At a certain moment of Leon’s campaign in Resident Evil 6, Derek Simmons justifies his motivation for assassinating President Adam Benford. According to him, had the truth about Raccoon City had been disclosed, the United States would have lost its authority and the global political order would have collapsed. This global order is, for him, the position of leadership of the United States towards the rest of the world, something that Resident Evil took directly from our reality.
Let’s talk about the constitution of this global order and how it relates to the rest of the franchise, then?
Simmons’ interest in maintaining the global order is, of course, related to the power he himself possesses at this juncture. He shouts, “He [Benford] was leading my country, and this world, into complete chaos!” in a reference to the US not only as his home country, but also as the country he dominates. As Ada had already said in the catacombs: “We are up against the people who really run this country, in a very dangerous game.”
Interest groups
The idea of an organization like “The Family” led with Derek Simmons manipulating the world’s development gives an Illuminati thing to US power. But in order to think about the organization historically, we can understand it as more than a secret society and rather as a union of several extremely powerful interest groups.
These groups can be people with lots of money and influence, large exporting farmers, religious organizations, and especially large business conglomerates such as Umbrella.
In the case of The Family, what we see is a huge lobby. Simmons is not in the organization because he is a high-ranking member of the government; he’s in government because he’s the leader of The Family and he’s there to represent the interests of all its members, among whom there probably are multi-millionaire businessmen, heirs of aristocratic families from the times of the 13 Colonies and people from the arms industry (I will soon explain the latter).
And the greatest examples of Simmon’s advocacy for interest groups are precisely the murder of Adam Benford and the decision to launch the missile that erased the evidence of Umbrella’s involvement with the Raccoon City Incident.
Armaments and the US hegemony
I repeat: although there is an Illuminati thing in the power of the United States because of the interventions of The Family, there are very concrete historical reasons why the country became the strongest on the planet and they are much more recent than the action of the secret society in the Resident Evil universe.
The definitive rise of the United States dates back mainly to World War II. The US emerged victorious from the conflict and with little material losses and comparatively few human losses than European countries on both sides of the conflict.
An important part of this process were the alliances between the military and the industrialists who began to dedicate themselves to the arms industry, for at the end of the conflict these groups realized that maintaining this relationship in the post-war period was very advantageous both in economic terms and in terms of political force. A well-armed country imposes authority and fear on other nations that might try to go against its interests or compete for world hegemony, making the Industrial-Military Complex the most influential interest group within the state.
But to keep a military industry operating, it would be necessary to justify its existence. Then the creation of the idea that there is a constant threat to the national security of the United States, so the country always needed to be prepared. Thus there is always an enemy in view: the USSR and its allies during the Cold War or the Middle Eastern countries after 9/11.
Therefore, the US arms industry is also frequently present in wars in various parts of the world, whether participating directly with troops or selling arsenals, even to very questionable allies such as Saudi Arabia. In Resident Evil, we can remember the brief (but definitive) participation of the American government in the War of Independence of the Eastern Slav Republic, in the film Damnation.
Thanks to this rigorous organization around the Industrial-Military Complex, the United States is the largest arms exporter in the world and there is plenty of questioning about the ethical principles of this industry’s affairs.
The cartoon represents a critical view of the Industrial-Military Complex as an unstoppable consumer of money at the expense of other possible investments in society. The animals at the bottom represent the public administration working to reduce investments and spending in other areas to feed the arms industry, reversing taxes paid by US citizens into profits for this group. [Image Source, Access: June 19th 2021]
No wonder that in the RE universe Umbrella produced biological weapons to be used in wars. It was this idea of continual threats that led the President to keep on buying bioweapons from Umbrella even after the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (which is a treaty from real life that we may one day discuss here). Tyrants, hunters and later creatures like Eveline were soldiers created exactly for the battlefield, taking the idea of the arms industry into another level.
However, as we saw from RE5 onwards, just like in real life, these biological weapons, which were already absurd in themselves under the “restricted” control of the United States, fell into the hands of other governments and also of terrorist groups, bringing great dangers to the world.
Even though the attack on Terragrigia was caused by a terrorist organization and not by the government, the use of hunters made there shows a good example of their action as soldiers.
One would think, therefore, that to carry out their plans to manipulate politics on a worldwide level – and that includes wars – Simmons and The Family would necessarily need to be involved in the arms industry, and Umbrella was nothing but one of their suppliers. This could have made Simmons one of the most interesting villains in Resident Evil, being responsible for numerous incidents that the protagonists would have to face. Nevertheless, his potential was completely wasted and he ended up in the fans’ memory as one of the lamest villains.
The next steps
This is, of course, a subject that we are far from exhausting here. After all, in Resident Evil, there’s no shortage of confusion in the US government! So expect to see other texts like this around here, especially with Infinite Darkness coming.
In the trailer for the new series, which will be released on July 8th, that Wilson guy talks about the United States demonstrating its capability to lead the “free world”, an expression coined in World War II to designate the Allies against the Axis. The United States continued to use it to define themselves as defenders of freedom against the Soviet Union and later in the so-called “War on Terror”.
However, as we have been able to discuss, there is a profound contradiction in this free world discourse both in Resident Evil and in reality. The series will probably show us more of this dark facet of the American State and for anyone who is a fan of conspiratorial plots, Infinite Darkness should be a field day.
References:
- FOUSEK, John. “Defining “Free World Leadership” In To lead the free world: American nationalism and the cultural roots of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
- MOREIRA JUNIOR, Hermes. O Governo George W. Bush e sua Guerra Contra o Terror: A nova orientação tática à estratégia norte-americana. Dissertação de Mestrado em Ciências Sociais, Linha de Relações Internacionais, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Marília, 2011.
- SIMÕES, Edson Emanoel; PERILLO, Eduardo B. F.; MIGUEL, Jair Diniz Miguel. “Indústria e militarismo”. In COGGIOLA, Osvaldo (Org.). Dinâmica da Economia Mundial Contemporânea. São Paulo: Stortecci, 2003.
