Forum Post: Michael Vlahos does "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" in The Atlantic
Posted 11 years ago on June 18, 2012, 12:23 p.m. EST by OccNoVi
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"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a wildly popular end-of-war game. Millions of copies were sold within hours of its November release, with Americans alone snapping up 9 million copies that month. The official trailer for its new expansion, Face Off, is worth one minute and 50 seconds of your time even if, like me, you are not a habitual gamer. It is a remarkable portrait of America's love affair with war, and a deeply troubling glimpse into how war changes national identity."
As always with this writer, brilliant work. I won't try to summarize it.
Also --------------------------------------
The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, trans Jefferson Chase
"Schivelbusch also examines how the American south coped with defeat in the civil war and in what fashion Germany survived the collapse of its armies in 1918. In each case, the same constellation of notions emerges. Traitors and scapegoats play a part, but there is also the more fundamental thesis that something fine was defeated by something gross. In the US, southern chivalry supposedly went down before the north's butcher-shop efficiency, a mere application of factory skills to the battlefield. French ésprit in the Franco-Prussian war was crushed by the rote discipline of the Germans. And in the first world war, the Germans lost because their European opponents, on the point of being beaten, "unfairly" brought in the Americans, bringing to bear on one country the might of nearly all the advanced industrialised world. Then there is the thesis that defeat purifies a nation, while victory puffs up the winner, brings countervailing forces into play, and prepares his downfall."
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Defeats.
Afghanistan was/is a tracking war. And our guys don't even try to track the enemy. There's not a single bloodhound in use by American forces. We're playing the wrong game as well as not understanding that we're on the wrong side -- Taliban are not our enemies, that's the drug cartels.
Review of the book is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/29/history.highereducation1