VIDEOGAMES NEED TO DO MORE THAN JUST PORTRAY NAZIS AS MONSTERS

VIDEOGAMES NEED TO DO MORE THAN JUST PORTRAY NAZIS AS MONSTERS - by Mr Biffo

21/9/2017

I read a great piece this morning, on PCGamesN, by Kirk McKeand. It discusses the depiction of Nazis in video games, from a Jewish perspective. It's well worth a read in its entirety, but it ends on this note:

"We have to keep including Nazis as villains - in fact, we have to do so more - but only in their horrible and disturbing entirety.”

It reminded me of a similar discussion I read in a newspaper many, many years ago, regarding 'Allo 'Allo, of all things, where the conclusion was that the best way to undermine Nazis was to make them look like buffoons.

It's something I've been thinking about a fair bit recently, because I've been watching the TV show Preacher, on Amazon. In that, Adolf Hitler appears as a character - albeit one doomed to spend eternity in Hell - but his portrayal is one that is weirdly sympathetic... and sort of pathetic.

I've not reached the end of the series yet - so maybe it's going to show that his gentle demeanour was all an act - but it's a brave move to make in the current social climate. Of course, two of the people responsible for putting Preacher on TV are Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg - who aren't exactly not-Jewish - so... fair enough. The anti-semitism they've no doubt encountered over their lives has earned them that right.

Inevitably, Kirk's piece got a lot of backlash from - well - those who think we should stop bringing up the Nazis, because the past is the past, and politics have no place in video games, and video games are escapism, and blah-blah-blah.

I probably - hopefully - don't need to point out why these perspectives are wholly wrong-headed in this day and age, why video game creators have every right to put political discussion into their games, and why anyone saying that Nazis should be left in the past are completely on the money, but also deluded if they're not aware that the Nazis themselves haven't exactly left the whole "being a Nazi" thing in the past.

wHITLER POO
Off the back of Preacher, I've been wanting to read a book about Hitler, and last night I found myself looking for one on Amazon.

Hitler has become an iconic figure - indeed, an iconic figurehead for some - and we tend to forget that behind the funny moustache, the foam-flecked ranting, and the, y'know, World War 2/genocide thing, there was a human being. Clearly one of the worst human beings who ever lived, but Hitler was just one man. He was an opportunist who saw the prevailing societal winds, identified a gap in the market, and stepped in to give his people what they wanted. He wasn't a man overburdened with an excess of morality.

And yes, I could be talking about Donald Trump there.

I'm fascinated - nay, obsessed - less with the behaviour of the current US president as I am with how he got like that. Indeed, how so many ill-suited people in positions of power get there.

I mean, look at our leaders in this country. Look at Boris Johnson. There's no question that he is someone who shouldn't be let within a mile of political office, and yet... there he is. Another opportunist who wants power for the sake of power, because he thinks that's the only thing that's going to plug that chasm in his psyche.

The psychology of our leaders is what we should be looking at as much as what they say. Why do they want that job? What is it they want out of it? Are their motivations truly selfless, or are they driven by faulty wiring? Did they get there simply because they were the best at shouting and being intimidating?

Even Jeremy Corbyn (though I find his political leanings more palatable than the alternatives) seems driven more by long-held inflexible beliefs - that have become part and parcel of his entire self-identity - than an attitude that is fluid enough to move with world around him.

Far too often, it seems to me, the people in positions of power - be it political, managerial, whatever - are the worst candidates for the job purely because they want that job in the first place.

I mean, do we really believe that Donald Trump really has any sincere convictions? I don't. I just think he's a messed-up individual, with any number of psychological conditions, who just wants to be the most important, most powerful, person in any given situation.

From what I can tell, he craves respect, craves attention, and craves being right. He's the sort of person who says something, and then will never, ever, back down - no matter how wrong he's proven to be - because he's so achingly insecure. He can't admit when he's wrong, because that would show weakness.

Inside, you can bet that he's terrified all the time.

HUMAN BEINGS
For me, this is the only thing that was missing from Kirk's brilliant piece, and the discussion around Nazis in video games - and, indeed, from the depiction of Nazis in video games as a whole. Simply demonising Nazis and the far-right isn't enough to defeat them. We have to understand why they're like they are.

We have to understand that behind the beliefs are human beings. They weren't born that way; they're a product of where they came from, of the society they live in, and the people around them. It's not about sympathising, or sitting down for a chat over a cup of tea, but I remain a firm believer that you can't just get rid of Nazis by punching them in the face, no matter how funny and satisfying that might be.

There's a reason surgeons don't treat cancer by doing karate on it. You have to eradicate a problem completely - or at least try to - otherwise you drive it into the shadows, where it'll be waiting for its moment to reassert its dominance. Similarly, you can't just bury problems in a marriage. You can't shout your way out of them. You can leave, certainly, and end it... but that isn't a solution when it comes to society, where we have no choice but to live together.

Or, look at it another way, unless you grab a weed by its roots it's only going to grow back. You can't simply pluck at the leaves.

Video games portraying the Nazis as evil - or, slightly more troublingly, as evil zombies - does, as Kirk McKeand points out in his piece, risk turning them into caricatures. But I also think it's not enough to simply depict the evil actions of the Nazis, and decry their ideology as a real bad thing.

The best movie bad guys always think they're the hero, and that's the same with fascists. They don't think they're bad, or wrong. Despite the fact that it's glaringly obvious to the rest of us. The best way to undermine them, to really grab them by the roots. It's to expose them for what they really are; scared, or opportunists, or broken in some way. Exposing that reflects it back on them. It diminishes a monster's power.

As counterintuitive as it feels, if video games really want to help, they need to do something unthinkable. They need to somehow find a way to show the world that Nazis are people too.

Frankly, there's nothing more horrible, disturbing, or scary than the inner workings of a human being.

28 Comments

Paul

21/9/2017 09:47:00 am

Two observations by Douglas Adams spring to mind when reading this. The first was that anyone who wants to be in power shouldn’t be allowed to do so. If memory serves correctly, this claim proceeds a short breakdown of the issues, resolving in the conclusion “people are a problem” (I really need to read those books again - been a long time). This is the reason the rule of the galaxy is a man in a shed with a cat who has no real idea that the questions people ask him have a genuine impact on the galaxy than he thinks they do (in fact, he’s almost unaware of his importance). I think this is covered more in the radio plays than the books.

The other Douglas Adams observation, and remember this was written way back in the early 1980s, was that a good president always distracts peoples’ attention away from those with the real power. Zaphod Beeblebrox, he wrote, was very good at his job.

It’s a good observation to have made all those years ago, but we are now in a world where Donald Trump IS distracting attention away from those who really hold the power. He says something (usually on Twitter - but this week it was a speech to the UN), or does something, and the media scrambles to report it, and the White House scrambles to clarify, mitigate, or just fight fires. Meanwhile, unpleasant things crank on in the background and people tend not to notice.

Whatever Trump is up to, be it planned or just blindly staggering from obstacle to obstacle, he’s a scary person. That he got to power should worry us all, especially as we have a pretty pathetic PM at the moment, and the alternatives appear to be Boris Johnson, or Jacob Rees-Mogg, both of whom can play the Beeblebrox game very, very well.

Darren Lock link

21/9/2017 10:02:46 am

I'm in no way a Hitler apologist (ye gads) but there was more at work than just the raving mad man persona. There were a whole slew of deranged people working under him who were responsible for the aroticities the Nazis came up with. If it were a band, Hitler was the leader singer, but the rest of the band wrote the songs. That's probably not a good analogy.

Of course, that complicates the history and so we now use Hitler as a cypher for pure evil, the Swastika is shorthand for racism and far-right politics, the Holocaust a lesson we must never forget (but genocide still happens despite the horrors of the death camps).

Some of us remember that Allo Allo was actually quite a controversial programme when it first aired. Back in those days, veterans of WWI and WWII were more likely to be alive and have strong memories of the time. Turning figures of hate into mirth-filled morons of merriment took the edge off. There were no death camps in Allo Allo and when the Resistance were caught, they were never put against the wall and shot - instead they often escaped with a flash of their stockinged legs with the picture of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies hidden in an oversized Bratwurst. It was war without consequence.

On the other side of the coin, Mel Brooks has made it his life's work to ridicule the Nazis and Hitler - take on board "The Producers" or "To Be Or Not To Be" - and he is there poking a pointed stick at the Third Reich. The difference between his work and Allo Allo are that characters like Franz Liebkind are deranged and are still dangerous. You wouldn't want to mess with them, whereas comedy SS leader Herr Flick seems harmless and inept.

But back to video games, there's nothing more satisfying in games like the Sniper Elite series, than putting a bullet through a virtual Nazis skull or shooting off his computer generated plums. Every time I score a hit, I do it for my great Aunt and her two children who were bombed out of existence by the fascist scum in the last months of WWII during the final bombing runs on London. The irony is that same great Aunt used to march for Mosely and his blackshirt fascists in the East End because she was poor and they gave some of the participants money to take part in the rallies to bolster numbers. Now Donald Trump hires actors...the same shit, different day.

The thing is we always need to be reminded of the dangers of all forms of political extremism, whether it be from the left or the right. Both paths lead to madness and our baser human feelings. So in computer games, lessons still need to be taught about WWII. There should be no comedy Nazis, but if there are, they still need to have that dangerous edge that shows them to have the capability to round up a whole village and put them to death, rather than to do a comedy goose step out of frame.

So yeah, use the Nazis, but tell the story, remind people what happened (as Holocaust denial seems to be a popular thing these days) and reinforce the idea that good people can be perverted by political ideals run amok. Then make jokes...

David Heslop

21/9/2017 10:05:43 am

Well said Mr B. This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about a lot this past year: that I thought, essentially, Nazis were over. Obviously far-right hatred still existed, but as a concept, Nazis and swastikas and the like were a thing of the past. They were the baddies that Indiana Jones fought. Whilst I’m sadly unsurprised by a resurgent far-right movement, I honestly thought we’d seen the back of actual honest-to-gott Nazis. Till they walked down the bloody streets in Charleston.

As to tackling the human side of Nazism in videogames, that’s a great idea. Humanising Nazis – whilst still showing them to be repellent humans – is fairly common in other media, from Schindler’s List to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and even as far as Downfall’s pathetic portrayal of Hitler; but I’ve never seen it in a game. It reminds me of an idea I had years ago, back when the Call of Duty games were still set in World War II (er, before they were set in World War II again). What if, after playing through an entire game of gung-ho Nazi-stomping action set pieces, the final level said you were to “liberate a German camp” and it turns out to be Dachau or Auschwitz or something. You essentially play one of the first GIs to enter a concentration camp, and the entire last level of the game is a combat-free affair as you walk around, with no clear objective, witnessing the frail tortured humans and the horrific infrastructure that had been put in place. The idea would be to shock the player, to remind them that this was the consequence of Nazism – that it was building these places which made them evil, not necessarily shooting at you and your buddies. Obviously it would be incredibly sensitive and is, in truth, perhaps a terrible idea in the first place. But maybe it would have been effective.

RichardM

21/9/2017 12:50:46 pm

My grandfather was amongst the British soldiers who liberated a concentration camp somewhere east of Berlin. My dad never knew this until he read a history of the division he was in, despite his dad regaling him with many war stories from Egypt and so on. All he ever said was that he didn’t think much of anyone who didn’t like the Jews. This has always resonated with me personally: I agree that it would be a staggeringly awful experience, and wonder if videogames could do it justice.

Spiney O'Sullivan

21/9/2017 03:35:45 pm

Basically the game equivalent of that camp liberation episode of Band of Brothers. That thing hit so very hard.

It's really interesting idea, but frankly I'm not sure the world is ready for a AAA title to tackle the horror of the holocaust. The tabloid press would likely scream about the insensitivity of what they misunderstand to be sick videogames that let you carry out the holocaust yourself, while even certain sections of the gaming press would accuse the developers of being insensitive and using an atrocity to sell games (consider the furore over Deus Ex' Mechanical Apartheid theme, where people got upset that a sci-fi game was doing social commentary like actual good sci-fi is meant to). Other, worse, sections of the gaming populace would take the opportunity to demand that any politics not be included in games because they think they're being victimised by elitist liberal game developers and games should be fun etc...

The few people who actually get the message would be drowned out by idiots.

This, incidentally is why 90% of my gaming media diet is now this website.

Chris Wyatt

21/9/2017 10:24:06 am

People could make a joke, and make ironic stabs at Hitler at the time, and yet, people are more scared to bring up Hitler now than they ever have been; when a bomb could have landed on their head at any moment. You just need to look at the Warner Bros cartoons at the time. Yes, a lot of it was propaganda, but there was also some rather clever, satirical stuff too.

We live in a time when the stupid and ignorant seem to be in charge more than ever. Whoever shouts the loudest gets heard, and the idiots are usually the ones that make the most noise. It's hardly surprising, because our ancestors were aggressive ape. We still are aggresive apes; we've just become a lot better at hiding it; we've found more clever ways to intimidate each other than chucking poo in each others faces.

Nikki

21/9/2017 10:42:44 am

I'd add only one caveat - physical uprising against Nazis has to happen when they are either in power, or are enabled by those in power.

JohnBoyAdvance

21/9/2017 11:32:51 am

Nice Article sir! just gonna put this point through.

Trouble is, we never get the story of why the Nazis (Or someone like them) rose to power. Yes there was blood in the streets but to deny that sanctions made against them after WW1 made people desperate, eager for scapegoats and for change.

Even looking at recent events/results we now go into "insult, belittle and violence" people we don't agree with constantly.

People who voted for Brexit are racist morons who followed what Boris put on a red bus. I voted remain but I looked at everything and the EU is very shit and after some 30 years I can understand why some people wanted to be done with it.

Trouble is on so many social media sites and games is that we like our opponents/villains to be paper thin in depth and hell Im guilty of this too. Like you said we never see how people can possibly think like that and now we don't even go that far. People scream buzzwords now and there is never any attempt to review why someone thinks like OR even see what people have written.

Im stopping here because I'll rant incoherently, go back and re-write for hours.

Col. Asdasd

22/9/2017 11:58:22 am

Think you're on the money with this point. When Biffo says we need to get at the 'roots' of evil people, we can't do so if we refuse to engages with the root causes of their behaviour.

An example: American actions in the Korean war killed something like 20% of the North Korean population. 1 in every 5 people, killed in a conflict still within living memory!

And yet this is never acknowledged when discussing the anti-Western fervour of present day North Koreans. Indeed, the level of sophistication we have in our discussion never progresses beyond the Kim Jong Un freakshow circus, even among esteemed organs such as the broadsheets and the BBC.

22/9/2017 12:02:18 pm

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-american-air-power-destroyed-north-korea-21881

Here's a link for anyone interested in reading more about the Korean war death toll.

MacabreCrab

21/9/2017 12:08:09 pm

The Journey mode in FIFA would have been more interesting had the character been a Nazi.

The problem is that games are not usually well written (I don't think this means they are not good writers, just a logistical barrier) with a few notable exceptions. I see very little characterization that resembles humanity, in fact excluding indie games that are built more on story than direct gameplay, the closer most titles get to representing a normal person or reality the less convincing they seem. I think you highlighted this indirectly when you compared Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Horizon. Somehow dialogue muddies our immersion.

21/9/2017 12:45:47 pm

Haven’t read the linked article yet, but will.

My own ramblings... I think the Nazis and the Holocaust are serious subjects that should never be forgotten (I hadn’t considered until I read this that I’ll have to talk to my children about them someday, which make me want to cry) and that videogames are an acceptable vehicle to do this. There is a clear risk of trivialising them, but I doubt anybody decided to be a Nazi or hate Jewish people because of Herr Flick’s funny walk or Lt Greuber’s Little tank. The ‘mundane’ evil of doing the monstrous acts your commanders tell you unquestioningly is a fascinating position to explore.

I think that the wholesale, almost default position of Nazis or Nazi analogues as baddies detracts from other horrible situations that could be explored in videogames. Would you play a videogame about Islamic extremism? The Troubles? About the Rwandan genocide? The Rohinghya Crisis? And so on and so on. I know none of these things are as black and white as hating Nazis and what they stand for, and are all much more recent, but I think videogame developers can spread their net a bit.

PeskyFletch

22/9/2017 07:55:38 pm

Don't dread it, it can be a good learning experience for them. Discussing the holocaust with my foster son actually helped knock the juvenile, nascent homophobia he had started to pick up from school out of him.

Matt N

21/9/2017 01:06:39 pm

This article got me thinking of Spec Ops: The Line. That game did a great job of making you question just what the hell you were doing, and made you realise just how unhinged your character had become by the end of it. I wonder if it'd be possible or even desirable to have something similar told from the perspective of someone in the Hitler Youth, or the SS? It'd be *incredibly* hard to do right but there could be potential there to explore some of the issues you've touched on in the article. I'm not ashamed to admit I couldn't do the idea justice, though.

21/9/2017 04:45:53 pm

I love how that game messes with you. As well as little things like changes in animations and sound clips in combat, there's lots of little psychological tricks going on that you may not even really notice like changing billboards.

I also really like how upset it makes people. Some people get really angry at being told that playing through the story sort of makes you the bad guy, even if the game didn't give you choices. Not every game has to make you feel like a hero. All they have to do is be satisfying. I was definitely satisfied at the end of Spec Ops: The Line. Certainly not happy, but glad I played it.

Mr Biffo

21/9/2017 03:14:04 pm

I love you lot. Great comments today.

Nick the Gent link

21/9/2017 07:11:29 pm

I'm afraid you spoke too soon, Mr. Biffo ...

Karl M

21/9/2017 06:29:47 pm

I don't understand this obsession with Nazi's. They almost have a monopoly on villainy in the entertainment media and the News Media are totally obsessed with them.

Neo Nazi's are just a bunch of clowns these days and will never (thank god) gain any serious traction as the negative publicity will prevent it. That's not to say they aren't dangerous and can't kill the odd person here or there, but they only have to put their heads above the parapet and the press are all over them.

If only there were another group of villains that could be used instead............

Marxists made the Nazi's look like mere amateurs when it came to death toll. Hitler only gets the Bronze medal for deadliest dictator of all time. Over 100 million people were killed by the Far Left, far outstripping anything the Nazi's did.

Not only did they have death camps, but Marxists were the first to start exterminating political opponents with gas - using "gas vans". A mobile form of gas chamber back in the 1930's.

Yet Marxists are rarely portrayed as the villains in games or movies despite being the ultimate villains in the history of the human race.

Instead, Marxists can come within a whisker of winning a general election, it is social acceptable to be one, acceptable to display marxist symbols, control our education system and indoctrinate the young (Hell, just Google "stoke newington school polling booth" and that's before you get to the s**t show that are Universities) and large chunks of the media will ride shotgun for the ideology.

We see people who are proud to admit to voting for Marxists. I wouldn't vote for a party that openly contained Nazi's and if I was pathetic enough to do so, I certainly wouldn't wear it like a badge of honour!

Pity the Far Left don't get the same level of representation as video game or movie antagonists as the Nazi's.

It's about time we have some of that magic "diversity" when it comes to the portrayal of villains. Would be nice to see some video games that cover these issues as I am sure it would be extremely challenging for a lot of players and invoke deep thought.

Instead we get the same old same old repetitive trio of villains:

Nazi's
Islamic Terrorists
Large omnipotent Corporations

In the absence of the education system doing the job for us, I'd like to see a game about the Killing Fields. Perhaps from the perspective of an urban middle class family and their experiences as they are forced into agriculture with no knowledge or experience and have their individuality stripped away.

It would make the Walking Dead look like Teletubbies.

Nick

21/9/2017 07:09:26 pm

Not a huge fan of Alexei Sayle then?

21/9/2017 08:05:39 pm

I liked him in the Young Ones! Not seen him since!

Kendall9000

21/9/2017 10:33:42 pm

For all the terror and bloodshed caused by the far left, the fact that their ideology isn’t fundamentally based on racial superiority does make a difference. It’s possible to be a Marxist without being a hate filled racist bigot, while that’s something of a prerequisite for becoming a Nazi.

Outside of extremist antifa types, most of the Marxists you’ll run into today aren’t actually in favour of murdering people. Obviously there are quite a few apologists for Stalin and Mao (either denying their crimes or presenting them as a necessary evil), but not compared to the mix of holocaust denial (and outright holocaust celebration) from modern neo-Nazis.

It makes a Marxist character less obviously and straightforwardly black-and-white evil than a Nazi or religious fundamentalist.

22/9/2017 07:05:17 am

How many ever were openly for killing a hundred million people? Was it ever in a manifesto? Well neither were gas chambers I guess.

Yet Marxists did their killing on an industrial scale that made the Nazis look like amateurs.

By proudly defending the most murderous ideology in history that committed crimes against humanity that could rival anything done by the National Socialists, you totally prove my point. Over 100 million dead and it just kind of happens and by people who come at you with a smiling face.

The individual considered to have zero value and even a hundred million considered a worthy sacrifice for the greater good. I consider that far more sinister than outright hatred for one group.

As Diane Abbot (who came within a whisker of being in Government and a cabinet minister) said, "on balance they did more good than harm". Such a disregard for human life is unimaginable but unlike the Nazis she doesn't come at you twiddling her moustache like a cartoon villain.

The Nazis are portrayed with as much depth as the Imps and Demons from Doom and whilst there was a lot more too them, there is a lot less to explore there in a games narrative than there would be with the Left.

Jareth Smith

25/9/2017 03:10:04 pm

"Over 100 million people were killed by the Far Left, far outstripping anything the Nazi's did." - This is the trademark, stunningly ignorant claim you see right wingers making online these days, along with the ongoing Holocaust denial, and other propaganda claiming the Nazis were liberals. It's the usual hodgepodge of irrational nonsense.

Stalinism was not Marxism. It's as simple as that. What Stalin led was a fascist dictatorship which was more in keeping with far right policies than left wing ones. Stalin is hailed as a left wing leader primarily by right wingers who don't understand history or are pursuing an agenda to try and make their anachronistic ideologies appear less bigoted or outright psychotic.

There's a great deal of confusion about socialism/Marxism (remarkably - it's a simple concept) - the tenet is as follows: distribution of wealth amongst the working masses for better living standards for all. In fundamental form, this is it. Right wingers, often being a deranged and vacuous lot (see the Daily Mail comments sections, or idiotic sites like Return of Kings for endless examples of this) singularly fail to understand the concept as they are right wingers - this is their punishment. They're so shut off from the reality they'll just make up whatever nonsense they want as they loathe the left, which is entirely counterproductive as they promptly bumble through online debate making imbeciles of themselves, but remain wholly unaware of it.

Penyrolewen

21/9/2017 10:15:10 pm

Hmm, lots of heavy stuff today! But stuff that needs discussing.
There's so much I could write here but I'll content myself with the left/right thing.

As I see it - and I've read a fair bit about this- there *is* a difference between the far left and the far right in terms of killing/inhumanity etc. Yes, the left has probably killed more. Stalin, and others, killed anyone in their way. Utterly ruthless, amoral, no regard for human life at all. Pol Pot drove millions to starvation because he thought money and urban life was the wrong way to live and only peasants were pure and righteous enough to exist. Awful, inhumane, unspeakable things were done in many countries. But only the nazis killed (and did worse) to people for simply being who they were. Stalin killed anyone who opposed him. Millions of them. But he didn't turn people into soap (literally. Google it if you don't know) because of their grandmother's religion. Pol Pot despised (and killed many, many) non-peasants but it was ideological, not racial. And the Nazis are the only people to have industrialised mass murder. The British invented concentration camps but the nazis turned genocide into a process and even made the Jews do a lot of the "work" as it was too mentally distressing for the SS. And actively searched for cheaper, quicker and less "upsetting" ways of killing as shooting was a) expensive in terms of ammunition b) slow and c) affected the SS troops in a negative way.

They took racism to its extreme, ultimately obvious, conclusion.

That's the difference. People on the left AND right have killed people who oppose their world view. Only nazis industrialised the murder of a people who didn't oppose them in terms of political views (at least, not necessarily) but simply for being a 'different race' (whatever that means).
Of course I don't mean that any Jews supported Hitler. Just that they had never set themselves up in opposition, that wasn't the nazis' problem with the Jews. The nazis simply thought that they were in themselves the problem and so set out to exterminate them.

Double Harris

21/9/2017 10:59:43 pm

Biffo, being a psychologist type you'll no doubt be aware of the "Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures" carried out in the 60s - the experiment was able to prove the vast majority of regular people can voluntarily end up committing harm to another person if told to by a person in apparent authority.

This revelation to me was in many ways scarier than reading about the scope of the Nazis' crimes. The fact that the majority of human beings, if they had been placed in a similar situation to a Nazi soldier would have 'obeyed orders' in the end really makes you worried about what the species as a whole is capable of. And that's exactly why we can't forget or over-caricature what happened, at the risk of humans all too easily repeating the past.

Matthew Long

21/9/2017 11:49:24 pm

This might not be a popular view, but forgive me for offering a slight defence of 'Allo 'Allo here (which was co-created by a WW2 veteran).

Yes, it's smutty and coarse, but there's quite a few things about it that deserve praise, particularly considering it was a broad British mainstream comedy made over thirty years ago. First of all, the French are the heroes. Stereotyped as randy philanderers, I concede, but still the heroes. In contrast, all the Brits are bumbling idiots. Secondly, as a kid I found Herr Flick very creepy, an effect enhanced by all the other characters being so obviously frightened of him. (And possibly by my parents explaining to me how evil the Gestapo were.) Finally, this was one of the first UK shows or films I saw growing up that was even slightly sympathetic towards the Germans. In the sense that it made it clear there was a difference between a German soldier and a Nazi. Most of the German officers just seemed scared, trapped by circumstance; they just wanted to get out of the war alive rather than driven by burning ideological hatred. All that and jokes about big boobies and flashing knobs. So for all its faults I think we should cut that programme a little slack.

22/9/2017 07:34:36 am

Yup a surprisingly level of nuance there. All Quiet on the Western Front is another great one to check out but in relation to WW1 and also shows the war from the perspective of the average Joe.

Would be nice to see something similar with the US Civil War where the average Confederate soldier certainly couldn't afford slaves and if anything were held in poverty by the wealthy using slaves to provide cheaper labour.

Yet those men turned out to die on a scale that made it the most deadly conflict Americans were ever involved in.

Clearly there must have been a LOT more to it than existing media depictions.

For me a war is defined by the poor sods who did the dying, not those who sat miles from the lines drinking fine wine and actually ended the war with plum jobs and a comfortable life whereas the soldiers that survived went back to grinding poverty.

Alas those men and their motivations will always be misportrayed as being the same as the 1% at the top. Cartoon villains with moustache or Doom demons.

We deserve better writing.

22/9/2017 08:01:16 pm

Also Yvette was very hot.

VIDEOGAMES NEED TO DO MORE THAN JUST PORTRAY NAZIS AS MONSTERS - by Mr Biffo

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