In Destiny 2, a weekly task is named “Blood and Honor”, a slogan of the Hitler Youth. Bungie has now apologized for this after fans explained the difficult wording and pointed it out. They say it was not intentional, and they apologize to all who were hurt by the references.
Where did the slogan appear in Destiny 2? In Destiny 2, there are weekly tasks that come into play every Tuesday: One must complete 8 bounties to receive a reward.
The quest step “Blood and Honor” appears briefly when you have completed the weekly task and need to run back to the War Table to collect your reward.
The title of the quest section “Blood and Honor” was likely chosen because it fits well with the military orientation of the Cabal: The space turtles are the foes in the current Season 13.
What is the issue with this slogan? “Blood and Honor” was a slogan of the Nazis, which was used among others by the Hitler Youth, the youth organization of the NSDAP:
- Blood and Honor was the title of a songbook
- The words were embossed on the belt buckle of the Hitler Youth
- It was the inscription of the blades of the HJ camping knife between 1933 and 1938
This is regulated by Paragraph 86 of the Penal Code.
On reddit, a Destiny 2 player points out that a neo-Nazi organization in the UK today goes by the name “Blood & Honor” (via reddit), additionally, “Blood and Honor” was inscribed on a knife that an alt-Nazi pulled against Magneto in the movie X-Men: First Class (2011). The Nazi quickly regretted it after Magneto shoved the knife into his hand.
The Twitter user Mardin of Chatzuk, who writes fanfiction for Destiny 2, posted on February 16, the day of the Weekly Reset, a screenshot of the quest section on Twitter and tagged Bungie and the company’s community team.
The issue was compounded by the fact that a task in the Cosmodrome is titled “Battleground: Cleansing”: “Cleansing” is also a word closely associated with the Nazis.
The user on Twitter wishes for a change in wording.
Bungie is already working on a fix in an upcoming patch
This is how Bungie responds: They sent a statement to the US site Kotaku, which had first picked up the story (via Kotaku):
Any connection to anti-Semitism in Destiny 2 is completely unintentional. Bungie will never stand for anti-Semitism and is fully committed to inclusion and human rights.
We have already prepared fixes for an upcoming patch. We apologize to all our players who were hurt by the references, and we are grateful to our community for bringing their concerns to our attention.
A statement from Bungie
What is behind it: It apparently just slipped through because “Blood and Honor” is not necessarily thought of as a Nazi slogan, unlike other linguistic turns. This seems to not have even been noticed in the German localization.
The mistake could have been avoided: Anyone searching for “Blood and Honor” on the internet in Germany gets the Wikipedia entry: “Blood and Honor – Youth Under Hitler”, a TV miniseries from 1982.
Once you start looking in that direction, “Cleansing” quickly comes to mind as well. The swift reaction from Bungie once again shows how important such topics are to them.
If you have space turtles in the game that want to conquer the universe and fantasize about the rule of their own turtle race over “unworthy, other species”, then one probably needs to increasingly pay attention to parallels with the Nazis.
In September 2017, Bungie had already been made aware that they had a difficult symbol in Destiny. Hunter gloves bore the symbol of a racist movement:
