The Games People Play
The chilling revelation of neo-Nazi video games that have become popular among young people in Germany and Austria threw yet another shock wave across a world that, to many, just doesn’t make sense anymore.
By The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s count, about 140 such videos are in circulation and have been seen or used by 22 percent of Austria’s high school students. At least 39 percent had knowledge of the games, which have been around for the past three years.
In one of the games, “KZ Manager,” players run the Treblinka death camp. Points are gained by selling gold fillings from teeth, lamp shades made from the skin of victims, and other ghoulish by-products. Proceeds from these sales provide funds for poison gas and additional gas chambers.
Another game, “Aryan Test,” includes multiple-choice questions:
Get rid of Jews by …
- Ovens.
- Making them into soap.
- Dispatching them by airmail to Israel.
Neo-Nazis are targeting Germany’s youth with these video horror shows, and figures prove that they have caught on with a significant number of young people. The insanity of such viciously anti-Semitic games is obvious. But how the content can be rationalized to the young people of a progressive country that for half a century has been plagued with the legacy of Nazi atrocities is much more difficult to fathom. Adolf Hitler played on deprivation and post-World War I recriminations from the allied victors over Germany to finger Jews as scapegoats for Aryan rage. This cannot be said today. Germany ranks as one of the most prosperous nations on earth. No, one must look beyond insanity, because there is obviously a satanic hand in all of this, and poverty or injustice has nothing to do with the underlying obsession to destroy the Jew.
The brief flurry of attention the videos received in North America produced some strained inquiries about the possibility of these games finding a market here. Could it happen in the United States? You bet! And if access to the market is available, you can be virtually certain that skinheads and their soul partners in hatred and violence will gleefully play along.
Young people, however, are not alone in their susceptibility to the Jews are guilty of everything mania. Incredibly, some who call themselves Christians are playing word games very much akin to those put on video in Europe. Just a few days ago I encountered a believer who was deeply disturbed about a friend in the Midwest who had bought into the “Aryan Nations” nonsense that Jewish financiers were responsible for farm foreclosures in his area and that, as agents of Satan, they should be held responsible and punished. It is, according to this line of reasoning, “fat Jewish pockets” of people in the “Zionist conspiracy” that are being filled at the expense of poor American farmers.
This agents of Satan idea is not a casual designation. A preposterous but fundamental element in the “theology” of the neo-Nazi “Christian Identity”/“Aryan Nations” cadre is the concept that the Jewish people are literal descendants of the Devil. They blasphemously propagate the lie that Satan and Eve were involved in an illicit liaison in the Garden of Eden. Cain was the result, and Jewry is, therefore, to be identified as the literal “children of Satan.” Unbelievable? Certainly. Unbelievable but potentially deadly, because, as history has demonstrated, such mindless games and ideas can become the soil out of which death squads and gas chambers grow.
True Christians who come into contact with people, young or old, who are being tainted by this phenomenon are obligated to set the record straight. This requires learning the facts, particularly concerning what the Scriptures teach about Christian responsibility toward the Jewish people.
There is a two-sided rescue effort conducted in the process. On one side are the Jewish people in danger of being victimized by the threats, ridicule, intimidation, and possible violence inflicted by hate-filled anti-Semites. On the other side are people who, if lost to the affliction of anti-Semitism, will themselves be crippled, consumed, and eventually destroyed by the very hatred they disseminate.
