
What the Nazis of ‘Wolfenstein’ tell us about the futurists of Silicon Valley - dcposch
https://mic.com/articles/185995/what-the-laser-toting-nazis-of-wolfenstein-tell-us-about-the-futurists-of-silicon-valley
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jholman
Obligatory complaint about the mis-representation of Heinlein.

This is an author who also wrote a (glowing) book about anarcho-syndicalists
liberating their prison colony from corporatists colonialists (that'd be
MiaHM). Does it get more anti-facist than that? This is also the author who
wrote a book about how free-love hippies are so much more correct than Mrs
Grundy that physics itself obliges the hippies (I'm thinking of SiaSL).

But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues
of service to the collective. (Again, other books talk, _extensively_ , about
the problems with service to a collective.)

Of course service to a collective is part of a facist state, but it's also
part of a democratic state. Well, a healthy one, anyway.

Heinlein's politics were diverse and complicated (and sometimes thoughtful,
and sometimes wrongheaded), and attempting to summarize them based on a
shallow reading of one of his novels is a mistake no legitimate journalist
should make.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Pournelle and Card weren't fascists either.

The author is clearly one of those who uses "fascist" as a synonym for "a
person who isn't a communist", and can thus be safely ignored.

~~~
mordae
Yeah, Ender was actually devastated by the outcome of his involvement and he
works hard to undo his crime in the Speaker For The Dead book.

------
Lazare
> But these visions of a Nazi tech utopia aren’t just provocative settings for
> pop sci-fi. In fact, such science fiction and anti-fascist alternative
> histories reveal how those who imagine our future are deeply attracted to
> fascism.

Wait, what?

> Some of science fiction’s most beloved, canonical writers – Robert Heinlein
> (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land), Jerry Pournelle (Lucifer’s
> Hammer) and, more recently, Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) — wove their
> worlds with far-right, reactionary, and even outright fascistic themes and
> heroes.

False. It may be true that t he later Ender's Game's book have fascistic
themes (I haven't read them), and it might even be true that Card has some
fascistic beliefs (I'm not familiar with his personal philosophy). But I have
read Heinlein and Pournelle in general, those books in specific, and am
familiar with their philosophies, and that's simply an incorrect claim to make
about Pournelle, and a _bizarrely_ wrong claim to make about Heinlein.

~~~
Turing_Machine
It's pretty bizarre about Pournelle, too. I recall a hit piece that came out
after his death equating his beliefs with the CoDominium government in some of
his books, blithely ignoring the fact that the CoDominium were _not the good
guys_ in those books (far from it).

------
rayiner
> Peter Thiel, who’s written that capitalism is undermined by women being
> allowed to vote, is an investor in Yarvin’s startup.

I don’t know a lot about futurism, but given the author clearly doesn’t seem
to know how to fact check I’m going to assume the time I spent getting to this
part was wasted.

~~~
setgree
I stopped when the author wrote that "Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) — wove
[his] worlds with far-right, reactionary, and even outright fascistic themes
and heroes." This is just not at all an accurate read of Ender's Game. The
later books, sure -- i.e. the character in one of the Shadow of the X books
who says that the purpose of life is to reproduce and that he himself
suppressed his homosexuality to fulfill this purpose (???) -- but Ender's
Game's themes, while religious, are downright anti-fascist.

Thiel actually has said the thing that you quote [0] (though perhaps I'm
misunderstanding you).

[0] [https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-
thiel/educatio...](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-
thiel/education-libertarian) "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare
beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies
that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of
“capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

~~~
coldtea
> _but Ender 's Game's themes, while religious, are downright anti-fascist._

Is it though?

[https://fabiusmaximus.com/2010/09/12/21238/](https://fabiusmaximus.com/2010/09/12/21238/)

~~~
jholman
The parts of the article you linked that are about how Card is sooooo right-
wing, and so pro-facist, are pretty... insubstantial?

I'm attempting to write obliquely to limit spoiler effect.

But yeah, of course #2/#3 is the reason Ender's Game is so massively popular.
But also notice that's not what the author thought he'd written (ha ha, so
much for genius).

I mean, notice that Card thinks that SftD and Xenocide are the natural sequels
to the important themes of Ender's Game, but 99% of his commercial audience
(including me at the age when I first read SftD) thought they were unrelated
and unrelatable, and preferred the Shadow sequence. But Card took over a
decade to go for it and write the first Shadow book, Ender's Shadow (1999, 13
years after SftD, which only took a year after Ender's Game).

Ender's Game is pro-facist the way Robocop is pro-police-state. (And yeah,
when I saw Robocop in my teens, I thought it was pro-police-state. sigh.)

------
hnzix
Cory Doctorow's _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ is the only novel I've
read which deeply explores the cultural impact of pervasive social media
coupled with machine learning and post-scarcity. I found it far more thought-
provoking than the usual "oh lookie robots errywhere".

------
StavrosK
Granted, I didn't read the whole article, but I didn't really get how the
author went from "authors write about advanced Nazi societies that are clearly
oppressive and evil" to "authors want Nazi societies". Can someone explain?
Right now it seems to me that the article has some gaping holes (the average
alt-right is a 20-something male working in IT, but so is the average
libertarian).

~~~
oblio
> average alt-right is a 20-something male working in IT

How so? Or is it just because "alt-right" is an internet construct, normal
people just call them "far-right"?

~~~
StavrosK
I don't really know, that's what the article claimed. It seems odd to me, but
I guess they have their sources? But yeah, over here we usually call them
"neo-Nazis", as there's a lot of overlap.

~~~
candiodari
I've only heard that term used to refer to groups in Western Europe. Those
groups, incidentally, are very different from what is called the "alt-right"
online.

~~~
StavrosK
Very possibly (I'm from Greece, and Golden Dawn are Neo-Nazis). What's the
difference between them and alt-right?

~~~
candiodari
Well for one thing, they alt-right hate the association with Nazis, whereas
Neonazi groups in Western Europe are quite open about that connection. They
talk and glorify Hitler, (often publicly, which is where a lot of problems are
created), profess their hate on Jews, give the Nazi salute, etc. They don't
have much of an economic agenda, if any at all, whereas the online groups such
as the alt-right are defined by their economic agenda.

Neo-Nazis are also much more like the Nazis were: they are a youth movement.
Most of what they do is not all that political. They organize parties. They go
to soccer matches. They organize ping pong tournaments. They have biker
clubs/gangs. They hang out in cafes. (I'm talking about North West Europe,
don't know about Golden Dawn)

The alt right is much more about extreme laissez-faire, associated with the
republican party (Tea Party, etc).

You have the same group on the left, sometimes referred to as the alt-left (as
in associated with democrats), but the ideology is the same, they're about
extreme laissez-faire and small government. Of course this is "very different"
from the alt-right. Except, other than the association with the other large US
party I can't find any real difference.

The funny thing is that of course anti-immigration attitudes (immigration, the
concept of moving countries, as opposed to immigrants, the people),
historically, was far more associated with the left than the right. You can
understand the reasoning too: if the state is to control worker outcomes, then
of course the state must strictly control competition. Otherwise, companies
simply undercut eachother by hiring cheap labour overseas. So the State must
tightly control the borders, for goods and for people, so as to prevent that
from happening. Immigration, which directly affects the most important market
that socialists want to control, the labour market, must be very tightly
controlled if the government is to succeed.

I would even go so far as to say it makes very little sense, even today, for
ostensibly leftist parties to be pro-open-borders. That is in direct
opposition to their stated aims and clearly (and strongly) works against their
stated aims.

But of course the solution to that conundrum is simple : the entirety of the
US is simply extreme-right, extreme laissez-faire. Including Obama, of course,
who "nationalized" healthcare into a private sector solution (leftists
worldwide went WTF), and spent (sorry "loaned") almost 8 trillion dollars of
government money to keep capitalism running.

~~~
StavrosK
That's very insightful, thank you for the explanation.

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vadimberman
> “The standard Seattle Nazi is a white male under 30 who either works in the
> tech industry or is going to school to work in the tech industry...”

The tech occupation may as well describe an average inhabitant of Seattle.

What is the point of the article? Some techies are fascist / alt-right?
And...?

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YeGoblynQueenne
I think this article is best explained as a veiled advertisement of
Wolfenstein.

