The 3D Spies of WW2

[Monte Davis]

I'm guessing that Wolfenstein and 'Indiana Jones' get different treatment
because video games are more tightly linked than movies to Those Scary Kidz
Today: at some inarticulate level of German consciousness, the swastika a
teenager sees on the computer or Xbox screen playing late at night alone in
his bedroom is somehow more insidious, more dangerous, than in the
(presumably) more public, more shared-with-adults experience of a movie.

Symbols -- especially symbols with history (or histories) attached --  are
multivalent, even less constrained by expectations of consistency and
coherence than words are. Think about the Confederate flag here: it means
something different, and provokes different responses, when flown over the
South Carolina capitol than it does on the denim jacket of a North Dakota
teenager (or on Prince Harry's outfit at that embarrassing costume party in
2005). For the latter it's almost totally free of either historical or
racial context, and signifies only "I'm a small-r rebel, and this shows I
don't care what the Establishment thinks."

Ditto (here) for bikers' Wehrmacht helmets and other Third Reich trappings.
Ditto for Mao's Little Red Book on US campuses circa 1970: it was a way of
saying to LBJ and Nixon that "the enemy of my enemy (namely you) is my
friend." Never mind that this particular friend had recently finished
starving 20-40 million of The People, and was busily using *his* crowds of
angry young people much the way Hitler had used the SA before purging it. 

Then of course there's Hitler in Thailand...
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-16/national/40606745_1_chiang-mai
-ayutthaya-thailand-s


demands foir cionsiust5enty 
-----Original Message-----
From: Bekah [mailto:bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:49 AM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: 'David Morris'; 'P-list'
Subject: Re: The 3D Spies of WW2

In Germany, many things related to Nazism are illegal, for obvious reasons.
It's illegal to belong to a neo-Nazi organization, and it's illegal to own
Nazi paraphernalia except for purposes of historical interest (such as for a
museum.) But here's where things get a bit less clear. There seems to be
some kind of law against displaying a swastika, but under what
circumstances? The game Wolfenstein 3D was banned in Germany because it
depicted swastikas, and the new Return to Castle Wolfenstein will be sold in
Germany with all swastikas removed. However, when I lived in Germany, I
could go to the local video store and rent "Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade," which features a giant Nazi parade in Berlin with swastikas
everywhere. Why is that legal and Wolfenstein 3D is not?
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