The Patriots

The Patriots (or the "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo") were an organization whose sole purpose was once to carry out The Boss's final wish, and later sought to control the world.

Zero founded the group and recruited Ocelot, Big Boss, Para-Medic, Sigint and EVA.

Among other duties, the Patriots decided who the President will be and staged the Presidential Elections in order to please the American public, tricking them into believing they have a small level of control. The Patriots's tactics can be viewed as totalitarian in their efforts to deceive the public.

The Beginning of The Patriots
The Patriots are the successors to The Philosophers, which included members of China, the Soviet Union and America. The Patriots were originally put together by Zero using The Philosophers' Legacy which he had Ocelot steal for him from the CIA Director after luring him out of hiding when the Director thought a nuclear missile fired by Gene from the San Hieronymo Peninsula was heading towards him, and as he and his bodyguards were moving to a safer location, Ocelot emerged, killing all three of them. Taking the legacy, Ocelot claimed he was going to end the Philosophers and carry on the spirit of the true patriot saying "it's all part of our plan to make the world she (The Boss) envisioned a reality".

Later, Zero and Ocelot recruited Big Boss, Sigint, Para-Medic, and EVA and started their plans to re-unite the world by governing it from behind the scenes. Zero used his influence to turn Big Boss into a legend, a messiah-like figure for the world to follow. Big Boss eventually grew tired of Zero's way of running things, believing he had misinterpreted The Boss final vision. In retaliation, Big Boss defected and went to form Outer Heaven, his own version of The Boss's dying wish.

After Big Boss left, EVA and Ocelot began to drift away (although it appears Ocelot remained a spy for them, perhaps to keep an eye on the organization). Zero himself stayed with the organization and became power hungry, wanting to control everything. After Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land, Zero put Big Boss in a nanomachine-induced coma. This infuriated EVA and Ocelot and they serectly defected and schemed on how to destroy the Patriots.

As Zero got older, he didn't want to pass the organization down to the next generation, believing they wouldn't be able to truly realize his vision (and still bitter about Big Boss). With his immense amount of money, he commissioned the creation of four AIs with a fifth head AI that would control the world even after his eventual death. These AIs (GW, TJ, TR, AL and JD) became Zero's successors of the Patriots. Behind the scenes, EVA and Ocelot were slowly acheving their plans with Para-Medic (Dr. Clark) killed by Gray Fox and Naomi Hunter in 2003 and Sigint (Donald Anderson) killed by Ocelot himself on Shadow Moses Island.

The AIs were formless, and alloted funds to specific R&D Centers and other such companies under the Patriots control. The AIs were a "set of norms", a neural network in its simplest form, designed to decide and eventually manipulate the fate of the world.

In 2007, the US Marines had started up a project to build a new type of Metal Gear, in order to counter-act the large amount of Metal Gear REX models being built after the specifications were leaked onto the black market and this new Metal Gear was codenamed Metal Gear RAY. This did not fall in line with the Patriots's plans however, and they decided to reclaim RAY for their own. Whilst simultaneously leaking information to Philanthropy to lure them out, they planned to frame Solid Snake and Otacon for the incident. Patriot agent Revolver Ocelot took over the Tanker where RAY was being held with the help from Sergei Gurlukovich and his mercenary army, but Ocelot later betrayed Sergei, sinking the dummy tanker, taking RAY for himself, and framing Snake and Otacon. For the Patriots, the incident was a success.

They immediately sent a fully loaded tanker to the same location and sank it, appearently spilling oil everywhere in the process. This allowed them to set up the Big Shell, which they could use as camouflage to build Arsenal Gear.

Arsenal Gear was the Patriots's tool for securing power over the United States and in the world. The Patriots hoped to use Arsenal as a way of shaping the "truth" to fit their agenda. Arsenal Gear served the sole purpose of housing GW, one of their proxy-AIs designed to censor and delete unwanted information that could loosen their grip on the United States. For instance, GW controlled information through the media, television and mainly the free flow of data from the Internet. This was a means to completely censor any data detrimental to the Patriots's rule. This is a method of memetic eugenics, in which memes were artificially selected for or against by GW. Emma Emmerich was one of the main contributors to the production of the programming for GW.

The Big Shell Incident was later staged by the Patriots for their S3 plan (which stood for Selection for Societal Sanity). By manipulating the information that surrounded the incident, the Patriots had proved that they could manipulate world events. Their agent Raiden was sent in to test the exercise and forced Olga Gurlukovich (by holding her child hostage) to assist Raiden. The AI posing as Colonel Campbell revealed to Raiden that the Patriots were formed as a sort of non-corporeal "consciousness" over the course of many years in the White House, comparing it to the formation and evolution of humanity itself. The Patriots also revealed to Raiden that their agent Rosemary was posing as Raiden's girlfriend. Using the data they collected from this exercise their AIs (such as GW) would be improved even more. However, it is unknown if any data survived the incident thanks to the interventions of Raiden, Emma and Philanthropy, who apparently managed to destroy GW. Another AI (possibly JD) told Raiden told to defeat Patriot agent defecter Solidus Snake.

After the incident, Philanthropy discovered that all twelve members of the Wisemen's Committee had been dead for at least a hundred years (as early as 1900), and that "one of them was "their (Philanthropy) biggest contributor". The names they discovered were those of the original Wisemen's Committee that founded the Philosophers.

Originally, Zero intended the AIs to create a unified state by using the military-industrial complex to make economics and politics uniform and devoid of free will. It was all done in the name of Zero's megalomaniac attempt to erase individuality. But after the Big Shell incident (or maybe even sometime before it) the proxy-AIs began to deviate from that plan, undergoing a mutation that gave them a will of their own and enabled them to decide on a better way to accomplish their goals: war. They created the War Economy and started a battlefield revolution similar to the industrial and digital revolutions, a new world without ideology, principles or ideals, not even the thing The Boss treasured the most: loyalty. Big Boss stated that this was a "colossal error in judgment – one Zero couldn't possibly have foreseen". To control the flow of information, they would control the economy, by influencing the outcome of these wars through the SOP system which would also allow them to control individual people. According to Naomi Hunter, the Patriots planned to extend their control down to the civilian level, actively controlling and censoring people through nanomachines, such as the nickname "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo". In this case, members of "the system" were under the Patriots's direct influence could not even mention the name "the Patriots" and were forced by their nanomachines to say the codename.

In 2014, the Patriots, now fully controlled by Zero's proxy-AIs, managed to trick and manipulate Meryl Silverburgh and her group Rat Patrol 01 (similar to how they tricked Raiden) and enlisted Drebin (who, unlike the others, knew of his stance as a Patriot agent) to helping Solid Snake and Otacon in their mission to terminate Liquid Ocelot, though the Patriots did not foresee that Snake and Otacon would destroy the Patriots themselves in the process thanks to the true nature of Liquid Ocelot's plan.

The Patriots were ultimately destroyed by the FOXALIVE virus (an opposite to the original FOXDIE virus) created by Naomi Hunter (and unknowingly by Sunny Gurlukovich, who borrowed some code from the original virus created by Emma Emmerich to destroy GW), which would infect and terminate the AIs which now ran the Patriots, ending them forever. However, Sunny managed to pick and choose parts of society vital to the survival of modern civilization.

While the Patriots AIs had been destroyed and Liquid Ocelot defeated by Solid Snake, there was one more threat that needed to be eliminated and that threat was the man who started the entire fiasco and the main founder of the Patriots: Zero. Big Boss, shortly after JD had been effectively destroyed, had found the location of Zero's stronghold. After arriving there, he discovered Zero was a mere shadow of his former self: a vegetative old man who was effectively dead and only kept alive via machines. He then wheeled him over to Arlington Cemetery, and after explaining the full story of what happened in regards to the Patriots to his eldest son Solid Snake, Big Boss had euthanized Zero by cutting off his oxygen supply. Shortly thereafter, Big Boss died from the effects of the second FOXDIE within Solid Snake, thus ending the Patriots.

Founding Members

 * Zero (founder)
 * Ocelot
 * Big Boss
 * Sigint
 * Para-Medic
 * EVA

AI Codenames

 * JD (The master AI, John Doe)
 * GW (George Washington)
 * TJ (Thomas Jefferson)
 * TR (Theodore Roosevelt)
 * AL (Abraham Lincoln)

Trivia

 * In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, when Snake contacts Colonel Campbell while fighting Luigi, the Colonel shuts Snake out by repeating "La li lu le lo", a reference to the Patriots's "codename".
 * Since Metal Gear Solid, many soldiers have been fitted with nanomachines. In Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, it is discovered that the Patriots themselves have edited these nanomachines. Those with nanomachines will say (or hear) "la li lu le lo" instead of "Patriots" in order to keep the Patriots a secret.
 * The name La-li-lu-le-lo is a reference to the basic vowel pronunciation in the Japanese language. In the Japanese language, the "L" and "R" sounds are indistinguishable, although the Hepburn romanization of Japanese Gojūon uses "Ra-ri-ru-re-ro" instead of "La-li-lu-le-lo". The use of "La-li-lu-le-lo" in the English version of Metal Gear Solid 2 instead of the proper "Ra-ri-ru-re-ro" is a translation liberty, albeit one that fits with the game's motif of information control.
 * In the Snake Tales story External Gazer, Snake is briefly stuck in a parallel universe and believes that he is Raiden. He and Rose keep getting interrupted while trying to enjoy each other's company. At one point, the La-li-lu-le-lo shows up on their television set, randomly talking about how to keep toilets clean. They are then joined by two alternate versions, called the Ta-ti-to-te-to and I-ro-ha-ni-ho-he-to, which also give advice. The last version's name refers to Iroha, an old-fashioned Katakana ordering system (the more prevalent ordering is called gojūon). "I ro ha ni ho he to" is the first of seven lines in an Iroha poem that contains each character of the Katakana exactly once, much like the English ABCs song.
 * The names of the AI's, aside from the master AI "John Doe", are all four American presidents whose likenesses appear on Mount Rushmore.