Further Thoughts on Dressing Like a Nazi

I’ve had a number of interesting conversations since I wrote about Rich Iott, the Republican candidate from Ohio who was a Waffen SS World War II reenactor. Some of it took the from of a back-and-forth with Daniel Joseph, another Tumblr blogger, who wrote about the virtues of role playing as a good guys as well as bad guys (both in real life and in video games). Some of it has come from Twitter and some from conversations on campus this week, mostly about whether it’s permissible to play the role of a bad guy or whether doing so actually amounts to some form of agreement with the bad actions of the person whose role we’re playing.

Here are some further thoughts of mine on the subject:

First, I wonder whether people really enjoy playing the bad guys? Are there examples of this sort of behavior? Are there games where you dress up like a bad guy and commit atrocities?

I suspect not.

But, even if somehow this turns out to be the case, I’ll say a little more: the Republican candidate in Ohio didn’t just buy a game and play one of the options provided by the game’s creators. He joined a group that seems to whitewash the fact that the SS was a criminal organization effectively devoted to breaking internationally accepted rules of warfare. They murdered POWS and civilians, lots of them.

But he suggests that he joined the group a) to bond with his son and b) because he loves military history. If these things are true, then war reenactment might very well be the way to go — but why not reenact a group that didn’t break the rules of war and that didn’t commit some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century?

I’m not specifically against war reenactment or war games (video or board). In this case, though, I think that the choice of the Waffen SS is problematic. While I don’t know this person and while I’m merely guessing at his motivation, from all I’ve read it seems pretty likely that he sort of liked the idea of the notoriety associated with dressing up in an SS uniform and that whatever else he says is post hoc justification … and, from my perspective, his choice is worthy of rebuke.

At bottom, my position is, I think in fundamental disagreement with the position that it can be fun and not at all morally problematic to choose to reenact the part of those who commit (or have some hand in committing) atrocities. Thus, to dress up as a Confederate soldier and reenact some battle in the Civil War is quite different from dressing up as a Confederate guard at the Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War.

This boils down, at some level, to the clear difference between playing robbers in Cops & Robbers as a child and dressing up like a member of the Waffen SS for a couple of reasons.

First, I remember playing all sorts of games as a child and there are indeed good guy/bad guy roles that had to be played in order for the games to work. But, at least on my street, no one wanted to be the Robbers or the Empire or Captain Hook — because the bad guys lose. While the Robbers could take hostages, or violate some other norms, we know they can’t win … so playing that side was futile and, more often than not, the smaller children or the younger siblings would have to take those roles while we, smiling and pleased with ourselves, would always play the role of the Cops or the Rebellion or Peter Pan. The Robbers and the Confederates lose, and so I wouldn’t want to play those roles, but they don’t commit atrocities so playing those roles isn’t morally questionable. The SS and the Andersonville guards are pretty well-known for committing atrocities, so I wouldn’t want to play those roles and I think they are morally problematic as roles to be played.

Second, it seems to me that, for example, playing the Axis side of Axis & Allies is a far cry from dressing up like a Nazi (and not just any old Nazi, in this case, but a member of the SS): we would question the person with whom we play the game if (s)he did more than just talk about taking over the world (which is the role (s)he is supposed to play): what if the Axis player decided to joke around about committing crimes against humanity or decided that, instead of trying to win the war, (s)he would throw in the towel in the East in order to spend more time murdering Jews? Is this all still a fun part of the game? My sense is that it is not.

We spend a lot of time thinking about — and villifying — the Nazis, even though there wasn’t something inherently evil about Germans in the 1930s and 1940s. Hannah Arendt covered that ground nicely with her book on Eichmann. Just because many were bureaucrats rather than devils doesn’t tell us much, to my mind, about whether we ought to collect their regalia or dress up in their garb for Halloween. To my mind, their deeds were such that — even though we’re wrong to think of them as “pure evil” or something like that — dressing up like Eichmann or a member of the SS and then calling it a reenactment or game is problematic.

In short, this isn’t — for me — a question of whether we’re still allowed, in this day of political correctness and so on, to have some fun role playing the bad guy in a game. But, then, for me, it was never any fun to have to be the bad guy in those games. The bad guy loses … and well he should. I’d rather dress up like (and/or be) the hero, not the villain, any day. But no one, to my mind, ought to be dressing up like or playing the role of the war criminal.