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“Nazis,” said Indiana Jones. “I hate these guys.” One of the great, smirking asides in action cinema. For the past 70 years there has been no more reliable bad guy in pop culture than the Nazi.
We never argued about the propriety of punching them, pushing them into an airplane propeller or melting their faces off when Dr. Jones was doing it in the Reagan 1980s. Yet today, thanks to social media and Reddit and the innate contrarianism of comment culture, here we are: Some racist who graduated from the University of Chicago (Indy’s alma mater!) caught an MMA elbow to the face at the inauguration, and now we’re having a nice Donahue-style, virtue-signaling rhubarb about whether that was OK.
This satirical mod for 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D, which obligates B.J. Blazkowicz to reason with Nazis with constructive dialogue before opening fire, illustrates the uselessness of it all. The mod was made by Ramsey Nasser, a Tennessee native with Lebanese citizenship.
Is it OK to punch a Nazi? Jesus H. Christ, we’ve been shooting them through the fucking balls in Sniper Elite (sequel out one week from today!) and now we’re worried about their freedom of expression? One of the first things I can remember watching on TV, other than The Muppet Show, is when the Nazis and the Klan shot up Communist marchers in Greensboro and no one went to prison for it. So pardon me if my heart doesn’t bleed for a white supremacist getting a jackhammer to the kisser for his unpopular advocacy.
“Dialogue 3D” takes the convenient, infantile good-versus-bad conflict so many wish to apply to the real world and shows how argumentative bullshit only empowers the evildoers. It’s not like the goose-steppers are holding their fire as they provide thoughtful replies, either. As one might imagine, this makes a first-person shooter a lot less responsive, and a lot more difficult.
The mod can be played in a Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer browser, if it's 2002 where you are. Or it may be downloaded and played in Wolfenstein 3D on Windows PC, Mac or Linux.
