Fridge / Black Mirror: Men Against Fire

Black Mirror FridgeSeries ThreeNosedive — Playtest — Shut Up and Dance — San Junipero — Men Against Fire — Hated in the Nation

• Fridge Logic from Men Against Fire: The MASS system turns out to make military people think "undesirable" people are these monsters known as Roaches to make it easier to kill them. However, it's explicitly stated towards the end that the public at large doesn't have MASS implants in their head. There ARE villagers who have been conditioned through just word of mouth over the years to treat these undesirable humans as monsters, but nothing beyond that. How the heck is civilian murder justified beyond the military and those villages, then? This would be a major scandal.
  • The parallels to Nazi Germany aren't used very subtly...
  • Another possible allusion is the name, given to undesirables: "roaches". The same name was given to Tutsi militants, which were fighting against Hutu opression in Rwanda some 30 years before the infamous genocide.
  • Regardless of parallels to Nazi Germany, even a war-ravaged world at large probably wouldn't condone the murder of civilians (regardless of how much conditioning is attempted).
  • But how does the illusion work on anyone if they have already seen that Roaches are human-looking when they were civilians because then they didn't have MASS?
    • The soldiers all had those memories wiped when they signed up.
  • The soldiers doing the killing appear to all be Americans, deployed to Europe, and there doesn't appear to be any independent media anywhere to report on the situation. Those doing the killing wouldn't have any chance to see their victims before receiving MASS. The locals without MASS don't seem to need any special technology to look the other way or aid in the killing, so long as they aren't pulling the trigger themselves. Not without precedent in history.
  • Also, consider how Stripe didn't remember agreeing to the conditions regarding MASS when he joined the military. It seems that MASS (or another technology in the hands of the military) is capable of providing Laser-Guided Amnesia. This could mean that the soldiers got all their pre-military memories of seeing the Roaches in their true appearance erased likewise.
  • The villagers aren't the ones killing them. Making people actually kill the "Roaches" themselves requires MASS and memory wipes, but all it takes to make people condone killing them is some propaganda. This is also true in real life.

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