The German Twitch streamer Marcel “MontanaBlack” Eris promoted an NFT showing a monkey wearing a swastika. When criticism arose, MontanaBlack justified himself: The symbol belongs to history. For these statements, he apologized yesterday in a Twitch stream: That was nonsense he hadn’t thought about.
This is the situation:
- The German Twitch streamer MontanaBlack has been promoting NFTs, a new tech trend, via Twitter for a few days that is critically viewed in gaming, but is interesting to some people as a speculative investment. Recently, he gave away 4 NFTs showing digital monkeys on Twitter. One of the monkeys wore a swastika.
- This sparked criticism on German-speaking Twitter and on international Reddit. The manufacturers of the NFT then deleted the problematic monkey and stated: MontanaBlack was paid to post it. He had nothing to do with the creation of the monkey.
- However, MontanaBlack fueled the atmosphere further with relativizing statements. He said he hadn’t deleted the monkey at all. The symbol belongs to history.
This was the quote that sparked the discussion: The exact statement by MontanaBlack that fueled the mood was (via twitter):
I personally probably wouldn’t have deleted it at all. Ultimately, dude, it also belongs to history and just because a swastika is somehow visible somewhere, not everyone immediately “salutes and greets Adolf” – that’s nonsense, dude. This whole Nazi crap unfortunately also belongs to what happened back then.
MontanaBlack
MontanaBlack says: Management made the Twitter post
This is how he reacts now: In a current Twitch stream from January 19, MontanaBlack apologized for this statement and asked for forgiveness. He later posted parts of the stream on Twitter.
MontanaBlack says:
- He was overwhelmed by the situation
- The giveaway was not posted by him, but by someone from his environment; one could also call it “the management”
- However, he failed to check the post again – that was clearly his mistake
- He was then rightly criticized on Twitter
“Confused statements without any context, just to say something”
In hindsight, MontanaBlack apparently mainly regrets his own statements about the swastika in the Twitch stream:
And yesterday I tried in the stream to somehow present it a bit argumentatively and made some statements where I had reflected 0 percent on prior.
So I had shelved the whole topic for myself yesterday, deleted the post myself, came home at some point, started the stream, and didn’t say anything, and then at some point I desperately tried to say something that ended up only hurting myself because I made some weird statements – Or let’s say not weird statements, but just confused statements without any context, just to say something.
MontanaBlack
In the course of the approximately 4-minute apology, MontanaBlack emphasizes his own Turkish roots: his mother is Turkish, and he holds citizenship “German/Turkish”.
At the end of the apology, MontanaBlack states that he clearly distances himself from the “whole Nazi crap” and raises his middle finger to the camera.
However, he also says that he actually doesn’t care about the opinion of people on Twitter or the general public, even though he is “dependent on people celebrating him.” But for him, what really counts is that his friends and family love him. What some “Johannes on Twitter” thinks about him is pretty irrelevant to him.
In May 2020, MontanaBlack had to face accusations of being associated with the far-right. This accusation came from satirist Jan Böhmermann. At that time, MontanaBlack also reacted outraged to this accusation and vehemently denied it:
Böhmermann pushes German Twitch star into the far-right corner – He defends himself
