Sentox6 said:
MelasZepheos said:
Magneto was a terrorist who in every continuity of he X-Men save for the recent cartoons (even in the old ones he killed, it was just off-screen) is a mass murderer on the genocidal level. To say you agree with Magneto is literally like saying you agree with minority group terrorists, because that's what he is. That's what the writers intend for you to see him as, a Well-Intentioned Extremist who has taken his own dogma so thoroughly to heart that he believes he is entirely justified in killing normal people and imposing his worldview on everyone.
Educate yourself. [http://www.magnetowasright.com/pages/analysis/genocide-or-acts-of-war-magnetos-brand-of-terrorism.php]
First things first: Low content post, and vaguely offensive (inferring I am uneducated in the matter).
To the point.
Magento is a fascist, and nothing I saw in that article, or in his entire comic book history, negates that belief. Interestingly what Magneto is is not the view of fascism that the world holds today (which is in fact National Socialism=fascism) but his is closer to true fascism.
'Genocide or acts of war' is a term of semantics and personal philosophy, because in the end what is war and what is not? Is the War on Terror a war in the same way that World War II was? No, no two armies meeting on battlefields for the continuance of democracy, but a war has been declared on terrorists, thus any terrorists that do want to carry out the annihilation of the Western world (and there are some extremists who would go that far) are not by the definitions of the argument planning to commit genocide. Heck, the US declared the war themselves, they gave it the legitimacy of an act of war instead of the heinous act of genocide.
Comic books are not the real world, and any attempt to apply to them real world terms and problems is usually a mistake. Comic books necessarily exist in a space in wich every storyline has closure in the grand sense. They may not tie each loose thread but the plot ends where the story ends. Life is not like that, the genocides Magneto has committed can be safely locked away in a box because it's in a weird comic book limbo that wouldn't immediately execute him for his crimes. There have been trials for 60-80 year old men found 40 to 60 years after the Second World War for the crimes they committed, yet Magneto walks scot free after killing thousands. The term genocide really means nothing in the comic book world, when it can be considered a good day when you exterminate an entire alien species.
To see this best illustrated, the Marvel Ultimate universe, perhaps the greatest Marvel failure, alongside One More Day. An attempt to bring comic books into the real world only serves to highlight just how ridiculous they really are. Magneto continuing to go free from his crimes works in a comic book, because like the Joker you need to bring back likeable characters, but in the real world Magneto would have been executed without trial the first time they ever caught him.
He is a terrorist (regularly engages in acts of terror) whose stated goal is the subjugation of all humankind (racism or at best speciesism if you take him on his own terms), who has committed mass murder on the level of genocide (bandy terms all you want but killing hundreds of people and feeling no regret because they were human and they deserved it is like arguing that it's okay to massacre the Jews because they broke Germany and thus they deserved it).
I think my original post still stands. The only concessions I feel I should make are that comic books should never be judged by the same stadards as the real world, a concept I apply to all works of fiction, and that once he got popular the writer started to like him, which as seen before with the Joker and countless others is a bad thing because then they try and make the character something beyond a complete monster, and eventually people genuinely start to sympathise with them.
To give it some real world context:
Hitler by all accounts loved Eva Braun as much as he was capable of, truly believed he was making Germany a better place through all of his actions, and was a staunch believer in a dream of a perfect Germany. His closest advisors seemed to think and speak very highly of him, and also shared his views, and he managed to convince an entire country that what they were doing was right and justified due to charisma and personal courage of conviction.
I'd still want him dead, and I wouldn't try and compare myself to him, he was a genocidal nutjob.
