#Americans are inherently complicit in the war machine

[thawragiya]

But then these very same Americans will turn around and make excuses for the veterans who committed war crimes and the politicians who covered them up and would demonise the middle east that rightfully thinks of America as the genocidal, imperalistic entity it is.

No one is uninvolved when it comes to attacks on their country, but when it's the other way around? Watch as they try their best to exonerate the freaking soldiers themselves “because they were just following orders 🥺” and “Some of them are just doing it to get into college”

is this what it was like in 9/11. trying to reason with people whose entire concept of human decency flies out the window when presented with the possibility of causing the smallest amount of harm to a "terrorist", no collateral damage is too large, no civilian too innocent, no connection too murky for people to deserve to die or be permanently crippled. people citing world war two urban warfare statistics to try to make a bad situation seem less worse and not balking at how fascist they sound

[breakingarrows]

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2018)

[This was originally published on VerticalSliceMedia.com in 2018 and is republished from the latest draft I have]

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a game at odds with itself but also very willing to face uncomfortable truths. Tool tips and mechanics can be rendered useless on difficulty levels beyond, and in some cases even on, the normal difficulty. BJ is presented as an unstoppable Nazi killing machine, but can be cut down in seconds when not in cover. A strong narrative and a presentation of a United States in control by the Nazi regime has enough to say about white complicity under fascism to be worthwhile, and is wonderfully timed.

Beginning Wolfenstein II you are confronted with a difficulty slider that ranges from descriptors of “Can I Play Daddy?” to “I am death incarnate!” This naming is present due to the legacy of Wolfenstein 3D. However, Wolfenstein II is a game that wants you to feel empowered, especially in the latter portion of the campaign, and has tooltips clueing you in on dual wielding and melee executions. Unfortunately, these sorts of mechanics are counterintuitive on the higher difficulties, and even on the default “Bring ‘em on!” health and armor deplete quickly. The lack of a hit indicator when taking damage doesn’t help. The New Colossus wants you to hack up Nazis, yet leaves you open to taking fire when doing so. It wants you to dual wield shotguns as you sprint through soldiers, but will leave you dead within seconds when you depart the safety of cover.

Comparatively, DOOM (2016), the natural companion to Wolfenstein, does not have this problem. DOOM on the easiest and on the hardest difficulty plays the same. Wolfenstein II on the easiest level is the best way to play the game, but it’s condescending at the outset. Wolfenstein II on the hardest will lead you to much slower confrontations and relies heavily on weak stealth. With no mini-map and no ability to see enemy vision measurements, stealth sections frequently devolve into an enemy commander sounding an alarm that will rotate in more enemies to reset your progress. A courtroom scenario midway through the game strips you of your weapons and starts you in the middle of a large arena surrounded by enemies. You begin with a submachine gun and have to slowly reaccumulate your small armory. Trophy data suggests otherwise, but I believe this section to be impossible on the highest difficulty. Surrounded by enemies with breakable cover your only protection, you will die often from cheap angles or just overwhelmed by numbers. This sort of scenario is not a challenge, its punishment.

Even on the easiest level, the gunplay is still the weakest aspect of The New Colossus. The weapons themselves are adequate, with the optional upgrades and satisfying audio feedback. Melee executions are a joy to watch, but it's a shame that there are no perks to give you bonus health or armor for each takedown. A jump and smash mechanic is used once in the introduction and very rarely appears as an option later on. A nuked New York City as at first arresting in its large scale tragedy, but eventually devolves into a muddled mass of grey husks with progression obscured by the confusing layout. New Orleans rotates between interior and exterior spaces, but besides a confrontation and ride-along with a Panzerhound, has nothing unique to offer. Not one level sticks out as memorable, and even Venus lacks a unique scenario or great setting for the shootouts. Instead, when outside the Venus base you need to fuel up on coolant consistently, which just layers on another meter besides health and armor that you must babysit.

The New Colossus’ narrative is its saving factor, as scenarios presented both in and out of cutscenes are wonderful to watch unfold, and character interactions can be very entertaining.

The relationship between children and their parents is a major theme of The New Colossus, evidenced by the introductions focus on BJ’s abusive father, Rip. Throughout the game, characters have to come to terms with either their own upbringing or the newfound responsibility of introducing life into this bleak world. BJ has his abusive father and impending parenthood to twins with Anya, Grace and Super Spesh already have a child, Max Hauss is cared for by the entirety of the Kreisau Circle, and Sigrun is belittled by her mother. BJ and Sigrun are the most interesting of these, as they must decide whether or not they will become mirror images of their respective parent.

BJ is informed early on that Anya is having twins, and he frequently contemplates his death in tandem with regret at not being able to be a father for his children. BJ’s own father did not leave behind a great example to follow. A racist, sexist, anti-semitic, economically anxious white man who is almost a cartoon epitome of everything that was and is wrong with part of the American population. As a child, BJ is berated for not being enough of a man to take care of himself, but Rip blames others for his own deficiencies. Instead of reflecting inward at his own failings, he explodes outwards at whatever is available. This conflict results in abuse towards his wife and pushes him to kill the family dog in a fit of rage. Rip is a good example of how not to be a parent.

Rip doesn’t just represent the worst offerings of what a father can be, but also the worst aspect of the american population. Willing to sell out his family for meager rewards such as property ownership, it was men like him that paved the way for Nazi occupation to sweep through the United States as quickly as it did. People like him gave in to their debase hatred of the Other and went above and beyond betraying their fellow citizens in order to have an easy life. We already allow people of color to be unjustifiably killed at the hands of police, would it be so hard to believe we would go further under threat of violence to willingly give them into the hands of death?

A positive influence on BJ was a young black girl named Billie, who exposes BJ to the discrimination experienced by those whom his father hates. She upends the expectations he has inherited from his father, teaches compassion, and they even share a child crush. She teaches him empathy, something his father never bothered to even attempt. BJ is forced to relive and reflect on these memories when he revisits the family farm. Upon confronting his aged father, BJ kills him upon learning that his mother was sold out by her own husband. By doing so he rejects the teachings of his father about white supremacy and all that it entails.

Mentioned throughout the main narrative and spread throughout collectibles in each level are details that tell the tale of how America fell to the Nazis, and how it was mostly with a resigned sigh. An ex-military student murders scientists working on the “Manhattan Project” resulting in Nazi Germany obtaining the nuclear bomb first and using it on New York City. This attack is framed as a necessity to end a brutal war, much like the United State’s position on the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima which resulted in extraordinary civilian death. History is written by the victor, and since we were not the subject of an atomic bombing in this timeline we are free to justify it. After this forced surrender, America reverted back into what it was a hundred years earlier: devoid of rights for any who weren’t straight or white.

A most damning example of this new America is shown during a brief segment taking place in Roswell, Arizona The townsfolk celebrate “Victory Day” as Nazis parade through the streets. A soldier critiques/mocks Klu Klux Klansmen on their failed attempts at German, a different soldier rebukes a white woman who tries to earn favor by talking shit about Austrians (not knowing Hitler himself was Austrian), and a citizen reminds her family of an upcoming slave auction. Propaganda newspapers talk about replacing the fake news of yesterday and the efficiency of the new regime compared to the “clique of corrupt elites who were never interested in [your] welfare.” Two Nazi soldiers discuss attacks against their rule and how violence is not okay before pondering if they’ll be assigned to the same death squad in New Orleans. A newspaper clipping I am convinced was placed late in development explains our current political situation:

“...then the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre - the man who can most adeptly disperse the bottom that his mind is a virtual vacuum… On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

America in Wolfenstein II is complicit to the racism of the Nazis due to their beliefs being intertwined with our history. Not content to exist only behind us, this inherent discrimination continues to be active given the rise of the so-called “far-right” and blatant racism in figures like our current president. The white man, a majority of the population, has nothing to fear from a Nazi overhead when compared to the black, the queer, the Other, who already had restricted rights underneath a “free” America.

As for those born underneath Nazi rule, we are given Sigrun Engel, daughter of Irene Engel our central antagonist. Having turned on her mother due to Irene’s consistent verbal abuse towards Sigrun’s weight and diary entries, the Kreisau Circle welcomes her but doesn’t accept her. Members frequently call her a Nazi despite her protests. This boils over during BJ’s birthday party in which she confronts Grace over her Nazi labelling and overcomes her emotional connection to Bombate. She represents the hope that even those born under Nazi rule can break free and work against it. We even avoid predictable plot beats as Sigrun is not secretly feeding her mother information or betrays the Circle near the end.

Ultimately, you take revenge on Engel after she has killed Caroline during the introduction, steals a family ring meant for Anya, and mocks you after murdering Super Spesh. After taking over her Ausmerzer fortress in a frustrating shootout, the Circle confronts Engel at a talk show where you hack off her arm before delivering the fatal blow to her head. No matter the timeline, members of the Circle deliver what is meant to be a rousing speech to those watching the television broadcast, but any emotion is swiftly eliminated by the end credits song: a horrible cover of We’re Not Going to Take It.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: A number of recent, press articles, including an over 8000 word feature piece in the New York Times have asked, to quote the The NYT’s headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?” Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late stage capitalist culture evokes classic flight or flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks. The word panic has its derivation in reference to the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of pastural repose, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives, Pan. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a flight or flight response. If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch. Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are losers who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parent’s homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread. Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations. What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery. As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.” In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalise odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one example, homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation. Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege. What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny the simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the overclass can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape. It comes down to this: societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious overclass, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle; e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two legged toxic waste dump. How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war. Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal bases, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness. A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost. In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tumefied carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade…its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire. As liberals new BFFL George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning?” In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of US culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, were complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem. Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967, cinematic barnburner 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme; i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power. Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. The effect of these excursions on people was often profound…the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamour, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality…the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) manoeuvres directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level; i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated. The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted…High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche…There is so far to fall. Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clinton’s et al and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money. Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soulscape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us. http://clubof.info/