A Nazi piece of work

I just finished The Boys From Brazil this morning. A good, fun read. Without giving too much away, it's about Nazis.

I think it was Shaun I was talking to a while ago and he said something along the lines of:
"You can get away with killing a heap of people, as long as they're Nazis."

And it's true. In movies, books, computer games... if you're looking for an antagonist to cause some shizz, just throw in Nazis. Everyone loves killing them. The Russians were for a while, but it's different with the Nazis. With the Russians, you got the suspicion that they were only guarding the military installation because they were forced to. With the Nazis, they did it because they loved to guard. I think our popular perception of Nazis includes these factors that make them supremely killable villains.

- Arrogant belief in their genetic superiority.
- Tall, blond, muscular and good-looking, they are the high-schools jocks of the martial world. Inferiority complexes ensue.
- Absolutely abhorrent beliefs about race.
- Absolutely abhorrent practices involving race, including killing six million people based on who their parents were.
- The creepy science they were involved in, meaning who knows what kind of horrors they had waiting in the wings.
- Their effectiveness. Nazis were very, very effective soldiers. Intelligent, motivated, well-trained... fighting a Nazi was a tough proposition. So therefore, killing one was an achievement.

I sometimes wonder if we'll see the kind of fanaticism and organisation the Nazis brought ever again. I hope not. But then I remember that history always repeats, and what might seem like an impossibility will one day seem very possible to a generation of people. I guess the world has changed since the 1930s, when it was clearly a good time to be a dictator. These days I guess the young dictator types are running middle-management and playing hacked versions of Call of Duty online.