Today's Healthy Dose of Xenophilia

Day 2,023, 14:02 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Arjay Phoenician III


I’m prompted to write this because of an incident on the Bolivian IRC yesterday. Mind you, I’m not completely innocent, I would never say I am, but I got into a insult-filled, expletive-laced feud with a dumb kid because of the cocky way he was pushing his ONLY BOLIVIANS DESERVE TO LIVE IN eBOLIVIA, GTFO agenda. Specifically, he was insulting my friend, Princess Isabella, because she is running for president in Bolivia, but lives in Romania in real life. Of course, that led him to come after me, a real-life American playing this game as an Irish citizen on a perpetual journey.

The fact that I devoted my time, my gold, my weapons, my damage, and my newspaper to the Bolivian resistance was apparently beside the point to him. And because of his blind devotion to his cause, I didn’t feel it appropriate to tell him that my grandfather was the first MoFA in eBolivia’s history and a member of its original Congress. When someone is blindly calling all “foreigners” PTO artists that need to get the hell out, there’s not much you can do.

But it’s okay, he’s a dumb kid who doesn’t represent eBolivia at all, and from talking to others, this is par for the course for him.



The guy who pulls Arjay’s strings grew up in Arizona and made no distinction between races. Growing up in a small town, the only thing we judged you on was whether or not your mom would let you play football with us after school. I never understood xenophobia. In fact, I went the other way with it, I loved getting mail (about a decade before the Internet became public) from students in France and Belgium when I was in French Club.

It’s the great miracle of the Worldwide Web and a true joy in playing eRepublik, to meet people from around the real world and share ourselves. I ought to get one of those online maps where you can push a pin in to mark something significant, I’d love to mark all the places where people I meet and have great in-game friendships live.



I just don’t get how xenophobia works in this world. I know, it’s impossible to take real-life humanity out of the game, and I’m one to talk, I push a philosophy based on individualism and honor, two things people seem to abhor in this game. Perhaps I should take the good with the bad, but the Phoenicians have seen this all over the world, and I just don’t understand how someone who inherently has to work with people who live everywhere can foster such bigotry.

For one, the game-mechanics-only crowd inherently forbids it. You can’t talk about “winning the game” and bring your prejudices from real life. They contradict.

For another, the majority of countries in the world have small populations, less than two thousand citizens. A good chunk of those populations are either disaffected by wars that place them in foreign countries or they travel frequently. None of these countries have the manpower to simply harass “foreigners” into leaving. How can Bolivia, with a population of 1,180, afford to kick out everyone non-real-life-native, and hold their own against neighbors like Argentina (pop. 17,836), Brazil (15,449), Chile (9,202), and Peru (6,203), countries with long histories of PTOing and invading the country?

Truly, the notion of “ethnic cleansing” in any small eRepublik nation will doom it if it seeks to pursue such a policy.

Some might call it in-game racism. I’ll just call it stupid.



It is incumbent on us to consider a newcomer on his own merits and not where her real-life home may be. It is also our duty to not just ignore the knuckleheads who promote their hate-filled, ignorant philosophies, but to stand up to them and shout them down. The poor dumb kid I got into it with yesterday, I won’t honor him by printing his name in this paper, but he knows who he is, as apparently does most of eBolivia, as well as elsewhere. He has a reputation for bouncing from country to country and annoying people with this crap wherever he goes. As long as someone in the world is willing to honor him with a ministry position or a MU command, he’s going to feel entitled. That’s the problem, these punks work themselves up the political and military ladders, they have value, but national leadership is willing to look past their bile-drenched rants for the sake of a bit more damage on the battlefield. Such leaders trade a little of their country’s reputation for a little more advantage elsewhere. The attitude tends to be:

Oh, we know he’s a little bastard, we know he spreads his hate in the forums and upsets people on IRC, but what can we do, he gives us a couple million more in damage once in a while.

Thankfully, eBolivian leadership is aware and taking action, proving their country does not believe in the unsound GTFO theory this knucklehead puts forth.

Truly, if my friend Isabella is elected tomorrow, I hope she kicks him square in the nuts.



Belfast Lough Times: Issue #19