Irish Brigade: The Great Game in Space

The Irish Brigade by J.F. Holmes, despite being a work of sci-fi, is a sharply written apologetic manifesto for neoliberalism and globalism.

For context, I’ve had a PDF of this book two years ago. However, there was the COVID lockdown, I took too much xanax, and my reviews and other writing endeavors were, ahem interrupted. Now, finally, I read it, and found the experience worthwhile. Contemporary art and literature is worth looking at because it says something about our culture and mood. The Irish Brigade is one such example. It’s a tirade against patriotism and morality.

The Irish Brigade is set in the 28th Century, after the collapse of an advanced civilization known as the gausians who ruled most of the known universe, including the planets occupied by humans. After a series of civil wars, the Gausian empire collapsed and they lost most of their territory occupied by other races, including humans. The humans now have a competing, though also weakened and war torn civilization. In the post-war chaos, various mercenary companies organize to offer their services to planetary governments that no longer have the protection of a regular army.

If that sounds like Jerry Pournelle’s Falkenberg’s Legion, you’re not wrong. It’s highly derivitive of Falkenberg’s Legion, but without Pournelle’s naive optimism. Also, Pournelle’s books are quite right-wing with the expected anti-immigration tropes (every problem is caused by those darn darkies coming here and taking our jobs and demanding equal rights and stuff). The Irish Brigade presents a different, more enlightened ideology that’s consistent with the USA’s current power structure, and I’ll explain why.

The gausians, aside from extremely surface-level cosmetic differences (including a weirdly long description of what their nipples look like), are human. Furthermore, the author explicitly describes the ongoing conflict between humans and gausians as the “Great Game.” So it is completely accurate, in the author’s own words, to say that humans and gausians are actually an analogy for Anglos and Slavs. So not only are gausians people, they are white people.

Most of the other alien races mentioned are window dressing and don’t actually contribute much of anything to the story or world building so I won’t mention them – with the exception of the Charee, who the author goes out of his way to describe as violent, awful, and contemptible in every conceivable way, though interestingly, doesn’t present any evidence for this. In every scene, charees express human emotion, loyalty, and intelligence. So it’s unexplained why charee are inferior to (white) people except that the author says so. This is of course the first clue that Irish Brigade is a neoliberal book, not a conservative one. A conservative will at least explain why he believes certain things (however wrong and misguided his reasoning might be). A neoliberal will just say something is true, and get angry if you question it.

Back to the gausians, who as I mentioned already, are a stand-in for another white European nation. Why are humans and gausians fighting each other? Why not just co-exist and trade with each other? Sci-fi books of the 20th Century (including Falkenberg’s Legion) usually explained that wars of the future will have the same causes as wars of the past: overpopulation, and that’s a sensible statement. When a nation, whether it’s a tiny tribe or an industrial super power, doesn’t have enough food and space for its people, there is overwhelming social pressure to conquer and/or colonize new territory. But now we understand that the overpopulation fears of the past century were unfounded. Almost every developed nation is worried about under-population. Too few babies to replace aging workers. In the 21st Century, no major developed country is really trying to annex more territory for its own sake. The USA isn’t trying to annex Iraq and Syria and Russia isn’t trying to annex Ukraine. With very few exceptions, almost no war today is just about hoarding farmland, but rather about more complex reasons pertaining to national security, people, and geopolitics. So why exactly, is anyone in the 28th Century trying to conquer each others’ planets? Who knows, and it’s never explained.

Wars are taken for granted without any thought put into a rational motivation for them, and the way the wars themselves are fought is absolutely savage. The characters of the Irish Brigade think war crimes are cool, and find it inconceivable that it is possible to fight wars without committing atrocities. Of course there are the obligatory “shoot enemy prisoners” scenes, over and over. It’s a trope that’s basically obligatory in American war fiction at this point.

In one scene, two mercenaries reflect on their time in the Earth military before they became guns for hire:

“So what did you do? I know what I would have done.”

“What any Marine leader would have done. We shout our way out of it, killing everything in our path. Grausian, Human, lords damn me, Illyrian [another alien race], armed or unarmed. Men, women, and children. It’s not something I ever want to see again.”

So, I am reminded of the ending of Boris Vasiliev’s (who was a Soviet paratrooper in WWII) story The Dawns Here Are Quiet. The main character is the lone survivor of the squad of female soldiers he commanded and grown attached to. Despite being wounded, he manages to ambush the remaining Germans at their camp. He has them all at gunpoint, and screams that he is going to kill them and doesn’t care if he’s court martialed for it. This scene is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, the Germans probably have no idea what he’s saying, he’s a lunatic screaming at them in Russian and waving around a machinegun (okay I take that back, they could probably get the idea of what he was saying even if they didn’t know Russian). But aside from that, it’s interesting the way he phrased it. He could kill all of the Germans and be celebrated as a war hero, as there’d be no other witnesses to contradict his story. But he doesn’t have the right to kill unarmed prisoners, so would confess to his crime and be court-martialed. In the end, he decides to do the right thing and take the Germans prisoner, at considerable difficulty and risk to himself.

The Irish Brigade is like The Dawns Here Are Quiet or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, except the main character decides that committing crimes is good if you can get away with them.

Pertaining to committing crimes, nobody in the Irish Brigade understands the concept of in-group loyalty. Throughout most of the story, they are working for a gausian monarch ruling a mixed population of gausians and humans. As described in the quote from earlier, human mercenaries kill other humans with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. I mean, really. Even a nazi in 1930s Germany understood in-group loyalty. “This guy is the same race as me and has the same fatherland, so he is my friend.” Or, for God’s sake, “I have an obligation to protect my people from the bad invaders.” That’s just basic humanity, so even the worst regimes throughout history were still recognizably human, even when they were extremely cruel. But neoliberalism reduces people to something that’s somehow subhuman, actually worse than animals. It’s like throwing a cat into a Florida pool with a snake in it. The cat will panic and only think about escaping, and claw at anything that gets close, even his owner trying to help. This isn’t the cat’s fault, it’s just a panic response, and neoliberalism reduces humans to a perpetual, neverending panic response. Just kill, kill, kill, don’t even pause to think about what you’re doing.

Seriously, this makes me very uncomfortable. There’s what I call “passive” racism, a natural human tendency to distrust people who look and act differently from you, and this can be turned somewhat easily into “active” racism, when you actually go out of your way to harm those people. Those immigrants want to hurt you and your family, or that foreign country is planning to attack us unless we attack them first – something like that. But what about people who are not different than us? With incredible ease, western governments get their populations to hate countries that are basically the same as us, and it feels sacrilegious. Like a distressed snake that’s eating its own tail. What is the sense in western Europe destroying eastern Europe, and itself?

Neoliberalism in the Irish Brigade doesn’t stop there. The characters are stripped of everything that makes people human. As mercenaries, they have no sense of patriotism of course. They are also, weirdly genderless. There are many female characters in the book, but they are completely interchangeable with the male characters. You could swap the gender of every character and it would change nothing. Nobody has anything even hinting at romantic or sexual feelings toward each other.

There’s no religion either, There are a couple of references to Islam, but, unsurprisingly, just that it’s violent and primitive. Religion bad. At one point, one of the character randomly does a prayer to Joan of Arc before combat, but it’s just window dressing to make the battle scene cooler. Nobody at any point in the plots says “I can’t do that because I’m Catholic,” or even “I can’t do that because it’s against my beliefs.” Nobody has beliefs at all. Nobody is human, they’re just robots who kill who they’re told to.

Another ongoing political theme in Irish Brigade is the weaponization of language. “Imperial,” the language of the old gausian empire, is frowned upon and humans are supposed to all speak “standard.” When someone slips up and speaks Imperial, he’s chastised for it and told to speak standard. It’s a little unsettling, since liberals in the real world are just as obsessed with controlling people’s languages. Force Moldovans to speak Romanian, Kazakhs to write in Latin script, de-gender gendered language, and so on.

Now, all that said, gausians and charee aren’t the real enemies in this universe. The real enemy is Donald Trump and his supporters. “The Sons of Terra” are a right-wing isolationist political party who are an obvious stand-in for American conservatives. Their slogan is “humans first” (like how Trump supporters often say “America first”). Okay, so tell me, why is it bad for humans to put humans first? Why is it bad for humans to live on human planets, and aliens to go home and live on their own planets? The author never even attempts to explain why this is a wrong thing to believe, so he just paints Trump supporters as cartoonishly evil. More alarmingly, the author delights in graphically murdering Trump supporters. Every Trump supporter who appears in the story, whether or not he did anything, is is brutally killed a few minutes later. I find it concerning that liberal Americans are obsessed with killing conservative Americans, and think about almost nothing else. And by their own admission, these liberal Americans think it is fine and appropriate to murder all conservative Americans “armed or unarmed, men, women, and children.” I think our liberals are so obsessed with murdering Russian and Syrian children because they have to direct their animalistic rage somewhere by proxy. They want to murder their own neighbors, but can’t legally do so (yet).

Incidentally, the protagonist of Irish Brigade is a gausian from the local royal family who joins the mercenary company as a new recruit. He’s like a Ukrainian. Yes, he’s from the bad race but he’s “one of the good ones,” great. Then near the end of the story when his planet has just had a civil war and the rest of the royal family is dead he decides to stay in the mercenary brigade and fuck off to a different planet while his own people are in a lurch. For god’s sake, is nobody allowed to have higher loyalties?

You know, it’s just really fucking weird how liberals think every random border dispute no matter how minor (like Donbass) has to be a genocidal race war to the last man, woman, and child but at the same time think American society needs to be this rainbow celebration of diversity. It’s like how Democrats say China is the worst enemy ever but during COVID you should hug a random Chinese person and let him cough into your mouth. I’m sorry, but it is ridiculous to portray “enemy” countries as evil incarnate but their individual citizens are perfectly safe to allow to live here, and in any quantity. It is ridiculous to say Russia is GULAG, but Ukrainians are our mega best friends and we need to give them all of our best weapons, even though 100% of Ukrainians speak Russian and are literally the same as Russians to the point you can’t even tell them apart with a DNA test. No wonder that liberals suffer from eternal brain rot, none of their beliefs make any fucking sense whatsoever.

Ian Kummer

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