For two days in August of 2017, Nazis and their sympathizers marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a demonstration of hatred and violence, and resulted in the beating of unarmed protestors, many of them minorities, and a terrorist attack that killed an American citizen and injured 19 others. It was one of the most shocking and horrific moments in what is perhaps the most shocking and horrific era of American history since the abolition of slavery.
The once greatest nation on Earth is now occupied by a minority of the cowardly and hateful, led by a clear foreign actor who would isolate our nation from the rest of the global public and rob it blind. For the average person, there's almost no recourse. The vast majority of American society lives paycheck to paycheck, unable to take time to protest, make a public political statement, or wield nearly as much influence as a pharmaceutical or fossil fuel lobbyist. The only hope is for midterm elections in 2018—and that's assuming our election integrity remains in place. So what can the average person do in the face of this unmitigated, seemingly unsolvable outrage? Take part in the greatest of American past times: killing Nazis.
I started writing this piece last week, but apparently developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda were way ahead of me. Last Thursday, they stirred up controversy when they tweeted out the above trailer for the upcoming Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, as some believed this to be a not-so-veiled threat toward the American political right. Ignoring the sheer facepalming irony of a population—one so desperately playing the victim—being offended by anti-Nazi messaging, many seem to have forgotten that the Wolfenstein series has been about killing Nazis for more than three decades. It's one of the most enduring parts of gaming history, a lasting work of historical fiction, and as of the 2014 series reboot Wolfenstein: The New Order, a cathartic and morally instructive game that holds some important lessons for the present day.
Though there were two entries before it, Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 was the first real impact title in the series—and what an impact it was. Set in a universe where Nazis actually got their hands on the supernatural and occult technologies they were so obsessed with, it began a longstanding tradition in gaming: casting Nazis as absurd supervillains that explode into clouds of meat and blood when shot at. Not only that, but it also invented the first-person shooter and the technology necessary to make one (shouts to John Carmack). Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield—none of these series would exist without the Nazi-slaying DNA of Wolfenstein.
After about 20 years of other developers doing it better, MachineGames retooled the franchise in 2014, giving it an new setting, story, and place in the Nazi-fiction canon. Wolfenstein: The New Order follows series protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz as he struggles to liberate an alternate-history version of 1960s Europe after the Nazis won World War II. It was a surprise success, and a grotesquely gory ballet of Nazi killing. The game is important today because, in this time of heightened outrage and rhetoric, we seem to have lost track of all sense and realism. The political right, awkwardly shackled to a subset of hateful bigots, have attacked the series as a leftist fantasy that's meant to incite violence against their side of the aisle. Having played through The New Order, it's clear that this is far from the point. Wolfenstein isn't about politics, or inspiring real-world hate and violence—it's about how fundamentally absurd and awful hate and violence are on both sides.
In the first 15 minutes of The New Order, you'll experience a face-first aerial crash with a Nazi fighter plane, make a preposterous leap onto the wing of an Allied transporter, survive that transporter's crash, escape a snarling battalion of robot Nazi dogs, and gun down a couple titanic Nazi mechs. It sounds glorified—and to some degree it is—but whether it's the cramped, drab spaces, the downtrodden and terrified American GIs, or the gut-wrenching choice you're forced to make at the end of the chapter, the first message of Wolfenstein resonates loud and clear: war is hell.
Though you'll spend the next 10-15 hours tearing down Nazis like a Gronk-sized John Wick, the game doesn't let you forget that senseless violence affects everyone, and that even the cartoonish flesh bags you're blowing up were people too. A series of letters can be found throughout the game, which show tragedy and moral ambiguity on both sides. The first, written by a soldier named Oskar, is a touching note to a friend back home, full of fears and regrets and self-doubt—that is, until Oskar finds his resolve to continue killing "primitives" and assert the Aryan race's dominance over the world. After reading, your resolve to continue toppling the Nazi regime is intact, but the humanizing element casts a dark cloud over what's to come. By the time the credits roll, you'll have infiltrated a concentration camp, stolen a nuclear submarine, taken a quick trip to the Nazi moon base, and discovered an actual technologically-advanced secret Jewish cabal that helps turn the tides of war. Wolfenstein has two feet planted firmly in the ridiculous, and the absurdism on display is where the real philosophical meat is. When you kick down a door and blast a few Nazis with a supercharged laser rifle from space, any pretense of realism flies out the hole where the door used to be. And then it all comes into focus. The enemy, both then and in our current political climate, clearly isn't other people: it's hate itself. The unfortunate souls on the business end of your LaserKraftWerk are faceless super soldiers, giant death robots, and over-the-top comic book villains. You could slap any insignia you want on their sleeve and we'd still take them down—it just so happens that Nazis have been the definitive personification of absolute hate in literature since we killed Hitler. Think about how many of the best recent works of fiction involve Nazi villains. Saving Private Ryan. Inglourious Basterds. Captain America. Indiana Jones. Even the freaking Sound of Music. It's ingrained into our culture, and that's because we all understand Nazism for what it is: an extremist ideology with one of the highest body counts in the history of the world. It is an engine of hate built on hate that makes decent people hate them in turn. It spreads and corrodes and divides until we're reduced to nothing but ridiculously jacked dudes in giant overcoats mowing down stormtroopers with a chaingun. But to stop the madness, we can't be attacking the people that promote these things. We have to get to the root of the issue and rise above the hate. All of us, on every side, because it will propagate, and it will find new recruits, and it will continue to fuel our darkest moments. Hate hasn't made anyone act like this lately (warning: super NSFW and will totally bum you out)—
—but it has made us act like this (same warning applies):
The absurdism isn't just on the part of the Nazis, however. Of all the invincible protagonists in gaming history, few are as ridiculous as B.J. Blazkowicz, and the game is cleverly aware of this fact. After taking that initial Nazi plane to the face, your pilot somehow revives you only to exclaim, "You're tough as they come you know, Jesus." Throughout the journey, B.J. will also take a chunk of shrapnel to the head, survive a 14-year coma, endure several stabbings/eviscerations, be injected with enough nerve toxin "to kill an elephant," and call in a nuclear strike on himself in the finale—only to somehow escape and make it to the sequel.
If the Nazis are the hyperbolic image of hate, Blazkowicz is the hyperbolic image of American nationalism (basically the human version of this picture). Americans are known around the world for their overcompensating masculinity, obsession with guns, screaming "'Murica!", and respecting our flag more than we respect peaceful black protestors, but B.J. is what so many Americans want to see in themselves: righteousness, invincibility, tenacity, power. Unfortunately, the years of American supremacy are over. We have a global public now, like it or not, and we can't just take care of everything on our own. Blazkowicz survives because he has to—it's a video game, after all—but The New Order constantly reminds you that he shouldn't. This indestructible machismo is as divorced from reality as demon Nazis with death robots, and the current American hyper-nationalism that has resulted is what got us into this nightmare.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus will follow Blazkowicz as he makes his way to an occupied America and attempts to liberate it from the Nazi war machine. And though the real America has undergone a soft coup, it luckily looks nothing like this bleak alternate reality—except for an emboldened Nazi or two walking around. We don't need to resort to violence in the streets to solve our problems, and we certainly don't need dual-wielded automatic shotguns and EMP grenades either. We need to attack hate at the source, and we need to do it together, because no one person or single side of the political spectrum can do it alone. It will be difficult, and there will be setbacks, but it's the only way forward. And this brings us to the final lesson from The New Order.
In the climax, a grievously wounded but victorious Blazkowicz, having just dispatched the arch-villain, prepares to call in a nuclear strike on himself, in turn leveling the most critical military compound in the Nazi regime. As he reflects on his life and the wars he's fought, he recites an excerpt from the actual "New Colossus"—the famous inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Those words—"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses"—are famous, and they stand for a crucial value that nationalist Americans seem to have forgotten: sacrifice. Americans sacrificed when they left their friends and families in Britain to discover a new world and the chance of a better life. We sacrifice every time we let an immigrant enter this great nation in search of the same. In war, we've sacrificed bitterly to keep ourselves secure and turn back Nazi threats—but we've also sacrificed wantonly to protect our own interests in the Middle East and South America. Blazkowicz made the ultimate sacrifice for the good of millions he'll never know or never meet, and it's why he was victorious. If we want America to endure the era of Trump and survive, we need to sacrifice. We need to sacrifice our time and money to help the less fortunate and make our voices heard. We need to sacrifice policies that, while making some feel safer, ultimately stoke the fires of hatred (i.e. the war on drugs, travel bans, ease of access to firearms, privatized healthcare). And we will certainly need to sacrifice our own sense of self-righteousness and listen to the people on the other side, even if it seems like there's no common ground. No B.J. Bazkowicz is gonna swoop in and magically solve all of our problems (not even this guy). If we don't work together, sooner or later the hate—much like a mecha-Nazi with dual chainguns—will tear us apart for good.
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