Roleplaying game pioneer M.A.R. Barker was an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer

I started with the Chainmail rules back in the day and I never heard of this loser. I never heard his name mentioned in the same breath as Gygax, nor in any other breath.

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On a related note the people running the Japanese medical experiments/biological weapons research in China (Unit 731) dodged war crimes trials because the US thought their research might be of use. The work turned out to be unusable garbage. Really it was excuses for torture, spreading plague and creative forms of murder.

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On RPG.net forums, a person who grew up in a neo-Nazi household (he got away from it, thankfully) commented on the book, saying that he was familiar with it, that it basically does sit on the exact same shelf as The Turner Diaries, and that it’s used to indoctrinate children and young people into Nazi beliefs. It’s vile shit.

Edit: actually, since it’s on the public-facing part of the forums, let me link to the thread directly:

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There’s an interesting quote from Hitler that comes via Speer where he says:
“… it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Of course the theory reflected here that Islam was a more warlike and cruel religion is far older and more widespread than this.

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Hitler never heard of the Crusades or the Conquistadors?

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Well shit, normally somebody compares someone to Hitler and there you go just quoting the fucker.

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Not quoting with approval, TB. Context.

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Oh My God Wow GIF by Lillee Jean

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Well, but how will we know how horrible Muslims are unless we know that Hitler said nice things about the religion based on orientalist racist BS … /s

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‘Rule of goats’ still applies.

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Goats GIF

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As a huge Heinlein fan, I have to ask. What are you talking about? Care to give examples of these “stupid” books?

See The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A real Henlein fan would have read it. :grinning:

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Washington and Oregon were both states that had codified massive racism into its laws, and the opinion that they’re “blue states” is solely limited to the major cities like Seattle and Portland, and even then, there’s still a strident racist bias deep within.

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Well let’s take Heinlein’s most famous novel for starters: Starship Troopers.

The human society in the novel is described as a kind of utopia made possible via the authoritarian military government that only grants voting power to people who serve in the armed forces, because everyone else is a goddamned freeloading pussy who doesn’t deserve full citizenship. If you can read that entire novel and not find anything in it that is at least fascism-adjacent then you aren’t looking very hard.

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I know - it’s one element that makes his later conversion to Islam even stranger and more discordant - that is what I was trying to get across.

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Well, again, please see the context. The question is not about the nature of Islam but how a neo-Nazi might have thought Islam was compatible with his loathsome ideology – especially when the contemporary reactionary posture regards Islam as the enemy.
Lurks made some historical observations about the history of Nazism and its attitudes to Islam. I underlined it.
None of this should be taken as an endorsement of fascism or any of its opinions.

Not sure if you read the book or just saw the movie, but in that novel, the Earth is under attack by a hive-like alien race. Society is peaceful until directly attacked by the aliens. Everyone is completely free except for one thing. In order to vote, you have had to participate in the government in some function and only for a limited time. For many, it was the Armed forces but it did not have to be that area. Many people were happy not to be full citizens since they were allowed every right voting citizens had but the argument in the book was that if you were not willing to actively participate in government, you had no right to vote in order to impose upon others. Not exactly a fascist government.
Heinlein was an active supporter of Upton Sinclair and Social Credit in his early days. He also wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” which I would argue is his most famous work and definitely not a “fascist” novel (whatever that means). He also wrote stories about the evils of theocracies and oppressive governments and most definitely not in favour of them.
Whenever Heinlen was ever asked about the political ideologies in his books, he would usually reply that he was a storyteller, nothing more. Considering the amount of free love and anti-religious storylines in many of his books, I fail to see any issues with him at all.

So… people who decide NOT to do that are living without a say in their government… And that’s “okay”? Anyone living a particular place deserves a say in their government. Full stop. This shouldn’t be controversial. But apparently, it is. Only “real” citizens should be allowed to vote… yeah. Fuck that. Everyone should be allowed to vote. Always. Because other people making decisions for them for some arbitrary BS means that they are not equal citizens.

Sure Jan GIF

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Oh good this again :roll_eyes:

So, in the Starship Troopers universe, any citizen may request a term in Federal Service and be granted that request without anyone’s let or hindrance. Completion of the term is the only way to gain the right to vote.

So, just what is “Federal Service”? There are two commonly given answers, only one of which can be correct:

  1. Federal Service is roughly equivalent to present-day military service (Army, Navy, Marine), including military support services such as research and development, logistics, labor battalions and intelligence.

  2. Federal Service is equivalent to general government service, including military service and what we would call “civil service,” the latter being responsible for ninety-five percent of all Federal Service positions.

There has been an extraordinary amount of argument over which answer is correct. There is evidence to support both views, although it is unequally distributed. The evidence for answer one is strong and plentiful. The evidence for answer two is sparse, weak and subjective, although points can be made in its favor. Given the imbalance, it would seem that the argument would have been settled long ago. This would be true were it not for a very strong comment by Robert Heinlein himself, insisting that the latter answer is correct.

nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf

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