Chickens Coming Home to Roost: "Genocidal Organ"

Bring the memes back home

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.