The Draka/Headscratchers

• Everybody likes to ignore the The Draka and pretend the problem will eventually go away until it's too late to change anything.
  • The ostrich approach is not exactly unheard of in human history. Compound this with the fact that while the Draka were awesome to behold in combat, there weren't all that many of them (less than half as many Draka Citizens as Germans in 1940, throw in Italians, Austrians, plus divisions raised from French and other conquered territories, it probably looked like it'd be a Curb Stomp in the Nazi's favor). It was the Janissaries who turned their army into a true continent-crushing force. And for that matter, the Draka themselves were comprised of the losers of past confilcts (American Royalists, Confederates, French royalty, etc). White supremacists convincing themselves that a 'mongrel' nation wouldn't be effective in a shooting war? Idiotic, yes, but not an idiot plot.
    • It is an Idiot Plot by the time the Draka attack Nazi Germany. Most of the world believed the Draka wouldn't turn westerners (i.e. white people) in serfs, but that's exactly what they did in Italy only a few years before. And by Christmas 1941 Hitler is dead and a coalition government has taken over. The Alliance members should by now realise that the Nazis (or what's left of them) are a far lesser evil than the Draka and should join them in their war, but the Draka threaten to align with Japan and this somehow stops any peace negotiations. If the Alliance had any intelligence whatsoever they would declare war on the Domination, because any sensible person would recognise the Draka's main goal is the enslavement of the entire human race. The Nazis, even at their height, had no such ambition.
      • The Allies had their hands full with Imperial Japan, which in the Draka world had been building its empire and tooling up for WW 2 since the turn of the century, rather than the early 1930's. They not only bombed Pearl Harbor, but invaded and occupied Hawaii as well and made direct assaults against the West Coast. They weren't tied down by a protracted occupation in China, the Indonesian territories they captured were not undeveloped rain forests but highly industrialized nations and could be turned to support their war effort, nor presumably were they suffering from crippling resource and fuel shortages. Compounding this was the complete and total inability of the Red Army to contain the Nazis due to the need to defend the long southern border with the Domination. In short, the Allies' job was much, much harder than in real life. It's easy to forget that we know a hell of a lot more about the conflict than the combatants did; Allied leaders were truly worried about losing even to the lesser real life foes. When the Draka ostensibly entered the war on the Allied side, no way, no how would they look that particular gift horse in the mouth (this was actually mentioned in MTG). Could just as easily say that the real life US and British unwillingness to continue WW 2 by invading the USSR (Operation Unthinkable) was a Real Life case of the Idiot Ball, seeing as how they had nuclear superiority and failing to do so resulted in the 50-year Cold War.
      • Also, it's worth pointing out that "They're not a real threat, we don't have to worry about them" was exactly the same thing the Nazis and Japanese said about the United States, right before the Americans put 13 million guys into uniforms and started building ships faster than the Axis could sink them. Idiotic, yes. Idiot Plot, no.
        • Except no, they didn't. The whole history of the Japanese Navy between world wars was driven and directed by fear of United States, and the fear that the US Navy buildup, ongoing from about 1939, will make it completely unstoppable in a few years was one of the reasons that pushed Japan into war. Germany by that point was in an undeclared naval war with US already and the Nazi leadership believed (correctly, most likely), that a full-blown war was a foregone conclusion.
      • I tend to agree. The relatively minor Allied invasion of France and Germany was a terrible logistical strain for the American military. A war against the Draka would have been a full scale invasion of the entire world island - Afro-Eurasia. Invading Drakan territory would have been playing to the Domination's strength, namely its absurdly powerful land forces. There would have been no balancing totalitarian force to provide the meat for the grinder so that Western men didn't have to die by the millions as there was in our World War II. Rather than involve themselves in some sort of cataclysmic world Gotterdammerung, the Allies probably sought to play to their own strengths - industrial wealth, technological development, naval power, and massive ocean buffers. The Alliance probably felt that given enough time the Domination would either collapse in on itself due to the "wrongness" of its way of life (something like what happened to the USSR) or become so technologically backwards that it would eventually be a pushover. Remember, the "waiting game" strategy almost worked - it was only late game Drakan resourcefulness (the Stone Dogs) that saved the Domination from ruin.
      • Personally I would be willing to throw my own life away to destroy the Draka. And my family, my friends, and everyone else in my country. If fifty million Af D citizens die, then it's worth. If the ENTIRE WORLD is nothing but a glass parking lot, then it's worth it, just to get rid of the Draka.
      • True, but you say that with hindsight knowledge of how things ended up turning out. There've been lots of threats that nations should have paid attention to but didn't, and conversely, ones they became positively monomaniacal about when they shouldn't. For instance, knowing what you do now, would you have given up your life to defeat the vile, barbarian Hun in WW 1, as Anglo-American & French propaganda depicted them? After the fact, we know full well that it was pretty much the 2nd largest piece of butchery in history, but lacking any semblance of the righteousness of the followup conflict. It was entirely an Armchair General war, driven on by alliances and a simple unwillingness to cut losses, not by any real conflict. But going by popular opinion of the time, you'd have thought they were in a fight to decide the fundamental fate of civilization. In any event, this is mentioned heavily in MTG. The Draka freely admit that they are the larger of the threats to the Alliance, and that while they have almost no traits in common with the 3rd Reich and the Japanese Empire, an innate antagonism towards liberal democracies is one of them. The American reporter likewise recognizes the threat the Draka represent, but rightly points out that it is a long term consideration, while the Axis nations must be defeated in the short term for that to even be a problem. In Ut Y, it is brought up again, that once the Japanese were put down, the Alliance could have muscled the overstretched Draka forces out of their new gains, but by that point nuclear weapons were in play (and how!) and it would have cost the Alliance several of their largest cities. Yes, in hindsight (from the Final War in TSD) it would have been worth it, but they quite reasonably chose instead to buckle down on their R&D (which they had an advantage in over the Domination) and wait until they had an edge that could give them a less bloody victory.
        • • WW 1 was primarily caused by German leadership's shameless intent to solve all problems with the neighbors by military power, as soon as a reasonable-looking pretext presents itself. And resisting that lacks any semblance of righteousness?
        • Precisely. It's a close parallel (almost certainly intentional, given the historical attitudes played with elsewhere in the series) to how very few people in the Allied nations believed about the Holocaust until Germany'd actually been invaded and they had firsthand evidence (largely because of falsified stories of German atrocities in World War *One* -- there was a bit of a 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome). Not enough people in the Democratic nations realized just how dangerous the Draka were. And yeah, as the troper above points out, it's made clear that basically, the Alliance lost because they weren't willing to go to a full scale, WMDs everywhere, total war of annihilation -- not in the window when it would have worked, anyway. The Operation Unthinkable analogy is pretty exact; it's just that the Draka were way more aggressive than the USSR, and competent enough to push on every flaw in the Alliance's plans.
  • One of the worst parts may be that it's a British colony with absurdly high economical significance. And needs a lot of resources, because it has to work in and/or around the hellish jungles and sands of Central Africa. For example, US South (until American Civil War) and Russian Empire (until Alexander II) were pretty much British economical colonies for all their political sovereignty. You'd think both had to feel the push or pull - and they often were in precarious position already. What was the effect on these? Nothing.
    • ...which is tied to many critical points in military and political history. Napoleon Bonaparte started his Russian campaign to cut off strategically important British trade shore-side. Surely there could be some considerations?.. Nope. Crimean War? Right. Opium War was all about trade, and mostly British - surely it would develop differently, and any later developments on Pacific and world economy would be wildly different? But opium trade also have to affect Afghanistan and British presence in India. Nope. Russo-Japanese War may count as indirect involvement in several different ways - even assuming things leading to it somehow still get exactly as bad - and it had great consequences both for Russia (even more so if WWI still somehow happens, as it contributed a lot to the morale loss and later fall of monarchy and then Red October) and the whole East Asia. N-nope.
    • ...and the only thing that may be as bad is its ghostly non-existence in the realm of ideological squabbles - given that it started before Napoleon, both that such a thing exists at all and that it's British must have immense impact.
    • Okay, this somehow dragged all the way through to the first quarter of XX century. But now USA won't want Atlantic Charter all that much, because it have Draka as a nasty rival, rather than one more British colony as a soft juicy market / banana republic. Soviet Union have in it a mighty (in economics, military and, yes, ideology) foe. So why not to pull them into a war and/or subject to a course of "interbrigade" treatment, rather than trying to make Europe all-Red first, only to immediately have this monster as a neighbour? Then who would invest in Hitler, Wermacht or Germany at all? Even if Draka would, now that it's clearly a liability for Comrade Stalin, why not to order German communists to ally with anyone they can against Nazi (as self-preservation suggests), rather than split voices, and/or send some fellow with an icepick after certain defiler of Socialism with inferior moustache? Nope, there's still SS. It's a healthy diet of wunderwaffles, or something.

• So where are all the African-Americans in this universe's version of the U.S.? You'd think that a nation anxious to demonstrate its moral superiority to the Draka would be working hard to improve things for the descendants of its former slaves. And yet we see no prominent blacks on the American side anywhere in the series (though we do see a few Asians, and the U.S. President at the time of the Final War is a Hispanic woman). The only blacks we do see are Domination-born serfs and Janissaries. Worse yet, in Drakon Ken Lafarge is surprised by the sheer numbers of blacks in our U.S., as there apparently were few or none among the postwar refugees who settled his home planet. Did the proto-Draka who fled America for Africa take their black slaves with them, or is the racial situation in the U.S. even worse in this universe for those left behind? Lots of Fridge Horror material here.
  • "Did the proto-Draka who fled America for Africa take their black slaves with them?" Yes, they did exactly that. Race relations in the US at the time of the Final War are far better than IOTL - Roosevelt's "New Deal" apparently brought in a lot of desegregation and equal rights for Hispanics. I assume African-Americans were included, but they're just such a small minority in a country that includes North America from Alaska to Panama that they're never mentioned.