Thread by @PatBlanchfield

the new Call of Duty: Cold War comes out next week, so on tonight's stream we'll be playing Black Ops 2 (2012). arguably the most singularly fucked up game in the franchise, it'll send us to do operator shit with Jonas Savimbi in the Angolan Civil War / South African Border Wars

topics: right versus left wing internationalisms, the Cold War as race war, the birth of the modern PMC/mercenary industrial complex, the rhetoric of "child soldiers," homosocial operator family romance, and, yeah, probably the fucking election | 8PM EST twitch.tv/carteblanchfie…

CC @dbessner this might be of interest!

oh yeah because I keep plugging them I want to recommend uncpress.org/book/978146964… and theshadowworldbook.com

not joking, it was the memory of this specific game - which might be at once the purest and most obscure and insidious of the entire CoD franchise - that inspired me to do this whole thing. like this game is the most florid and darkest installment and also the most exemplary

just gonna say one or two more things about this b/c I actually think it might be interesting to people who follow me who either don't play games or find the idea of Call of Duty specifically odious (and don't get me wrong, it's fucked up)

I contend that the call of duty games are, one way or another, about metabolizing trauma - historical episodes, ongoing current events, anticipated future horrors - in a variety of senses. it turns them into entertainment, it recruits for the military, it sells guns, etc.

but this task of metabolizing trauma also works on another level besides just materially helping the military industrial complex. it does ideological work, not just in terms of indoctrinating young men to think that the operators of endless counterinsurgency wars are badass.

it's about answering the question of how, at the supposed end of history, the supposedly greatest nation on the planet, the supposedly most just, most universal in its values must apparently also constantly be at war. it's about naturalizing and gamifying the fact of endless war

and if you follow the history of the franchise, you can read each installment as indexing moments in the past two decades of the US's GWoT experience - its reversals, humiliations, disillusionments, and reboots - and trying to metabolize those into a grand justifying narrative

which is IOW about metabolizing and justifying all the traumas and obvious cruelties of the endless Global War on Terror, escalating domestic crackdowns, etc, and queuing us all up for an anticipated future nightmare of resource war and great power violence

not to get too specific (I'm sorry I'm threading this so long) but that means, in other words, that in the early Bush era it's all about mining WW2 "Good War" vibes. but as tech gets better and the wars continue, it starts doing modern COIN wars, metabolizing those

and then finally, when it's clear those wars will never end - when the utterly sterile imagination of Empire at the End of History *LITERALLY RUNS OUT OF WARS* it fragments backwards and forward in time to justify this perpetual nightmare not coincidentally right when Obama wins.

and suddenly the franchise is (1) gamifying the 1960s-70s bloodiest counterinsurgeny wars, at once weaving a stabbed in the back myth *and in many cases making US kids aware of wars they might otherwise never learn about in school* while totally warping them

into a model where actual US war crimes are histrionically projected onto our enemies (one features Ollie North FFS)! and (2) and weaving multiple hypermilitarized space opera futures of war against the global south (including one that features Kevin Spacey!)

and the whole frame is weirdly homosocial love affairs between grizzled operators and epigenetic trauma between multiple generations of Operator Faildads and Operator Failsons. I am making none of this us, it's madness

so anyways if you want to watch me try to fight as a MKUltra'ed mercenary alongside Jonas Savimbi to liberate disavowed CIA agents who are in NO WAY connected to south africa so we can all do Iran Contra but for Good while we just talk about ideology and the elections come thru

here's that link again, thank you for your thread patience, would love to see you, these can go in various directions but they're fun I think and part of how I'm staying sane m.twitch.tv/carteblanchfie…