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.
I think the author fails to make his own point distinct enough:
> Right from the start, Wolfenstein's enemies are the brutal instruments of an ideology that liquidates the weakest among us.
There were ideologies promoting "Liquidation of the weakest" that FAR predated the Nazism. And those are still considered "cool" today.
All Spartan infants were brought before a council of inspectors and examined for physical defects, and those who weren’t up to standards were left to die.
Yet the Spartans are positive cultural memes, glorified for their masculine badassery, honor and valor, see the "300" for example.
My point is: If you want to talk about how bad Nazism is then you'd better approach it seriously and in my opinion this article failed to deliver that, it was superfluous.
I've played this very game for many hours, I've completed every achievement just as I did in Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. And I'm also Russian to boot. Yet I did not consider to make a mountain out of a molehill like the author did in this article.
So the nazis are the ultimate bad guys with no redeeming qualities, well who would have thought? This game has cool villains in it but it also has very satirical moments that the author failed to mention.
In the final fight the antagonist goes on a wild rant painting YOU as the actual villain for resisting the admittedly very fast progress that the world has achieved under Nazi rule and then you have to take out Zeppelins powering the antagonist's machine and when you do that the villain berates you for killing people on those zeppelins, saying that he had "put good men there. Men who had families." I honestly don't know how you can take that seriously and not laugh.
I agree with you, partly. I would also mention the Mongols, Alexander the great, the Roman empire and the British empire as similar examples. Only difference between these and the Nazis are the Nazis are the latest in a long line of historical villains, so their atrocities still linger in our memory while the actions of the others are forgotten, by the general population at least.
Perhaps the Nazis just embody a basic human nature, and there is nothing much unique about them. Go far back in history and you are certain to find various groups engaging in similar levels of atrocities.
Given this, then the Nazis are not uniquely evil and everyone is vulnerable to become the perpetrators of such under the right conditions and leadership. So it is worth it, to remind people of how ugly and damaging such a thing is. So in conclusion, to point this out, is not making a mountain of a molehill.
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.
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."
writers/designers like Nazis not because they're generic but because they were horribly weird, they were associated with multiple mystic organizations like the Ahnenerbe and the Thule society, they worked on crazy engineering projects like superweapons, megacities, and rocketry, they did lovecraftian experiments on people in concentration camps
the reason people use Nazi Germany in their media is because they were extremely interesting
which is why we have all this media about fighting robo-Ottomans during the Armenian genocide or protecting Huguenots from Catholic necromancers right?
Nazis are used as all-purpose villains because the evil of their movement is universally recognized, not because of this Thule Society nonsense. It's because nobody likes Nazis.
The weirdness is part of what attracts people to Nazism in the first place. Fascism is an anti-rationalist ideology which caters to people's quest for a psychic identity that transcends materialistic impulses. The same dynamic is leveraged by people like Aleksandr Dugin in Russia.
I'm not arguing about what attracts adherents of Nazism to Nazism. Something is deeply wrong with anyone who decided to become a Nazi, and I'm not qualified to diagnose what.
I'm simply saying that movie producers and game designers don't cast Nazis in the villain role because of Nazi weirdness. They do it because we all agree that Nazis are, almost alone among historical western adversaries, categorically and indefensibly evil.
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.
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.
I think that is what scares the author the most- that all this education, all the remembering and memoria- just evaporates- a thin layer of paint on a savage creature.
And one must admit, that at the moment it does not look very good for freedom, democracy and civilsation as a whole.
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.
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.
When a word is too flimsily used against people, it loses its meaning. This is what happened with calling people racist. It got tossed around inappropriately so much, the public lost their sensitivity to it. People now roll their eyes when someone accuses them so casually of being racist. Therefore we have a new word to level at people, Nazi.
The same thing will happen with calling people "Nazi". Initially people will be scared that they will lose social capital if called a Nazi. Eventually, people will have seen enough obviously non-Nazi folk be called Nazi, that the word will again lost meaning and power.
Nazi will fall faster than other social weapons, simply because it is so ludicrous. When they level that charge are they really suggesting the person follows the National Socialism doctrine? That they advocate for mass genocide? That they follow the numerous ideas of Nazi-ism? They have a strong position on Anschluss? This is bizarre (and amusing) watching from a European perspective.
There is a much more widely held ideology that is closer to what the left perceives the right to hold, but it would Never fly to accuse people of that..
edit: I fully agree with the parent that the term being used in the way it has been is Incredibly insulting to those who suffered under the Nazi regime.
I'm glad you asked! Yes, there are people who advocate for genocide. Here's a recent example of such rhetoric from a well-established blog that I'd prefer not to link to here:
Genocide necessarily involves either suppression of fertility or active or passive killing, or some combination of methods. Passive killing might include the refusal to supply aid such as food or medical care, preferring to just let Nature run her course, or refusal to come to the rescue when brown tribes genocide each other. The passive method would cause greater suffering and would not finish the job, as there will always be a remnant population to rebound in time. Clearly, an active genocide using white man methods would be more humane than passively letting Nature or savage tribes to do a much sloppier and less complete job. In the same way that animal lovers cannot adopt and care for every stray, but must accept that many be euthanized or sterilized, so it must be with the lower races of humanity.
Having been studying the far right for a good many years now, I'm quite comfortable about my ability to distinguish between anodyne center-right policies and a small but well-organized and funded cadre of honest-to-goodness extremists, thanks. I hope you're not going to come back with some hair-splitting argument about the exact position of any given proponent of genocide in your political calculus.
I absolutely agree with you that some people on the wildest fringes do advocate genocide. Note that that pro-genocide advocates tick more diversity quotas than the most liberal arts college.
Do I paint all of BLM with the same brush as I do with the small numbers of their group who advocate white genocide?
Do I cast all Muslims aside because a small % advocate genocide of Kuffar?
Both would be unthinkable in right-on politics, and rightly so. If you are not very careful when pushing a certain way to judge things as absolute, you will find yourself having to answer very tricky questions that are contrary to the values you believe you hold.
What I was trying to get across in my previous message is that if you really want Nazi to be a powerful, meaningful word, it should be used correctly. Unfortunately a quick look at some publications/social media shows you it not being used that way. It is being levelled against out-groups completely inappropriately and in a way that is counter-productive to the left's cause. Many of the liberal old-guard personalities are called Nazis by thousands online. Whenever someone sees an article or twitter movement accusing their favourite old-guard liberal icon being called "literally a Nazi", people start realising the stupidity and tune out. The same thing happened with "racist". There is a reason it has fallen out of favour in certain circles.
> Do I cast all Muslims aside because a small % advocate genocide of Kuffar?
I think you did a disservice to the point you were trying to make because with muslims anyone who does not follow Quran to the letter is found lacking.
Qur'an (8:39) "Wage war on non-Muslims and kill them until they submit and the only religion is Islam."
It is about as genocidal as it gets.
I've never heard about anything connected to National Socialism prescribing something so extreme, in as clear and direct way, e.g. there is no "Wage war on non-Nazis and kill them until they submit and the only ideology is Nazism."
But muslims get a free pass. You don't hear them saying it that often because of Taqqiya.
It's worth recalling that Qu'ran is some 1400 years old and a great deal has changed in the world since that sectarian (not genocidal) ideology was proposed.
Nazism as an ideology developed only about a century ago, and should be evaluated in the light of all the historical and other knowledge accumulated during the interval. If you're looking for bold statements of Nazi ambition, you could consider this remark by Goebbels on the New Order concept in 1943 - bluster during a losing war effort, to be sure, but hardly out of line with past expressions of the ideology:
The Führer gave expression to his unshakable conviction that the Reich will be the master of all Europe. We shall yet have to engage in many fights, but these will undoubtedly lead to most wonderful victories. From there on the way to world domination is practically certain. Whoever dominates Europe will thereby assume the leadership of the world.
I think the point of this article is more about the fact that there are signs which suggest that the US is heading towards Nazi Germany, not that it already is as bad.
Where does this article make that comparison? I don't see it. I see it pointing out there that is a loud new crop of American Internet Nazis, but that is not remotely the same as saying the US is like Nazi Germany.
"In all the time I’ve been playing video games, only one game has forced the player to deal with the toxic ideology of National Socialism...That game is 2014’s Wolfenstein: New Order and it’s a game that’s depressingly relevant today."
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.
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.
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?
I am not sure if it could have been easily avoided, unless the Nazi party was met with strong resistance from the start. When a party assumes total power, it has inertia that is hard to overturn.
A lot of people are using the word authoritarian, but we are still far from a true authoritarian regime (that said, the fact that we are given two dubious candidates every four years makes me wonder how free we really are).
I think the counter-counter-question is "will history repeat itself indefinitely?" We still have genocide today (i.e. the Yazidis by ISIL), but the last genocide to occur in a country with remotely Western values was 70 years ago (not that Western values imply moral purity).
Like the dropping of the nuclear bomb, the Holocaust was so powerful that most people (even on the extreme right) seem keen not to repeat it.
> 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).
It's a debate within historians if this is true. Some people contend that racism was so inherent to Nazi ideology that you can't have Nazis who don't commit genocide (if they can), and that the Nazis (and Hitler) always planned to commit genocide. And some claim that the Holocaust sort of evolved, and there was no original plan.
So you can't be certain that you can have nazis without genocide.
You're only willing to bet 4 or 8 years out, which is itself worrying.
There are certainly people who actively espouse genocidal intentions openly in our body politic, and the connections between them and powerful figures in the administration are not very distant.
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?
Have you heard about this plan to build a wall and forcibly move millions of people to the other side of it?Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the population seem heartily in favor of this idea.
> You're only willing to bet 4 or 8 years out, which is itself worrying.
In the FSU and in Central Asian countries with Turkic influence there is a very widely known little anecdote about Nasreddin[0] making a bet for a large sum of gold paid in advance with the Padishah that Nasreddin can teach his own mule to know theology better than Padishah himself in 20 years.
When asked why he made the bet Nasreddin replied: "In 20 years one of the three will have died: Either me, the mule or the Padishah . And nobody will be able to ascertain who knew Theology better."
The takeaway here is that it is foolish to make such long bets when the bettors might not even be around to collect. People in these countries often use the phrase "The mule or the padishah" when talking about politicians overpromising to deliver something over a long time.
Betting any further out would make me presumptuous. :) I really cannot be so bold as to say I know what the far future holds, and I can only make educated guesses about the near future. As far as domestic policy, deporting illegal immigrants is a far cry from genocide (FWIW I am pro-immigration anyhow).
At least 50 percent of our country is to the left, and probably less than 10 percent of the country is on the extreme right. There is enough healthy disagreement that I do not see one side assuming authoritarian-level power any time soon IMHO.
Of course there's a big difference, but the Nazis didn't start gassing people the day after they took power; as late as 1940 they were considering just resettling Jewish populations in Madagascar. The chilling fact about the Holocaust was not that it was directly ordered from the very height of the Nazi government as that lower-level officials decided it was the most practical solution to an operational problem that seemed compatible with Hitler's fanatical loathing of the Jews.
My anxiety about this stems not from any belief that this or a future administration has a detailed plan to murder large numbers of people, as from a coincidence of political momentum and the existence of a decent number of people who would be just fine with or outright enthusiastic about that outcome, as well as a much larger number of people who'd rather just look the other way any time unpleasant topics appear on their radar.
I have much less confidence that you do about demographics and the health of the body politic. Just to add some context I'm not basing my opinions on blogs but on lengthy analysis from military intelligence professionals, counterterrorist analysts, and other high-quality primary sources, as well as extended personal study of the far right. I hope I'm wrong about this.
> and forcibly move millions of people to the other side of it?Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the population seem heartily in favor of this idea.
Yeah, only a true Nazi would deport millions of people. If someone deports millions of illegal immigrants they must be punched as they are Nazis. Can't believe Obama was a secret Nazi all along :'(, Alex Jones was warning us all along.
Minor nitpick: The nazis never won a majority of the vote, needing to use another party to prop them up, and were not in support of democracy. There were various steps on the way to the Nazi dictorship which all had the veneer of democracy, but were all fake. Sure the majority of the parliament voted for the Enabling Act, but they changed the voting rules, they arrested and detained opposition members, during the vote armed villiganties were in the voting hall.
Nobody is suggesting the current regime is committing genocide. People are suggesting that the racial scapegoating and facist themes of the current administration look a lot like the start of a slide in that direction.
If I had survived a concentration camp, my feelings about the current regime would be "DANGER DANGER DANGER"
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
It does not say that punching nazis is ok. The closest it comes to that is "To be clear, sometimes the only way to win against a Nazi is to punch them."
The article is clearly advocating coherent argument over violence, dialogue over silencing.
I believe you have significantly misunderstood.
It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence.
You mean as advocated in the article, where it states:
"... we also need to understand and be ready to explain the reasons why racism, genocide and white nationalism are bad"?
I think you are grossly misinterpreting the sentence you quoted. It isn't advocating anything; it is making an observation. "We punch them" is indicative mood, not subjunctive as you seem to have taken it ("we should punch them").
That's some pretty sickening white-washing. I'll assume good faith and that it was unintentional.
Their primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, unionists, and Jews – for instance, during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.
Perhaps you point out that "originally formed" and "primary purpose" aren't necessarily the same. Fair enough. So:
Some 70 people attended, and a second such meeting was advertised for 13 November in the Eberlbrau beer hall. Some 130 people attended; there were hecklers, but Hitler's military friends promptly ejected them by force, and the agitators "flew down the stairs with gashed heads."
The next year, on 24 February, he announced the party's Twenty-Five Point program at a mass meeting of some 2000 people at the Hofbräuhaus. Protesters tried to shout Hitler down, but his former army companions, armed with rubber truncheons, ejected the dissenters. The basis for the SA had been formed.
Even from what you quote I noticed you took it as an endorsement of what it criticizes, but it goes on:
> To be clear, sometimes the only way to win against a Nazi is to punch them. But we also need to understand and be ready to explain the reasons why racism, genocide and white nationalism are bad. This may seem simplistic and rudimentary, it may even make you angry, but we must be ready to explain to young people why these ideas are so poisonous. It is no longer enough to just point at the history and say “because.”
or, as you said:
> Kind of like "It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech"
Ironically, disallowing speech and interpreting it as the opposite of what it very clearly says are both closer together than they are to free speech. What's the point of being able to say something when you then feel free to turn it on its head? That's shifting the point of breakage. And is it some kind of joke that EliRivers got downvoted for stating what you should have realized, much less other readers; without even a response?
Careful. Whether it's OK to retaliate violently against odious views is one question (personally, I think: no). Whether Nazism is simply a "view one dislikes", like a particular ice cream flavor, is another.
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.
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.
There will always be unreasonable people, in fact everyone's idea of what is unreasonable will be different. It's ok though because we're a social species whose individuals like to share their thoughts and values and refine them together. The fact that people will disagree about what warrants violence is not a refutation of the idea that it is possible to justify violence. It is not a justification for refusing to ever analyze the merits of a particular justification for a particular act of violence.
Instead of discussing the merits of whether it is justified to violently oppose the ideology of white supremacy, whose latest form includes doublespeak like "peaceful ethnic cleansing" (Richard Spencer), you've shifted the topic to abstract considerations where the implicit demand is an argument that decides for all instances of violence whether or not they are justified. I can justify punching Richard Spencer, for example, without considering the rather absurd claim that someone who touches black hair (I presume you mean without consent) should be considered a white supremacist and therefore worthy of violence.
Just because a problem is difficult doesn't mean it's not worth examining. The fact that one cannot analytically decide a priori when violence is justified or not is just one of the many messy facts of the world that necessitate politics and taking conflict seriously.
See now you've introduced a third debate. If this was simply an attempt to deal with whether it's a good idea to punch Nazis (again, I think: no), we'd be much more careful. But now we're asked to debate whether touching a black person's hair (also: huh?) is "white supremacist".
Neo-nazis and their ideology directly threatens the very lives of a lot of people, and it's basically impossible to argue against them because they already understand these ir position and just don't care about any of the myriad reasons why they're wrong.
This is where the "punch a nazi" thing comes from. They're a very real personal threat to people, and they can't be convinced to change their mind, so all you can really do is get them to shut up and go away, and the way you do that is by punching them. If you can make them afraid to express their neo-nazi ideas, then that's a win.
This logic ends nowhere good for anyone. If you can punch away evil, so can the people who believe abortion clinics are murder factories --- in fact, their arguments are even better than ours.
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are espousing a viewpoint that takes away rights from other people, and in many cases threatens their very lives.
That's what anti-abortionist people do too, in fact. They're trying to take rights away from women (specifically, the right to control their own body), and in many cases threatens their very lives (abortion can be used as a medical intervention to save the life of the mother).
The only real difference I can see is that anti-abortionists are more likely to be able to be reasoned with.
All you're saying is that you disagree with anti-abortionists. Because if the anti-abortionists are right (spoiler: they aren't), then it's nowhere nearly as simple as "they're trying to take other people's rights away from them".
Not if they don't support factual sex education and easy availability of contraception.
If they don't then they're probably just fascists using emotive subjects to gain power (see the blood libel against the Jews) or suckers falling for the fascist propaganda.
It's great that Godwin can't be applied to this thread.
Sorry, but that's an orthogonal argument. Pro-life activists believe abortion is murder. Nothing you can say about contraception refutes that argument.
The fact that I find the pro-life argument so personally repellant is why I think it's a reasonably good example in discussions like these: it's a system of practical beliefs directly contrary to my own that is held by a great many people. Whatever ethics about speech suppression I would apply to others, I have to make work for these as well.
Personally I put the anti-abortionists (who directly cause more abortions) in the same category as the guy who turned up at a pizza parlor with a rifle and many low level Nazis. Confused by propaganda into making the situation worse.
All you're saying is that you disagree with them. I do too. What's your point? There are tens of millions of them. To be actively racist is (thank Christ) to marginalize yourself in modern society. But to be pro-life? Sorry, it may not seem that way on a message board, but there's not a lot of stigma to opposing abortion.
Meanwhile, there's no evading it. You simply must stipulate that opponents of abortion believe, in good faith, that abortion is the unjust taking of human life.
If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics.
We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it.
Obviously, I have company in that perspective with the ACLU.
If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics.
Nobody can ask the fetus whether it is OK or even agree on whether it has the capacity to experience suffering given that most abortions take place prior to fetal brain development. A fetus, therefore, has no legal agency of its own.
By contrast, someone who advocates punching Nazis does have legal agency, and may be wishing to exercise it on their own behalf rather than on behalf of some third party. This is a fundamentally different situation.
We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it.
It sounds awfully like you're abrogating people's right of self-defense. How is this 'suppression' to take place when Nazis have a demonstrable track record of being willing to use violence but you deny that option to their opponents under any circumstances? I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.
I didn't argue that you can't hit someone who is literally about to physically attack you, and neither did the ACLU.
You seem to be arguing that the mere presence of a Nazi marching under a Nazi flag in the public square justifies physical violence. What did the ACLU get wrong about that when they defended the Nazis in Skokie?
The ACLU was worried about government restraint on anyone under the 1st amendment, specifically the display of the Nazi flag with a swastika. I think they were wrong insofar as the march and display of the flag was intended specifically to terrorize the Jewish population of Skokie. In the event, the march never took place; by the time the case was resolved, the residents of Skokie had built a holocaust memorial and the Nazis got permission to hold a march in Chicago instead, which they did.
The 1st amendment does protect private parties from government interference with their political expression. It says nothing about whether other private parties should passively accept political expressions that are specifically aimed at intimidating them. Had the march gone ahead and the citizens of Skokie set about the Nazis with baseball bats, I would not consider the Nazis' first amendment rights to have been inhibited in the least bit.
If I'm standing in a park with a police officer and an angry activist and I say something that offends the police officer and he hits me to shut me up, he's violated the First Amendment.
Similarly, in that same set of circumstances, if I say something that offends the activist and he hits me to shut me up and the police officer doesn't arrest him, the police officer has also violated the First Amendment.
So, no, I don't think you can flee into definitions of "private parties" versus the "government" to avoid the ACLU's logic here.
Are you sure about that? Police officers owe a duty to the public in general, not to specific individuals. In general, police officers do not have a duty of care towards individuals unless there was a prior promise to provide protection, and then only in that context.
I'd like some case law support for your claim that failure to arrest/act by a police officer equates to a violation of the first amendment.
In the meantime, I'd also like you to consider that it's not hard to find examples of collusion between police and members of right-wing militias, as in this one from just a few weeks ago, which provoked questions from the mayor of Portland: https://theintercept.com/2017/06/08/portland-alt-right-milit...
In this document, the police chief replied to the mayor's inquiries and admitted (Q5/page 5) preemptively detaining and photographing left-wing activists on the basis that they might later engage in violence against right-wing activists, based on observations of earlier altercations between the two groups. Oddly, no such preemptive behavior was carried on with respect to the right-wing group. I might point out that the ACLU also finds this problematic.
Individual anecdotes like this are not dispositive, but there is at least some evidence for believing that the police do not reliably maintain a politically neutral position as referees of fair play and good behavior, notwithstanding the belief that they should.
Note how the weird particulars of how Colorado police were not required to enforce this person's restraining order in effect define where there are requirements, in particular, from anything intrinsically stemming from the Constitution.
Fascinating though your unproven legal theory is, I'm a lot more worried about the immediate reality of how to deal with the problem of white supremacists in and out of the police force. Obviously getting a restraining order against them isn't going to do the trick.
No they're not. People who object to abortion clinics claim to be intervening on behalf of a third party (the fetus) whose legal status is that of a non-person in law and whose moral status is indeterminable by rational means.
Quite a lot of the people who are willing to punch Nazis are, by contrast, people who feel their own persons are threatened, as opposed to being outsiders choosing to insert themselves into a private dispute.
All you're saying is that you don't agree that abortion is murder. I don't either. Would that our agreement on this were dispositive of the abortion debate.
Thomas I can't help observing that you're completely ignoring my second point about what differentiates anti-fascist activists from anti-abortion activists.
Could you re-state it? You know I'm not inclined to blow you off; you've been on my list of favorite commenters for something like 5 years.
I seriously do not see a distinction between the two perspectives, other than that the anti-abortion activists would be employing violence to actually stop what they believe to be real, immediate, kinetic violence.
Again, it's not like my argument here is novel. It's the ACLU's argument, from National Socialists of America v. Skokie.
Anti-Abortion protesters are appointing themselves as moral guardians of a fetus.
Anti-Nazi protesters are declaring their own selves to feel threatened by Nazism, rather than claiming to be intervening in the defense of someone else.
I don't really care about the ACLU's argument. Things have moved on since 1976 and the scope and intensity of violence perpetrated by white nationalists and similar far-right groups has increased considerably. Also, consider the fact that the ACLU was founded in 1920, but it was not the ACLU that defeated the Nazis in World War 2.
These aren't academic discussions with imaginary Nazis. The people killed by Dylann Roof or Jeremy Christian were real people who really died at the hands of people who really profess support for white supremacist ideologies, to name but two examples.
The mini-riots and street battled in Berkeley might seem comical from afar but having been at several of them I can tell you for a fact that there are people there who show up shouting nazi and white nationalist slogans and threatening or engaging people with weapons.
White nationalism is not some tiny radical fringe. I'd remind you that people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller occupy senior roles in the administration of the executive branch and there's abundant evidence of their extremist views.
This is a pretty ahistorical argument. We've had overtly racist Presidents and Klan members at the highest levels of government in the past, not to mention a 100+ year history of lynchings.
The First Amendment wasn't repealed when Steve Bannon accepted his role as Trump's chief strategist.
Yes, that's quite true. And my point is that vulnerable people are sick and tired of dealing with violence directed at their persons and communities and are voicing their discontent by saying they're not going to take it any more.
Why do these discussions always end up with liberals wringing their hands over whether any Nazis are going to get punched, but the opposition to the eliminationist rhetoric of fascists themselves is so muted? Yes, yes, of course everyone agrees that they're bad and that their ideology is bad.
But the reflexive agreement that Nazism is bad doesn't translate into action to do anything about it. Donating to the ACLU or the SPLC is great, but it does nothing to make the streets safer for vulnerable people. Surely it has not escaped your attention that many vulnerable populations are distrustful of the police precisely because of this legacy of injustice you mention, which has often taken place with the tacit agreement of the authorities. .
Muslims, jews, black people, latino people, queer people and so on are not enthused about being the designated victims for yet another round of The Oppression Show. Simply put, there are a lot of people who don't feel safe exercising their rights in the USA and are getting really pissed off about it.
I'm allowed to hold two thoughts in my head at the same time: that it's important that we do everything within legitimate law to suppress bigotry and racial supremacy, and also that it's important that we defend the basic principles on which our rule of law is built.
So: I'm not so concerned about the welfare of the Nazis that are getting punched.
What I'm concerned about is that normalizing political violence will have the effect not just of normalizing Nazi punching, but normalizing punching of all sorts of people.
Does this mean that vulnerable people should be left to fend for themselves on the streets with Nazis throwing bottles at them or beating them? No, of course not. Beat the shit out of those people (call 9-1-1, too).
But those same vulnerable people are going to need to employ something other than violence to deal with offensive flags and racial slurs, no matter how unsafe they (legitimately!) feel when confronted with them.
I think the basic problem is that people arguing the way you are arguing are basically arguing in a theoretical space. It almost never addresses the practical realities nor tells people how to move the needle in any meaningful way. Arguing about doing it right very often ends up being a form of flak that helps keeps the status quo in place.
I'm currently homeless and I try to explain to people why I don't agree with their position and it kind of boils down to the fact that no matter what I do, I seem unable to get meaningful traction on solutions and, very often, people are content to argue with me about "well, we need the right answers" and ignore the fact that they could do something for me right here, right now.
I am probably not saying this very well, but I just run into an awful lot of people online who imagine themselves to be good people who claim they desire to live in a better world and see zero contradiction between that and crapping all over me personally in conversation while doing nothing whatsoever to help me solve my financial problems in any kind of meaningful way.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your side. I get a lot of flak from women who act like my efforts to empower them are simply another form of blaming the victim. But I increasingly feel that it is both irresponsible and disingenuous to argue the side you are arguing without giving concrete solutions in the here and now to the problems people are actually having. Without that, these arguments merely serve to say "We need to respect Nazis (or other horrible people) and we don't need to respect you and we don't actually care about your problem at all."
Hold on. I DO NOT think we need to respect Nazis or their beliefs. Rather, I think citizens have something close to an obligation to suppress Nazis (and all related ideologies) with every lawful means available.
By way of example: the deference Hacker News gives to racism and misogyny in the name of tolerance is deeply problematic for me, and, I think, an enormous mistake.
Where Ed and I disagree is that I do not think it's OK to physically assault someone simply for carrying an offensive flag. That is probably the entire extent of our disagreement.
When people are horrible enough and are not respecting the laws at all themselves, advocating that we can only go after them by lawful means amounts to advocating more respect for them than they will give anyone else.
I don't know the solution. I really don't. But in order to defend yourself from horrible, predatory people in the world today, you basically need to be some kind of kung fu wizard and diplomatic genius combined or you will be railroaded by the laws that, in theory, are supposed to protect good people.
As a victim of childhood sexual abuse who was clear I would murder anyone in cold blood if they raped my small children -- and then go to jail for a very long time because I would not have at all made a sympathetic defendant -- this is a problem space I have contemplated a great deal. Fortunately, I am hellaciously talented and was able to make sure no one raped my children. But there is something very wrong in a world where we worry more about protecting the rights of heinous people like child rapists than we do about their victims, which is essentially what is going on here.
The moment a Nazi attempts to use physical force against you, all bets are off.
But the idea that you can physically attack someone for carrying an offensive flag can't possibly be defensible.
I understand how the flags and racial slurs and such create strong emotions and I offer you all the rhetorical space in the world to talk about how you personally would beat the everloving crap out of someone who tried to burn a cross in your field of vision. I'm not condemning either you or Ed for having strong feelings about Nazis.
But it remains a simple fact that you can't use coercive physical force to stop people from talking.
What has usually happened in practice is that people seize the offensive flag and shred or burn it. Look Thomas, carrying a Nazi battle flag or a deliberate derivative of it isn't just a matter of 'creating strong emotions' in the sense of some proxy moral outrage. In certain contexts, it's an act of aggression.
Legally speaking this may not rise to the standard of criminality for evaluating criminal threats. But a lot of people are increasingly losing confidence in the legal system to protect their civil rights or fairly balance their interests with those of other people in society. In relation to both this and your exhortation to call 911, it's worth referencing the recent controversy over the acquittal of the police officer in the death of Philando Castile. However you feel about the legal aspects of that verdict, there's no getting away from the fact that many people of color and other groups do not feel safe around police officers.
You keep saying of course we must use available within-the-law means to suppress Nazism, but that presupposes the law is morally neutral (highly questionable), fairly enforced (likewise), and that this job should really be left to law enforcement and prosecutors rather than being the subject of any kind of private or collective action. I suggest to you that that's an easy attitude to have when you are not a member of a vulnerable population, but a potentially fatal error of judgment for someone in a more marginal position.
I have basically the opposite perspective: that in a time like this, when the executive branch of the country is controlled by someone who aspires to be an American Duterte, the rule of law and our institutions have never mattered more. To abandon them now is to lose entirely.
Punching nazis isn't because they're "carrying an offensive flag". If that's all it was, I'd totally agree with you.
The difference is the nazi ideology directly threatens the very livelihood of people, and allowing nazis to spread their ideology is really dangerous to these people. The very ideas they're espousing are threatening, because they lead to bigotry and racism and disenfranchisement and violence and death. You can't just argue against them, because your argument isn't going to convince 100% of listeners to reject the nazi ideology. The only way to actually be safe is to stop the spread of nazi ideology, and the way to do that is to make nazis shut up, and the way to do that is to make them afraid to open their mouths.
Yeah it really sucks that this is what it's come to, but the other systems in this country that are supposed to deal with this lawfully aren't working.
I advocate violent suppression of those who think genocide is appropriate. I don't advocate violent suppression of people talking loudly on cellphones.
Nobody's asking for validation of the contents of a persons heart. But people are saying that certain speech acts deserve unyielding opposition because they consist of exhortations to violence. Why conflate two different things?
I'm not following your suggestion of conflation. The correct way to read my comment is as a criticism of the clear rhetorical support for violence in its parent. I am full of controversial opinions, I know...
The contents of a persons heart are known only to them and fundamentally unknowable by anyone else barring some scientific breakthrough, so they cannot and should not be subject to sanction. The words that come out of their mouth, on the other hand, are discernable.
You say the correct way to read your comment is as a criticism of the rhetorical support for violence in the parent, but the parent comment in question treats of violent opposition to Nazism, an inherently violent ideology, which you seem to be overlooking.
Allow me to illustrate how this looks from where I'm sitting:
Abel: Nazism is good! I support putting [people I dislike] into camps and killing them.
Baker: I find Abel's views repugnant and threatening to me, and if he expresses them in my presence I will punch him.
Charlie: Baker is terribly violent!
Please explain to me why you find the idea of violent opposition to Nazism 'chilling' but don't have anything to say about Nazism itself. It seems like a strange double standard.
> Please explain to me why you find the idea of violent opposition to Nazism 'chilling'
That is one HECK of an uncharitable assumption. My original comment speaks for itself. You are coming uncomfortably close to calling me a Nazi sympathizer. I don't appreciate that.
In case the ancestors get edited:
>>> 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?
> One of the most chilling comments I've ever read on this site. How does one provide evidence of the content of their heart?
I have no doubt you're a good hearted person and have not made any assumptions to the contrary, but it does read as if you are chilled by a request for evidence that reason and truth are the best means of combating racial purity ideologies.
It would certainly be nice to rely on reason and truth if those strategies are indeed reliable. But the extant question is what if they're not?
The historical record suggests that appeals to reason, truth, and morality actually have a really terrible record as practical responses to autocracy. As we've been talking about Nazis, it's an easily verifiable fact that there was abundant intellectual, political, and religious opposition to their ideology and that none of these proved especially effective.
Once the nazis got comfortable and installed their people in key administrative positions, they just started arresting people whose public behavior was politically inconvenient for them. I don't want to start drawing parallels with individual current events which is more likely to confuse than to inform, but they're not hard to imagine.
I'm not misrepresenting it, I'm giving you my best understanding of your rather cryptic utterances. It would be a lot easier to understand your point if you would explain it in greater detail.
I realize you think your original comment speaks for itself, but I'm telling you that I'm finding it vague and confusing.
No, they expressed a sociopolitical theory that honestly sounds ineffective. They can support that theory with evidence if they want to convince at least me
> I study the role of the monopoly of force in shaping cultural traits associated with violence
and their persistence. I do so in the context of the settlement of the Canadian Prairies from
1890 to 1920. I find that places with a weaker monopoly of force by the Canadian state
during the settlement – as measured by their distance to the early Mounties’ fort – were and
are still more violent despite the later consolidation of the Canadian state. My interpretation
is that counties with a weak monopoly of force during the settlement developed a persistent
culture of violence. Consistent with my view, I find that hockey players born in these places
behave more violently even when observed in a common environment: the same team in the
National Hockey League. Besides the persistence of culture via inter-generational transmission
and socialization, I find that culture favors complementary institutions and political
views, creating an additional channel of persistence. Finally, I show that the monopoly of
force during the settlement crowds out pre-existing cultures of violence brought by immigrants.
Despite the persistence of culture and its dependence on past circumstances, the
right institutional conditions can change it
American textbook whitewashed versions of King and Gandhi, perhaps. It's convenient for the ruling class to have peaceful (and ineffectual) forms of 'resistance' lauded over other means.
So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them?
If they're carrying a battle flag (a specific design you can look up) then they're literally signalling that they're there for purposes of conquest. It's perfectly OK to oppose that.
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
But the 'racial purity' ideology is not always expressed in terms of their personal life choices about who they start a family with. Rather, it frequently comes paired with the assertion that the Other must be conquered, driven away, or eliminated.
'More speech' sounds really nice in principle, but I'm guessing you're not a member of any group that is threatened by eliminationist rhetoric, and people who are under threat are not obliged to serve as martyrs for you to use as moral exemplars in polite debate. Thus, the 'unlimited free speech' argument is a very privileged one, because speech is only free if it can be engaged in without existential anxiety.
Consider Jeremy Christian, the guy who killed two people and injured a third in Portland just weeks ago. He was yelling abuse at two female passengers on the train and people intervened to ask him to stop, and he attacked them with a knife. Those people took your 'more speech' approach and they're dead, are they not? No more speech of any kind for them, and no speech of yours can possibly restore them to their families.
Why, exactly, should people have to subject themselves to injury or death at the hands of bad actors before they're allowed to take any other action in your value schema? By feitishizing 'free speech' without regard to the consequences, you're giving extremists a license to engage in criminal threats but insisting that the people who are the subject of such threats do nothing to safeguard their own persons.
If your approach is so great, how does authoritarianism get off the ground anywhere? Why isn't it just talked out of existence by people armed only with reason and truth? What good are reason and truth when confronted with anti-rationalist ideologies that ignore logic and rely on atavistic emotional appeals, and which are demonstrably successful in activating people to commit violence against innocent people and populations?
You moved the goal posts. Virtually all of us "oppose" Nazism. That doesn't make it OK to physically attack them.
Once again: if it's OK for us to punch Nazis, it must also be OK for anti-abortion activists to violently attack abortion clinics. Their argument that abortion clinics are murder factories --- and argument I vehemently disagree with --- is on firmer ground than our argument that white supremacist speech is somehow intrinsically violent.
If someone is carrying a battle flag, they're manifesting an intention to physically attack you.
I already addressed your abortion point in more detail elsewhere, but briefly, anti-abortion activists are intervening on behalf of a third party, the fetus. Many who support punching Nazis feel directly threatened by Nazism. These are two wildly different situations.
That's just not true, and I think we both know it. The Confederate flag is literally the battle flag of militant American chattel slavery of black people, and virtually nobody who wears or carries it intends to physically attack you.
(Apropos nothing: I was walking through Munich a week ago and saw someone walking down the street in a Confederate flag shirt. I wondered, should I say something? Maybe they just didn't understand what it meant?)
Perhaps that has something to do with my willingness to punch back.
I've been the subject of quite a lot of unprovoked assaults in my life, Thomas; it's rather disconcerting to have someone that I've had as a guest in my own home tell me to disregard my personal experience of violence.
People who are displaying a Nazi battle flag or its derivatives in public spaces are not doing so to express their desire for peace and mutual respect.
And you know that if you ever find yourself in Chicago you are always welcome in my house, too.
I'm not discounting your personal experience of violence. But no personal history of any sort entitles you to hit someone simply for carrying a flag. You know that's true.
I don't know that's true, and will read each situation on its own merits.
I think it's important not to over-simplify or sanitize this. I'm making specific and qualified statements about political realities, not arguing a law school hypothetical. I'm not proposing just unilaterally hitting anonymous individuals over display of generic flags. I am saying that we're suffering an institutional breakdown where reflexive adherence to behavioral norms under all circumstances could compromise people's safety.
The two people who died in Portland a couple of weeks ago are dead because they remonstrated verbally with Jeremy Christian and he responded by cutting their throats. They would have done better to just assault him physically and they might still be alive if they had. They could have done nothing, of course, but you may recall that Christian was abusing and threatening two young women at the time, as opposed to just shouting at nobody in particular.
That's a real thing that happened. Those two people are really and permanently dead now because they underestimated the guy's willingness to initiate deadly violence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The event and Mr. Spencer were panned, to be sure, but not as unambiguously as one might have expected.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You keep responding to me as if I were claiming the purpose of the game were to educate people, when I have told you twice that I don't think that to be case.
“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.”
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.
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.