Gears of War: COG Was Always the Villain: Fascism, State Violence + Political Allegory of

The Coalition of Ordered Governments presents itself as humanity's last line of defence, the institution that kept the lights on long enough to mount a resistance, the apparatus through which civilisation might be salvaged from an underground enemy that arrived without warning. For much of the original trilogy, players have no reason to question this framing.

The Locust are monstrous. The Gears are outnumbered. Survival is the only currency on offer, and the COG is the only institution still issuing it.

But the COG is not a flawed government forced into hard choices by an impossible war. It is an authoritarian state that existed long before Emergence Day, built on seventy-nine years of resource warfare, ideological conformity, and the systematic dehumanisation of anyone it designated as other. The Locust did not expose the COG's brutality. They gave it a new target, a new justification, and a permanent emergency to govern under.

This is the argument the franchise builds across its entire run: not loudly, not didactically, but with the slow accumulation of detail that good political fiction requires. By the time Gears 4 and Gears 5 make the COG's nature explicit, the groundwork has been laid in every propaganda poster, every buried programme, every soldier the state used up and discarded.

The gear is not a badge of service. It is a diagram of what the state thinks a person is for.

01 / Defining the framework: what fascism actually is

Before applying the label to a fictional government, it is worth earning it rigorously. Fascism is a word that gets stretched until it means little, deployed as an insult rather than a diagnosis. Using it precisely matters, both for intellectual honesty and because the Gears franchise deserves the specific, evidenced reading it was built to support.

In 1995, the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco published an essay titled Ur-Fascism in The New York Review of Books. Having grown up under Mussolini, Eco was uniquely placed to identify fascism's structural features rather than its surface aesthetics. He set out fourteen properties of what he called "Eternal Fascism": not all of which need be present in any given case, but which collectively describe the grammar of fascist states. Several map onto the COG with uncomfortable precision.

"Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions."

Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, 1995

Alongside Eco, the historian Robert Paxton offers a complementary lens in The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton defines fascism not as a coherent ideology but as a practice: a set of political behaviours organised around the permanent mobilisation of a community against internal and external enemies, in which a party of national militants abandons democratic liberties in pursuit of redemptive violence.

This distinction matters enormously for reading the COG. The Coalition does not need a manifesto. It has the Octus Canon, the Pendulum Wars, and E-Day. Its fascism is structural, not declared, which is exactly why it survives being questioned. There is no single speech to point at, no rally footage, no armband. There is only a century of behaviour.

A franchise that looks like brute spectacle and turns out to be an argument about institutions.

02 / Before the Locust: the COG's original sin

The most common defence of the COG runs like this: whatever its flaws, it was a functioning government that humanity rallied around when an existential threat emerged from underground. The Locust created the conditions; the COG merely responded. Authoritarianism was a necessity, not a preference.

This defence collapses the moment you examine the chronology of Sera's history. The COG was not born in response to Emergence Day. It formed out of the Silver Era wars generations earlier, and it spent seventy-nine years waging industrial-scale warfare for a resource called Imulsion before a single Locust broke the surface.

The Pendulum Wars are the key to understanding everything else. Fought between the COG and the Union of Independent Republics over global Imulsion reserves, the conflict killed on an industrial scale, restructured entire economies around military production, and, crucially, shaped generations of soldiers who knew nothing else. Adam Fenix built his career as a COG weapons researcher during those wars, and the Hammer of Dawn orbital network he helped create was designed to win them. Dom Santiago enlisted young enough that war was his entire adult life before E-Day. Victor Hoffman spent his defining years holding Anvil Gate under siege, learning that the acceptable price of a position is whatever the position costs.

The COG that greeted the Locust threat was not a peacetime government galvanised by crisis. It was a war machine looking for its next war, holding a functioning orbital weapons platform and a population already conditioned to obey.

Imulsion is worth pausing on as allegory. It is the resource that causes the Lambent mutation, that corrupts everything it touches over time, that ultimately drives the entire catastrophe of Sera's history, and that, in Gears 3, turns out to be the reason the Locust were fleeing upward in the first place. Societies that organise their identity around controlling a single exploitable resource, and wage extermination-scale wars to secure it, are tending toward a particular kind of rot in the Gears universe as in our own. The COG built itself on Imulsion and became something Imulsion-adjacent: a consuming force that cannot recognise the damage it does, because it has defined itself as civilisation.

The Octus Canon and the architecture of obedience

The COG's founding document, the Octus Canon, functions as the ideological infrastructure of its authoritarianism. Under the Canon, citizens owed the state their productive capacity, their children's military service, and their ideological loyalty. Education was COG-run and COG-focused, teaching a sanitised history of the institution. Students wore uniforms. The curriculum centred government. Dissent was framed not as political disagreement but as moral failure, a defect in the citizen rather than a criticism of the state.

The parallels are not accidental. Ancient Sparta's agoge, the compulsory military formation system that took boys from their families at seven, produced soldiers who were Gears by another name: trained from birth to treat the state's survival as identical with their own. Rome's virtus, martial virtue as the highest civic expression, is there in the texture of every exchange between Gears: the contempt for weakness, the stoic swallowing of loss, the sense that to grieve openly is somehow indecent. And the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft, the people as a single organism to which the individual owes absolute service, echoes in every recruitment poster and every speech about what it means to be a Gear.

03 / The Hammer of Dawn: the state kills its own

If there is one event that settles the argument, it is what the COG did roughly a month after Emergence Day.

Losing ground everywhere, Chairman Richard Prescott ordered the Hammer of Dawn, the orbital satellite array built to win the Pendulum Wars, turned on Sera's own surface. Every city outside the granite shield of the Jacinto Plateau was burned, on the theory that scorching the surface would deny the Locust their gains. The Fortification Act pulled whoever could reach Jacinto inside the walls. Most could not.

E-Day is remembered as the day the Locust arrived. What followed is the part the official history handles more carefully.

This is the number the franchise never lets you forget, and the one the COG never accounts for. The Locust killed a great many people on E-Day. The COG killed most of the rest. It was a deliberate, centrally ordered, technologically sophisticated act of mass killing carried out against the state's own citizens, justified by strategic necessity, and then folded into the official history as a hard decision bravely made.

Stalin's scorched-earth policy during Operation Barbarossa made a version of the same calculation: deny the enemy the resource, even when the resource is your own people. The distinction the COG draws, that it burned the cities to save humanity, requires you to accept that the institution and humanity are the same thing. That equivalence is the whole ideology in one move.

The Stranded: manufacturing an internal enemy

What happened to the survivors is the more revealing half. People who lived through the Hammer strike, or who refused to abandon their homes for Jacinto, were not treated as citizens the state had failed. They were reclassified. The COG named them the Stranded, denied them rations, medical supplies, and protection, and treated the label as a moral category rather than an administrative one.

This is the Eco marker in its purest form: contempt for those who decline to serve the collective effort. The Stranded had committed no crime. Their offence was existing outside the institution's control after the institution had destroyed their homes. Within a few years the COG's own soldiers used Stranded as a slur, and firefights between Gears and Stranded became routine. A state that creates a population of refugees and then criminalises them for being refugees is not improvising under pressure. It is doing the thing it was built to do.

04 / The aesthetics of power

Fascism is not merely policy. It is spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl understood this, which is why Triumph of the Will is still studied as an aesthetic object decades after its politics were universally condemned. The designers of the COG's visual world understood it too.

A gear with a skull inside it. The state's symbol tells you what the machine runs on.

The gear iconography is the place to start. The gear carries specific ideological freight: industrialism, productivity, the citizen as an interchangeable component in a larger mechanism. It strips the individual of uniqueness and elevates the function. Every Gear is a Gear, identified by role rather than name, by armour rather than face. The deindividuation this creates is not an accident of game design. It is the visual argument the franchise is making about what the COG does to the people inside it. That the insignia became, in-game, the mark that appears when you are bleeding out is a joke the series tells with a straight face.

Environmental propaganda, the posters visible throughout the games and particularly in Gears of War: Reloaded, shows a state actively manufacturing consent. These are not historical artefacts in the game world. They are current, maintained, freshly printed. The COG is still selling itself to whatever population remains. Compare the visual grammar: bold flat colour, simplified heroic figures, slogans of collective purpose. Soviet constructivist and Nazi mass-media propaganda used the same techniques for the same reasons. A population that is perpetually afraid needs perpetually renewed permission to be afraid of the right things.

The architecture continues the argument. Where COG buildings survive, they are brutalist in the truest sense: massive, ordered, monumental, designed to communicate permanence and the insignificance of any single person measured against the institution. Albert Speer's plans for Welthauptstadt Germania proposed architecture scaled specifically to make human beings feel small. COG urbanism achieves the same effect with less grandeur and more concrete, and then the games let you take cover behind it while it collapses.

A soldier the state jailed for treason, then re-armed when it needed bodies. Both decisions were about the state, not the man.

05 / The necessary enemy: dehumanisation and the logic of extermination

Every fascist state requires a dehumanised enemy. The enemy justifies every curtailment of liberty, every economic sacrifice, every atrocity committed in the name of collective survival. Before the Locust, the COG had the UIR. After Emergence Day, it had something far more useful: an enemy that genuinely was trying to exterminate humanity.

What the COG did with that enemy is the telling thing. In the original trilogy the Locust are never offered terms. They are never negotiated with, never studied as a culture, never addressed as anything other than an infestation, despite speaking a language, holding rank structures, building cities, and being led by a queen who speaks fluent Tyran.

RAAM commands armies and holds rank. The COG's official vocabulary for him and his kind is vermin. RAAM's Shadow is the one time the series lets you look back the other way.

The word Grubs, the standard derogatory term Gears use throughout the series, is not casual. Naming an enemy after larvae, underground vermin, things that live below the threshold of civilised life, is a documented technique of extermination-enabling propaganda. Rwandan Hutu radio called Tutsi people inyenzi, cockroaches, in the months before the 1994 genocide. Nazi German press used Ungeziefer, vermin, as standard vocabulary for Jewish people. Language that places the enemy beneath the category of the human makes killing feel like sanitation rather than slaughter.

The sinking of Jacinto deserves to be read carefully. Flooding the Hollow meant drowning the COG's own capital, and the operation was executed with the Locust's own Riftworm-carved geology as the mechanism. It is presented as the war's great sacrifice. Structurally, it is a state destroying its last population centre rather than contemplate any outcome other than total enemy annihilation. That is not heroism in any meaningful sense. It is the logical endpoint of an institution that has decided its own survival matters more than the lives it was created to protect.

The revelation that changes everything

Then comes the reveal that the Locust were, in origin, human.

At the New Hope Research Facility and later beneath Mount Kadar, COG-funded science under Niles Samson experimented on children suffering from Rustlung, the Imulsion sickness contracted from the resource the COG had spent decades fighting over. The results were the Sires: deformed, agonised, and eventually abandoned when the programme produced outcomes the institution found inconvenient. From that lineage came Myrrah, the Locust, and later the Hollow's own war-beast engineer, Ukkon, whose creatures Gears Tactics sends a COG squad to hunt.

"We were human once."

Queen Myrrah

This is the franchise at its most structurally sophisticated. The COG did not merely benefit from having a dehumanised enemy. It manufactured one, out of sick children, using money and laboratories it controlled, in pursuit of the resource its wars were fought over. Then it waged an extermination campaign against its own creation while insisting on the moral necessity of every step.

The soldiers who carried out that campaign, Marcus, Dom, Cole and Baird among them, had no way of knowing this. They were, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, engaged in the banality of evil: ordinary people doing terrible things not out of malice but because their society had built structures that made those terrible things feel like duty. The state that knew, knew all along, and kept the file closed.

06 / Gears 4 and 5: the mask comes off

The original trilogy lets players be complicit in the COG's violence without fully confronting it. Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 are where the franchise does its most honest political work, staging the COG's nature as the explicit subject rather than the background.

Twenty-five years on, the same institution with better robots. The Gears 4 campaign is where the franchise hands its politics to the children.

The rebuilt COG under First Minister Mina Jinn has learned nothing. Walled settlements run on curfew and mandatory population growth policy. DeeBee enforcement robots patrol and suppress with mechanical efficiency, a police force that cannot be persuaded, shamed, or made to hesitate, which is precisely why the state prefers it. The Outsiders, people who simply chose to live beyond COG jurisdiction, are treated as criminals and enemies of order, exactly as the Stranded were a generation earlier. The label changed. The policy did not.

The central theme of Gears 4 is inheritance. A new generation lives inside structures built by the old one, constrained by decisions made in desperation that have calcified into permanent policy. JD Fenix and Delmont Walker, both trained Gears, went Outsider rather than keep serving an institution they had come to recognise as something other than what it claimed, and what turned JD, we eventually learn, was firing on civilians at Settlement 2 on the state's orders. The emergency measures of the Locust War are now simply how things work. This is how authoritarian states persist across generations: not through continuous spectacular violence, but through the normalisation of violence until it becomes administrative.

Gears 5's central theme is accountability, not only for actions but for origins. Kait Diaz discovering her lineage as Myrrah's granddaughter is the moment the franchise forces the founding crime into the open. Her identity crisis is the franchise's crisis: if the enemy was ours all along, what does that make the war? What does that make the people who fought it? What does that make the institutions that orchestrated it and then buried the evidence?

The COG's response to the revelation is to file it. Every authoritarian state requires a sanitised origin story that places it on the side of necessity and righteousness. The Soviet Union airbrushed inconvenient figures out of official photographs. The Nazi state rewrote Germany's defeat in 1918 as a stab in the back by internal enemies. The COG buries Mount Kadar and maintains the fiction of a war it had no choice but to fight, then expects Kait to keep fighting the successor version of it.

07 / Tools and victims: the complicity of Marcus Fenix

None of this makes Marcus Fenix a fascist. That is precisely the point.

Marcus is a man whose entire sense of self was formed by an institution that needed soldiers. His loyalty was never to the COG as an idea. It was to his squad, to Dom, to whoever was physically beside him in the hole. But his squad was the COG's weapon. The distinction feels enormous from the inside. Structurally, it changes very little.

Consider what the state did to him. Marcus abandoned his post to try to save his father during the Locust assault on Ephyra and was convicted of dereliction of duty, sentenced to forty years in the Slab, and left there when the prison was overrun. He was then released, not pardoned and not exonerated, because the COG needed bodies. Both the conviction and the release were decisions about institutional need. Neither had anything to do with whether he had done right. That is the whole relationship between this state and its people, rendered as one man's paperwork.

Dom Santiago's arc is the emotional argument the franchise makes most openly about what perpetual war does to people. Dom's search for Maria, the mercy killing in the Locust camp, the years of functioning grief, the final act of self-sacrifice in Gears 3: this is not the story of a winner. It is the story of a man the COG used up. His death is the series' most honest statement about the cost of this kind of war, because the soldiers who believe most completely in what they are doing are the ones it destroys most completely.

Hannah Arendt, covering Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961, coined the phrase to describe how monstrous outcomes are produced by ordinary people performing bureaucratic functions without engaging their moral imagination. The Gears are not Eichmann. They fight and bleed and grieve in ways desk-bound administrators never did. But the structural point holds: the COG's greatest crimes were carried out by people who were, individually, not monsters. They were soldiers doing what soldiers do inside the systems soldiers serve.

Judgment's art direction pushed the series back toward horror. Its story pushed it toward the courtroom.

The story of Gears of War: Judgment makes the tension most explicit in its tribunal framing. Kilo Squad is tried not for outcomes but for obedience: for prioritising the survival of Halvo Bay over procedural loyalty to the chain of command, and for using a weapon a superior officer had forbidden. They saved people. The charge is that they deviated. The COG has decided the crime is departure from authority rather than the circumstances that forced it, and Colonel Loomis presides over the whole thing with the conviction of a man who cannot see the difference. That the squad includes Sofia Hendrik, an Onyx Guard cadet still loyal to the institution, and Garron Paduk, a UIR survivor with no illusions about it, is the game putting both readings of the COG in the same dock. Authority demands obedience even when obedience is insane. That is what authority always demands.

08 / Why this matters: what Gears of War is actually saying

Military science fiction has a persistent tendency to arrive at anti-war conclusions. Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. Spec Ops: The Line. Apocalypse Now and its source text, Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The genre keeps asking the same question, what does permanent war do to the people and institutions that wage it, and keeps finding the same answer: it makes them into something they would not have chosen to become.

Gears of War belongs in that tradition, and it is more deliberate about it than its chainsaw-bayonet reputation suggests. Karen Traviss's novels expanded the political texture enormously, and the narrative teams at The Coalition built Gears 4 and 5 as a sustained interrogation of the institution the first trilogy asked you to serve. The franchise-length argument is about what militarised states do to people and to truth, and whether a society that builds its entire identity around war can still be worth saving.

The people inside that society, though, are worth saving precisely because they keep choosing each other over the institution. Because they grieve. Because they question. Because Marcus went to prison rather than leave his father, and Dom died in a fuel truck rather than let his friends die, and Kait walked into the truth about her own origins rather than live with the comfortable lie. The franchise's loyalty is to the squad, never to the flag on its armour, and that gap is the argument.

The question the series leaves open, the one worth sitting with as E-Day takes us back to the beginning, is whether there was ever a version of the Coalition worth fighting for, or whether the rot was structural from the first line of the Octus Canon.