White House adds "subtlety" to the casualty list via Call Of Duty-themed Iran bombing video

Per Kotaku, this isn’t the first time that Donald Trump’s White House has deployed a Microsoft-owned gaming brand in service of its propaganda goals, having previously used images and lines from the Halo franchise—including referring to “The Flood,” which in Halo is a zombie plague but in our world was being used to refer to human beings born in a different country—in some of its ICE recruitment posters. Still, there’s something freshly dystopian about watching the Call Of Duty games—which draw a large amount of their appeal from their efforts to fetishize the modern military in ways that increasingly seem to have bled back into said military—be leveraged in support of the current bombing in Iran. (Complete with using the game’s “killstreak” animations in concert with actual missiles exploding actual buildings and vehicles, presumably with actual human bodies contained—however temporarily—inside of them.)

By being given pause by this blurring of the line between military fantasy and the Trump White House’s more immediately lethal brand of military fantasy, we are, of course, revealing ourselves as the trolled, our tears just as precious as all those pop stars and rockers who are playing into “the joke” by getting upset when their work is plastered over footage of ICE abducting people in the streets. The main difference here, of course, being that Microsoft (which owns the franchise) hasn’t issued any “Hey, please stop doing that” messages, possibly because it might get in the way of their various existing and prospective contracts with the Department Of Defense.