UPDATE 6/7/2020: Tag group discussion starts here.

Posts on this site about Germany in World War II often attract some spirited debates. Specifically, post #1592564 sparked a back-and-forth about whether images featuring the Wehrmacht should be tagged 'Nazi' by default, the argument being the Nazis ran the government, ergo, the Wehrmacht was, by association, a Nazi institution.

I'll leave the philosophical questions of what is Nazism to the flame warriors; in terms of tagging integrity, I think a formal implication is a mistake. Yes, the Wehrmacht used the swastika et al. in its uniforms and swore the Hitler Oath, but it was not inherently political the way the SS was: there were plenty of Nazi sympathizers in the Wehrmacht's ranks, but being a Nazi wasn't a requirement for recruitment. And yet as of this writing, two posts of Rommel (pretty much the poster boy of Not All Germans Were Nazis after Stauffenberg) is tagged 'nazi' without a swastika even present.

So, just as swastika itself is not implicated to nazi, I don't think implicating wehrmacht would be correct for categorization, and would make such tagging less accurate. I submit this thread for consensus on the issue, and as a public brainstorm for any other hair-splitting we want to do re. the Third Reich.

If I blacklist "nazi" it's because i don't want to see that kind of stuff.

This isn't about 'accurate tagging' or even 'technical accuracy.'

If I post a picture of a 10,000 year old succubus who looks like a 8 year old girl, I still tag 'young'. The "lore" might make it 'okay'... but it still looks like an 8 year old.

If someone is wearing a nurse's outfit in a medical scenario, I tag nurse. If someone is wearing a military uniform, then I tag appropriately.

The "nazi" lore might state that members of Nazi Germany's armed forces, but unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what a person's personal politics are. All we see is the uniform that Nazi Germany used while they were Nazi Germany.

We cannot see politics. We cannot see if someone is secretly a demon, or secretly a secret agent or spy. We cannot see if someone is cosplaying. We cannot see if his wife is being held off screen with a knife to her throat if he doesn't perform as ordered. We cannot see if he is playing a part in a movie.

Political pedantry aside, implicating wehrmacht and nazi would devalue the meaning of both for the sake of "common sense" convenience.

There are no formal implications. People are tagging nazi because it looks like a nazi to them.

Outlaw bikers wore Nazi insignias and other things. Some clubs went as far as flying Nazi flags during gatherings. Were they all Nazis? I don't know. All I know is that's what they did and what they did.

Earlier outlaw motor clubs were full of outlaws and social misfits. They wore such symbols out of rebellion, and that's what I've always viewed them as. David Mann(artist) captured a lot of the earlier culture in his art. There's also a famous still painting of a group of Hells Angels having rowdy fun. They were rebellious, rude, and crude. They had no pride and didn't care. Nude ladies, beer cans, and dirty magazines laying all around. If they had a party house, motorcycles would be strewn across the yard. They'd dress up like the SS and hand carve Nazi symbols into whatever, even if it was public property.

So if I see a pinup with Nazi insignias and so forth, I generally associated with outlaw motorcycle culture than with actual Nazism.

SnowWolf said:
If I blacklist "nazi" it's because i don't want to see that kind of stuff.

This isn't about 'accurate tagging' or even 'technical accuracy.'

If I post a picture of a 10,000 year old succubus who looks like a 8 year old girl, I still tag 'young'. The "lore" might make it 'okay'... but it still looks like an 8 year old.

If someone is wearing a nurse's outfit in a medical scenario, I tag nurse. If someone is wearing a military uniform, then I tag appropriately.

The "nazi" lore might state that members of Nazi Germany's armed forces, but unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what a person's personal politics are. All we see is the uniform that Nazi Germany used while they were Nazi Germany.

We cannot see politics. We cannot see if someone is secretly a demon, or secretly a secret agent or spy. We cannot see if someone is cosplaying. We cannot see if his wife is being held off screen with a knife to her throat if he doesn't perform as ordered. We cannot see if he is playing a part in a movie.

There are no formal implications. People are tagging nazi because it looks like a nazi to them.

If I were to blacklist Nazi, I'd prefer it to be characters actually wearing more decidedly nazi outfits. The linked image definitely does not contain what I would consider Nazi. If somebody doesn't want to see either, then they should blacklist both, not add an invalid second tag.

SnowWolf said:
The "nazi" lore might state that members of Nazi Germany's armed forces, but unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what a person's personal politics are. All we see is the uniform that Nazi Germany used while they were Nazi Germany.

We cannot see politics.

To me, this seems like an argument that "nazi" is a lore tag, then, not a visual tag, and folks should respect whatever the artist has to say on the matter (similar to, say, crossgender). If you don't want to see swastikas, blacklist swastika.

That being said, this particular uniform seems to have only been worn during Nazi Germany. I can see why folks associate it with Nazism, especially if they aren't keen to split hairs over who was or wasn't a Nazi. I don't personally expect high standards here, given the current state of U.S. politics.

As long as the thing depicted is directly associated with Nazi Germany and Third Reich it should be tagged as nazi, for the sake of convenience.

The Wehrmacht also still enforced the will of Hitler and the third reich, making a distinction between Nazis and Wehrmacht is thus rather pointless. We can also have tags for wehrmacht and schutzstaffel uniforms, if someone wishes to find a particular style of uniform.

NotMeNotYou said:
As long as the thing depicted is directly associated with Nazi Germany and Third Reich it should be tagged as nazi, for the sake of convenience.

The Wehrmacht also still enforced the will of Hitler and the third reich, making a distinction between Nazis and Wehrmacht is thus rather pointless. We can also have tags for wehrmacht and schutzstaffel uniforms, if someone wishes to find a particular style of uniform.

That's dumb. What's the tag for the black counterclockwise swastika rotated at a 45 degree angle, then? Because while the uniforms can just be worn for a fashion statement, wearing or flying the black 45º ccw swastika cannot.

Furrin_Gok said:
That's dumb. What's the tag for the black counterclockwise swastika rotated at a 45 degree angle, then? Because while the uniforms can just be worn for a fashion statement, wearing or flying the black 45º ccw swastika cannot.

That iteration of the swastika is not called "nazi" either, so this is a moot point.
We can make the tag be swastika_(nazi) or swastika_(nazism) if there needs to be a distinction. That tag-style would also allow us to denote what type of religion / culture the swastika depicted belongs to, since there are some more iterations around than just Hinduism, Buddhism, and Nazi.

SnowWolf said:
We cannot see politics. We cannot see if someone is secretly a demon, or secretly a secret agent or spy. We cannot see if someone is cosplaying. We cannot see if his wife is being held off screen with a knife to her throat if he doesn't perform as ordered. We cannot see if he is playing a part in a movie.

I agree with everything stated here, yet it's led me precisely to the opposite conclusion.

If I'm looking up the 'nazi' tag, I have certain expectations for what I'll find: the armband, jet-black uniforms, gratuitous edgycool, et cetera. It's not just that they use Nazi symbols, they are unmistakably Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. In general, the tag is used for characters or overtly political settings.

But for the Wehrmacht, like you say, we don't know. Unless it's a party militia or a rebel organization, we don't generally attach broad political intent to military forces. To me, the statement

NotMeNotYou said:
The Wehrmacht also still enforced the will of Hitler and the third reich, making a distinction between Nazis and Wehrmacht is thus rather pointless.

feels remarkably disingenuous if we assume that all national armies are supposed to carry out the will of the incumbent government. The Syrian military enforces the will of Assad and the Ba'ath party, the US Army currently enforces the will of Trump and the Republicans, but nobody's going to run around to posts of those countries' respective soldiers and tag them 'baathist' or 'conservative', because that would be absurd. We also don't actually have any posts about Syrians. Why, then, does the Wehrmacht get special attention?

Of course, it's because people see the Reichsadler clutching the swastika and tag it 'nazi' on impulse. And while I think this is wrong from a tagging argument, I understand why they do it. Similar to the Soviet Union, Party iconography was disseminated throughout society to become ubiquitous, and thus synonymous, with the country entire—never mind whether individual citizens supported the NSDAP or not. So, just like the instinct to tag anything with a Soviet flair with communism, so nazi is being used as a catch-all for the entire Third Reich.

So here's my proposal: a new tag, nazi_germany, to serve as the root category for all of this. nazi and wehrmacht implicate separately so people that aren't looking for card-carrying Party members don't have to wade through pages of SS cosplay, and people that want to blacklist it all in one stroke can do so.

NotMeNotYou said:
We can make the tag be swastika_(nazi) or swastika_(nazism) if there needs to be a distinction. That tag-style would also allow us to denote what type of religion / culture the swastika depicted belongs to, since there are some more iterations around than just Hinduism, Buddhism, and Nazi.

This is something else I wanted to raise, but worried about spinning tangents in the OP. Could call it 'hakenkreuz' (the German word) and make it the catch-all for Nazi/fascist/white supremacist contexts.

NotMeNotYou said:
That iteration of the swastika is not called "nazi" either, so this is a moot point.
We can make the tag be swastika_(nazi) or swastika_(nazism) if there needs to be a distinction.

Such distinction is probably not needed.
There's occasional arguments about it being a Buddhist symbol, but almost invariably the characters in question happens to be wearing a uniform and hailing the Führer. So there's no real argument to be made about which type of swastika it is.

In reality, the eastern religions have moved away from using that style of swastika, despite their long history with it. It's very rare to see a Hindu or Buddhist use that swastika nowadays, because there's plenty of alternatives that don't have the same reputation.

The counter-clockwise version could be tagged as sauwastika, since that's what it is known as nowadays.

Genjar said:
Such distinction is probably not needed.
There's occasional arguments about it being a Buddhist symbol, but almost invariably the characters in question happens to be wearing a uniform and hailing the Führer. So there's no real argument to be made about which type of swastika it is.

In reality, the eastern religions have moved away from using that style of swastika, despite their long history with it. It's very rare to see a Hindu or Buddhist use that style of swastika nowadays, because there's plenty of alternatives that don't have the same reputation.

The counter-clockwise version could be tagged as sauwastika, since that's what it is known as nowadays.

Disagreed. I'd rather have swastika/manji styles tagged. Even if a Nazi swastika is the only one prominent enough to be tagged, it is still far better an indicator than clothing. The greater the variety of valid tags, the better people can blacklist.

Epantsimator said:
So here's my proposal: a new tag, nazi_germany, to serve as the root category for all of this. nazi and wehrmacht implicate separately so people that aren't looking for card-carrying Party members don't have to wade through pages of SS cosplay, and people that want to blacklist it all in one stroke can do so.

This thought occurred to me literally 10 minutes after my previous post, but I was in the car by then, and forgot to follow-up.

But my first thought now is that you get cosplayers and neo-nazis who are decidedly modern, so a "nazi_germany" tag would be inappropriate for them. So, no implications or aliases from nazi, swastika, or (probably) wehrmacht. But since nobody's been using nazi_germany so far, it seems unlikely people will think to use it going forward, so it just sounds like pointless busywork to police its use.

ikdind said:
But my first thought now is that you get cosplayers and neo-nazis who are decidedly modern, so a "nazi_germany" tag would be inappropriate for them. So, no implications or aliases from nazi, swastika, or (probably) wehrmacht. But since nobody's been using nazi_germany so far, it seems unlikely people will think to use it going forward, so it just sounds like pointless busywork to police its use.

Yeah, I started realizing the problems with a hard tree even as I was writing it up. Still, I feel there should be some way to differentiate between Nazi as the subject and Nazi as the setting.

As for shifting paradigms, put the policy in writing and make enough edits to set a clear pattern, and the system will usually sustain itself. Part of the reason I started this thread is right now it's all ad-hoc.

Considering the German military forces were specifically called the Wehrmacht during the Nazi era of power, BECAUSE of the Nazis, it should be tagged as Nazi. They were a branch of Nazi power. Regardless of whether or not they wore a swastika.

I'd say implicate Wehrmacht to Nazi.

In the process of drafting wiki pages for the Len Gilbert book, I figured it was as good a time as any to revisit corralling these tags. I spoke with NMNY, who voiced support for a tag group in lieu of an official hierarchy. Although the index itself and most of the new pages have been prepped for a few days now, anyone that's seen my tag edits knows I'm OCD and want to try to get this all out in one shot. In addition to clarifying whether this should be submitted as an official tag group (and if so, where it would fit in the index) there are a few tags I'd like to highlight for anyone who wants to help codify this.

(List headers to be replaced by h4. in final release as they keep breaking section/quote formatting:)

Asterisks denote special circumstances:

• sturmabteilung: will need to be populated: it's the brown uniform with the short tie, eg. post #2175955. Schrödinger from Hellsing appears to wear an SA uniform.
• ernst röhm: currently exists as ernst roehm; not sure if mods can simply retitle/redirect the relevant elements.

"ASCII-only" apparently means only basic letters, so ernst_roehm stays.

• dornier: currently a single-post artist page/wiki, but potential copyright tag for aircraft (see messerschmitt); not sure whether elements can be retitled, a separate dornier_(artist) created and the current tag repurposed, or whether mods would prefer full disambiguation.

Reorganized.

• focke-wulf: potential copyright tag (see above), currently tagged as focke_wulf. Five instances total so this is easy to change by hand.

Fixed.

Outlying tags

There are a few Nazi-related tags not included in the draft, as I'm not sure whether they're worth keeping:

• nazi_salute (22 posts) – without additional context, it's indistinguishable from the "Roman salute", or even the original American Pledge of Allegiance.
• nazi_uniform (21 posts) – would be practically disambiguated between sturmabteilung and schutzstaffel, though potentially valid as a catch-all as per military_uniform, police_uniform etc.
• nazi_armband, nazi_insignia, nazi_hat (1–5 posts) – replaceable by nazi_uniform + relevant general tags.

If anyone knows some I've missed, give a shout and I'll try to fit them in. Barring any veto by staff in the next few days, I'll assume the current list is acceptable and start posting the wiki entries.

Not to be rude but this is a site whose tag base is almost entirely english. Using german specific terms for the separate paraphernalia only reinforces a lot of the issues surrounding the tags to begin with...

1: Few people know or care to know.
2: It clouds results, intentionally or not it harms the ability for people to use their blacklist.

Nazi bullshit is nazi bullshit it doesnt need special tags meant to disguise its origins.

So yes. Absolutely we should have a large set of tags like you suggested that umbrella List things as Nazi 'memorabilia'.

Also at the above ridiculous discussion, that "Asian Swastika" facing the other way is called a Manji. Its a totally different symbol and has a totally different purpose.

demesejha said:
Not to be rude but this is a site whose tag base is almost entirely english. Using german specific terms for the separate paraphernalia only reinforces a lot of the issues surrounding the tags to begin with...

1: Few people know or care to know.
2: It clouds results, intentionally or not it harms the ability for people to use their blacklist.

Nazi bullshit is nazi bullshit it doesnt need special tags meant to disguise its origins.

So yes. Absolutely we should have a large set of tags like you suggested that umbrella List things as Nazi 'memorabilia'.

Also at the above ridiculous discussion, that "Asian Swastika" facing the other way is called a Manji. Its a totally different symbol and has a totally different purpose.

The folks who are going to be searching for these things to find and enjoy them are going to know the difference. For everyone else, however, a Third Reich umbrella tag seems more logical. Please put the tinfoil-hat away, nobody is trying to disguise anything.