This was all over social media last night:
Michigan State apologized Saturday night for playing a pregame trivia video that showed an image of Adolf Hitler on the Spartan Stadium scoreboard before its game against Michigan, which the Spartans lost 49-0. The image of Hitler’s face flashed on the screen alongside a trivia question asking about his home country.
For those of you who aren't history buffs, Hitler was born and raised in Austria. Surprise!
But I have a question. Was this supposed to be offensive in general? Or only because it popped up while Hamas terrorists are killing Israelis?
Because I honestly don't quite get the outrage. Are games of trivia no longer allowed to have questions about Hitler? That seems excessive. Or is it just that Michigan State should have had the good sense to know the timing was bad?
Any help here?
POSTSCRIPT: Huh. Twitter wouldn't allow me to post the picture of Hitler.
Maybe it's showing a giant blown-up image of Hitler on your scoreboard that scores as tacky.
I hope the day comes (soon) when showing pictures of donald trump will be treated in the same way.
Before anyone howls, of course trump didn't do the things Hitler did, but I have no doubt that he would have if given the opportunity.
That is over the top. Hitler had a murdurous ideology about killing and enslaving non-germans. Trump just don't care about anybody else except himself, and just wants to have to control. Stalin would actually the best match.
No including the war, who killed more people? The Holodomor certainly gave the Holocaust a run for its money. Of course, neither can compete the the Great Leap Forward.
Yes, only looking at WWII and later...
It is not just body counts.
Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler because they were more successful. But Hitler had a worse ideology.
As Colbert says, unfair to compare Trump to Hitler. Hitler served in the military.
True, but Stephen Miller does which is all kinds of irony.
I’d like to ask the same question here that I asked below.
Is the image of Hitler blocked for anyone else using an iPhone? (I see it on my PC but not my phone.)
For anyone against showing the image in a stadium, would you support a tech company blocking pictures of Hitler?
Definitely this. Tacky and borderline at best.
Blondi's dad is smirking too.
It's a weird trivia for a football game. Normal trivia for home game or historic trivia. I wouldn't be outraged but I'd boo.
I agree. As a trivia question it's fine but it's not really appropriate for pre-game fun trivia games to feature large smiling photos of genocidal dictators.
Putting things on such scoreboard gives them publicity.
There is no reason why Hitler should get (free) publicity.
I wouldn't say I am outraged by this kind of things, but people should know not to do it.
As if the endless Hollywood movies with Hitler do not?
Really the idea of merely showing his face is offensive is utterly ridiculous search for offence.
Agree. I think it's counterproductive. It's as if any mention or image of Hitler is so offensive people cannot handle it, and when you do that you give more power to the image than it would otherwise have. People need to grow up. (Asking a lot with that last sentence.)
"As if the endless Hollywood movies with Hitler do not?"
In the movies, Hitler appears as the vile person he was. Just a picture like the one above doesn't make it obvious. So this is very different.
If he is not shown as a vile person, this is bad.
"Really the idea of merely showing his face is offensive.."
It is not offensive. It is something you shouldn't do (because it gives free publicity to a vile person).
Ahem, please refer to it from now on as TwiX.
Thank you.
Not Xitter?
I do prefer "Xitter."
... or Xitler.
great...now I'm picturing Musx with a tiny mustache.
There were topics we never discussed at the dinner table; same principle. I'm not convinced genocidal dictators belong on billboards at college games any time. And this is surely a worse time than usual to reduce Hitler to a trivia question at a large, public, family event, with cheerleaders and marching bands and popcorn and national anthems and stuff.
Very poor taste, bad timing, and somebody needs better supervision.
“There were topics we never discussed at the dinner table…”
This may surprise you to know, but around the dinner table when I was growing up, I learned quite a lot of WWII history. My dad was a vet.
Hitler was not so irredeemably evil that we dare not speak his name.
He was so irredeemably evil that we dare not forget what he did, the threat he posed, and the sacrifices made by my mom and dad’s generation to help save the world.
Assuming in these dinner conversations Hitler wasn't regard as a morally neutral person, that is completely different thing. The problem with putting him on the scoreboard is that it is appearing as a morally neutral subject (and gives him free publicity).
The publicity argument doesn't work for me. The surface appearance as a morally neutral subject is better
"Assuming ... Hitler wasn't regard as a morally neutral person..."
I'm not sure what that means. Nobody needed to be reminded that Hitler was an evil madman. And nobody was offended if you referred to him and failed to mention he was a moral abomination. Some things were clear back then. One point in favor of the tenor of those times.
"Nobody needed to be reminded that Hitler was an evil madman."
That is obviously false. There are nazis that admire him now in the US and elsewhere.
"reminding" is not the right term. Society need to make sure that it is not normal to talk about Hitler as aneutral person/object.
" One point in favor of the tenor of those times."
There were times when it was OK to have trivia quiz in a stadium like that about Hitler?
Does anyone else remember the treatment of Richard Nixon in the future world of Woody Allen's "Sleeper"? He was erased from history and nobody knew who he was.
Or is Woody Allen now considered so irredeemably evil that we dare not refer to his movies?
"did we basically all agree years ago, Hitler should never come back?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRjjKVRaAik&t=149s
It wouldn’t be offensive if it was a picture of Adenoid Hykel standing in front of a globe.
That Hitler’s birthplace would be a trivia question that one might expect college students to not to know strikes me as being sad.
Austria has other things they could brag about.
Worst trade in history. Hitler from Austria to Germany, Beethoven from Germany to Austria.
My late partner, who spent a number of years in Germany, told me this was a common joke (? morbid observation? smarmy anti-Austrian take?) in Germany. Apparently many of them are NOT fans of Austrians generally.
Most Dutch I met were also not fans of Austria OR Germany - although the hatred of the Austrians seemed to be a lot hotter.
I wound up as one of DEC's engineering liasons to FABA, an Austrian company based in Linz. My first visit was to learn about their advanced new office software suite - much better that DEC's existing suite (Microsoft Office was still in the future.
Didn't last past the first morning. The company founders came to the classroom and very apologetically asked me to come with them to discuss a serious problem.
They were supposed to work with a Phillips company based in Appledoorn that had been bought by DEC. But the company refused to send them DEC VAX software they needed to convert their programs to the VAX computers. They asked if there was anyway to help, because they were on a tight schedule for their first (German bank) customer.
I had a premonition as I was packing for my trip - and packed an amazing multifold expanding CD folder with every released version of VAX OS code and SW applications. I pulled that out and said: "What do you need?"
They panicked - it was amazing! The damage from authoritarian attitudes and education was suddenly clear. After they dithered a while, I told them that was enough, took out the CDs for the products they immediately needed, and said: "Take me to your VAX! Do you want to argue endlessly or do you want to do product development! "We don't have licenses for this!" The CD's I had were for "Engineering and Engineering Partner Use Only". I told them the only reason DEC had flown me and my partner TO Austria was that they were engineering partners.
I had everything installed in under two hours, and it took them very little time to port both COBOL code and a few helper C code routines. I spent the rest of the week giving selected people deep training in software performance analysis on a VAX - both system and application.
Coda.
About a month and a half later I got a panicked call late on a Sunday evening their time from FABA. The performance of their application had dropped by 98%. I set my alarm for very early (MA time) so I could call FABA. Because of the time differential, that meant waking up before 3 AM, slugging down a big mug of coffee, and calling them at the beginning of their business day.
When the receptionist answered, I introduced myself, said that Frank and Barhend had told me there was an urgent performance problem. She actually gasped audibly and immediately put them on the line. (Turned out they thought no one from the US would ever get up early for their problem...)
They didn't know what they'd done to cause the problem. (Even some experienced SW engineers can be DUoTD (Dumb Users of The Day).. Anyway, because this was a major DEC partnership, I was on a plane Monday afternoon to a German airport on the border near Linz early Tuesday. They sent a young SW engineer to pick me up and offered to take me direct to a hotel - I told him to wait, did a 15 minute soldier bath in a toilet with a sink, changed to fresh clothes, and had him take me direct to the FABA office.
I installed a very special addition to the EMC Software Performance Suite that extended it's range to what the OS was doing in very fine detail. Turned out that the young SW engineer had been VERY spherically assigned to improve security by executing a credential check in a inner loop, run, basically, every few microseconds for every single operation. Almost all the VAX CPU was tied up in running that very expensive operation.
YOU DO NOT DO CPU and OTHER RESOURCE INTENSIVE OPERATIONS in inner loops - they go in outer loops where the process itself starts an operation requiring a security verification.
I told him move the check to the outermost loop encompassing the actual need for security - he said he couldn't change the code base that without the explicit permission of the Herr Doktor Professor - who was at a conference.
Their code management system, like most good ones, allowed creating experimental branches of code - I told him that the Herr Doktor was "in my way after a long trip", and to create the branch. We install the branch code, and we ran a test. The performance problem was solved.
The FABA founders, after a couple of more tests, approved the inclusion into the main branch, and I spent a week turning the young gun into a SW Performance Engineer. Very much fun!
Timing is everything.
Or as Hitler might have said, (das) Timing ist alles.
(Okay, I suppose rhe use of the English word doesn't go back that far. It isn't in a dictionary from 1950. I recalled it from Boris Becker in the '80s, and it's in a dictionary from 1990.)
Back when Trivial Pursuit first came out my younger sister had a rule if she didn't know the answer, she would guess either Hitler or Nixon.
The picture of Hitler is blocked on my iPhone too. I can see it on my PC browser (Firefox). Is this some kind of selective tech censorship? If so, not good.
Are games of trivia no longer allowed to have questions about Hitler?
Don't know. I know crossword puzzles *whose audience overlaps with trivia fans) have at times have been very restrictive in what is "acceptable" for publication. HITLER is not an answer you're likely to see in any crossword grid. (Though Mel Brooks's "Springtime for Hitler" was an answer in a NYT puzzle more than a decade ago.) In recent years, there's been an effort to eliminate reference to anyone deemed "offensive." That includes the once-frequent answer IDI (Amin) and clues for the frequent answer LEE that refer to the Civil War general. An answer like NAZI gets clued in an innocuous way (e.g., Seinfeld's "Soup ___"), if it appears at all anymore. On the other hand, these days you're more like to see answers like Ibram X. KENDI, who appeared in yesterday's NYT. Whether that's a good trend or not may depend on your perspective.
ETA:
A year or two ago, there was a big to-do in crossword world about a NYT grid that if you looked at in from a certain angle had a faint resemblance to a swastika. I didn't see the similarity. But a few did see it and raised strong objections.
The image is blocked on both of my laptops and and my desktop, using either Chrome or Edge. (All three are running Windows.) On one of my laptops, half of the image loaded the first time, but refreshing and all further attempts came up blank.
I share a name with an actor who once played Hitler in a movie, so for years running a Google image search on me has pulled up that image as one of the first several options. I checked just now, and that's still the case, pretty much the same as always. So I have no idea what is going on.
I think the current rules specify that
* Any reference to Hitler is antisemitic
* Any reference to money is antisemitic
* Any reference to noses is antisemitic
* Any reference to Israel, unless it's profuse and unalloyed praise, is antisemitic
* Ditto Netanyahu.
It's one of the "Newspeak" topics, where if you can't say the words, in time you won't be able to think the thoughts. Ingenious, actually.
If you notice I always refer to him as Netanyahoo as allusion to the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels whom his morality mirrors in their crude, selfish, elitist greed. In his case, power and Palestinian land.
Thanks! I've often thought that, but putting it into ASCII is a good editorial comment.
Was that line 'We Never Drop the Ball' underneath it the whole time it was up?
That suggests they're using the picture to send a message about something or other.
'Gives the impression they may be suggesting something or other'
It's not just about trivia games in general, Kevin, as I think you well know. It's about what you want to put up in front of a stadium full of people. There are plenty of other hateful world leaders they can put on the scoreboard as part of a trivia game that very few would find offensive. And the timing makes this more offensive but it had a pretty good head start.
I don't find it outrageous or offensive, but I do find it strange. Who gets assigned to pick a trivia question for a football game jumbotron and thinks "hitler would be a fun topic". It's such a strange pick that I could believe it was intentional by some neo-nazi type, in which case of course that is offensive.
Yes, this is my reaction. It's curation issue with the trivia questions. This being a football game, I think the trivia should be curated to be happy harmless topics say sports trivia, animal trivia maybe history events that weren't so dreary like the first ballon flight?
Menachem Begin, one of the founders of the ethnic nationalist party Likud, was born in Brest-Litovsk, Russia.
Since I had forgotten, I just googled Hitler's exact birthplace in Austria (Braunau am Inn) and was surprised to discover that his birth house, about which (understandably) there has been frequent debate, has only a few weeks ago started to be remodeled into a station for both the city police department as well as for the regional office of the federal police. Although the idea is apparently to alter the appearance of the building so drastically that it loses its symbolic power, it still seems like a somewhat questionable usage of the property.
I'm a lurker, but attended Michigan at an Ann Arbor
Students there called Michigan State Moo U. State responded by calling Ann Arbor Jew U.
perhaps that could be an answer.
Michigan had no Jewish quotas in the 20's and 30's, and so attracted more than their share of Jewish students. That how we got Arthur Miller. It's become a family tradition.
The only reason why this was wrong is because this was at a football game. Everything should be fun and family friendly. Can you imagine parents having to explain to the kiddies who hitler was during the game? Better to ask where spongebob SquarePants was born.
Nothing says “family friendly” like drunk morons watching ppl give each other CTE so their college can take in donor money.
Maybe lay off the crack pipe…
Maybe not your family or mine, but lotso kids in stands with parents who hope one day that their kids will be on those fields smashing other people’s brains. Hitter just complicates things.
I gotta agree, yes there are drunk young folks at the game and CTE cases being developed on the field but keep the optics at a family friendly upbeat level.
Also not appropriate for a football game:
What city did Jack the Ripper hail from?
What was the name of the second Japanese city that the atom bomb was dropped on?
The Watts riots took place in what state?
There are so many more. C'mon, Kev!
Human interaction is like a chemistry experiment. Interacting with 75,000 football fans is not a small experiment. What happened could have been predicted. Somebody should have known better. If you're not sure, keep the blast area as small as possible.
In my opinion, this is the essence of free speech. We don't need to stop people from saying what they think, not should we, but we have the right to expect good judgment. Somebody tell Elon.
In quizbowl it is OK to ask questions about Hitler. This is a different setting, and that makes the difference. I find it surprising that they ask general trivia at a football game in the first place because the audience would prefer sports trivia or local trivia. Some people probably would find it offensive if they asked about Joe Biden (and now I said something offensive by putting Hitler and Biden in the same category).
It isn't offensive, but it is weird.
Can we expect to see future questions like "What holiday was the Tet Offensive launched on?" or "What state was war criminal Ed Gallagher from?"
If they put up a picture of Charles Manson on his birthday would that be offensive?
I'd think it would be repellent.
A little more context: The question about Hitler was in a sequence of trivia/history/general knowledge questions supplied by an external vendor. It probably was part of a package that was generated a long time ago. Nobody explicitly chose the question for the event. I doubt that anyone at MSU reviewed the questions beforehand.
Also, it was shown more than an hour before the game started, not during the game. It was to give the early arrivals in the stands something to do while waiting for the game. Movie theaters do the same kind of thing.
I'm with Kevin; I didn't get the outrage. But when I mentioned it to a friend yesterday who hadn't heard about it, he reacted very passionately, saying in the current context it was an incredibly insensitive thing to do. He also pointed out that a Jewish leader in Detroit had been murdered that very morning (not yet clear if it was racially motivated), so sensitivities were especially high.
I get what he was saying, but I still can't feel the outrage. I guess some of us just compartmentalize things more than others.