In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia, which he previously described as an “extension of legacy media propaganda.” But while Musk’s Grokipedia, in his eyes, is propaganda-free, it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography.
Take Grokipedia’s entry on Adolf Hitler. Until earlier this month, the entry read, “Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” That phrase has been edited to “Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator,” but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.
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Führer is not just „leader“, it is tainted and using it as a substitute for Hitler in a factual text is super weird, like casually calling Jesus in his Wikipedia article „our lord and savior“ now and then.
Thank you for this comparison. That’s a fun one and one that’s made a little more ‘subtle’ in the US if only because of how common that language is among the populace in regions and how pervasive protestantism is in advertising/messaging.
Jesus would’ve hated America. I think according to the bible he lost his shit twice - both because of capitalism.
There was one other time, when he cursed a tree because he didn’t like its fruit, but yeah in general he disliked the nascent forms of capitalism and money people that he encountered.
Yeah I fully agree with this. I am thick in the middle of “Third Reich Trilogy” which gives an enormous amount of context to the word though.
If they changed it, it’s further evidence of scummy behaviour, but on its own it’s not a huge red flag for me with historical context.
Can’t recommend the books enough if you’re into that. The lad must have spent half his life in primary sources.
Leader would be “Anführer” these days. “Führer” was probably a perfectly neutral word before 1933. Now you just can’t use it anymore without alluding to that period. You can call your mountain guide “Bergführer”. All such derived terms are unaffected, but “Führer” is basically off limits for anything outside the Nazi Germany context.
From what I gather I don’t think the German people meant it like that (read: they weren’t supposed to). Of course he was the solitary head of state and everybody knew that his word was above any other’s, but addressing him as “my Leader” is much more about ideology than politics. The honorific would’ve probably been “my Chancellor” if it had been about his political authority. As “Führer” he was the figurative savior of the German people after the perceived injustices encapsulated in the WW1 armistice. And he did lead them back towards a sense of national pride that was completely shattered after 1918.
Being a political figure was just a means to an end for him. If he hadn’t been dismissed as a bad artist by a Jewish professor and if WW1 had taken a different course who knows what he would’ve ended up doing with his life. His weapon was his voice and that weapon was fueled by all these toxic convictions. If your hatred is aimed towards entire peoples and nations I guess your only shot at revenge is becoming a politician.
Is there another more ‘generic’ German term that would fit when talking about this period of time in retrospect? So you could have one line that says the German equivalent of ‘he was the leader in Germany during this time period, commonly referred to by the title Fuhrer’, and then no need to keep using “Fuhrer” anymore in the rest of the article.
Pretty sure its usually “Diktator” in that context.
Maybe Staatsoberhaupt. I would translate it as “leader”. But given how illegitimate his reign was, it is still a bit to soft.