Sphinx

Considering how far the Twitter is full of bots or sock puppets pretending to be people, so that’s become the automatic accusation against someone you don’t know spouting stuff that you don’t like, it’s interesting how far proclaiming oneself to be a bot is taken completely at face value. Especially when winding up angry, ill-informed neo-Nazis.

The original plan for The Thucydiocy Bot was indeed that it should be an autonomous programme, but I haven’t the first idea how to do that – and at best that would work only for familar fake Thucydides quotations, not the new and/or ambiguous ones that are generally more interesting. I retained the name, even though actually I do all the tweeting, on the assumption that people might get less cross at being corrected, however politely, by what they thought to be an automatic programme rather than by an actual human pedant, and this generally seems to be the case.

But every so often someone gets annoyed, and disinclined to accept correction – and more often than not the result is a conversation that seems, at any rate from my privileged viewpoint, confused and contradictory: they address it/me with questions and comments that are surely beyond the grasp of any current AI, and whether or not they expect a coherent and relevant response – I can well imagine the temptation to mess with a bot in that way – they then seem to accept the answer at face value, and carry on the argument, every so often throwing in phrases like “you’re just a bot, what do you know?” and “how can you be programmed with everything Thucydides ever said?” that do suggest a continuing acceptance of my professed identity. Is this how everyone talks to Siri and Alexa? As if the Singularity has already happened?

Case in point: on Sunday, a dodgy-looking account (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there any more) posted a lot of dodgy statistics about ‘white genocide’, together with a quote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”: Thucydides. No it isn’t – and it also isn’t Voltaire, to whom it’s more commonly attributed, but US neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, who has written at least one angry blog post complaining about Voltaire being given the credit.

The poster was really not happy to have this pointed out. First, there was blanket rejection of the correction; then, presented with a few web links, resentful insistence that it was just a typo; all of this peppered with claims that I was editing his responses to make him look bad (yes, it’s tinfoil hat time) and furious denunciations of the malign agenda of my programmers, who are clearly determined to spread dissension and undermine order. It eventually became clear that the real trigger was the phrase “neo-Nazi”, applied to people like Strom and (by implication) himself: not because they repudiated white nationalism and any admiration for Hitler, but because the admirers of Hitler never called themselves Nazis, which was rather a term of abuse derived from AshkeNAZI Jews now being used to discredit the wholesome agenda of white nationalism, exactly as my programmers intended…

Yes… At this point, even an imaginary bot starts to edge towards the door, and reports the account for racism, anti-Semitism and general hatred-spreading. What struck me was the coincidental link to the book I was just finishing, the sixth in Volker Kutscher’s series of Krimis set in 1930s Berlin (see Fear and Loathing in Berlin), which is of course full of Nazis as we’ve reached 1934. I think – I haven’t checked – that the word is not in fact used by any of the Nazis themselves; Kutscher is good at this sort of background detail, such as the fact that the Geheime Staatspolizei are at this date still known as the Gestapa, although we readers know what they’ll soon become. But it’s clear that ‘Nazi’ here is an abbreviation in the same class as ‘Commie’; descriptive at best, often hostile, but that is a matter of what the name stands for, not the name itself.

In some ways, Kutscher’s latest book is less depressing and disconcerting than the last couple; not for its leading characters, who have a miserable time of it, but for the reader alert to contemporary parallels. Hitler is now in power, the police (especially the ever more powerful Gestapa) is stuffed with his loyal supporters, and with the SA he has a paramilitary force of several million men, who arrest, torture, extort and kill with impunity; at least in the West, things today are clearly nowhere near this bad.

But… 1934 Berlin is also full of people who think that things aren’t too bad, or that the crisis will pass; there’s widespread belief in the ability of Hindenburg and Papen to make use of Hitler and moderate his excesses before dropping him back into obscurity, in the idea that abuses are the work of a few bad apples, in the efficacy of just keeping one’s head down and obeying the law. Kutscher presents the process of normalisation, and the power of optimism and hope; we readers know that things are going to get worse – and are prompted to reflect whether that’s actually true of our times.

Meanwhile, we see characters negotiating differently slippery slopes, sometimes unknowingly. Kommissar Rath has been compromised since Book 1, and suffers this time mostly from failing to take his gangster patron seriously enough, but now his wife Charly makes the mistake of asking the charming but sinister Dr M for a favour, as well as getting mixed up with communists on the run; meanwhile, their foster son Fritze is agitating to join the Hitlerjugend because all his friends have and it looks fun, and then starting to wonder about his parents’ suspicious behaviour, and Rath’s former assistant is rising in the ranks of the Gestapa and dealing with his homosexual leanings by shooting his occasional lover from the SA during the Night of the Long Knives, and you don’t want to know about the dog…

As before, part of the interest is seeing how small-scale personal stories play out against wider events whose course is already familiar; we know what’s happening to Germany, and the question is how these characters will respond to changing conditions. The delay between hardback and paperback publication meant that I knew from the start that there would be at least one more book even before I started this one – and I’m almost inclined to invest in the hardback this time, just for the thrill of not knowing whether this time it’s the end. There is a sense of impending crisis and of narrative pieces being moved into position; Rath’s freedom of action gets ever narrower, professionally and personally, and we’re shaping up for multiple betrayals – Charly has now called him a Nazi in the course of a row, in a contact in which this was certainly an insult…