Red Flood - Where Art is Politics
I hear the soft strains of an organ blending with the wistful, melancholic Russian lyrics being sung, staring at surreal collages of modernist art, historical figures, and flyers promoting fictional regimes, as the small loading bar inches across the screen. I’m playing Hearts of Iron 4, a WWII strategy game, and I feel myself become slightly deranged, tearing my hair out over the terrible loading times on my PC as I listen to the eerie Russian song for the millionth time. But my madness seems fitting, as I am playing the mod Red Flood , a total conversion mod that seems to have taken Percy Shelley’s words that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and replaced “unacknowledged legislators” with “authoritarian leaders.” Entering the ersatz world of Red Flood , we can observe a few commonalities with other alternate history worlds – Russia and Spain are competing to see who can have the most confusing and destructive civil war, Africa is in ...