more often state creation: the US did it's best, and smacked the UK's fingers when they started talking protectorates and stages of self-government, but things were often pretty muddled. The new African states launched into the future with better infrastructure and more industry than OTL (even after the nukings) and with a trained class of engineers, agriculturalists, etc., but not a soul trained in banking, politics, economics, history, administration, etc., and peoples deeply scarred by often generations of slavery.

Some African tribes were almost exterminated or entirely displaced from their homelands: a great deal of fuss and bother took place as a result of millions trying to "return home" only to find other people living there. The Somalis were fortunate in having a chunk of largely worthless desert to return home to: other peoples (see, Afghanistan on the map) were less fortunate. Some areas were so ethnically messed up and culturally crushed that entirely new multiethic states were created, usually with the Draka version of English as a common language given the lack of anything else.

(There was some talk of creating a unified black free Africa, but the international authorities felt that the results would most likely be bloody chaos, and if it worked, well, then you would get a new great power composed of angry, anti-white black people, no? Can't have anyone controlling that much of the world's raw materials, anyway: not in the US/British/Brazilian/whatever interest...)

Another ethnic hodgepodge was Madagascar, which made it more justifiable to "return" the non-Draka locals to the mainland to create a Draka "reservation" there (dickish to the Malagasy blacks and asians? Yes, but the trouble is that with Draka around everyone else looks so civilized they have trouble realizing that they are being dicks when they're not, say, impaling babies). The Draka were dumped there to sink or swim, and embargoed for a wide variety of technical and industrial goods. In spite of basic food aid, some starved in the early years.

Europe, invaded by the Draka as well as overrun by *Nazis [1], was even more devastated than in our WWII, taking nearly two decades to get up to speed economically, although it was spared the further joys of Communism in the east, and is a bit poorer in the west than OTL relative to the US, although without said joys Eastern Europe is actually relatively a good bit wealthier. France and the Low countries were only briefly Draka-occupied, and Spain and Portugal weren't occupied at all (they were nuked during the Draka's abortive invasion, but those were little Hiroshima-type bombs with limited radius of destruction and fallout). Having also missed out on Franco's nastiness, Spain is close to France in standards of living and ahead of either Italy.

Germany was more thoroughly de-*Nazified than OTL, and this leads to a certain resentment of Americans in the older generations, who lost parents and brothers and friends to US and UK-run trials. Still, there is no *Nazi revival in Germany, and Germans are often ostentatiously anti-racist and internationalist, to the point of being rather annoying.

The former USSR, overrun first by Nazis and then by Draka, lost another 15 million or so over the OTL losses, and was reconstituted by fragments of the Red Army and Party holding out in Siberia: starting off as a "pinkish" military regime in the postwar period, it has developed into a Russian-nationalist regime with a few threadbare remnants of Socialism (it still calls itself the "Union of Socialist Republics", the "Soviet" having been dropped somewhere along the way) with a standard relative to the US comparable to OTL South Korea: not having suffered the demographic collapse of OTL, in spite of its even larger losses it is only slightly less populous than the same area OTL, with perhaps 190 million inhabitants. The regime managed to extend its control temporarily into the chaotic post-Draka south Caucuses (Baku in particular) but later withdrew to consolidate its Slavic core.

India is a struggling Great Power to Be, with a multiethnic and multireligious internal politics of byzantine complexity.

The most noteable political process of the last half-century was the almost-cold-war between Japan and the US, between racist imperialism (often accused of being "Draka lite") and US democratic assimilationism. The Japanese cooperated with the US in the postwar era, helped set up this world's equivalent of the UN, helped bring order to the chaotic post-Draka situation, etc. But once the Japanese had their own atomic bomb and the means to deliver it to the US, they began to compete ferociously for influence with the US, world wide. If their population and capacity for supporting a vastly bloated military were less than than of the USSR, they were also better at converting pure science into useable products and weapons, and kept up with the US technologically rather better than the USSR. Although the arms race never got as intense as between the US and USSR (there never was a Fulda Gap to worry about), it got rather unpleasant at times, especially with the "Madagascar missile crisis" of 1964, in which extremist elements of the Drakan population allied with the Japanese to make Madagascar Japan's regional catspaw.

Fortunately the situation was resolved, in part due to the Draka government itself defeating the accompanying coup attempt and carrying out some ferocious purges: and Japan in the end found the project a total propaganda flop, since any Japanese-Draka alliance was a red flag to both Africans and Middle Easterners: it took _decades_ for Japan's reputation to recover.

As of 2012, a tepid Detente exists between the Japanese and the US, Japan finding paying the bills for a proper Cold War increasingly difficult as their population grow goes negative (if later than OTL: traditional mores continued longer with no US occupation) and productivity gains drop. Japan was driven out of China by protracted guerilla warfare supported both by independent China and the Russians, and hangs on grimly in Korea: Taiwan is fairly quiet so far (at this statement millions of Japanese knock on wood). The Japanese have a number of allies, but they are mostly third-world dictatorships of one sort or another.

China has had a different experience than OTL, if just as messy. The Tai'ping were rather more successful and for a while ruled over almost all of China, but their empire fell apart messily, and Japan and other European nations moved in. Currently a Tai'ping remnant surives in the south, allied to Japan to avoid being swallowed by China proper. In a world with the Draka and the mega-USA, people still think conquest and imperialism _works_: the idea that Tai'ping China (majority God-followers nowadays) might be unassimilable is out of place.

The US is effin' huge: it has assimilated most of America north of the southern continent, as well as the Philippines. Catholics are the single largest denomination, although a plurality rather than a majority: economic convergence has meant an early demographic transition (although Filippinos still like kids) and there has been a fair amount of conversion from Catholicism to evangelic Christianity. It is by far the world's largest economy, and is some 60% richer than Europeans on a per capita level, and it has been long enough since the Draka were destroyed that the gratitude has largely faded.

Technology is more advanced than OTL: there was more of a "first world" and the Japanese were higher-tech compeditors than the USSR. It has not gone wizzing off into the empirian as in the baseline Drakaverse, though. There is working fusion power and genetically engineered guard-bears and bases on the Moon and advanced cancer-fighting gene therapy and even the internet (the rather insanely security-conscious computer systems of the Drakaverse did not develop), but nobody is genetically re-engineering themselves into supermen or building conversion drive starships (although the Japanese are screwing around with antimatter, somewhere in the north of Sakhalin island).

And what of the Draka? The Madagascar Missile Crisis made a lot of people go "oh, there go the Draka again", but the fact that the radical faction ended up crushed by the legitimate government made people thoughtful. It is nowadays seen as a turning point: people came to note the Draka's real grudge as to raids and terrorist attacks by African mainlanders and the eternal "Malagasy Liberation Front" which technological restrictions limited their ability to defend against. And others noted with a certain grudging admiration the extraodinary efforts the Draka had made to make Madagascar support their twenty-plus millions (lack of those black nursemaids plus the simple problem of feeding new mouths had put a serious wrench in the Draka drive for large families).

The Draka move to redemption in US and other American eyes was slow, slower for Europeans (the Japanese authorities had rarely given a crap about Draka atrocities). But over five decades, there has been a slow normalization and removal of the more onerous restrictions on the Drakan economy and military. Today, in 2012, although the Draka are bound by international law from developing nuclear weapons, its navy and airforce can see off any African invader. A regular form of republican government is in place, and the standard of living is comparable to, say, Spain. The Draka republic is increasingly seen as a "normal" state, at least in places they didn't invade.

And yet...

The Draka are still a people "few, and not liked." They are still loudly loathed and condemned in a vast swathe of land from Italy to Iran, from the Black Sea Straits to the Cape. Birth rates are up, and there are now 35 million people in Madagascar. Military service remains universal. The Draka do not trust the rest of the world to let them be normal. Stregnth and the ability to defend themselves are still important. The modern generation is fascinated by technology, and like the oddball Arabians, seek to make their nation a center of high tech. There is a fascination with space travel, with cybernetics, with genetic engineering and transhumanism...

(Note I have made a few changes from the baseline scenario, so don't come complaining about Newfoundland not being British or something).

[1] Nazis, with a divergence a century and a half earlier? Later Stirling said something re Hitler being blond and having an eyepatch, but meh.
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Here are a few points about a realistic Draka
1. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…

Here is a map of the Communist world at it's height which means that a "realistic" Draka doesn't need to be an Afro-Eurasia spanning empire to be a global threat to the "Free World".

2. Have them be pragmatic enough to figure out the term "puppet state".

3. Have them use carrot in treating serfs

4. And finally, please have a free underclass of people ala Colonial subjects OTL who are either too white or too troublesome to enserf (if not both)