Tommy Gavin | Magazine Editor
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”. In the book, the protagonist acts the part of a Nazi propagandist in Germany during the Third Reich, as a cover for spying for the allies. Nobody knows his true inclinations apart from his handler and the president of the United States. Unfortunately, he does such a good job rhetorically convincing the world he’s a Nazi that he ultimately ends up standing trial for war crimes in Israel.
That sentiment resonated with me quite strongly the summer my friend and I pretended to be Nazis on the internet, to troll real life Nazis. We didn’t have any pretentions of doing good we just figured that if you’re setting out to be a bollocks on the internet, you might as well be a bollocks to Nazis.
Not that we felt the urge be trolls, but after learning of the existence of a forum called Nazi Europe on an online game called Nationstates, it seemed like it would be a diverting way to spend our spare time.
If unfamiliar with Nationstates, the best way to describe it is probably as an “online text based role playing game.” You set up an account; your nation, and answer a series of questions. Based on your answers, your country may be described in two to three paragraphs as a corporate dictatorship, a left leaning college state, and many more in between, depending on your country’s civil rights, economy and political freedoms. That’s basically it. You can locate your country in a “region” of your choosing, but they’re really just message boards, with people role playing as their nation. As you might imagine, Nazi Europe is a region populated by Nazis.
Our stated goal was to gain admin privileges through the in-game voting system, ban everyone, and change the regional motto to “where interracial gay marriage is mandatory”. Our first aim then was to make an impact, and it seemed logical that the best way to do this would be to accuse the current admin of not being Nazi enough. Strangely, this didn’t technically work, but it also didn’t fail outright. Therein lies the oddness of Nationstates.
It’s not an inherently nerdy game, playing it only involves answering one or two policy questions a day, and watching your country slowly develop. It gets nerdy when people start role playing as their nation, and interacting with other nations. Because all interaction is through role play and nothing is at stake, it tends to get very convoluted, very quickly. We did think it was weird at the time that they were being surprisingly tolerating and engaging with what, looking back, was obvious trolling. To show up in a forum, and demand administrative privileges on the grounds that the current administrators aren’t Nazi enough, using ridiculous language like “people often fear my power and magnetism”, only to be met with responses like “I believe you think too highly of yourself” and “I would like to add that I have no fear of you”, rather than “fuck off”.
Our arguments, always about how we should be the ones in control, would devolve into minor points of semantics, where we were wearily tolerated rather than banned outright.
This went on for about four weeks, but things approached critical mass of weirdness when we were given access to their offsite forum, where they would go to say the kind of thing that they wouldn’t say on the public message boards of Nationstates. There was one person in particular who engaged us in argument the most, who maintained that while she didn’t agree with the racial prejudice of the Third Reich, believed that national-socialism with a strong militaristic government was the best kind of state, and she was the most willing to accept us at face value. She seemed to see herself as the big sister in Nazi Europe. She didn’t agree with everyone regarding “the Jewish question”, but enjoyed mutual respect with its other denizens. She liked our go-getter enthusiasm, but thought we needed to curb our impertinence and accept the region as it was. Things got slightly too real for us when we saw that she had an old AOL instant messenger address on her account on the offsite forum. Through that we were able to find both her Livejournal account and her Facebook page. We were suddenly confronted with a real person, studying in a military academy in Canada, who bemoaned unrequited love in her blog.
That, coupled with the growing unease at having pretended to be a Nazi on the internet for weeks at this point, prompted final action. We knew we probably hadn’t done enough to fulfil our goal of taking over the forum and shutting it down, but we had gone as far as we were willing to go. The main activity of Nazi Europe, besides congratulating each other for being Nazis, was performing raids on other regions, basically doing to other regions what we were trying to them. This involved the vast majority of the Nazi Europe relocating their “nations” to another region, gaining admin powers through the voting system, and shutting it down. Unfortunately, we were impatient, and made our move with our many, many dummy nations while there was still time for the rest of the Nazis to come back and kick us out.
Cathartically, we were afforded enough time before being kicked out to shed our assumed Nazi identities and engage them in argument for being Nazis, but ultimately we knew we just wanted to personally disassociate ourselves from them, if only in our own minds. We had pretended for too long, and we didn’t like it.
