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The Surprising Importance of ‘Wolfenstein: The New Order’

72 points by hunglee2 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Having played the game, it's just a shoot em up with a goofy story to justify shooting things. Nobody is going to care about it in 10 years. The only reason anyone cares about it now is cause everything is a culture war and complaining on the Internet about games you aren't gonna buy is a great way of fighting it, apparently. I ran into some Holocaust deniers on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. Those people are so far gone that BBC video of bodies in concentration camps is seen as propaganda. If people don't understand the evils of the Nazis within the context of history, the videogame equivalent of Transformers isn't going to change minds.
- MBCook 9y ago
  I heard someone on a podcast make a VERY passionate defense of the game. Not only was it well made and presented a good story (for a shooter) but a main character (THE main character?) was Jewish and as a Jew that was a huge thing for him. There was a Jewish character who wasn't tokenized or just a stereotype but a well written and critical to the plot. Helpful and not inept but strong and self directed. Representation like that can be a very powerful thing.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Similar to the bit in "Knocked Up" about how "Munich" is a great movie because the Jewish characters are all bad-asses, not victims.
- SamUK96 9y ago
  Well, branding them all as Holocaust deniers and essentially insane may not be the most accurate or productive term. One camp of them seems to believe that the true scale was smaller than what we believe now. Given the ever-sensationalist media and the motive they had to heavily dramatise the war to pull in more soldiers and war funding that they definitely desparately needed, it's not a completely bonkers idea. It's just likely wrong and there's never any hard evidence for it. The other more hardline camp seems to believe that the scale was correct but that the Germans had legitimate justification. These seem to be the more unfounded and racially charged opinions. I disagree with both, especially the justification idea (nothing justifies the tragedies they caused), but bundling everyone and calling them all insane - although your prerogative and right to do so and I respect that indeed - doesn't help anybody and actually perpetuates them and the whole thing. It just creates more alienation, division, and hate. Some of them are just questioning the media coverage and if it was reliable and if our current view is 100% true. I'de say that's pretty reasonable, although i'm not sure since i'm certainly no historian. What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. Once you take what the media tells you as universal truth and denounce any dissenting people as insane is the day we slip into abject despotism.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I ran across this article later on, but it captured my impression of the people I interacted with. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspiracy-theories-feed-holocaust-denial https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspir... “They are people who have reached their 40s or 50s and have embraced the internet as it has grown and new platforms have come along. They have moved away from quality newspaper-reading mentality; maybe they’re professionals, some may have degrees, but they are not skilled in assessing sources in history. When you interact with them, you realise that they have no clue as to how we know anything about the past, about how history works, what information is available. They are willing to go along with certain ideas that are summarised for them and simplified in web articles or videos.”
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. That's highly questionable. Anyone who has doubts about the historical record is free to research it in depth and engage in scholarship of their own, and even try to make a case to other historians that an error has occurred, as revisionist historian David Irving did for years. There's a big difference between asking questions like 'how do historians calculate the number of casualties in the Holocaust (or any other historical genocide)?' in good faith, for the purposes of gathering information, and asking questions for the purposes of disputation, a practice commonly known as sealioning although it has its antecedents in forensic debate and the Socratic method. Rhetorical question whose purpose is to undermine existing historical consensus rather than to gather information is implicitly rehabilitative, and the idea that Nazism is just a regular philosophy that happens to have gotten a bad rap because of being on the losing end of a war is not a legitimate position. I support the German approach of criminalizing Holocaust denial. It doesn't limit free speech, as claimed; for example, Mein Kampf can be and has been republished in Germany, but in a scholarly edition with abundant notes on historical context so that the eliminationist rhetoric can't be peddled without mention of the verifiable consequences that resulted from its implementation.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I don't think litigating Holocaust denial is a good use of Hacker News.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  The point is not to change minds; people who want to deny, excuse, or revive the holocaust have made their decision to be horrible people and while deradicalization programs should be available to assist people who want to reintegrate into society, you can lead a person to education but you can't make them think. The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. A secondary purpose is to remind would-be Nazis that being a Nazi is hazardous to their health and that any attempts to implement their ideological views in practice will meet with opposition.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. We've failed at a fundamental level if the grandkids of the victims and survivors of that war don't understand what happened is evil and wrong. It's just hard for me to contextualize a violent game which core purpose is to gun down waves of people as an effective teaching tool. Is it like after the fifth headshot the kid is gonna sit back and say...I get it...Nazis are bad?
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      I wrote in the very first sentence that the point is not to change minds, which you inexplicably ignored. The point is to motivate people to fight against Nazism. The game is not about gunning down waves of random in an enjoyable spree of virtual destruction, but about gunning down Nazis qua proponents of genocide.
      - aaron-lebo 9y ago
        I wasn't really trying to pick a fight with you. I've played games for a long time and based on my biased experience with gamers, you don't play first person shooters because you're trying to learn something. You play them because it's entertainment with big explosions and escapism. Some people will learn something from it, sure. Hopefully they get through high school understanding that, though.
nether 9y ago
War is Boring is the worst military/defense affairs blog I've ever read.
- tritium 9y ago
  It's born out of the ashes of an old Wired blog, that was popular ten years ago. https://wired.com/category/security/dangerroom/ https://wired.com/category/security/dangerroom/
Asooka 9y ago
Another salient point that must be made: if we always depict the Nazis as inhuman monsters, as most videogames do, then people learn that true Nazism is perpetrated by those and only those. So when you hear an actual seemingly intelligent human being explaining how racism is totally cool, you automatically don't see that person as a Nazi, because he is a person and not a monster. People may not be able to understand Prolog programs, but everyone has the instinct that "A=>B <=> !B=>!A". Nazi => monster, that person is an ordinary person, so he isn't advocating for Nazism. Of course, we want then to think "that is Nazism, so the person advocating for it is a monster", but many people don't think that way. In a way it parallels the failure of the War on Drugs and the Scare Them Straight campaigns. I wish more media would humanise the Nazis, show that those are completely ordinary people, some up for the doctrine, some against it, all caught in one completely ordinary, if slightly mentally off person's plan to make his country the greatest place on Earth for his own people. They did horrible things. They did beautiful things. They were no different than you or me.
- SamUK96 9y ago
  To be honest by how many times the terms Nazi and Facism get flung about these days i'de say that people _not_ seeing people as someone like a Nazi maybe isn't the problem, but quite the opposite. Then again I suppose both our views are pretty anecdotal and futile to even talk about without it degenerating into "well i saw six people do this", "well i saw seven do the other so my view is more right" kind of gobblewash.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Speak for yourself. I am perfectly comfortable viewing people who say racism is totally cool as Nazis, once it's established that they're smart/educated enough to know better and choose to be racist anyway. It's not surprising to me that nice ordinary people are capable of monstrous behavior. Saying 'well everyone was just caught up in it, it could happen to any of us' is an abdication or moral responsibility. Subscribing to any kind of authoritarian/eliminationist ideology is reprehensible.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  People may not be able to understand Prolog programs, but everyone has the instinct that "A=>B <=> !B=>!A". People do not have an instinct against denying the antecedent. It's a common fallacy. And even when people know about the logical error and can recognize it represented with "P"s and "Q"s, it is also well known that people don't always have the pattern matching skills to notice a similarity in _shape_ of argument when the _topic_ of argument is different. Edit: I accidentally called denying the antecedent by the name affirming the consequent.
arthur_trudeau 9y ago
If you think "nazi ideology" or their actions are uniquely horrible, you are either historically illiterate, or so parochial that only their particular victims are of concern to you. History, especially twentieth century history, is a charnel house.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  It doesn't have to be uniquely horrible to be absolutely horrible.
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- bmm01 9y ago
  I'm not trying to speak as an authority on the subject, because I'm not. But perhaps it's you who has not properly contextualized the crime. And perhaps there's something wrong about the casualness with which you dismiss its uniqueness.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Nazi ideology is not uniquely horrible, as other eliminationist rhetorics have existed and led to genocides of their own. Nor are their actions unique in numerical terms, as other authoritarian regimes have engaged in systematic genocides through famine etc. with similarly large loss of life. But Nazism is unique in its combination of rhetoric and scale, and also in its instantiation within a highly developed society - politically, intellectually, culturally, and economically. Authoritarian horrors in less developed countries are still horrific, but it's not really surprising that an authoritarian can take over in a country where low standards of education are the norm and/or the mass of the population exists in grinding poverty and/or where long-standing tribal affiliations are suddenly exposed to drastic technological asymmetries. Germany was a highly developed society at the leading edge of intellectual and industrial development. Numerous peer societies have also engaged in imperialism, and often in utterly reprehensible ways , but none of them industrialized genocide in quite the same manner that the Nazis did.
lucio 9y ago
It's pretty scary how the article goes from killing Nazis is fantastic, to anybody at my right is a Nazi and it's morally ok to punch them. >Too often, when we engage in arguments with extremists who talk of racial purity, we falter to explain our side. Instead, we punch them and tell them “because.” >Nationalism leads to war So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them? I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD
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- glibgil 9y ago
  > It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
  - doctorless 9y ago
    Are you advocating violent suppression of views you dislike? Do you not see an irony there?
    - danharaj 9y ago
      It's grossly dishonest to reduce white supremacy to "views one dislikes". Yes, if you remove all of the content of views and just focus on the act of liking or disliking them, you can make any disagreement look unreasonable.
      - elefanten 9y ago
        The problem with that is that, especially when emotions run high, it becomes very difficult to tell where the line is for sufficiently "dangerous" views that deserve punching. If you look around today's blogosphere and social media, for example, you'll see a significant variance in what gets labeled "racist" or "white supremacy" (to use the most germane example). If someone is declared a white supremacist for touching a black person's hair and the standard is "it's ok to punch white supremacists because they are violent and dangerous"... it will become a mess fast. Which is one reason why it's generally a good decision-rule to not employ violence (as a citizen) unless violence is imminently being used against you.
gavanwoolery 9y ago
I find the constant comparison of present-day US to Nazi Germany a bit disrespectful. Not disrespectful of people in the present day (necessarily), but to those who actually survived Nazi Germany. What would you think, if you were a someone who survived a concentration camp, to have people consistently claim that the modern-day US is anywhere near as bad? I understand that the US is far from perfect, but we are also not engaging in genocide against our own citizens, and I do not think that there is anything that realistically signals that we ever will. Really, I guess it boils down to nitpicking over how watered-down the term Nazi has become. Lets not forget what the Nazis actually did.
- bashinator 9y ago
  Let's not forget that the Nazi's took power during a time of democracy, with full support of a plurality of the vote. Between that and Trump's overt authoritarianism, it's fair that people will draw analogies between the situations.
  - gavanwoolery 9y ago
    Yes, also important not to confuse correlation and causation IMHO. Even if we fully mirrored the rise of the Nazi party (in the political sense), it would not necessarily imply that we would mirror their actions (genocide, etc). In situations like this, its important to step back and ask - under what circumstances would the US actually cross the same line that the Nazis did? (And I do not mean anecdotal instances - I mean the US performing outright genocide on a large subset of its own citizens). The odds of this are so low, in my opinion, that I would place a monetary bet it will not happen within the next four or eight years. I am personally not a big fan of Trump, but I also do not think he is anywhere near Hitler-status.
    - bashinator 9y ago
      Then let me turn the question back to you - what historical precedent is there for a major power having a disputed election amidst war and economic inequity, where they turned things around and maintained a free and open society? We're asking the same question - what can the US do differently from Germany in the 30s? Edit: or to reframe the question, what could the German public have done differently in the '20 and '30s?
fulafel 9y ago
The bar is very low, it seems.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  The video game industry is… very bad at writing.
4bpp 9y ago
Well, this sort of depiction is always a many-edged sword. After seeing a media argument that amounts to "Nazis are these grotesquely inhumane monsters, and therefore it's okay to punch them", you'll have some people taking away that they should punch Nazis (their own, possibly much more general definition), some people actively trying to expand the "Nazi" label to their political opposition (so they are flagged for punching), and some people becoming more easily persuaded by actual Nazis because they aren't dangling any babies by their legs like garbage bags and therefore don't pattern-match against the Nazis they have been taught to punch.
- Udik 9y ago
  I am more concerned with the fact that, when you keep depicting the baddies as grotesquely inhumane monsters, people will soon start believing that recognizing them and choosing the right side is an easy task. In reality, baddies are often not that grotesque, they might actually have a point on a few things, and their arguments might be quite spread in the culture of the time, making them sound more reasonable than they are. And once people are trained to recognize evil in grotesque caricatures of human beings, then it becomes easy to provide them with such caricatures and send them to war, when the necessity arises. Quietly confident that the baddies are in front of them and not behind them.
  - reddog 9y ago
    Excellent point!
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zoner 9y ago
It's okay to speak ideas whatever it is. It's also okay to dislike other ideas. I do the same. What is not okay is to promote violence against anybody you think their ideas are harmful. Who decides if an idea is harmful? I think liberalism is harmful. Through abortions, millions are dying every year. No one should have the authority to say these motherf-kers are free to live, lets celebrate their defects and these other motherf-kers should be punched on the face. This liberalism-atheism is a religion. They do witch hunting, they purge their heretics, they don't allow opposition. However, Wolfeinstein 3D helped me to become who I am, even though it's purpose was the opposite :) Even a 8 years old feels if a game was designed to deform his thinking.
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tptacek 9y ago
This thread is all over the place. Did I read a different article, or misread this one? Here's what I read: Pop culture has a possibly unfortunate habit of co-opting Nazism as an all-purpose source of villains. Because it assumes everyone understands why Nazism is evil, our culture rarely provides any historical context for its Nazi villains. Worse, to heighten drama, our all-purpose villains must be made continuously more intimidating and powerful. The problem is that you're now left with a small army of generic bad-ass villains. Without the context of what it truly meant for a world power to be actively genocidal, those bad-ass Nazi villains can end up as figures for emulation or admiration or respect, for the same reason we put bad-ass villains on heavy metal album covers or use them as team mascots. So the value of a title like Wolfenstein: The New Order is that it actually takes the time to try to break the cycle of "Nazi As Bad-Ass Signifier". I don't know how important this point is, but it seems valid and worth thinking about; or, at least, I'd never thought about it before.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  You seem to have missed the half of the article which was about today's political climate
  - tptacek 9y ago
    What do you think the article is saying about today's political climate? All I read is that there are American Internet Nazis and that we're not very good at getting rid of them. That seems like a banal observation.
    - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
      I'll quote you the opening paragraph, which isnt about internet nazis at all: "In certain corners of the Western world, Nazi ideology is making a comeback. For years, we’ve taken it as a given that ideas such as racism and ultra-nationalism were poisonous roads to pain, suffering and war. Pop culture, and especially video games, share part of the blame." This is an example, not holistic
matttproud 9y ago
For anyone abroad who lacks the perspective of the resurgence of neo- or cryptofascism in the United States, this is interesting material: https://youtu.be/1o6-bi3jlxk https://youtu.be/1o6-bi3jlxk The event and Mr. Spencer were panned, to be sure, but not as unambiguously as one might have expected. Hate and supremacists — of all stripes — are alive and well in the U.S.: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

72 points by hunglee2 9y ago

Having played the game, it's just a shoot em up with a goofy story to justify shooting things. Nobody is going to care about it in 10 years. The only reason anyone cares about it now is cause everything is a culture war and complaining on the Internet about games you aren't gonna buy is a great way of fighting it, apparently. I ran into some Holocaust deniers on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. Those people are so far gone that BBC video of bodies in concentration camps is seen as propaganda. If people don't understand the evils of the Nazis within the context of history, the videogame equivalent of Transformers isn't going to change minds.

MBCook 9y ago
I heard someone on a podcast make a VERY passionate defense of the game. Not only was it well made and presented a good story (for a shooter) but a main character (THE main character?) was Jewish and as a Jew that was a huge thing for him. There was a Jewish character who wasn't tokenized or just a stereotype but a well written and critical to the plot. Helpful and not inept but strong and self directed. Representation like that can be a very powerful thing.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Similar to the bit in "Knocked Up" about how "Munich" is a great movie because the Jewish characters are all bad-asses, not victims.
SamUK96 9y ago
Well, branding them all as Holocaust deniers and essentially insane may not be the most accurate or productive term. One camp of them seems to believe that the true scale was smaller than what we believe now. Given the ever-sensationalist media and the motive they had to heavily dramatise the war to pull in more soldiers and war funding that they definitely desparately needed, it's not a completely bonkers idea. It's just likely wrong and there's never any hard evidence for it. The other more hardline camp seems to believe that the scale was correct but that the Germans had legitimate justification. These seem to be the more unfounded and racially charged opinions. I disagree with both, especially the justification idea (nothing justifies the tragedies they caused), but bundling everyone and calling them all insane - although your prerogative and right to do so and I respect that indeed - doesn't help anybody and actually perpetuates them and the whole thing. It just creates more alienation, division, and hate. Some of them are just questioning the media coverage and if it was reliable and if our current view is 100% true. I'de say that's pretty reasonable, although i'm not sure since i'm certainly no historian. What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. Once you take what the media tells you as universal truth and denounce any dissenting people as insane is the day we slip into abject despotism.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I ran across this article later on, but it captured my impression of the people I interacted with. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspiracy-theories-feed-holocaust-denial https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspir... “They are people who have reached their 40s or 50s and have embraced the internet as it has grown and new platforms have come along. They have moved away from quality newspaper-reading mentality; maybe they’re professionals, some may have degrees, but they are not skilled in assessing sources in history. When you interact with them, you realise that they have no clue as to how we know anything about the past, about how history works, what information is available. They are willing to go along with certain ideas that are summarised for them and simplified in web articles or videos.”
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. That's highly questionable. Anyone who has doubts about the historical record is free to research it in depth and engage in scholarship of their own, and even try to make a case to other historians that an error has occurred, as revisionist historian David Irving did for years. There's a big difference between asking questions like 'how do historians calculate the number of casualties in the Holocaust (or any other historical genocide)?' in good faith, for the purposes of gathering information, and asking questions for the purposes of disputation, a practice commonly known as sealioning although it has its antecedents in forensic debate and the Socratic method. Rhetorical question whose purpose is to undermine existing historical consensus rather than to gather information is implicitly rehabilitative, and the idea that Nazism is just a regular philosophy that happens to have gotten a bad rap because of being on the losing end of a war is not a legitimate position. I support the German approach of criminalizing Holocaust denial. It doesn't limit free speech, as claimed; for example, Mein Kampf can be and has been republished in Germany, but in a scholarly edition with abundant notes on historical context so that the eliminationist rhetoric can't be peddled without mention of the verifiable consequences that resulted from its implementation.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I don't think litigating Holocaust denial is a good use of Hacker News.
anigbrowl 9y ago
The point is not to change minds; people who want to deny, excuse, or revive the holocaust have made their decision to be horrible people and while deradicalization programs should be available to assist people who want to reintegrate into society, you can lead a person to education but you can't make them think. The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. A secondary purpose is to remind would-be Nazis that being a Nazi is hazardous to their health and that any attempts to implement their ideological views in practice will meet with opposition.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. We've failed at a fundamental level if the grandkids of the victims and survivors of that war don't understand what happened is evil and wrong. It's just hard for me to contextualize a violent game which core purpose is to gun down waves of people as an effective teaching tool. Is it like after the fifth headshot the kid is gonna sit back and say...I get it...Nazis are bad?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I wrote in the very first sentence that the point is not to change minds, which you inexplicably ignored. The point is to motivate people to fight against Nazism. The game is not about gunning down waves of random in an enjoyable spree of virtual destruction, but about gunning down Nazis qua proponents of genocide.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I wasn't really trying to pick a fight with you. I've played games for a long time and based on my biased experience with gamers, you don't play first person shooters because you're trying to learn something. You play them because it's entertainment with big explosions and escapism. Some people will learn something from it, sure. Hopefully they get through high school understanding that, though.

nether 9y ago

War is Boring is the worst military/defense affairs blog I've ever read.

tritium 9y ago
It's born out of the ashes of an old Wired blog, that was popular ten years ago. https://wired.com/category/security/dangerroom/ https://wired.com/category/security/dangerroom/

Asooka 9y ago

Another salient point that must be made: if we always depict the Nazis as inhuman monsters, as most videogames do, then people learn that true Nazism is perpetrated by those and only those. So when you hear an actual seemingly intelligent human being explaining how racism is totally cool, you automatically don't see that person as a Nazi, because he is a person and not a monster. People may not be able to understand Prolog programs, but everyone has the instinct that "A=>B <=> !B=>!A". Nazi => monster, that person is an ordinary person, so he isn't advocating for Nazism. Of course, we want then to think "that is Nazism, so the person advocating for it is a monster", but many people don't think that way. In a way it parallels the failure of the War on Drugs and the Scare Them Straight campaigns. I wish more media would humanise the Nazis, show that those are completely ordinary people, some up for the doctrine, some against it, all caught in one completely ordinary, if slightly mentally off person's plan to make his country the greatest place on Earth for his own people. They did horrible things. They did beautiful things. They were no different than you or me.

SamUK96 9y ago
To be honest by how many times the terms Nazi and Facism get flung about these days i'de say that people _not_ seeing people as someone like a Nazi maybe isn't the problem, but quite the opposite. Then again I suppose both our views are pretty anecdotal and futile to even talk about without it degenerating into "well i saw six people do this", "well i saw seven do the other so my view is more right" kind of gobblewash.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Speak for yourself. I am perfectly comfortable viewing people who say racism is totally cool as Nazis, once it's established that they're smart/educated enough to know better and choose to be racist anyway. It's not surprising to me that nice ordinary people are capable of monstrous behavior. Saying 'well everyone was just caught up in it, it could happen to any of us' is an abdication or moral responsibility. Subscribing to any kind of authoritarian/eliminationist ideology is reprehensible.
forgottenpass 9y ago
People may not be able to understand Prolog programs, but everyone has the instinct that "A=>B <=> !B=>!A". People do not have an instinct against denying the antecedent. It's a common fallacy. And even when people know about the logical error and can recognize it represented with "P"s and "Q"s, it is also well known that people don't always have the pattern matching skills to notice a similarity in _shape_ of argument when the _topic_ of argument is different. Edit: I accidentally called denying the antecedent by the name affirming the consequent.

arthur_trudeau 9y ago

If you think "nazi ideology" or their actions are uniquely horrible, you are either historically illiterate, or so parochial that only their particular victims are of concern to you. History, especially twentieth century history, is a charnel house.

dsr_ 9y ago
It doesn't have to be uniquely horrible to be absolutely horrible.
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bmm01 9y ago
I'm not trying to speak as an authority on the subject, because I'm not. But perhaps it's you who has not properly contextualized the crime. And perhaps there's something wrong about the casualness with which you dismiss its uniqueness.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Nazi ideology is not uniquely horrible, as other eliminationist rhetorics have existed and led to genocides of their own. Nor are their actions unique in numerical terms, as other authoritarian regimes have engaged in systematic genocides through famine etc. with similarly large loss of life. But Nazism is unique in its combination of rhetoric and scale, and also in its instantiation within a highly developed society - politically, intellectually, culturally, and economically. Authoritarian horrors in less developed countries are still horrific, but it's not really surprising that an authoritarian can take over in a country where low standards of education are the norm and/or the mass of the population exists in grinding poverty and/or where long-standing tribal affiliations are suddenly exposed to drastic technological asymmetries. Germany was a highly developed society at the leading edge of intellectual and industrial development. Numerous peer societies have also engaged in imperialism, and often in utterly reprehensible ways , but none of them industrialized genocide in quite the same manner that the Nazis did.

lucio 9y ago

It's pretty scary how the article goes from killing Nazis is fantastic, to anybody at my right is a Nazi and it's morally ok to punch them. >Too often, when we engage in arguments with extremists who talk of racial purity, we falter to explain our side. Instead, we punch them and tell them “because.” >Nationalism leads to war So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them? I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD

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glibgil 9y ago
> It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
- doctorless 9y ago
  Are you advocating violent suppression of views you dislike? Do you not see an irony there?
  - danharaj 9y ago
    It's grossly dishonest to reduce white supremacy to "views one dislikes". Yes, if you remove all of the content of views and just focus on the act of liking or disliking them, you can make any disagreement look unreasonable.
    - elefanten 9y ago
      The problem with that is that, especially when emotions run high, it becomes very difficult to tell where the line is for sufficiently "dangerous" views that deserve punching. If you look around today's blogosphere and social media, for example, you'll see a significant variance in what gets labeled "racist" or "white supremacy" (to use the most germane example). If someone is declared a white supremacist for touching a black person's hair and the standard is "it's ok to punch white supremacists because they are violent and dangerous"... it will become a mess fast. Which is one reason why it's generally a good decision-rule to not employ violence (as a citizen) unless violence is imminently being used against you.

gavanwoolery 9y ago

I find the constant comparison of present-day US to Nazi Germany a bit disrespectful. Not disrespectful of people in the present day (necessarily), but to those who actually survived Nazi Germany. What would you think, if you were a someone who survived a concentration camp, to have people consistently claim that the modern-day US is anywhere near as bad? I understand that the US is far from perfect, but we are also not engaging in genocide against our own citizens, and I do not think that there is anything that realistically signals that we ever will. Really, I guess it boils down to nitpicking over how watered-down the term Nazi has become. Lets not forget what the Nazis actually did.

bashinator 9y ago
Let's not forget that the Nazi's took power during a time of democracy, with full support of a plurality of the vote. Between that and Trump's overt authoritarianism, it's fair that people will draw analogies between the situations.
- gavanwoolery 9y ago
  Yes, also important not to confuse correlation and causation IMHO. Even if we fully mirrored the rise of the Nazi party (in the political sense), it would not necessarily imply that we would mirror their actions (genocide, etc). In situations like this, its important to step back and ask - under what circumstances would the US actually cross the same line that the Nazis did? (And I do not mean anecdotal instances - I mean the US performing outright genocide on a large subset of its own citizens). The odds of this are so low, in my opinion, that I would place a monetary bet it will not happen within the next four or eight years. I am personally not a big fan of Trump, but I also do not think he is anywhere near Hitler-status.
  - bashinator 9y ago
    Then let me turn the question back to you - what historical precedent is there for a major power having a disputed election amidst war and economic inequity, where they turned things around and maintained a free and open society? We're asking the same question - what can the US do differently from Germany in the 30s? Edit: or to reframe the question, what could the German public have done differently in the '20 and '30s?

fulafel 9y ago

The bar is very low, it seems.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
The video game industry is… very bad at writing.

4bpp 9y ago

Well, this sort of depiction is always a many-edged sword. After seeing a media argument that amounts to "Nazis are these grotesquely inhumane monsters, and therefore it's okay to punch them", you'll have some people taking away that they should punch Nazis (their own, possibly much more general definition), some people actively trying to expand the "Nazi" label to their political opposition (so they are flagged for punching), and some people becoming more easily persuaded by actual Nazis because they aren't dangling any babies by their legs like garbage bags and therefore don't pattern-match against the Nazis they have been taught to punch.

Udik 9y ago
I am more concerned with the fact that, when you keep depicting the baddies as grotesquely inhumane monsters, people will soon start believing that recognizing them and choosing the right side is an easy task. In reality, baddies are often not that grotesque, they might actually have a point on a few things, and their arguments might be quite spread in the culture of the time, making them sound more reasonable than they are. And once people are trained to recognize evil in grotesque caricatures of human beings, then it becomes easy to provide them with such caricatures and send them to war, when the necessity arises. Quietly confident that the baddies are in front of them and not behind them.
- reddog 9y ago
  Excellent point!

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zoner 9y ago

It's okay to speak ideas whatever it is. It's also okay to dislike other ideas. I do the same. What is not okay is to promote violence against anybody you think their ideas are harmful. Who decides if an idea is harmful? I think liberalism is harmful. Through abortions, millions are dying every year. No one should have the authority to say these motherf-kers are free to live, lets celebrate their defects and these other motherf-kers should be punched on the face. This liberalism-atheism is a religion. They do witch hunting, they purge their heretics, they don't allow opposition. However, Wolfeinstein 3D helped me to become who I am, even though it's purpose was the opposite :) Even a 8 years old feels if a game was designed to deform his thinking.

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tptacek 9y ago

This thread is all over the place. Did I read a different article, or misread this one? Here's what I read: Pop culture has a possibly unfortunate habit of co-opting Nazism as an all-purpose source of villains. Because it assumes everyone understands why Nazism is evil, our culture rarely provides any historical context for its Nazi villains. Worse, to heighten drama, our all-purpose villains must be made continuously more intimidating and powerful. The problem is that you're now left with a small army of generic bad-ass villains. Without the context of what it truly meant for a world power to be actively genocidal, those bad-ass Nazi villains can end up as figures for emulation or admiration or respect, for the same reason we put bad-ass villains on heavy metal album covers or use them as team mascots. So the value of a title like Wolfenstein: The New Order is that it actually takes the time to try to break the cycle of "Nazi As Bad-Ass Signifier". I don't know how important this point is, but it seems valid and worth thinking about; or, at least, I'd never thought about it before.

ruleabidinguser 9y ago
You seem to have missed the half of the article which was about today's political climate
- tptacek 9y ago
  What do you think the article is saying about today's political climate? All I read is that there are American Internet Nazis and that we're not very good at getting rid of them. That seems like a banal observation.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    I'll quote you the opening paragraph, which isnt about internet nazis at all: "In certain corners of the Western world, Nazi ideology is making a comeback. For years, we’ve taken it as a given that ideas such as racism and ultra-nationalism were poisonous roads to pain, suffering and war. Pop culture, and especially video games, share part of the blame." This is an example, not holistic

matttproud 9y ago

For anyone abroad who lacks the perspective of the resurgence of neo- or cryptofascism in the United States, this is interesting material: https://youtu.be/1o6-bi3jlxk https://youtu.be/1o6-bi3jlxk The event and Mr. Spencer were panned, to be sure, but not as unambiguously as one might have expected. Hate and supremacists — of all stripes — are alive and well in the U.S.: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map