![]() In fact, just about everything in Homefront: The Revolution is painfully stupid. In Homefront: The Revolution, this means doing things like “liberating” surveillance drones in the name of American “freedom,” a task presented to the player with no apparent sense of irony. Homefront: The Revolution ’s designs, though, are somewhat more ambitious: we’re now in Philadelphia, and therefore re-performing the myths of the American Revolution, piecing together an ad-hoc resistance to depose a technologically superior foe. In Red Dawn, a high school football team from the fictional any-town-every-town of Calumet, Colorado arms itself to usurp invading Soviet, Nicaraguan, and Cuban arm ies (the original Homefront takes place in Montrose, Colorado). Homefront was, in many ways, a ludic adaptation of Red Dawn (1984), a classic piece of Cold War cinema that was recently remade, though not well, to reflect a new era of political boogeymen. It’s this tradition that gives us Dambuster’s lamentable Homefront: The Revolution, the sequel to THQ’s Homefront (2011) that neither critics nor players asked for. As a result, especially in videogames and in film, there exists a genre of works that center on “ordinary” Americans rising up to recover “freedom” from the hands of occupying foreign army, enacting the lurid dream of far-right militias against a less-treasonous foe than the federal government. But the fantasy of open rebellion is potent and pervasive, not least of all because revolution sits squarely at the center of our myths of national origin. Their sense of “freedom,” such as it is, is highly selective, keyed to the tradition of white dominance that is threatened by an increasingly diverse nation. Such groups are rarely taken seriously in popular media, and rightly so: virtually every militia associated with the so-called “patriot movement” espouses, implicitly or explicitly, some version of white supremacism as an integral component of their ideology (the SPLC attributes the growth of these groups since 2008 in part to “an angry backlash against non-white immigration …and an African-American president”). What constitutes tyranny is rather open to interpretation-one group, Posse Comitatus, rejects the validity of both fiat money and driver’s licenses, along with more familiar grievances about income tax and gun control-but, in every case, there is a common antagonist: an overbearing, conspiratorial government intent upon suppressing the “freedom” of the American citizen. Though the specifics of their agendas vary, their shibboleth is what’s often labeled “insurrection theory,” the supposed right of the body politic to take up arms against tyranny, no matter its source. By the most recent estimate of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), there are just under 300 non-governmental militias active in the United States. ![]()
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