[off topic]
One of the biggest mind fuck novels I ever read was "The Iron Dream’ by Norman Spinrad.
On one level it’s a ‘hero’s journey’ story about an exiled prince who returns to his homeland and defeats a bunch of evil mind controlling wizards. Lots of excitement and adventure and terrific battles.
The fucked up part is that it’s the last novel Adolph Hitler wrote after migrating to America in 1921.
Hitler was a popular illustrator who eventually felt confident enough to start writing in English. He was a popular figure at conventions and had a huge fandom.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iron-dream-norman-spinrad/7751155?ean=9781490439457
I’m very confused, but I have to go into work. Can someone summarize for my lazy ass what the fuck is going on here?
Read the wikipedia article. It makes more sense but still a mindfuck
No way…what about wolfenstein??
Heavily censored in Germany apparently, which kinda seems odd and protective of Nazis
Yeah they have a blanket ban on Nazi iconography with no carve outs for art, even if antifascist.
That statement is not true and it never was.
Almost correct, but artistic depictions of Nazi iconography actually are exempt from the ban (falling under “Kunstfreiheit” - artistic freedom).
The reason why Wolfenstein still had to be censored was because video games were not really seen as a form of art for quite a long time. But AFAIK that has fortunately changed in the last years and you can now legally obtain uncensored Wolfenstein versions in Germany.
“Bethesda covers its arse in anticipation of a bunch of terminally online American teenagers who just learnt the word ‘nazi’ and would use it to describe a fuckin nun if it made them feel a bit morally superior for ten seconds”
I’ve heard plenty of people try to say WOLFENSTEIN glorifies nazis
I’ve had one idiot tell me ANY media that paints them as competent or successful is glorifying them. And setting anything in a world where they succeeded and progressed technologically instead of collapsing is basically saying Hitler’s world view is valid.
I still don’t know how to respond to that beyond “if you think the nazis were incompetent you don’t know history, and if you think showing a future where fascism took hold is unrealistic I have some bad news for you”
It’s fantasy, and specifically a fantasy in which you get to go on a massive killing spree against some of the worst people in history, how you can somehow pull “this game is making these guys look good” from that, I’m not sure.
It should be noted that a lot of their blunders later in the war can be traced back to Hitler (or one of his sycophants) getting involved and overruling far more experienced Generals, many of whom were not party members. It could also be argued that the economy they set up, while impressive given the state of Germany post-WWI, was an entirely unsustainable war economy that relied very heavily on slave labor. That’s not to say they were completely incompetent, but they did vastly overestimate their own abilities and made many mistakes as a result.
Indeed, they made plenty of mistakes, otherwise they would have won the war.
But it’s less about whether they could have sustained their empire afterward and more people trying to say that portraying them as such is “glorifying” them or propping them up in some sort of idealistic way.
Indeed, they made plenty of mistakes, otherwise they would have won the war.
Therein lies the problem, because even if they somehow executed an absolutely perfect strategy they would not have won the war, not in the long run at least. I agree that Wolfenstein doesn’t glorify them since its reasoning for them winning is outlandish sci-fi technology, but a lot of media that assumes they could have won is glorifying, even if indirectly.
Yeah they were an empire run like and by meth addicts. Terrifying to face, shockingly clever, and headed directly to destruction with the only question being whether they or someone else landed the killing blow on them.
These were not hyper competent tacticians, it was a society that hyped itself into a blood frenzy, convinced of their own superiority and that they’ll be destroyed if they don’t destroy everyone else first. That’s a terrifying threat, but so’s a meth addict with a knife and paranoid delusions.
They were hemorrhaging competence through their Nazi bullshit. Yeah they had some people like von Braun, but they lost people like Einstein (and special shout-out to Fermi who defected from Italy because his wife was Jewish). Additionally their behavior in held territory actively fostered partisan resistance and encouraged fighting to the death.
And that’s ignoring the fact that they broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact while at war with France and England and at war in Africa and while leaving Italy to defend itself. The Soviets were a force unto themselves having been the only army to trounce Russia in centuries.
If they didn’t have at least a few competent nazis, they wouldn’t have been such a threat; WW2 would be over in a month. I’m sure there were even competent Talibans and North Koreans.
