M.A.R. Barker, author of Tekumel, also author of Neo-Nazi book?

[Parmandur]

Compartmentalization. Yup, that's what I was searching for. The tendency for some old school wargamers to compartmentalize history. I think that might partly explain Barker's Nazi novel . . . but still, I think it goes beyond that.

I read elsewhere a breakdown of how Tekumel can actually be read as crypto-Nazi, with the Humans being white colonizers pushing out "primitive" races that cannot ever be assimilated into the superior human culture...I don't know the setting very well, but given what we are learning it passes the smell test.

 

[Dire Bare]

I read elsewhere a breakdown of how Tekumel can actually be read as crypto-Nazi, with the Humans being white colonizers pushing out "primitive" races that cannot ever be assimilated into the superior human culture...I don't know the setting very well, but given what we are learning it passes the smell test.

Eh. Most folks I've talked to familiar with Tekumel say the opposite. The fact we're only talking about Tekumel as a possible secret Nazi campaign setting now, tells me it isn't really so. Barker wrote a campaign setting populated mostly by brown people, and heavily influenced by Southeast Asian cultures AND he wrote a Nazi utopian fantasy novel. It's a weird juxtaposition, but one that I can believe in without looking for secret Nazi coding in Tekumel.

 

[Dire Bare]

The separation of political/moral from aesthetic value is at the core of fantasy as a genre.

JRRT's world is arch-reactionary, racist, and celebrates authoritarian government. The legend of King Arthur is much the same. REH's Conan is a celebration of a murderer and freebooter. In Star Wars we cheer when thousands of enemy crew die in massive explosions with no quarter seeming to be offered.

These are all fundamental elements of the fantasy genre: "LG" paladins who serve righteous kings; "heroes" whose principle mode of resolving conflicts is to deploy interpersonal violence; peoples divided along reified ethnics and racial lines (elves, dwarves, orcs, etc).

And even RPGs and settings that, in principle, might be able to express different outlooks - eg Traveller - tend not to. The default setting for Traveller is an Imperium; and the default conflict resolution framework in Traveller is one-on-one or small unit combat.

Meh.

There are certainly problematic elements of our favorite fantasy and sci-fi stories if you dig too deep (sometimes, just below the surface). And we certainly do compartmentalize to a degree when cheering the destruction of the Death Star or the return of the king to Gondor.

But the compartmentalization we're talking about here is on another level. Gygax proudly quoting Chivington's horrid "nits make lice" reasoning for slaughtering innocents as good tactics comes to mind. Barker's ability to write a fairly progressive seeming fantasy setting and also write Nazi fan-fic is perhaps another.

To me, a difference between these two ways of looking at history is that "mainstream" fantasy/sci-fi doesn't ignore the morality of autocratic rulership, but rather romanticizes it. Aragorn is esteemed because he's a righteous king and is returning Gondor to the light after a long period of decline. All those imperial deaths off-screen are easily forgotten, both because they are off-screen but also because they are the bad guys.

The old school wargamer compartmentalization we're talking about here is different. It celebrates horrific real world people, ideologies, and actions by separating, compartmentalizing, the morality and horror from the military effectiveness. From a coldly analytical point-of-view, Chivington has a point. He was also a horribly racist individual and a purveyor of genocidal atrocities against Native American peoples.

Of course, this isn't meant to stereotype old school wargamers. I'm sure plenty of them, perhaps even most of them, didn't engage in this sort of troubling compartmentalization. And I'm also sure others, non-gamers, have taken a similarly compartmentalized view of history. But Gygax was definitely of the sort, as were several of his companions from the early Lake Geneva days. Perhaps Barker was similarly afflicted, I don't know.

 

[Mallus]

The separation of political/moral from aesthetic value is at the core of fantasy as a genre.

It’s at the core of many genres. My favorite example is the cozy mystery. These frequently involve trivializing the murder of a human being (usually for money).

 

[MGibster]

I read elsewhere a breakdown of how Tekumel can actually be read as crypto-Nazi, with the Humans being white colonizers pushing out "primitive" races that cannot ever be assimilated into the superior human culture...I don't know the setting very well, but given what we are learning it passes the smell test.

Let's be honest, you can interpret just about any work through whatever lens you want. Sometimes the lens we choose can offer us some additional insight. Other times it's just a big pile of baloney. Would you like to read my latest interpretation of Moby Dick entitled "The Whale is Red: A Neo Marxist Interpretation of Moby Dick?"

 

[Parmandur]

Let's be honest, you can interpret just about any work through whatever lens you want. Sometimes the lens we choose can offer us some additional insight. Other times it's just a big pile of baloney. Would you like to read my latest interpretation of Moby Dick entitled "The Whale is Red: A Neo Marxist Interpretation of Moby Dick?"

It' a bit different if we discovered an extended Marxist treatise from Melville (chronologically impressive, but that's the analogy present).

 

[Parmandur]

Eh. Most folks I've talked to familiar with Tekumel say the opposite. The fact we're only talking about Tekumel as a possible secret Nazi campaign setting now, tells me it isn't really so. Barker wrote a campaign setting populated mostly by brown people, and heavily influenced by Southeast Asian cultures AND he wrote a Nazi utopian fantasy novel. It's a weird juxtaposition, but one that I can believe in without looking for secret Nazi coding in Tekumel.

based on what I know of Tekumel and it's imperialistic racial hierarchy, not that weird at all. Literally, I don't see any contradiction in Barker being a Nazi and fetishizing a romantic take on Islam or India (both were common among the Nazis), or writing a setting with racially superior humans suppressing racially inferior space aliens. It's all of one piece, a seamless garment of Fascism.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well according to the letter he described some Jewish friends of his as nice people.

Mod Note:

Utterly meaningless. I was on my HS football team. Our starting RB yelled, “Stop that n****r!” in reference to a player who was destroying our defense. Standing right behind him, I yelled the same thing. He immediately realized it was me, turned around, and said, “He’s not like you. You’re different.” And walked off.

Bigots have an amazing capacity to compartmentalize their targets into “good ones” and “bad ones”, and to present masks of normality to those who wouldn’t approve of their hate. It’s why you can find Klansmen with black friends (who don’t know their “friend” is in a white supremacist organization).

So, let’s not present things like this as redemptive or mitigating evidence.

 

[Hussar]

I don't know that I'd call it cynical. It's compartmentalized. Most WWII-era war games are concerned with the battlefield and, sometimes, logistics (at least with respect to supporting things on the battlefield). Some, like Advanced Third Reich, also delve into high level views of wartime diplomacy. But they usually don't deal with other aspects of the war - massacres of civilians in Eastern Europe, intentional mass starvation of Soviet POWs, and the Holocaust. Non-WWII games also tend to skip over the epidemics, famines, and other mass depopulations that wars typically inflict.
Most of those wouldn't be good topics for games (though there is a scenario for Advanced Squad Leader that involves an uprising in a Warsaw ghetto) and so get glossed over in the tabletop wargames. That may give the impression of cynicism, but I really don't think that's the right description.

Yeah, "compartmentalization" is probably the right word.

You see it in gaming discussions all the time. People absolutely lose their poop over the Wall of the Faithless - the game telling players to make characters with religious leanings - but have zero problem with the whole feudal life thing that D&D is set in. Let's be honest here, millions of people died to end feudalism. Feudalism is about as evil as it gets. There are very good reasons for ending feudalism and absolute monarchies.

Yet, most players of D&D will have absolutely no problems with feudalism in the game. Never minding colonialism which is only recently becoming an issue. People think slavery is a problem in the game? How about political systems where you have no rights, no freedoms, frequently different systems of law and the overwhelming majority of the populace isn't even considered people?

So, yeah, we'll play a game about the Eastern Front that in no way references the unbelievable horror of the time and call it a fun afternoon. Hell, we'll play a game about millions dying in a global pandemic (bit on the nose right now) and call it a fun afternoon.

Never underestimate people's abilities to ignore things that might make them uncomfortable.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

With some degrees of separation. Midkemia itself was based on some kind of extremely house-ruled D&D, which among other things involved planar travel to an Asian-inspired setting called Kelewan. Kelewan had its roots in Tekumel, but I don't know to what degree. I know Feist has talked about how much of the flavor of the book version of Kelewan comes from his collaboration with Janny Wurts on the Daughter of the Empire series.

In the original gaming sessions Midkemia was invaded by the actual Tsolyani of the Tekumel setting. Feist changed it to Tsurani for publication for copyright reasons but you can read Magician and notice little changed except the names. Later novels made it more of a distinct thing.