SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Nobody here is a fascist right? I thought not. Fascism is something other people get up to. But maybe we should check ourselves. We might be fascists after all. Perhaps we play fascist games. These thoughts are because of a news item about the popular (or, as subeditors would have it, 'controversial') board game Secret Hitler. The game (which Kickstarted in 2015) has been released to mainstream retail in Australia and New Zealand where it's attracted criticism. There have been 10 complaints to the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) in Australia after it was stocked in ordinary toy stores. Children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have spoken out against this crass and tasteless product. People have been triggered. The ADC has called for stores to boycott the game. Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the ADC, has this to say: This is beyond normal. What's next, a board game set in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz? Ah, my old friend, the famous slippery slope argument. But let's investigate this game on its merits. Secret Hitler is produced by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage LLC, the people who brought us Cards Against Humanity. These guys have form for skirting the edge of good taste and occasionally plunging over in a glorious splash-dive. Secret Hitler is a hidden role/social deduction card game in the same vein as The Resistance or the various Werewolf iterations. Each play takes the role of a politician in Weimar Republic Germany in the 1920/30s: most players are liberals but one or two will (unknown to the others) draw the role of fascists. The fascists know who each other are, but the liberals don't know who anyone really is. One fascist player is secretly Hitler. Each turn, the office of President moves round the group and everyone votes on legislation drawn from a deck, which is either liberal or fascist. The liberals win if 5 liberal laws get passed; the fascists win if 6 fascist laws get passed or if Hitler ever becomes president after 3 Fascist laws have been passed. But why would anyone vote for fascist laws? Well, passing fascist legislation lets you peep at other players' roles or even assassinate other players, so the liberals have an incentive to do what fascists want for their own game (for example, to identify fascists or even kill Hitler). As with most social deduction games, the drama comes from the fact that everyone is motivated to act against type. The liberals will urge fascist legislation to gain some unconstitutional benefits, whereas the fascists (including Hitler) will lie low, masquerading as liberals and reluctantly allow themselves to be persuaded of the need to vote for tough measures until they are strong enough to reveal themselves and seize power. It's a pretty neat exploration of the frailty of democracy in the face of determined insurgency. Let's be clear, the game does not flaunt Nazi iconography. There are no images of Hitler or swastikas anywhere on the box, in the rules or on the cards. The word 'Nazi' is not used. As you can see, the fascists are snakes and lizards, Hitler is some sort of dragon and the legislation is generic. Jews and the Holocaust are nowhere referenced. The game is abstract and the only concrete links to the German context are the name 'Hitler' and the convention of saying 'Nein' or 'Ja' when voting. The main designer, Max Temkin, sees the game as a tool for raising consciousness about the dangers of fascism. In a candid interview with the US news site Washington Jewish Week, Temkin (himself Jewish) explains how the idea for the game was prompted by his apprehension about the rise to power of President Trump. We came up with the idea for Secret Hitler as we were watching the Republican primaries last year. We were playing a lot of hidden identity games ... and thinking about how the mechanics of those games mirrored how authoritarians take power in a democracy through deceit and manipulation Temkin has followed through on his concerns. In 2017, he sent a copy of Secret Hitler to every US Senator - a copy each to all 100 of them. The point, Temkin explains, is that Hitler "required the cooperation of well meaning men who hoped to appease and control the Nazis" - and that Trump won the White House for similar reasons. He followed this up by releasing the 'Trump Pack' that allows you to play the game with Donald Trump and his Administration rather than the nameless fascists - and all profits go to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Temkin and the guys at Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage clearly have impeccable liberal credentials. They even ran a campaign to buy some land on the Mexican border to help stymie Trump's wall. So if Secret Hitler is an educational game with pure liberal intentions, what are the Anti Defamation Commission up to? The ADC is an anti-hate charity, focusing largely (some would say, entirely) on antisemitism and drawing attention to the rise of Far Right and Neo-Nazi sentiments. Worthy stuff. Their mission statement includes
The ADC and games designers like Max Temkin should be a united front against fascism, since Secret Hitler is exactly the sort of product that 'educates the public about the dangers of anti-Semitism and racism in all its forms' and if the ADC was really 'employing the instruments of research and fact finding' then they'd discover this themselves after 5 minutes of online browsing. Instead, we get this: There is nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about Hitler This of course true, in a narrow and reductive sense. There's nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about murders in big Edwardian mansions either, but Cluedo still escapes the censorious eye. Max Temkin offers this advice to morally vexed customers on the Secret Hitler website FAQ: Temkin's cheery dismissal is surely the correct response - because it was the response of the generation that actually fought Nazism, who regarded Hitler as a preposterous figure of fun. Wartime propaganda poster, Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and Bugs Bunny in Herr Meets Hare (1945) Somehow, Hitler has turned into a numinous figure of evil, too terrible to be spoken of except in hushed tones and certainly not a fit subject for games or entertainment. How different my own childhood was. Nazi Action Men!!! The classic 'Escape From Colditz' board game HAD A SWASTIKA ON IT. Notice how the modern re-issue has removed that. Escape From Colditz is a good case in point, since nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about being stuck in a Nazi POW camp - but that game was designed by Pat Reid who had himself been such a prisoner (and successfully escaped) and the game was first published well within the lifetime of men who experienced such imprisonment. But perhaps the past was wrong and the new sensitivity is right. The ADC justifies its stance by appealing to the hurt feelings of shoppers confronted by Secret Hitler while browsing for Buckaroo One can only imagine the pain and moral offense a Holocaust survivor would feel walking into a shop and seeing this game displayed for sale This isn't a trivial concern: 27,000 Jews emigrated to Australia after the War and many still live there. Perhaps former-POWs walked into 1970s toy shops and wept when they discovered Escape from Colditz on the shelves, trivializing their ordeals, but that's no reason why we, in 2019, should put Holocaust survivors through a shock like that. Yet that's exactly what we appear to be doing. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor stumbled across Secret Hitler in a toy store in Bright, Victoria, and complained in these terms: I started shaking, I literally saw the Holocaust flash in front of me. I felt as if there were Nazis about to storm into the store. I could barely look at the shopkeeper. I felt anti-Semitism alive. I couldn't wait to get out of there It's easy to snigger at this. The Holocaust isn't the sort of thing that can 'flash in front of you' and the idea of Nazis storming a toy store in Bright (a tiny tourist village beside the Mount Buffalo National Park) is absolutely the product of an over-active imagination. But perhaps the sheer loveliness of Bright, Victoria made finding Secret Hitler for sale there even more shocking It's tempting to accuse someone like this ('only the daughter of a Holocaust survivor,' we are quick to point out, 'not a survivor herself!') of trying to appropriate the victim-status of her parents, who bore their sufferings with greater dignity. But hold on. Just because the expression is absurd, even histrionic, it doesn't mean the sentiments aren't serious. The exact words might not be the woman's own anyway, but put into her mouth by local journalists eager to 'sex up' a silly story ("Madame, would you say you saw the Holocaust flash in front of you? Can we write that? How about feeling Nazis were about to storm the store? Just sign here!"). A bit of empathy is needed. If you're the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, you're probably a woman in her 60s or 70s, shopping for a gift for grandchildren. Your idea of a board game is Monopoly, Mousetrap or Sorry! You stumble across Secret Hitler instead. You read on the box that "one player is Secret Hitler". What do you make of this? You were raised on stories of your parents' sufferings in the camps. Your community shares these stories reverentially. Your whole life has been informed by the fear that, since it happened once, it can happen again. Only the consensus about Hitler's unique monstrosity reassures you. Now that seems to be slipping. Being 'Hitler' has turned into something you do for a party game. Your family tragedy has become a joke and, what's worse, a bulwark against history repeating itself has been slyly removed under the pretext of entertaining children. You don't know what a 'social deduction game' is. You don't really appreciate that Secret Hitler is a game for adults. You entirely miss the point that it shares your alarm about creeping fascism and cleverly challenges it. All of which is to say that septuagenarian Jewish ladies browsing in rural toy shops don't have the resources of the ADC to investigate things like this. They just get alarmed and fly off the handle. But this makes the ADC's response even more deplorable. The ADC does have the resources to look into this sort of thing (i.e. a PC, an Internet connection, an employee with ten minutes to spare) and, as noted, a mission statement to promote "the instruments of research, fact finding, education." Put it another way. On gaming forums, this news article has been greeted with great derision. As I said, it's easy to sneer at this old lady's outrage and the hapless way it is expressed. Really, though, it's not for those of us who weren't intimately connected to the Holocaust to school the Jewish community. It's for the ADC to do that, to sift rumour and hysteria from stuff that's truly dangerous or offensive. The ADC commands a position of moral responsibility and if it came down from the mountain to say, "No, actually criticisms of this game are misplaced and we support its agenda," then everyone would go home wiser and less distressed. But that's not what happens. The ADC's failure to engage with this topic is a setback for serious, politically-engaged gaming, but it has serious ramifications. It's right to fear the resurgence of fascism, but there are right and wrong ways of acting on that fear. One is to view Hitler and the Nazis as an expression of inscrutable cosmic evil - as Satan, if you like, who punishes us for sin. If you adopt this view, then the precautions we take against resurgent Nazism must be things like:
The other view is that the Nazis were ordinary human beings, produced by ordinary social, cultural and political circumstances. If you take this view, then inoculating society against Nazism involves education, since we must understand these circumstances so that we can detect and defuse them in future, and a healthy scepticism towards the powerful appeal fascism makes to our anxieties about power and identity. Humour is vital but so too is placing yourself in the position of fascists themselves, the better to understand them. The Roman writer Terence (c195-c159 BCE) expresses it like this: Words to live by and a succinct refutation of fascist thinking If we apply the Terence-test, then Secret Hitler qualifies as an anti-fascist product, but the ADC, for all its right-on mission statements, on this occasion functions with a fascist mindset:
Which isn't to say there can't be morally odious games. I'm not backing a 911-themed version of Jenga any time soon. A case could be made the Monopoly embodies laissez-faire capitalism or that Cards Against Humanity encourages cruelty, coarseness and contempt in its players. I could get behind both those criticisms. But Secret Hitler is on the side of the angels, despite its provocative concept. Perhaps there are genuinely fascist games. Diplomacy seems to advocate military expansionism through treachery and deceit. Spartacus endorses slave-trading and gladiatorial combat. Britannia exalts our island story as a rise to greatness through war and ethnic cleansing. I've discussed the dubious politics of Conan in a previous blog. And yet I can't take these critiques too seriously. There seems to me to be something about game-playing that is inherently anti-fascistic (although we can take issue with particular pieces of art, titles or topics).
At the end of the day, the Nazis were too anxious about their ideology to be happy with people playing games based on it. Maybe they realised that a game about deporting Jews allowed for the losing players not to deport Jews and for some players to play to lose. Games give players agency and foster choice and the contemplation of alternatives: not qualities fascists like to promote. In any event, the Nazis preferred to get kids out of the house, doing sporty-things in the countryside. Perhaps the ADC have similar qualms. After all, in Secret Hitler it's possible for the Fascists to play better than the Liberals and then Hitler wins. In a morally-ordered universe, that's not supposed to happen, but although games express values, they don't impose outcomes, which is what the ADC wants to see happen. But let's put all this in perspective. With antisemitic attacks on the rise, the ADC is understandably fretful. It's a mistake to jump at shadows, but (I think) a pardonable one. It's just a shame to see opportunities for education and discourse missed. Banning board games doesn't present a set-back for fascists. In any event, should Antipodean retailers follow the ADC's misguided appeal to refuse to stock Secret Hitler and "show moral responsibility when it comes to this issue and put aside the issue of profit," designer Max Temkin (truly guided by moral responsibility rather than profit) has made his game available as a free print-and-play download from the Secret Hitler website. Enjoy This just in: Am I too complacent in dismissing fascist games and the absurdity of 911-Jenga? A couple of Russian designers have put out a board game based on the Salisbury Novichok poisonings. Clearly, there's more to say about this issue in a future blog.
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