The apparently humorous columnist Marina Hyde of The Guardian has criticised Dr Liam Fox for suggesting that video games in which players can select to play the Taliban in combat mode is dangerous and unpatriotic.Yet the subtitle of the article If Liam Fox can rant over a videogame it's no wonder we're losing the war, tends to imply that Afghanistan just could be a war that might be won but for the comic stupidity of those responsible for directing it.
"Dr Fox appears to have surpassed even his own exacting standards of idiocy this week, by calling for a forthcoming video game set in Afghanistan to be banned.Though the latest Medal of Honor is essentially a first-person shooter following US troops as they seek to crush the Taliban, players can take the role of the enemy in its multiplayer mode. "It's shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban," Fox fumed showily. "I am disgusted and angry. It's hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game."
The response from the game's manufacturer is pityingly understated. "Most of us have been doing this since we were seven," it runs. "Someone plays the cop, someone must be the robber. In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone must be the Taliban."
It's vaguely troubling, isn't it, that the press officer for a games company has an infinitely more rational take on the Afghan war than the secretary of state for defence. In fact, the whole business forces a call to the MoD.
Condemnation of Dr Liam Fox is easy. For he is merely playing part in a role play game himself. It's obvious that Afghanistan is being fought for grand geopolitical interests that are considered too complex for the British oligarchy to explain to the plebs. The TAPI pipeline.
To admit British troops are dying for that is never on the news, not an aim considered worthy of dying for, even if this banal reality is the only factor that explains why British troops are out there. For the "war on terror" or some heroic greater cause.
Hence a bit of fake outrage about "patriotism" is entirely in order and entirely predictable in relation to a video game as Fox has to put the mantra forward that this is a real war in in the patriotic interest of defending the country against" evil enemies" Not about a pipeline.
Fox is thus not "idiotic". He is just maintaining the propaganda line in the long war to preserve the Western resource conflict that allows Marina Hyde to be able to enjoy her high standard of living in a consumer society. The hypocrisy runs deep. Few of us are not implicated.
Yet as usual the easy line from smug "liberal" journalists is that it is only the Establishment that is stupid and not the Fourth Estate which comes across as just as idiotic in failing to grasp what is really at stake in politicians devoting time to the trivial.
The problem with most media commentator is that they are largely superflous, adding nothing to helping people understand the way the world actually works, adding more media to media and spinning off words into the void.
Politicians are not "stupid" and often know what they are doing. Liam Fox's comments on video games seem trivial but what seems trivial often has a serious subtext to it that it should be the job of real journalists to interpret.
Liam Fox's comment on video games reveal the fact that there is virtually no examination of the underlying reality of what on earth the War in Afghanistan is really about in the media, which tends to just lead to the received opinion that this war is "stupid".
A war which is continually assessed according to whether it advances "liberal" or "humanitarian" agendas as if that was a given fact because it is the explicit aim given by politicians and "think tank" experts is itself stupid whilst the war is not.
A war for geopolitical hegemony in Central Asia and for the construction of the pipeline to integrate Afghanistan into these designs to give NATO the upper hand in controlling the competition for natural resources, that is the flow of gas from Turkmenistan, is "rational".
Rational in the sense that it is an objective that is considered attainable and desirable as part of a military and economic plan that is amenable to examination on the basis of the ambitions and interests of the contending players beyond the spin and "narrative" as officially stated.
Of course, rationalisations for war can be quite irrational when broken down by a searching and forensic analysis. What is really irrational is the spectacle of a civilisation intent on pursuing illusory ends according to objectives that simply cannot be met.
For what it's worth, Karl, I can't stand Marina Hyde and her brand of arch and jaded faux cynicism.
ReplyDeleteLike you say, she typifies that kind of metropolitan liberal who is just about bright enough to thread together a handful of bon mots and put downs toward some easy target and thereby win the adulation of her target audience, but not bright enough to have to self-awareness to examine her own part in the story and to realize that that resource wars are being fought precisely to keep people like her in the lifestyles to which she has become accustomed.
This is what got me about the "not in my name" slogan used by the anti-war protesters. Not only did it sum up their narcissism (it all about ME), but it also their Eloi-like ignorance about what it actually was that was actually underpinning their comfortable lives....
@Pat Davers,
ReplyDeleteYes, there was something bizarre about that ritualistic "anti-war" protest back in 2003 and the whole hullaballoo: what in the end did it amount to: nothing nor even the embryo of a civil society movement to reform the political system in Britain and try to put constructive proposals to ensure that the country could not be taken to war by such an "elective dictatorship" again.
Somewhere I once wrote something on political protests being now part of "the entertainment economy", a carnival like release mechanism where, for one day only, people can strive to believe in the possibility of great change without the effort of having to think very much-or look at what is really at stake.
Hyde is a nonentity: yet she does get a decent salary for writing this self regarding and shallow shit, whilst far more intelligent and perceptive observers exist "below the line" are doomed to be marginalised despite having much more to say.
Ultimately, this is a result of the media, like politicians, being part of the same fraud-telling people what they want to hear or they think others want to hear, never challenging their readers in any way apart from affirming that the enshrined commentator's position as really being "one of us".
Narcissism is the correct word here. There is something fundamentally wrong with the media, of course, but it has been hoped in vain, perhaps, that The Guardian like the BBC might avoid this cult of the celebrity commentator....But, of course, not..
There is no aspect of public life in Britain not blighted by rampant banality and militant mediocrity...
One more thing. Where the Metropolitan elite are in collective flight from reality, then certain people who have very different ideas begin to step in: the fact that Afghanistan is about the TAPI pipeline has been emphasised recently by BNP leader Nick Griffin. When it really does come out that the obvious was obvious all along, those like Griffin will benefit because there was no discussion of the pipeline's centrality.
ReplyDeleteGriffin is malign but far from stupid: he knows that the elite won't mention the "poxy pipeline" as the reason for the Afghanistan War is because it lacks heroism and seems a paltry motive for why British soldiers are coming back in body bags ( check out the Youtube video on the BNP and Afghanistan )
In anticipation of that, Griffin has staked out his contention ( correctly ) that Afghanistan is about a pipeline. Yet like anti-war populists on the left he sells that on the basis that its totally unrelated to the needs and interests of British people.
That is not so clear: the energy security is in the interests of the vast majority of British people, unless Griffin is going to tell people that driving your car to the scrapyard is a patriotic act. Or to develop coherent alternative policies to being overdependent on oil.
It is rather depressing that it takes a Fascist to bring up the TAPI pipeline: yet it also shows the problem that those who do so are often essentially trying to vilify the elite by making them out to be greedy sadists and mark out themselves as truth tellers.
What they will not do is tell people that the TAPI pipeline and war is necessary because, as with debt fuelled credit booms, we are living beyond our means in Britain and that a great number of people have colluded in such policies.
As Tolstoy put it, in this respect,
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself".