Story here:
Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military. As an official arm of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a “Military Crusade in Iraq” in the near future.
<snip>
With the endorsement of the Defense Department, OSU is mailing “Freedom Packages” to soldiers serving in Iraq. These are not your grandfather’s care packages, however. Besides pairs of white socks and boxes of baby wipes (included at the apparent suggestion of Iran-Contra felon Oliver North, according to OSU) OSU’s care packages contain the controversial Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game. The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ bestselling pulp fiction series about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye’s and Jenkins’ books, the non-believers are ultimately condemned to “everlasting punishment” while the evangelicals are “raptured” up to heaven.
The Left Behind videogame is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. With tanks, helicopters and a fearsome arsenal of automatic weapons at their disposal, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye’s interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, “Praise the Lord!” To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist. (Video preview here ).
Producers of the Left Behind videogame were faced with a storm of controversy after Christian blogger Jonathan Hutson exposed its eliminationist overtones in a series of posts on the website Talk2Action. Statements by the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference on American Islamic Relations, the Christian Alliance for Progress, and others condemned the game and demanded that Walmart pull it from its shelves. Even Marvin Olasky, the evangelical publisher, intellectual author of “compassionate conservatism,” and a force behind the George W. Bush Administration’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," denounced the Left Behind videogame. In a blog post on the website of his World Magazine, Olasky described the game’s content as akin to “the way homicidal Muslims think.” As a result of the fallout, Left Behind Games fired its senior VP and released three board members.
This controversy has not deterred OSU from encouraging US troops to play virtual rounds of kill or convert after a hard day of house-to-house searches and counterinsurgency warfare against Iraqi insurgents. What’s more, OSU’s “Freedom Packages” include a copy of evangelical pastor Jonathan McDowell’s More Than A Carpenter – a book advertised as “one of the most powerful evangelism tools worldwide” – that is double-published in Arabic. Considering that only a handful of American troops speak Arabic, the book is ostensibly intended for proselytizing efforts among Iraqi civilians.
:eek: We didn’t have enough trouble with bin Laden calling Westerners “Crusaders”?! What made the boys at the Pentagon think it was a good idea to give official backing to a program where U.S. troops stationed in a hostile Muslim country can play at “killing or converting” non-Christians?! And where they get points for offing UN troops?!
Earlier Pit thread on the Left Behind game.
Absolutely first rate parody, BG ! Really had me going, not ashamed to admit it, but that name? Operation Straight Up? C’mon!
Otto
August 10, 2007, 2:35am
3
Ah Stephen Baldwin. How we miss your Threesome days, when you’d frolic naked and encourage men to grab your ass on film. It’s always so sad when the somewhat-more-than-marginally-attractive find Jeebus and transform into total douchebags.
What better way to unwind during a war than to play a game about war? It must be absolutely cathartic. :rolleyes:
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Sincerely,
A rabid Penn State fan who thought that this was going to be about Ohio State University football.
Oh, that OSU certainly bites it, no question, though not as much as the one north of Heaven, in Oklahoma…
That’s awful.
Those games suck major ass.
Not Stephen Baldwin…I’ll never be able to enjoy Half Baked again.
McGayver Friend: Hey, man, we’re out of papers.
Or The Usual Suspects which is an equally good movie.
From George Orwell’s 1944 essay, “Raffles and Miss Blandish”:
As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS [No Orchids for Miss Blandish, an extremely violent and sordid crime novel] enjoyed its greatest vogue in 1940, though it was successfully running as a play till some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the NEW YORKER had a picture of a little man approaching a news-stall littered with paper with such headlines as ‘Great Tank Battles in Northern France’, ‘Big Naval Battle in the North Sea’, ‘Huge Air Battles over the Channel’, etc., etc. The little man is saying ‘ACTION STORIES, please’. That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom the world of the gangster and the prize-ring is more ‘real’, more ‘tough’, than such things as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point of view of a reader of ACTION STORIES, a description of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the European underground parties, would be ‘sissy stuff’. On the other hand, some puny gun-battle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely ‘tough’. This habit of mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls in a muddy trench, with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot or two overhead, and whiles away his intolerable boredom by reading an American gangster story. And what is it that makes that story so exciting? Precisely the fact that people are shooting at each other with machine-guns! Neither the soldier nor anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is taken for granted that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one.
The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events. . . .
What’s more, OSU’s “Freedom Packages” include a copy of evangelical pastor Jonathan McDowell’s More Than A Carpenter – a book advertised as “one of the most powerful evangelism tools worldwide” – that is double-published in Arabic. Considering that only a handful of American troops speak Arabic, the book is ostensibly intended for proselytizing efforts among Iraqi civilians.
Well, there were five dozen more who could have read it, but they were “left behind” for not being “straight up” enough.
Pity they don’t leave the games behind and send Stephen Baldwin over there. One way.
:rolleyes:
Great, Jesus gets the ugly/stupid/loser Baldwin. Did someone release a loser-grade version of the Great Commission? Bring all your losers unto Me, that they may make a mockery of My Life.
Great, Pentagon, make a loud statement that you think that your service people are stupid, lack good taste in video games, and desire severely damaged theological products.
It’s an odd thing, when the the tards/damaged/stoners/alkies/addicts/losers replace their old damage/addiction(s) with Jesus™ . I won’t really be offended until the Pentagon admits $cientologist “Chaplains” into the ranks. I can see it now, combat-grade “touch assists.”
Get thee behind me, Thetan!
zygote:
I-O!
I knew it wouldn’t be long. We are many, we are loyal, and we tend to at least make it to championship games. Can’t win 'em all, but we do tend to win most of 'em.
Isn’t it “international incident” illegal to proselytize in officially Islamic countries?
Its a misdemeanor. They just chop off your dick and shove it up your ass. Then probation.
I wish a large meteor would land on ALL the Baldwin brothers. Meh.
