A quiet man of many talents who likes few things better than a morning spent blasting through HALO campaign levels. Better known as Didact, he writes about game, politics, philosophy, heavy metal, and other things at Didact's Reach and can be reached at [email protected]

“Then, gentlemen,” said Napoleon, “let us wait a little; when your enemy is executing a false movement, never interrupt him.” —Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, 1805

I am not normally in the habit of making predictions. Yet based on what I have seen and heard and learned over the past year, I will make a prediction for the record which readers at this site and elsewhere can, and should, hold me to account.

I predict that when cultural historians look back at #Gamergate, they will judge it to be one of the defining fronts of the newest phase of the various wars that have been fought to save traditional Western culture. And, if things continue to move the way I expect them to, they will find that unlike previous battles in the culture wars, we will have won this one.

We will win because our tactics are so fundamentally different from what our enemies expect—they emphasise speed, flexibility, surprise, and individual initiative, while our enemies remain tied to moribund doctrines that emphasise overwhelming application of massive force to individual targets.

We will win, above all, because we will have captured the moral high-ground in this conflict. And once we align the mental and physical levels of this war with the moral level—as we are already beginning to do—we will become unstoppable.

When historians look back at this movement, decades or even centuries from now, they will see a powerful example of the applications of what was once a radical and bizarre new theory of conflict called Fourth-Generation Warfare. And what we have achieved, and what we will achieve, will be used as a case study to show the destabilising power of such warfare against entrenched interests that seek to subvert values that the rest of us hold dear.

In order to understand just why that is such a radical statement, you have to understand exactly how unusual it is for traditionalists of any stripe in any of the past three generations to win these kinds of conflicts.

We Lost the Culture Wars

Our modern cultural wasteland is the result of a painful and difficult truth to hear from a lot of readers, especially those of a more politically and philosophically conservative stripe (like me):

We have spent the last forty years LOSING the war to preserve our culture.

We have seen the most important and fundamental values of our society torn down and destroyed by vandals who used the tactics of cultural Marxism to subvert our society. We have seen abominations like gay “marriage”, no-fault divorce (read: his-fault), government-subsidised abortion and freely available birth control, and universal suffrage become “acceptable”—as if these cultural freak shows could ever possibly be considered “normal”. We have seen our most fundamental rights of conscience, association, freedom of thought, free exercise of religious belief, and freedom of action circumscribed, shrunk, and destroyed before our eyes. And we let it happen.

The self-aware man who looks at how this happened will come away with a certain cold appreciation for the tactics of those who imposed this ashen, burning Hell upon us.

When it comes to gaming, we have repeatedly seen how SJW tactics work. They have used the fundamental decency of the average Western gaming consumer against him, by browbeating him into believing that he is sexist if he wants “believable” (i.e. non-ridiculous) women in games, or that he is “racist” if he doesn’t want games to become some sort of absurd paean to multiculturalism, or that he is a misinformed idiot if he thinks that women can’t be just as strong and effective in an FPS game as men.

They are exquisitely good at shutting down dissent. They’ve had forty years to entrench themselves and become institutionalised. And they have succeeded. They did this by capturing the single most important and powerful level of war.

The Moral Level of War

According to the leading theorists of 4GW tactics—American military historian William S. Lind, Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld, Col. Thomas X. Hammes (USMC), and the late military genius and probably the originator of the term, Col. John Boyd (USAF)—you will find that all of them say exactly the same thing:

The moral level of war is BY FAR the most powerful.

By capturing the moral high ground, by making your cause look like a pure choice between good and evil to those who are unsure which side is worthy of support, and by relentlessly crafting the narrative to suit your ends, you can destroy your enemy’s will to fight and cut him off from the economic and political support he needs in order to defeat you, even if his forces outnumber yours a thousand to one.

The cultural Marxists who brought us to this point have used the moral level of war brilliantly, up until now, by bludgeoning anyone who disagreed with them into submission through the threat of being branded sexist, racist, and other double-plus ungood things. To the SJW set, any deviation from “acceptable” modes of thought was and remains Badthink. Hell, they even have their own programming language! (Note the satire.)

But they grew overconfident, and made a huge mistake—giving us everything we need to destroy them, root and branch.

Until recently, gaming “journalists” had a lock on how the consumer viewed the products that they paid for. Games that promoted “social justice” narratives were given high reviews—but when the rest of us actually tried playing them, we often found them to be unplayable garbage, because they sacrificed absorbing gameplay and great storytelling for smarmy preachiness and painfully stupid messages about “tolerance”.

When #Gamergate first broke, the reason for this appalling state of affairs became perfectly clear: the gaming media were in bed, literally, with the very same game developers whose work they were reviewing.

Overnight, they lost their moral high ground in the eyes of thousands of gamers all over the world. And they have continued to lose that support as gamers have mounted a vicious backlash against their immorality. As a result, the worst of the SJW gaming journalism sites have been forced to close, and the less idiotic ones have been busy covertly reviewing their ethics policies.

We gave the SJWs a painful bloody nose. They really didn’t like it. Because they are ideologues, and because ideology cannot tolerate anything that refutes its worldview, they resorted to the favoured tactic of every force in history that finds itself fighting a movement that they do not understand: the application of overwhelming force to individual targets.

They crossed the Rubicon, attacking individual pro-#Gamergaters with doxxing and swatting, hoping to cut off the heads of the Hydra before they regenerated. Thus far, they have largely failed, because they are up against a decentralised, anti-fragile movement that has no real leaders.

We have already begun fighting back. And if we do this right, we will destroy them and their foundationless temple. We will raze the corrupt and blasphemous cathedrals of gaming journalism to the ground and sow those lands with salt, while next door the chaotic, free-wheeling, free-thinking bazaar of real gamers will flourish as never before.

4th-Generation Tactics In #Gamergate

4GW tactics work because they emphasise individual initiative and do not distinguish between foes and neutrals. Since we are adamantly opposed to actually physically harming anyone, we can simply resort to making sure that the moral, mental, and physical levels of our war converge upon the same Schwerpunkt (focal point).

We do this in five steps.

1. Never Lose Focus On The Objective

That Schwerpunkt is simple: we want gamers to be able to play the games that they want to play. We want developers to be able to create the games that they want to create. End of story.

This is a tremendously compelling moral narrative. We will win over previously uninterested or uninformed gamers by making a clear distinction between us and them.

Choose us, and you will gain a voice that demands that game developers and gaming journalists be held to a higher standard.

Choose them, and you will see your favourite franchises and most eagerly anticipated games subverted into equalitarian filth and disgustingly stupid, unplayably awful sewage.

2. Maintain Focus On The Moral Level Of War

We will NEVER convince the SJWs of their folly. Someone who is in thrall to evil is nearly impossible to convince otherwise, because the rewards of evil are extremely tempting.

Instead, focus on convincing the “great silent majority” of the righteousness of our cause. The average gamer is unaware of the pernicious and vicious nature of the average SJW—but it doesn’t take much to show him.

All you have to do is show your gamer friends what liars and hypocrites SJWs like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu really are.

By convincing them of the righteousness of our cause, we cut the supply lines of the most corrupt and decrepit parts of the gaming industry. This is a blow from which they cannot recover—for as much as they hate us as gamers, they depend on us for their livelihoods.

3. Moral, Mental, And Physical, In That Order

Capturing the moral level of this war is a great start; indeed, we’ve already largely done this. However, it isn’t enough. We also need to capture the mental and physical levels of war.

Capturing the mental level means supporting game developers, publishers, and critics who do what they should be doing: producing content of value to us as consumers. By capturing “mindshare” we force our enemies to create good games—which they patently cannot do.

Capturing the physical level means openly boycotting the SJWs and their pernicious ideology. Don’t go to their gaming conventions. Starve them of your funding and money. Deny them access to your patronage. They are powerless before the awesome strength of a gamer’s wallet.

4. Stay Mobile And Nimble

The gaming establishment will attempt to destroy us the only way it knows how: using the “steel on target” tactics of overwhelming application of massed firepower against relatively slow-moving targets. This tactic works brilliantly when you’re facing a horde of clearly defined howling Orks moving straight at you in a suicide charge.

It doesn’t work at all against individuals dispersed across geographies, countries, and entire continents.

5. Accept Losses And Move On

We will suffer setbacks in this campaign. We will lose soldiers who will be intimidated into silence or browbeaten into submission. We will be attacked, relentlessly and terribly, by both the gaming and mainstream media. We may even lose people to physical attacks. If anti-#Gamergaters continue to use swatting to call down the full power and force of the state upon us, some of us could die.

As cold as it sounds, we have to accept those losses. If one of us is silenced or even killed, the rest of us have to carry on. And through sites like Reaxxion.com and the blogs of its writers, we will do precisely that.

We Are Warriors

My friends, we have made tremendous gains in this phase of our war. We will continue to push forward. We will suffer losses and setbacks on the way. But we carry on even so, because we know that one day, we will obtain for ourselves a world in which gamers and game developers are free.

Together we rise. Together we prevail. Forward, unto dawn.