As a Brummie, I can confirm that description is nothing more than the truth 
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Birmingham, AKA “The Black Planet.”
It’s an old description, but it checks out 
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Well, it is next door to the Black Country. 
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So glad you raised this, @garethb2 .
Much like *chans and other dark corners of the internet, tabletop gaming has long been an incubator for right wing beliefs. There’s always a few in every group, but when you have a group that isn’t versed in social justice and don’t feel impacted by the rhetoric themselves (because they are all white cishet men) then the beliefs are allowed to fester.
This is why social justice awareness and training allies is so important. If you have a table that is all white men, when one of those men says something about the “fucking trannies”, said trannies are relying on the other white men at the table to shut that shit down. If they don’t, your table is a Nazi Bar now.
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Libertarian edgelords regularly also try to make the case for Pottersville from It’s a Wonderful Life. They usually completely eliding over the fact that it’s a company town controlled by a miserable old millionaire and that all the “fun” elements (Booze! Gambling! Girls-Girls-Girls!) are meant to keep the workers intoxicated and distracted in their off hours.
Given how they’ve supported MAGA, I’m sure they feel the same way about Biff Tannen’s alternate world Hill Valley.
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This is the kind of Warhammer Content that appeals to me. Mira Manga is new to the 40k setting and brings a fresh perspective to things that I’ve grown up with; while Arbiter Ian is steeped in the Lore, but has a progressive world-view.
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Something else occurs to me that ought to be said here. Others implied it, but it’s worth being explicit.
Warhammer started back when fascism-as-bad-guys was much more of a fun tongue-in-cheek thing for fictional world building. It was low hanging fruit for feeling like you’re doing social commentary and it was also lazy writing because you don’t have to explain any motives or justify the existence of the bad guys in your world.
However, now that shit isn’t so funny and innocent anymore. Fiction writers have a responsibility to take this stuff more seriously. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have fascists in fiction. Quite the opposite, we need to continue making social commentary on them. However that social commentary has to be taken seriously. It’s no longer okay* to talk about Nazis in a “fun” way because they had bad-ass uniforms and better tanks. We must always fully contextualize these groups, even when they are fictional. If you’re going to use fascists as bad guys, they can’t be cool anti-heroes.
*Of course it was never “okay” to do this, but it was mostly harmless back when most of us thought fascism was fixed and we wouldn’t have to worry about it again
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That window opened and closed quite a while ago, probably during the designers’ childhood.
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I’ve been avoiding 40k and its fans, but more because it all seemed so silly to me, with players taking the lore wayyy too seriously, but just in a, “duuude, guns, holy wars, and zombies, but in space, so edgy and cool! FOR THE EMPEROR!!1!” kind of way. You know, over the top, but harmless. So, keeping it at arm’s length, I haven’t personally seen the crossover to overt fascism, but I’m not surprised. Satire is difficult for…certain people.
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Back then it made total sense that there was a space back then where Nazis could be deemed comical – it was so utterly discreted and so universally derided – and not least, the country was full of middle aged men who had fought these bastards themselves and would likely beat the hell out of anyone who defended Nazism in any public forum. So there were plenty of cultural guardrails.
But “never again” in an era where the youngest person to actually shoot a Nazi is now in his mid-90s, the culture requires different tools, a general cultural prohibition on Nazism in any form is the right tool for the job.
Also, is there some rule in Spain that says a private event can’t kick people out of a private event for being a shitgibbon? Yeah, he can wear that shit in public, but does that mean he can wear at someone else’s event?
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Making the bad guys look like Nazis was a simple, unambiguous way of indicating that they were the bad guys, or so people thought. They didn’t think that a significant part of the audience might disagree that Nazis were bad.
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It seems odd that they didn’t have some catch-all rule to warn then yank membership for offensive behavior. Possibly with it being a gaming tournament rather than an SF fandom convention. ConCom usually have hard experience with all the crap that can happen, plus the stories get around. Replica weapons, big snakes, a-hole authors with knives, creepy older men in elevators, whatever…
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I knew it had to be there somewhere.
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Most conferences I’ve gone to in the last 5+ years have had a code of conduct (not always prominently displayed). I doubt any of them explicitly said “No Nazi shit”, but that is already covered by other rules. Eg- being in a harassment free environment.
If this conference didn’t have a code of conduct that is implicitly anti-nazi, then they fucked up.
ETA: Just checked the most recent gaming tournament I went to and pretty sure “no nazi shit” is covered. Code of Conduct – Terminal City Tabletop Convention
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It doesn’t help that GW has apparently over time been more and more explicit in stating that they are the “good guys”.
The linked article in the OP does a pretty good job of making that argument.
The OP links to a Spanish blog post discussing the incident and judging by a badly Google translated read through, the venue seems to have thought they couldn’t do anything because the insignia/logos weren’t outright illegal and that they would be on the hook for discrimination if they kicked him out.
Some, fairly evidently fashy, commentators say this is correct. Others say it’s bollocks and that the organisers weren’t really terribly interested in kicking him out.
As best I can gather there do seem to be some more difficulties in Spain than there might be in other countries due to the festering legacy of the Civil War.
Regardless, the main point isn’t whether one venue in Spain could or could not have kicked him out or even whether they did or didn’t but rather the several miles deep hole GW are enthusiastically digging themselves deeper into by virtue of having turned themselves into the Space Fascist company.
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The official line seems to be that the Imperium is a genocidal tyranny but everyone else is even worse.
From the essay:
The Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by foes beyond counting: the alien, the mutant, and the heretic. It is a galaxy where only the strong survive, where untold billions toil and die in nameless obscurity so that the war engines of an empire may grind onward for yet another day. It is a world where absolute cruelty, rigorous genetic purity and righteous xenophobia are not only encouraged but quite literally necessary to prevent chaos and corruption — a world where hypermasculine superheroes are the only thing standing between civilisation and annihilation.
This world is, by any measure, a fascist’s wet dream — and as such, it has been attracting both outright- and crypto-fascists for a long time. Even before the arrival of smartphones and algorithmically driven social media feeds, most long term players of Warhammer 40,000 will have a story or two about That Guy at the local games store whose edgy jokes are delivered in a way where you’re beginning to realise they aren’t jokes, or That Guy on the forum who can be guaranteed to pop his head up in any thread about “politics in the hobby”, or That Guy at the tournament with a weirdly realistic German military scheme on his Imperial Guard.
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The original founders of GW were directly satirising Thatcher and Thatcherism. Not quite fascism perhaps, but certainly right-wing authoritarianism. 2000AD was doing a similar thing in comics at the same time, Judge Dredd was never supposed to be a ‘hero’ either.
“Low hanging fruit” is one way to put it I suppose, but I’d say “the biggest, most obvious target”, in the same way as someone today satirising (eg) MAGA.
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