@ryzon: What games in particular do you have this problem with? I can certainly see the idea of this being irksome, but I can't come up with any games off the top of my head where this occurs. In a game like the first Assassin's Creed, they give you everything up front only to lose it after the prologue, which I actually enjoy because you know what you will be working towards.
@punkxblaze: That doesn't mean that dehumanization of particular groups isn't happening or isn't negatively affecting your thoughts/feelings towards these groups.
@example1013: How can you elaborate on how you think dehumanization would not be required to be okay with shooting Nazis? Wouldn't the opposite be true? That you have to see them as less than human in order to accept it?
Except Whitman's actions were caused by a brain tumor. Millions of people have shitty, terrible lives and don't go shooting up college campuses because of it. He had no control over his actions. Even without the fact that the song is straight-up based on false information and emotional trauma had nothing to do with anything, there's still a rather large cognitive disconnect when talking about a sick man versus Nazis.
And there's little evidence to show that we're any different from people who were involved with the death camps, even among the victims. The operation of the internment camps relied on a chain of command that required a vast majority of those involved to be complicit, including people who were ostensibly captives. Indeed, many of the cruelest overseers and foremen were prisoners who received their tiny scraps of power from the Nazis themselves.
A rhesus monkey will starve to death before willingly harming a fellow rhesus monkey. How long do you think it would take for most people to kill their neighbors for food?
I imagine the reason Harry Chapin wrote a song, and not a biography about Whitman, was so he could take artistic liberties with the reality of the shooting. The song is about Whitman as an idea. There's no way for a musician to know if Whitman was suffering an existential crisis like the one depicted in the song or not.
Furthermore, I was not simply comparing a sick man to the Nazis, I was comparing history's/MSM's treatment of both accounts. Other than that, I do like the additional angle you provide. Reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
@demoskinos: I guess I picked Nazis because of their "glamor," and because it was the announcement of Wolfenstein that made me start thinking about it, but yes, these ideas certainly apply to extremist Islamists as well. Or maybe it applies to any human video game enemy? I'm still sussing this all out, that's why the post ends in a torrent of questions and a gut check.
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