What I’ve Learned about People Who Believe in the Mainstream Narratives from Board Games

1,791 words

For many years now I’ve been a member of a gaming group — the old-fashioned, offline kind. We started out with fantasy and horror role-playing games and have over time moved on to board and card games. The group itself has seen members come and go, but our hard core of five has persevered over the years. We mainly play cooperatively; that is, us against the game.

There’s a teacher, a chemist-turned-housewife, two librarians, and an electronic engineer.

Four out of five are ardent liberals. You can guess who no. 5 is. As such, political discussions are always a bit problematic, shall we say, and usually end with me being cast in the role of the bigot who says mean things. It is a testament to our friendship that I haven’t been kicked out of the group yet.

We just finished the massive Sleeping Gods; fun, but full of diversity hires and girl bosses — and the white guy died heroically at the end. In keeping with those themes, I noticed again that liberals have a particular style of playing these kinds of games with role-playing elements. Whenever there is a choice to be made between helping people and looking out for our side’s interests, of course four out of five members of the group are all for helping — which more often than not results in us getting cheated, robbed, and generally taken advantage of.

“Will you stop doing that!” I finally exclaimed, annoyed. Naturally, to no effect.

Then it was my turn to make a decision: A. pull the guy away from the strange apparition, or B. watch what happens. Four out of five: “Of course A! Pull him away!” Me: “B.” And wouldn’t you know — nobody died, nobody got hurt, nobody was attacked, and we didn’t lose any resources. Mean bigots have discernment, I guess.

With the end of Sleeping Gods in sight, a decision had to be made as to what to play next. One of our librarians suggested the new game Weimar a few weeks ago, and that resulted in, let’s say, a test of our friendship. Weimar: Der Kampf um die Demokratie, in its very title, proclaims to be about “the battle for democracy.” The official game description (my translation):

Berlin, November 9, 1918: The armistice has not yet been signed and the mood in the German capital is tense. The working people want to strike in large numbers, even though the streets are lined with troops. Will they even survive the day? A few hours later, at 2 PM, Philipp Scheidemann of the German Social Democratic Party proclaims the Republic. The first German democracy is born.

The Weimar Republic took its name from the city of Weimar, where the constituent assembly was held in 1919. It existed until 1933, when the Nazis took power together with the DNVP. The period from its foundation to its decline can be divided into three sections.

From 1918 to 1923, the Weimar Republic suffered from serious problems such as hyperinflation and political extremism. In addition, there were various attempted coups from the Left and Right as well as the unresolved reparations issue with the victorious powers of the First World War.

From 1924 to 1929, the Weimar Republic succeeded in restoring financial and political stability. During the Golden Twenties, the Republic enjoyed relative prosperity, and German art, culture, and science began to flourish.

However, the global economic crisis at the end of 1929 hit the young Republic particularly hard. The resulting high unemployment and numerous acts of violence, such as Bloody May and Altona Bloody Sunday, led to the collapse of the coalition government. From March 1930, various chancellors governed with the help of emergency powers that were granted by Reich President von Hindenburg. This period ended with Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

The transformation of a democratic revolution into a National Socialist tyranny in just 14 turbulent years is Weimar’s theme. In this asymmetrical game, you lead one of the major political parties of the time: the SPD, Zentrum, KPD, or DNVP. Their spectrum ranges from Left to Right, from democratic to radical. Each party pursued its own goals and used different means to achieve them. While the radical parties (KPD/DNVP) attempt coups to overthrow the Republic, the democratic parties (SPD/Zentrum) try to defend the still-young democracy. As a card-driven game, Weimar contains over 150 unique cards with which you can control your strategy and actions. Each card can be played for its event, for political debates, or for actions in the cities.

The battle for democracy takes place on two levels. On the political level, you introduce important topics into the public debate and try to win them. Winning many seats in Parliament allows for participation in government — or a strong opposition. Foreign policy negotiations can improve the economic situation, but at the same time strengthen nationalist forces. In the streets, you fight for supremacy in the cities. Strengthen your political base through demonstrations and send your troops and paramilitary units into battle.

The threats are manifold. Will the Weimar Republic survive? Or will it sink into chaos, or even fall into the hands of the Nazis? It’s up to you.

“No way in hell,” was my response. “I’ll only get angry.”

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“You could play as the DNVP,” joked my friend.

Me: “Rather as the NSDAP.”

She: “That would be frightening — if you consider the consequences for Germany.”

While I am flattered that she would think I could actually win a strategy game (I suck at strategy), this was the kind of knee-jerk, braindead argument that characterizes so much of our public debate today. There is no thought behind it, no looking at the facts rationally, or even knowing many of the facts. It’s just: Hitler was the devil. That’s what we have learned in school.

So she and I got into a bit of an online spat that is typical of these kinds of discussions which you have with people ignorant of history who think they know more about history than the person who has actually studied it for many years.

I’ll spare you the details. Needless to say, I highly criticized the game for considering the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), while “radical,” still democratic enough to feature in a “battle for democracy.” I criticized my friend’s claim that, “for balance,” you have the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP), when in reality Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) would be the balancing party. But no — that’s the ultimate evil all those democratic parties have to save the world from.

The discussion then proceeded to my friend’s predictable argument that no other party had killed eight(!) million Jews, and then to me getting sarcastic about numbers and asking how the Communists compared in that regard. Finding herself cornered, my friend assured me that “of course” she thought of Communism as “a great evil” (but not the great evil, mind), the same as all ideologies with an absolutist claim. And so she weaseled out again of actually giving a thought to the idea that maybe the National Socialists were not the ultimate evil the game and the mainstream narrative portray them to be, or what the “consequences for Germany” might have been if the Communists had won — which you can try to achieve in the Weimar game.

During our next gaming session, she explained Weimar to the rest of the group, describing the goal as “of course” preventing the Nazis from taking power. “Of course,” muttered the mean bigot sarcastically, and was studiously ignored.

This seemingly trivial microcosm is a mirror of the public debate in Germany as well as of national politics. In a way, I blame neither my friend nor the average German nor even the heavily-slanted mainstream media for believing as they do. I myself was like that at one point in my life. It was only when I started doing biographical research that I realized how sloppily many journalists and even academics work and have worked over the years. That really marked a shift in my thinking. If those we rely upon for information are doing that bad of a job, and if I as a dedicated amateur with fewer resources and no funding can do better research than they, there is absolutely no reason to trust them in anything. I’ve seen how they work.

But most people have never had that epiphany. If they read or hear certain claims, they of course assume that somebody has checked the facts, the numbers, the sources. They assume that we have been told the full truth and nothing but the truth, because in all those decades since the Weimar Republic, somebody would have noticed any errors and corrected them, right?

No, what I blame my friend and the average German for is their fanatical unwillingness even to take a closer look when somebody points out to them obvious problems with the mainstream narrative. I’m not asking the impossible. I don’t expect people to go and work in archives. (Even though it might help. I’ve held in my hands the official instructions of the Communist Party leadership to its operatives during the Weimar Republic, and there was nothing democratic in it.) All they have to do is access the Internet and watch some videos, for crying out loud. Listen to some podcasts. Even read up on some stuff, if that’s not too much of an effort. But as Jonathan Bowden so eloquently put it, “The problem is not that the material is censored. The problem is that masses of the people have been taught that to even look at it is morally evil.”

That is, by the way, why I think Candace Owens is red-pilling her viewers in homeopathic doses right now. She knows she cannot ask too much of her audience too fast, so she eases them into it. Be it the Jewish Question or Allied war crimes in Germany, she puts some very low-key information out there and encourages her audience to do their own research.

And no, I don’t mean to revive the Candace Owens debate here. I’m simply using her as an example. (Don’t laugh — Glenn Beck was instrumental in red-pilling me about some things, so there’s that . . .)

My liberal friends and others like them assume people are generally good and honest. They cannot imagine that anybody would lie, for example, about their experiences in a concentration camp. Or that somebody like Steven Spielberg would knowingly sell those lies as facts. I mean, why would they imagine something like that? It’s sick, and that is why mean bigots like myself are looked upon as borderline crazy when we talk about it. It is crazy. But the craziness isn’t ours — we are just the messengers.