To be old enough to understand the full enormity of the thing is to gain a sobering understanding of what our responsibility is toward historical literacy, civic engagement, and empathy toward our fellow people. Then I got old enough to read The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night and to see documentaries about World War II. These portrayals defined “Nazi” for me for the first years of my life, punctuated only by the odd time classmates called me a “grammar Nazi” or that unbearable Soup Nazi Seinfeld episode. Beating the game meant pumping enough Chain Gun rounds into a robotic Adolf Hitler to destroy him. It was sensationalist and transgressive, calculated to incite pearl-clutching, and utterly unserious. It was not the first first-person shooter, but it was the one that kicked off the trend that would give us Doom and all that came after: a gunner’s-eye view of the action, focused on navigating labyrinthine corridors, collecting heavy firepower, and using it to inflict gory violence on an endless procession of foes. Indiana Jones and the Blues Brothers hated those guys. They were chumps, easy to slot into any story for the lurid fun of mulching them without any qualms. My generation was not raised to take Nazis seriously. So no criticism was legitimately in order. It had taken two hundred years to dispose of the American aborigines, and Germany had almost done it in Africa in fifteen years.
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