Sometimes the truth is stranger that fiction. Call of Duty, everyone’s favourite first person shooter, releases its annual theme on the 26th August and it looks to be a chilling title. The pre-release trailer has got the web agitated to find out more about the mysterious ‘Perseus’ , or the more prosaic Dr.X, or Mlad, the spy who was the talk of the “intelligence” community in the 1990’s. Could a straw hat and sandal wearing scientist really have joined the Manhattan Project, shared its secrets and then been a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement? Perhaps before 2020 most gamers and most people would have said it would have been unlikely but…..

I’m reminded of Brook-Sheperd’s Iron Maze, a must read for the dark intrigue of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed the central irony of the book is that the Soviet regime deliberately set up a clandestine organisation to catch its opponents , both within and external to the regime. As always the Left goes to far, and the rumours and claims for the network of foreign influence grow so strong that Stalin is able to dispose of his perceived enemies by the thousand at the mere accusation of belonging to the maze. Whether Stalin actually believed the shadow organisation ever actually existed is debatable but it certainly proved useful to his murderous regime.

Fast forward to Yuri Bezmenov, the grainy figure in the Call of Duty trailer. Yuri was an actual figure of great import in the culture wars of the 1980s and beyond. This Soviet trained propagandist turned on the Soviet regime and fled to Canada with dire warnings about the nefarious activities of his former employers. He powerfully described the four fold scheme to undermine the U.S.A. without ,as he says , an actual shot fired.

Could the desperate situation of the U.S.A. ,and the West more generally , be an echo of such dark arts? Human beings always have that in ate desire to see patterns and meaning in events but could we possibly be seeing that “old mole” of History at work beneath the surface. Or are we Stalin-like in our paranoia?

It may not be called ‘Marxism’ but we are certainly witnessing the demoralisation of our education systems. Post-modernism has literally got us doubting whether two plus two really does make four? Is our History just one long nightmare of oppression and violence? Who is strong enough in their profession to say that policemen, our military and our teachers should, indeed must, be allowed to be in control without facing tribunals and equality committees. The destabilisation of politics could also be accounted for by Bezmenov. A series of disasterous wars, unrestricted migration on a scale not seen in centuries and our “leaders” seemingly powerless to act. And, all the while, the clamour by those self same politicians to stifle debate. The Left has rediscovered its love of the big corporations, who generously can protect us from anything that maybe ‘offensive’ or worse, true.

The Democratic convention was an outstanding example of the crisis being ignored. While Democratic run cities burn and the police departments cannot even rely on the courts to prosecute rioters, nothing is said. Homelessness, unemployment, urban decline are all unmentionable because the new Government will bring ‘normalisation’. Like Khan’s London or Merkel’s Germany, these ills are just part of an unjust system that need more tax and more laws that go unheeded.

This is one game that has set the gaming community on fire with competing theories. Surely it is a sign of our times that all the above are even being proposed as the working out of a subterranean plot by some nefarious third party. You may have only twenty four hours to wait for the title’s release but it is a stimulating if unsettling proposition. The real evidence may come in November for our American friends.

Happy gaming!

Mark Cline