I originally watched “Genocidal Organ” on September 11, when it popped up unbidden in my YouTube recommendations - incredibly thematically appropriate on all levels, as it turns out. It has since been purged from any free-to-watch service, although one can find it easily if one lurks the DARK WEB. Despite being based on a very popular Japanese novel, popular enough to be translated into English, the bankruptcy of the producing studio shortly before release more or less managed to black-hole it.
Now, if this was an American film, I’d be a bit suspicious. It’s not like Hollywood doesn’t bury films that are a bit too close to home. But the Japanese don’t appear to care at all, so I credit the surface story. Nonetheless, you start to suspect as you watch it why that might be the case.
This is primo Bush-era (novel published in 2007) schizoposting with a kernel of truth. We open with extremely cyberpunk commandos (light invisibility cloaking, augmented reality targeting on their scifi PDWs, cybernetic emotion-control implants, the works) running the op on an east-euro shithole as the locals gun down civilians. They’re there to find a “John Paul”, who keeps popping up in similar shitholes like clockwork immediately before they devolve into genocidal self-immolation. Naturally they begin to suspect this John Paul, a not particularly noteworthy ex PR consultant, is somehow responsible for this unfolding global catastrophe.
So the twist - John Paul discovered the titular “genocidal organ”, a simple psycho-linguistic trigger to genocide and barbarism. And of course, he isn’t doing it out of mere sadism - the entire project was initially sponsored by the American government as a way to keep the rest of the world so focused on killing their own countrymen that they would be unable to turn on the US.
Do we even need to draw out the metaphor here? It’s remarkably prescient to have landed on the concept before the phrase “color revolution” was in the general parlance, but it’s identical. The incredible hypocrisy with which the United States condemns genocidaires when convenient while sponsoring the killing in the first place is a Chomsky-era old hat (and the film namedrops him at least once, in both a political and linguistic context), but the use of distributed, cultivated memetic contamination rather than top-down broadcasting to kick it off is something that can only happen in the Tiktok era.
On the one hand, this “genocidal organ” is just a weaponized legacy aspect of the human brain, a Langford basilisk for a complex behavior. Simultaneously, it is philosophized into an aspect of the human soul - are we willing to sacrifice others, against their will, to save those we actually care about? How much different is gunning down child soldiers (POV cyberpunk style) because they stand between you and your objective, versus causing them to murder each other with memes because it’s more geopolitically convenient? We’re not so different, you and I. It’s unfortunately a bit trite.
And it makes the resolution a bit puzzling. The film skips the novel’s more detailed explanation for “why”, but the protagonist ultimately decides to “bring the war home” and unleash the genocidal impulse on the American population, destabilizing them just as they destabilized the rest of the world. No one is a big fan of the United States government, and it may very well be in a “suppose ten good men be found there” kind of situation, but condemning the population to the charnel house seems a bit much, especially as we just spent the movie debating the morality of killing a stranger to save one’s progeny - let alone death for the sake of pure vengeance.
When something doesn’t make sense in a work of fiction, the thing to do is figure out what needs to be implicit in order to impose sense into it. There are two ways in which this can work, and both are fairly depressing.
The minimal explanation is that during their brief conversation, John Paul managed to invoke the genocidal impulse in the protagonist, and his heel turn on the American population is a recursive extension of this. The interesting implication is the virality of violence, in a memetic sense - it isn’t something that merely “blows back” as heavily armed former allies decide they take issue with you, and it isn’t “the people you killed have brothers that now hate you” cycle-of-violence theory. Blessing the violence of one’s putative protectors in a sense contaminates them, as they learn that actually you can just kill a man, and the precise tools that one used overseas have direct application in a domestic political context. The fact that the protagonist’s reasons are somewhat whimsical is beside the point - the problem is he was allowed access to such power without a corresponding apparatus of control, either self-control or controls imposed upon him.
The more philosophically bleak explanation is that John Paul didn’t even need to. The protagonist’s facile reasoning is perfectly sensible in a world where our intellectual leading lights justify the destruction of the current American population because, well, Haiti sucks, why shouldn’t America? The existence of horror anywhere ipso factor justifies bringing that horror home - enlightened universalism would demand nothing less.
Despite all this, as a piece of neat cyberpunk anime it holds up, and as an exemplar work hypothesizing about American imperial blowback, it was way ahead of its time.
“The existence of horror anywhere ipso factor justifies bringing that horror home - enlightened universalism would demand nothing less.”
I said since the 2020 Election Color Revolution Blueprint came out our foreign policy is our domestic policy now. To the extent we have a government, it’s the State Department. The recent CTI revelations about the DoS domestic GEC anti-disinformation section affirms same.
In Defense of what’s Defensible of American Foreign Policy;
(And it will be quite noticeable when it’s gone, and we’ll see that the rest of the world quite kills and wars without us).
Now in defense of America; when France fell in 1940 FDR said to an aide “This time we’re not leaving.” Harry Hopkins the traveling FDR said essentially the same thing to DeGaulle. This is understandable as it was the Second World War in a generation. All of our policy and largely successful since has oriented around preventing another World War, even if we have to fight or more often pay for small ones. Let’s note that we haven’t despite what you may believe caused or started wars in peaceful areas, instead we are going into area of endemic war, or as Sherman said of Mexico Eternal War.
So to prevent another world war we got involved. Our policy is as much peace as possible. We quite overextend in peace maneuvers far more than wars.
The other consideration is the collapse of Empires all over the world: this is a period of nearly unprecedented chaos, and no it’s not all our fault.
China 1911
Russia 1917
Germany 1918
Austro-Hungary 1918
Ottoman 1918
Ottoman Caliphate 1924 (this still haunts the world).
We 🇺🇸 are not responsible for WW1. Nor did we seek to get involved. We could have indeed not supplied the Allies with weapons and money, but keeping Great Britain a going concern was in our interests (their Fleet, the bases). Our support drove Germany to rash measures against us that dragged us in (however “justified” still rash).
WW2; 1945
By the end Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany had fallen.
The rest are weakened.
Over the next 30 years, and to an extent with our connivance the rest of the European Empires fall.
Dutch, British, French, Portuges.
NATO was about keeping more than the Germans down.!
Not that the imbecilic Europeans didn’t fatally weaken themselves.
In 1989 the USSR Warsaw pact Empire collapsed. We aren’t responsible for the ensuing chaos such as it was... and indeed it’s an excellent success of policy that Helmut Kohl and the FRG are there to catch the DDR, and we Eastern Europe.
Indeed we fed the Russians through a couple of rough winters.
And now the spiral of overreach begins. George Bush declined to move NATO East... but Bill Clinton doesn’t.
My Defense of 🇺🇸 policy ends here.
In fact Bill was quite adventuresome really. He has other matters on his mind.
Let the Albanian 🇦🇱 Madeleine Albright take her vengeance on the Serbs ! Haiti? Sure...
NATO East? Why not..
Bill has a government to ReInvent- Arkansas style.
At this point our government becomes corrupted through 2 major vehicles;
1. The laundering of the Rape of Russia money in the West, the entire administration not just neocons but Treasury (Lawrence Summers) are in on the swag.
Times were great for MBAs to pal with gangsters!
2. Domestic; Bill Clinton exclaims The Era of Big Government is over!
The Era of contracting out government functions begins!
> which is why our government is a Contracting Brokerage.<
The government does little in the physical or financial realm, it manages and Brokers Contracts.
*In Fairness the government was paralyzed by bureaucracy, idiocracy, and “the death of common sense.”
In truth at last things actually got done. “Government” worked.
The terrible part is - the Government and the Contractors are often the same people, see Hunter Biden (an idiotic crackhead example) or married.
It’s also why including Contractors the actual Federal Government is not 3 million, but 6-9 million with contractors.
The Clinton’s privatized and mobbed up the government.
By mob I mean criminal corruption. They’re trapped.
The government can’t quit.
They can’t. They’d be dead or in jail, and probably dead. Their actual associates might kill them if they lost power, because the money stopped. This is not “the M@fia runs the government “ this is they don’t want to go to jail- or die. Not to mention there’s a lot of dangerous people around now after decades of war that also have wives, mortgages... are SMBs, and won’t let the party stop.
So our actual government is you see largely already outsourced, and has to keep the money going or they’re dead or in jail.
They’re Prisoners of their own Devices now since the 1990s.
In 2001 - 9/11 happens.
This is both a genuine highly threatening situation and an opportunity to ... profit.
The actual war - terror, Afghanistan, Iraq - all done really but mop up by 2003. The Afghans and Iraqi were exhausted and ready for peace and to run their country.
But Profit won out. You see once the interests are created, they can’t be turned off. So we have this inane nonsense about (making them White) Democracy... you know the rest.
So my defense ends pretty much in 1991. We did good things, American women became the majority of voters , they elected a leering rapist... he turned out to be really the most transformative American President since FDR and not for the good... here we are.
Now they can’t quit. Hence frenzy when Trump* mentions Ukraine, COVID, 2020, Ukraine war... and whatever happens in 2024.
They can’t quit in DC, especially at State. So here we are...
*Only Peter Sellers at the Height of his Powers could do Trump’s first term any justice. Clouseau without the accent, all of DC Chief Inspector Dreyfus.
John Grisham novel as slapstick comedy.