Dissident Veteran For Peace

National Public Radio did an almost 6-minute infomercial today on the music of the new Ubisoft release, Far Cry 5. FC5 is a first-person shooter game where the player is a sheriff's deputy and the bad guys belong to Eden's Gate, an evil cult in Montana. I haven't played the game but various media reports indicate the cult is Christian-based (see here and here). One of the cover art pieces (see image at right) is a clear reference to Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and then there's the baptism trailer.

The game also calls to my mind the massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco, along with the M.O.V.E. massacre. According to the game's creative director, Dan Hay, FC5 was partly inspired or influenced by the 2016 armed protest at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge but mostly by his own insecurities:

"[That] brings us to the creative of the game," Hay said. "We are going to Montana. We are going to the frontier of Montana in present day. What we learned there is this concept of 'freedom, faith, and firearms.' People in that region, they don't want to be fucked with. We're applying that to Far Cry. We did that two-and-a-half years ago. But even today, this morning when I turned on the news, this concept of dissatisfaction, feeling like something is wrong, something is off. It brings me very much back to when I was a kid. I don't know that I feel safe."

Hay's words seem to also echo Obama's notorious bitter clingers remark.

I realize that my limited engagement with the game is no substitute for having actually played it. My analysis here though is not really so much about the game itself as about the mainstream media response to public representations of FC5.

Thus, listening to the fawning NPR piece left me wondering how they would cover a mirror-image game where the first person shooter is a militia member or a deputy sheriff who is gunning down a caricature of the Left, say evil prominent Lefty gun controllers who are surrounded by armed guards and based in New York, for example. What about a game taking out protesters run violently amuck, based loosely on Black Lives Matter or Antifa?

Methinks Ari Shapiro et al. would not similarly overlook the dynamics of who was shooting whom and why in such a game. A gamer friend made a search and found no such parallel games to FC5 with contemporary center-Left villains so we needn't worry, I suppose.

See also:

• Some Lessons of "Unintended Consequences"
• Cho not McVeigh

08 April 2018 update: I've done a bit more reading of and about responses to FC5. Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first or only person to think about the ramifications of using an identifiable, albeit exaggerated, contemporary American political/cultural subgroup as the targets of an FPS game.

Last year, Chris Plante wrote in The Verge: "But Far Cry 5, should it commit to the direction the key art suggests, will be the biggest and most aggressive game to adjust the sights of the first-person shooter genre against people in the United States .... The game promises a conversation about ... why it became acceptable to murder virtual versions of one group of people, but not another." Unfortunately, I see very little evidence of the promised conversation taking place.

There have been complaints about why the "bad guys" aren't more clearly identifiable as members of the real "alt-Right" and other perceived nemeses of the Left. As Adi Robertson put it, writing more recently in The Verge: "many reviews have criticized Far Cry 5’s cult for not drawing on real Christian Fundamentalist or neo-Nazi ideology" (that would likely be the Left's insupportably expansive definition of neo-Nazi ideology).

Relatedly, some are also unhappy that the "good guys" aren't more clearly not conservatives. The two links below astutely critique in much greater detail some left-of center responses to FC5.

See also:

• "SJWs Complain That Far Cry 5 Isn’t Anti-Conservative, Anti-Christian Enough"
• "Gamespot Whines About Far Cry 5 Portraying Conservatives As Good Guys"

Labels: culture, gaming, guns, National Public Radio, politics, terrorism, United States, violence

In 2001, Congress designated September 11th as "Patriot Day". In honor of the day here are some thoughts from one American statesman on patriotism, war, and civil liberties:

The true patriot … rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state. Unquestioned loyalty to the state is especially demanded in times of war. Lack of support for a war policy is said to be unpatriotic. … Yet, it is dissent from government policies that defines the true patriot and champion of liberty ... we must not forget that the true patriot is the one who protests in spite of the consequences …

We are continually being reminded that 9/11 has changed everything.

Unfortunately, the policy that needed most to be changed, that is, our policy of foreign interventionism, has only been expanded …

The record since September 11th is dismal. Respect for liberty has rapidly deteriorated. Many of the new laws passed after 9/11 had, in fact, been proposed long before that attack. The political atmosphere after that attack simply made it more possible to pass such legislation. The fear generated by 9/11 became an opportunity for those seeking to promote the power of the state domestically, just as it served to falsely justify the long-planned invasion of Iraq …

Though opposition to totally unnecessary war should be the only moral position, the rhetoric is twisted to claim that patriots who oppose the war are not supporting the troops. The cliché 'Support the Troops' is incessantly used as a substitute for the unacceptable notion of supporting the policy, no matter how flawed it may be.

Unsound policy can never help the troops. Keeping the troops out of harm's way and out of wars unrelated to our national security is the only real way of protecting the troops. With this understanding, just who can claim the title of 'patriot'?

Before the war in the Middle East spreads and becomes a world conflict for which we will be held responsible, or the liberties of all Americans become so suppressed we can no longer resist, much has to be done. Time is short, but our course of action should be clear. Resistance to illegal and unconstitutional usurpation of our rights is required. Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes.

But let it not be said that we did nothing …

Source: US Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas). "Patriotism." Congressional Record 153:84 (May 22, 2007; 110th US Congress) pp. H5609-H5612.

Labels: 9/11, freedom, military, patriotism, quotations, Ron Paul, terrorism, United States, War

Jürgen Todenhöfer is the only known Western journalist to openly enter ISIS-controlled territory and return alive. His views are largely unheard in the US media; I learned about him via the BBC. Below are a few excerpts from him or articles about his visit to ISIS/ISIL territory.

"During the last 200 years an Arabic country has never attacked the West. We must explain why we fought wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Libya. And if we are looking for a reason why this horrible organisation ISIL exists, we must have a look at its history. ISIL was founded some weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq. The organisation is the baby of George W. Bush. And the violence, that we face now is the fallout or boomerang effect of our own wars."

-Euronews. "ISIL is the baby of George W Bush."January 16, 2015.

Once within Isis territory, Todenhöfer said his strongest impression was "that Isis is much stronger than we think here". He said it now has "dimensions larger than the UK", and is supported by "an almost ecstatic enthusiasm that I have never encountered in any other warzone".

"Each day, hundreds of willing fighters arrive from all over the world," he told tz. "For me it is incomprehensible."

...

Todenhöfer says that this ultimately means Isis cannot be beaten by Western intervention or air strikes – despite US claims last week that they have proven effective. "With every bomb that is dropped and hits a civilian, the number of terrorists increases," he said.

Speaking in a TV interview with RTL's Nachtjournal programme two days after his return to Germany last week, Todenhöfer said Isis has worked hard to establish itself as a functioning state. He said it has "social welfare", a "school system", and that he was even surprised to see it has plans to provide education to girls.

-Adam Withnall. The Independent. "Inside Isis: The first Western journalist ever to be given access to the 'Islamic State' has just returned – and this is what he discovered." December 21, 2014.

See also Jürgen Todenhöfer's website.

Labels: Bush, Iraq, Islam, Syria, terrorism, video, war tax resistance

... you cannot declare war on terrorism without yourselves becoming terrorists. ... terrorism is a war of the poor and war is the terrorism of the rich. War is not a tool in the fight against terrorism.

Source: Peter Ustinov. "Der Krieg ist der Terrorismus der Reichen." Die Welt. April 22, 2003.

Labels: military, quotations, terrorism, War

John F. Ross' novel Unintended Consequences (St. Louis, MO: Accurate Pr., 1996) is an 861-page monster. It is also a disturbing terrorist revenge fantasy that depicts its protagonists carrying out cold-blooded murders in gruesome detail with little or no remorse or hesitation. It's not a book or a vision I can say I admire or unreservedly recommend. And yet I learned some interesting things from it.

One of the opening vignettes in the novel is the 1932 Battle of Anacostia Flats, i.e. the US Army's assault during the Great Depression on an encampment of impoverished WW I veterans seeking early payment of the bonus promised them for their wartime service. The author returns to this repeatedly in his chronicling of US government assaults on American citizens.

The book left me with a better appreciation of how some conservative, gun-rights advocates view the episode and I also learned that Jim Crow was banned from the encampment though in 1932, Washington, DC was a Jim Crow stronghold. Ross erroneously attributes an article entitled "The Bonuseers [sic] Ban Jim Crow" to the New York Times. It turns out the article was by Roy Wilkins and was published in the NAACP's house magazine The Crisis in October, 1932.

Wilkins' article is quoted in The Bonus Army: An American Epic by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen (Bloomsbury, 2006) on p. 118:

[At Camp Marks in Anacostia] I found black toes and white toes sticking out side by side from a ramshackle town of pup tents, packing crates and tar-paper shacks. Black men and white men, veterans of the segregated army that had fought in World War I, lined up equally, perspired in sick bays, side by side. For years, the U.S. Army had argued that General Jim Crow was its proper commander, but the Bonus marchers gave lie to the notion that Black and white soldiers--ex-soldiers in their case--couldn't live together.

I had either never known or else forgotten about this aspect of the Bonus Army's occupation. I also learned about the inspiring story of the Battle of Athens from Ross' book. In 1946, WW II vets and other locals successfully took up arms against a corrupt, local Democratic Party regime in Athens, TN, the county seat of McMinn County.

Ross' righteous anger about the ambush at Ruby Ridge and the Waco Massacre is refreshing. I remember many of my Liberal and Lefty friends being non-plussed about these two atrocities at the time. Unintended Consequences reveals that infamous FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi was at the scene of both crimes. Other government atrocities featured in the book include the Ken Ballew raid and the MOVE massacre. No government officials were ever held criminally or civilly responsible for any of these crimes.

From Ross' book, I learned of an interesting 1982 report on "The Right to Keep and Bear Arms" from the US Senate's Subcommittee on the Constitution. Here are two paragraphs from the report's "History: Second amendment right to 'keep and bear arms' ":

That the National Guard is not the "Militia" referred to in the second amendment is even clearer today. Congress has organized the National Guard under its power to "raise and support armies" and not its power to "Provide for the organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia". This Congress chose to do in the interests of organizing reserve military units which were not limited in deployment by the strictures of our power over the constitutional militia, which can be called forth only "to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." The modern National Guard was specifically intended to avoid status as the constitutional militia, a distinction recognized by 10 U.S.C. Sec. 311(a).

The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.

You can read more selections from the report here.

Ross makes the point in the book that early gun control laws were enacted to keep guns out of the hands of free Blacks. A surprising fact mentioned in the book is that Vermont has always permitted the open and concealed carrying of handguns without requiring a permit.

I'll close with two thoughts. One of the ironies of the books is that several of its characters train law enforcement officers in firearms usage and marksmanship as a means to get around gun control laws. The book has conflicted views on law enforcement personnel. Another irony is that the book's author and characters have a blind spot a mile wide. While they can see domestic government repression quite clearly, there is no clear acknowledgment that US government violence against foreigners is unjust and dwarfs domestic repression. Likewise, there is no evident appreciation in Unintended Consequences for the dialectical relationship between the killing of foreigners and the killing of Americans.

Labels: art and literature, civil liberties, guns, police repression, terrorism, violence

Terrorism ... revolutionizes state repression, and, indeed, in some cases was instigated by the secret police for the express purpose of legitimizing a state of emergency. The mass left, indeed the working class as a whole, was repeatedly victimized for the "heroic" deeds of a few. And despite the traditional disclaimers of its theoreticians, terror substitutes the messianic role of the self-sacrificial individual--or the magical totemism of the attentat [i.e. an act of 'propaganda of the deed']--for the conscious movement of the masses.

Source: Mike Davis. In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007) p.273.

Labels: quotations, repression, terrorism

Labels: music, terrorism, video

Another poster by SF Bay Area graphic artist Doug Minkler. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Labels: Doug Minkler, Empire, militarism, terrorism, War

Right: Choctaw Native Americans Gary and Dr Janie Whitedeer visit with students from Gaelscoil Cholmcille in Santry, Co Dublin.

In "Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland," I talked about how the roots of Western colonialism are very old and how the techniques of colonialism were perfected centuries ago in Europe against Celtic people. Since I wrote that post last August, while going through my files, I found two noteworthy articles on the subject from Race & Class (Vol. 34 No. 4; 1993). They are "The training ground: Ireland, conquest and decolonisation" by Bill Rolston (pp. 13-24) and "Columbus in Ireland" by Milan Rai (pp. 25-34).

Rolston argues that as a consequence of Columbus' landfall in the Caribbean in 1492, Ireland experienced a "new era of imperialism with its expropriation of territory, racism and genocide" ("new" as in different from that of the last era). He says the "terrorist methods, derived and perfected in the conquest of Ireland, were then transported to the American colonies" along with "the ideology to justify confiscation and genocide." Even "the same personnel were involved in the conquest of Ireland and America." The second section of the article deals with the fate and role of Irish slaves shipped to the Caribbean. Rai covers much of the same ground but focuses more on tactics and outcomes in sections headed: "War by starvation," "Population decline," and "Settlement, dispossession and 'total war'."

Also, in my earlier post, in the "See also" section, I had a link on Choctaw aid in 1847 to Irish famine victims. I should say the mere word "famine" does not do justice in describing the deliberate "policy of extermination"--to quote the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon--pursued by the British. Any way, after talking with Peter L. yesterday about this subject, I learned from him that the Choctaw-Irish relationship is ongoing. Below are some links to articles on the subject.

• "Louisburgh welcomes Native American artists to lead Famine Walk." Mayo Advertiser (Ireland). 6/15/2007.
• "Remember the Famine? Gaelscoil pupils learn of Choctaw generosity." Independent (Ireland). 5/30/2007.
• Links to three other articles from the 1990s on the same subject here.

See also: Irish Holocaust

Labels: Empire, Indians, Ireland, solidarity, terrorism, White folks

Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.

... the principles of terrorism unavoidably rebound to the fatal injury of liberty and revolution. Absolute power corrupts and defeats its partisans no less than its opponents. A people that knows not liberty becomes accustomed to dictatorship: fighting despotism and counter-revolution, terrorism itself becomes their efficient school.

Once on the road of terrorism, the State necessarily becomes estranged from the people.


There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. [She] sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because [she] is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that [she] works for their destruction. ...

Unlike the politician, [she] does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, [she] believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress.

Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for [rulers] can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.


... the genuine Anarchist looks with sheer horror upon every destruction, every mutilation of a human being, physical or moral. He loathes wars, executions and imprisonments, the grinding down of the worker's whole nature in a dreary round of toil, the sexual and economic slavery of women, the oppression of children, the crippling and poisoning of human nature by the preventable cruelty and injustice of man to man in every shape and form.


Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. ...

Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that "realism" and their "circumstantialism" invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion.


... violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

Labels: anarchism, nonviolence, terrorism, violence

A few days ago, I finished reading Future: Tense (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004) by Gwynne Dyer. When I learned of the shootings at Virginia Tech I was reminded of the following passage I had transcribed last weekend:

Terrorism ... is relatively speaking a very small threat. Even the biggest one-day terrorist atrocity ever committed, the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, is an event whose huge impact is entirely due to the careful choice of high-visibility targets and reflexive, relentless media promotion of the event. The lives of the other three thousand Americans who dies violently that same month in gun-related murders, suicides, and accidents were just as valuable, and they would have been relatively cheap to save compared to the immense cost of the "war on terror." But gun deaths happen singly or in small groups, generally out of camera-shot, and as a routine monthly tragedy they are not newsworthy--so nobody called for a "war on guns" in September 2001. This is not to devalue the tragedy of the Twin Towers, but it is to say that the "terrorist threat" is not the major threat of our times. (pp. 56-57; all emphasis in original)

Two people were shot dead near the Virginia Tech campus last August. Before yesterday, how many people had heard about that?

Dyer is almost always interesting to read and I recommend his book and documentary film, War. Future: Tense is probably best known for the phrase that opens the book: "The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq." (p. 9)

In Future: Tense, Dyer unfortunately shies away from pointing out the central role of Israel in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. This is despite the fact that Dyer titles one of the book's six chapters, "The Neo-Conservative Project." Zionism is a fundamental tenet of neoconservatism and, as Adbusters once observed, the Neocons are disproportionately Jewish Zionists.

Dyer has a PhD in Middle Eastern History but he shows remarkable gaps in his knowledge when it comes to the history of Israel. For example he claims, "... Americans had very little to do with the creation of Israel" (p. 58). In fact, as Prime Minister David Lloyd George said, Jewish support for the British and for American entry into World War I was part of the quid pro quo for the Balfour Declaration; the US government deliberately suppressed the 1919 King-Crane Commission report, which was highly unfavorable to the Zionist cause; the US government supported or turned a blind eye to the major flow of people--including US Army Colonel Mickey Marcus--and equipment from the US to Zionist paramilitary organizations in Palestine that killed both British and Palestinian people; contrary to the advice of the State and Defense departments, the Truman administration strong-armed other countries to support the adoption of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine with the Jewish minority (~33% of the population) controlling 56% of the territory; and, the US was the first country to diplomatically recognize Israel.

I could probably go on but by now you either get the point or you likely never will. Anyway, I think Dyer goes a bit awry on some of his discussion of religion in the book but I can't recall quite why I thought that. Since I hadn't planned on writing any kind of review I didn't take notes and the book has been returned to the library. So, it goes.

My final concern is Dyer's enchantment (although that is probably a bit unfair) with the UN and the post-WWII system of international law. I see its main--perhaps, only--value as being found in its potential for exposing the rogue nature of the United States but even that is of questionable value.

See also:

• "Political Zionism" (PDF) by John F. Mahoney. Americans for Middle East Understanding.
• " 'Ancient History': U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention" by Sheldon L. Richman. Cato Institute.

Labels: crime, Empire, Iraq, Israel, terrorism, violence, Zionism