>>38538Red Flood is not an ordniary HOI4 mod but an ontological parable; the point of the trees is the libidinal confrontation between ontologies, everything else is ancillary. It is about the open confrontation between Technocracy and Marxism; about the War of Opposites, about the confrontation of the psyche of the parisian pedophile and the bull-headed SED bureacrat; it is a work of art in its entirety. It's focus trees are both mere tools for optimizing gameplay to this confrontation, but also an intricate staging of ontological conflict, between revolutionary Germany and USA, France and the Revolution, and the Revolution against the resurgent Tsarist Russia.
It transforms the geopolitical into the psychological and psychoanalytical, casting the map as a battlefield of competing
desires, fears, and visions for the future. It is the wrestle, or as Clausewitz puts it, Zweikampf, of many dialetically opposed things; for one the battle of the decadent self destructive tendency of the Parisian salongoer and his desire to expand the powders he can snort and boys he can violate into a global amusement park; and the the ossified dogma of the SPD soldier and Red Armist who is waging a battle for humanity itself with all his might, against this wickedness and for the
Truth Itself, the truth written in blood of the martyrs of the revolution and the peoples that lie opressed by the colonial powers of the world of Red Flood.
You have the epochal struggle between the bureucrat of the American Technocracy. Socialism, even Communism, is not even up to debate in Red Flood anymore; the technocrats literally crash the price system in favour of tallying prices with energy directly, and planning a rational non-market economy in the wake of this. Yet the (at that point) Marxist, communist Europe and it stand at fundamental odds. The human component of the bureacracy of Technocracy Inc. represents the culmination of the Enlightenment's dream of total rationalization, a man defined by his relentless pursuit of efficiency and control. They have sublimated their individual desires into the collective rationality of the organization. His libido is not directed toward interpersonal relationships but toward the abstract notion of progress, of infinite growth for growth's sake, essentially turning America into an unholy chimera of Walmart and Disneyland. Eros is systematically repressed. Romance is enslaved by the labcoat; reproduction becomes an act of growth for its own sake on it's own. They are sexually sterile in both literal and metaphorical senses, their relationships, if they exist, are transactional and devoid of warmth, as mandated by a society governed by cold calculation and calculation only. They outwardly may exude confidence in the inevitability of Technocracy's triumph, but their unconscious is haunted by a fundamental lack. They are deeply aware, but unwilling to admit, that the world they are building may obliterate what makes life meaningful. They yearn for a world where life has been fully rationalized, a state indistinguishable from death. They are the archetypal neoliberal subject taken to its logical extreme conclusion, a being who lives not to enjoy but to maxx this and pill that, someone who has successfully strangled god and is now weeping silently over his corpse, much like the famous painting of Ivan the Terrible and his son.
The Tsarist is a figure of pathos and grandeur, a man out of time, clinging to a decayed and schizophrenic vision of order and authority, which he twists into a crude mockery of tradition. He embodies the residue of a feudal aristocracy crushed by the tides of modernity, crushed by what Kautsky and Marx predicted would come true, and crushed by how the rest of the world reacted to it. His libido is filled with nostalgia, pride, and rage. He constructs his ego as a bastion of tradition, a protective barrier against the flames of the revolutionary age. His libido is tied to the ideal of the Tsar and the Orthodox Church, symbols of eternal, unchanging order. His desires are directed backward, toward a golden age that never truly existed. Unlike the American bureaucrat, the general is not desexualized but channels his Eros into loyalty and devotion. His love for the Tsar and the Church is libidinal, a deeply felt yearning for something greater than himself. However, this devotion is often perverted into cruelty, as he projects his inner despair onto enemies and subordinates, seeing jewish bolshevists everywhere, and eventually ending up cannibalizing whatever little legitimacy he had to begin with. He is ridden with the delusion of his internalized voice of the Tsar, the Church, and the aristocratic order. This superego demands absolute loyalty and punishes the Tsarist with guilt and despair for every failure to restore the old regime. He is the tragic remnant of an age that cannot return, a mere husk of what once was, that refuses to let go and let his son take reins.
Antonin Artaud, both as a historical figure and as a psychoanalytic archetype, and as a charcter in Red Flood, embodies the disintegration and transmutation of the self in the face of modernity’s psychic contradictions. He represents the raw nerve of France: a collision of libidinal chaos, artistic experimentation, and existential anguish. The Artaudian archetype can be expanded into a symbol of France’s cultural psyche, rooted in both its colonial violence and its deep intellectual tradition of revolt and transgression. Artaud is neither the rigid bureaucrat nor the nostalgic general; he is the complete antithesis of stable desire and vision. He reflects a soul in torment, torn between the desire to destroy and to create, to transcend material existence yet remain embedded in its grotesque beauty. His archetype is the L’homme en flammes, or Man on Fire, a figure consumed by his own creative, destructive and transgressive impulses. He is constantly disintegrating under the weight of his libidinal forces. This collapse does not result in passivity but instead fuels a manic energy, a drive to reconstruct the self and eventually even reality itself through art, ritual, and confrontation with the real, culminating in an attempt of the construction of the unreal. He finds beauty in madness, in the unbridled rawness of human suffering, and in the ecstatic destruction of bourgeois sensibilities, most concretely when it comes to things like tradition and art; he destroys hundreds of years of artistic heritage because of the act of transgression in itself, but also to renounce the old world in its entirety. This manifests in the Theatre of Cruelty, where Eros and Thanatos converge. The audience, in this case all of France, unwillingly, are assaulted, stripped of its illusions, and left raw, a psychic state Artaud himself inhabits perpetually, reduced to animalistic instinct and monstrosity. The Escadron for the lack of a better descriptor are killer clowns who force everyone to participate in this ugly spectacle, who are quite literally like the SA on steroids, whose entire point is transgression and terror for it's own sake, it finds the only desire worth having to be a survival instinct and thus constantly seeks out life-or-death situations for itself and forces ordinary people into panicked states through open and state sponsored terrorism. In Artauds madness and suffering, he seeks not to mend but to reimagine the self entirely, envisioning a human subject liberated from the chains of modernity, an approach of burning it all down and starting over to put it simply. Where the bureaucrat suppresses libidinal forces, Artaud amplifies them to the point of self destruction; The general clings to an imagined past, while Artaud wages war on all forms of stasis, including tradition and identity.
The balm of the collective human soul, the beating revolutionary heart of the world, and the last bastion of humanity, love and solidarity is the Council Republic of Germany, which arose in revolutionary civil war between the old bourgeois-aristocratic order and the class brotherhood of workers, peasants and soldiers, united in their desire for peace, land and bread. The Social-Democratic Party of Germany was at the revolutionary Vanguard of this civil war; they lead this class alliance as the premier force, guided by the teachings of Marx and Engels, as well as Kautsky and Ultimately lead by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to victory. The game starts out with a revisionist leader, a normalizer, or as leftcoms would say, modernizer, essentially a non-communist social democrat of yesteryear. The bloody reactionary terrorism of the austrian empire against a socialist revolution in Vienna is violently snuffed out before it can take shape, and it leads to an ontological crisis in Germany, upon which the Orthodox SPD once again takes helm. It is driven mostly by the youth and the urban proletariat; The archetypal urban proletarian is an anonymous hero of the Council Republic. His psychoanalytical portrait reflects the psyche of a worker whose life is bound to the factory, the street, and the promise of collective liberation, his leisure spend in love of camraderie, family and friendship. Krause is not a leader or a thinker, but his presence is indispensable; after all, who do you call when you need something fixed? He is the beating heart of the class struggle. Years of exploitation have ingrained a fierce hatred of the bourgeoisie, who have sent him and countless of his friends and brothers to the trenches to die for their profit, as well as a simple yet profound desire for security, dignity, and leisure. His unconscious harbors both suppressed rage and a longing for joy and freedom, a freedom he can finally enjoy. His participation in discussions, demonstrations, and councils gives him a sense of agency and belonging. He takes pride in his work and in his contributions to the revolutionary cause, he takes pride in being an active part of the socialist collective. Krause is less rooted in theory and more in lived experience. His morality is shaped by solidarity, fairness, and a deep respect for fellow workers. The betrayal of these values, whether by revisionists or capitalists, is intolerable to him. He has tasted the sweetest fruit, the fruit of his own toil, and will fight and die to defend it, a simple man defined by his love for all peoples of the world who have not yet come to enjoy such a life and his actionable desire to contribute to work towards the realization of this globally, especially in the face of ugliness that reigns all over the world. Born into the revolutionary fervor of the Council Republic, Krause’s son represents the continuity of the proletarian struggle across generations. Shaped by his father’s unwavering dedication to the cause, he carries the ideals of solidarity and justice into a new era. His libido finds its outlet in street protests, impassioned speeches, and creative expressions like agitprop art or revolutionary poetry, and love and brotherhood of long nights around campfires, song and dance, and study of the classics. The utopia of the revolution is always just beyond his grasp, and he feels a powerful, almost spiritual, even religious, drive to make it real. Krause’s son is not just a revolutionary activist but a symbolic figure of youth caught between historical inheritance and the desire to create something radically new. It is thus that as the eponymous Red Flood nears, that he volunteers to join the Red Army. Krause’s son’s decision to enlist is propelled by the unrelenting pull of his id. His deep seated desire to protect the revolution and safeguard the dream of a better world is an almost primal urge to fight, to wield physical force in defense of the home the revolution has given him. This is not merely a call to arms; it is an urge to defend the utopia his own father and him are constructing.His libido now focuses on the collective, as he sees the Red Army as a place where he can transcend his own individual longing and merge with the greater cause of the revolution. His actions are not just fueled by the need for survival but by the need for validation, both of his own radical ideas and of the revolutionary dream he has inherited from his father. The naive idealism of his youth, shaped by artistic expression and cultural revolution, is now challenged by the harshness of military discipline. His superego is defined by the teachings of Marx, Engels, honed into a flaming sword by the party, and his father’s sacrifices during the revolutionary civil war. There is an overwhelming sense of duty that accompanies his decision. He believes that by joining the Red Army, he is fulfilling his obligation not only to his father but to the workers, peasants, and soldiers who fought for the promise of a better world. His uniform is both a symbol of duty and a marker of personal sacrifice, the physical embodiment of his journey from youthful enthusiasm to revolutionary realism. He carries the weight of two legacies: the first, the inherited struggle of his father’s generation, and the second, the generational thirst for a radically different, more immediate kind of change, and liberation of mankind as a whole.
Red Flood is more than a geopolitical struggle; it is an exploration of the deepest corners of the human psyche, where every nation, every ideology, and every revolutionary force embodies the raw, often violent clash of desires, fears, and longings; It is a visceral journey through the shadows of modernity, a battle not just for power, but for the soul of humanity itself.