this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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PC Master Race
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Swastikas were also not invented by Nazis and are also still used in other cultures as a sun symbol. Doesn't mean that is isn't associated with Nazis in our culture today
I agree with you. My point was, that Nazis adopted many concepts that were crappy before (like race theory) or took existing things and twisted them for their malicious purposes. I didn't deny the association, but context matters in my opinion.
Look at South Park for example, like the "pyjama day" episode. They make fun of Nazi ideology all the time, sometimes subtle, sometimes very obvious. You can't just watch the episode, see a reference to Nazism (the uniform, the lingo, etc.) and inherently call them Nazis for using it, when they clearly use it to make fun of it.
I personally see the term PCMR the way the original inventor of the phrase intended: as a way to make fun of the superiority complex that PC gamers often develop.
In Germany we have a term for someone getting a preferred treatment "Sonderbehandlung". It was used by the Nazis as a euphemism for mass murder. Today the term only means that someone, for example at work gets a raise despite not contributing to the project as much as all other people did or someone getting a rebate on something, just because he knows the cashier. The term is common in normal German lingo and no one uses it as a way to tell that someone should be eliminated.
I understand people from outside the German culture might get upset about the usage of those words, but in my experience most of them didn't really take into account in which context they are used today. If I ask a hundred people on the street today, where Sonderbehandlung came from, my guess is almost no one knows their previous ties anymore, which I see as yet another thing we took away from the influence of Nazis.
If people blindly want to ban everything that had at one time in history contact with Nazi ideology, you'll be surprised what you can't do anymore: drive cars, nuclear power, use thermos flasks, anti-ship missiles, radar, engines in general and many things more. Should we really give that much power to those assholes to hold our technology, culture and language hostage? Don't get me wrong, I condemn right-wing theories and ideologies, as well as extremism and I don't want to give Nazis any leeway either.
I sometimes get the feeling people just read a Vice article headline and march on to the internet to start an ideological war against whatever the article mentioned, without really investing time to check the context, if it has eventually been reclaimed and so on. Also every argument seems to start the same way: "GUESS YOU ARE A NAZI THEN!!!111!1". Not a good way to start a discourse.
I hope I could bring my viewpoint across in a matter that it is understandable and not too erratic 😅