Resident Evil 5 Accused of Racism...

[SlorgNet]

OK. This is going to be a hell of a long rant. Bear with me. (Or not.)

The RE5 trailer creeped me out, but in a bad way, not a good way. The problem isn't the white hero-figure per se. Redfield could have been any ethnicity or nationality under the sun.

The problem is that someone from the First World is shown slaughtering the residents of a Third World village... and then justifies it by saying "I've got a job to do."

You can show Spanish zombies running amok in RE4 because Spain is a rich, developed country today, with a terrible past, so players can easily get the reference: zombies = ghosts of Francoist fascism. We know enough about Spain to understand it isn't real, it's just a game.

But most of the media and images of the Third World -- Haiti, Africa, South Asia, etc. -- are horrible. It's all about starving bodies, gaunt faces, endemic AIDS, civil war, etc. There's no distance or information which would allow most people to realize, oh, this is just a game. How would they know Third World villages are complex places, full of vibrant personalities, story-telling, love-affairs, gossip, and all the other things which make us human?

The history of imperialism is spine-chilling. The British killed at least 35 million in India, Spanish imperialism killed maybe 15 million in the Americas, and the Europeans killed millions more in Africa. The slave trade alone killed 6 million people, the first organized genocide of modernity. Nazi Germany didn't invent genocide, far from it. All these genocides, new and old, have left terrible scars in our consciousness, which is why we still have to wrestle with the fallout, centuries later.

Why does this matter? BECAUSE THIS IMPERIALISM CRAP STILL GOES ON. Those of us who are Americans on this list should think twice before arguing that "oh, images of the Third World don't t matter". Our country is engaged in a colonial war of overt, naked aggression, which has killed at least 800,000 people in Iraq. Millions more may die before we finally leave them alone. Dehumanizing and demonizing Arabs was key to this war - erasing all images of Iraqis as human beings, and instead showing nothing but masked jihadis sawing off heads.

I'm not saying RE5 is pro-war. In fact, the series has always been damn subversive - bashing governments, corporations, etc. Osmund Saddler is the perfect incarnation of Dick Cheney. But the trailer was problematic, for the reasons listed above. I just hope RE5 avoids the cliches and identifies the real monsters - the monsters of Empire.