Most people have difficulty killing other people (those that don't are usually called sociopaths). So, here's the problem - how do you get someone to kill someone else in an organized fashion, but not indiscriminately? One way to do this is to "train" them such that they will engage an opponent only when they receive certain stereotypical sensory input. In an ongoing fight, this stereotypical sensory input starts to get crystallized into names - the "muj", the "geek", the "Hun". At other times, you end up picking a stereotype that already exists in the culture and is perceived as "dangerous" and use that. Since cultural stereotypes can come from almost any medium, I'm not at all surprised to hear about the German example. Anyone played any video games recently?
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