
The Surprising Importance of ‘Wolfenstein: The New Order’ - hunglee2
http://warisboring.com/the-surprising-importance-of-wolfenstein-the-new-order/
======
tptacek
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.

~~~
gspetr
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.

~~~
fellellor
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.

------
arthur_trudeau
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
louithethrid
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.

------
gavanwoolery
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
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
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
gavanwoolery
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution)

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.

------
lucio
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

~~~
glibgil
> 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
Are you advocating violent suppression of views you dislike? Do you not see an
irony there?

~~~
danharaj
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
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.

~~~
eridius
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
eridius
I don't see the relation.

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.

~~~
tptacek
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".

------
4bpp
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
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
Excellent point!

------
Asooka
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.

~~~
forgottenpass
_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.

------
zoner
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.

------
matttproud
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)

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

~~~
tritium
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/)

------
fulafel
The bar is very low, it seems.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The video game industry is… very bad at writing.

------
aaron-lebo
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
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
Similar to the bit in "Knocked Up" about how "Munich" is a great movie because
the Jewish characters are all bad-asses, not victims.

