No such thing as a "civil" war. They're all pretty uncivil. If you look for "offensive" things in a wargame and stop at unit names, you're pretty much overlooking the entire "WAR" aspect though. "Excuse me, chaps ... Would you mind very much if my military forces pushed through your territory and oppressed your people on the way to the next lot?" "Yes, as long as you keep the destabilisation and property damage to a minimum, and do try to keep the noise down ..." "Oh, and sorry about that temple ... it was in the way and sheltering insurgents ..."
My grandmother would certainly agree with you! I sometimes feel it is tasteless to get entertainment out of what others have to suffer through in real life. It is strange that humans have this fascination of war that they glorify it and want to play war games if they live in a peaceful environment. I once watched US soldiers play war games and wondered how they felt about being the disposable pawns they play with, but in real life.
This is one part of the reason why I'm much more comfortable playing fictional/fantastic wargames than historical and/or realistic ones.
IRL allowing the emperor to remain alive was a mistake. It’s a travesty that there were not war crimes tribunals on the same scale as Nuremberg for the Pacific theatre. There is no positive outcome from holding up IJA war criminals as any kind of hero unit in JSA. The only acceptable treatment for the kempetai is for all the other JSA units to kill every last one of them. This didn’t happen because the story is written by tone deaf Eurotrash.
I guess we differ on our interpretation of the scale of the two tribunal processes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Axis_personnel_indicted_for_war_crimes Far more Class A war crimes indictments in ETO compared to PTO. Far more immunity from prosecution granted in Japan than Germany.
Well, the footnote at the end of the section on the Tokyo trial indicates over 900 Japanese personnel were executed, and the full article indicates a total number of prosecutions (5700+) in line with the ETO. Granted, not having all of them listed out the same way the German ones were does lessen the impact.
And yet Hirohito got an honoured position as the head of state, c.f. Hess who got life imprisonment as deputy fuhrer and was already in custody from 1941, before a significant amount of the indictable war crimes were committed.
I very much agree with you, and as a European I don't take offense to your term "Eurotrash". I find it quite appropriate. However, to avoid unnecessary argument, it would have probably been wiser to just write "Eurocentric". This may be the core of the issue here. Because the crimes committed by the Kempeitai were not directed against Europeans, Europeans are mostly unfamiliar with the term "Kempeitai" and thus it does not evoke strong emotions. In a global world, we should accept that people from other cultures have other things that evoke their emotions. It is not necessary for everybody to become an expert on world history, but once we learn something, we should accept its meaning for others and act accordingly. Otherwise we are really just Eurotrash.
We should simply draw a line at some point. We're playing a game here, not replaying atrocities for real, and getting offended by in-game stuff is a slippery slope. I very much prefer to be offended by real world wars, poverty, and greed. Hell, I'm a member of a left-side party and in few hours I'll be attending an antifascist rally. I'm still not offended by including fascists, nazi, or their analogues in games and other media, I'm not offended by people who like to play Germans in WWII games or rooting for Empire in Star Wars, and probably the only way I would be, is when the media in question would send a message that being a fascist is a nice, proper, good thing to do. As far as I know and as man people pointed out Kempeitai aren't depicted as paragons of morality and justice. They're well-intentioned terrorists turned oppressive secret state police. Makes for cool villains in a game, not role models. On a similar notes we've been discussing female objectification in Infinity ad nauseam. But while the stripperific uniforms and combat heels are breaking the game immersion a bit, there's treatment of girls by many nerd/geek groups, real life objectification, catcalling and open sexism to get offended about. If a female model shows her belly I can just paint it over as a coverall and be done with it (sure, Tech Bee took it too far, but I simply voted with my money and bought that sexy, sexy Crabbot separately). It's the players who make the game sexist or not, not the minis. And I certainly get that people from other backgrounds and cultures might be offended by different things. Me being in a position of privilege as a white male from Western Hemisphere doesn't mean I can dictate to others what's offensive and what's not, quite the opposite. But drawing a line between games and real life is a good starting point for everyone.
Em how about no? nobody can dictate to anybody what is offensive and what is not. You can debate and if not convinced each other, or reach a common ground agree to disagree on what can and cannot be offensive, but nobody has the right to dictate to others what they should think it is offensive. No race (I hate this word), no colour, no culture, no religion, no political ideology has any moral privilege to enforce its opinions on the others, the sooner we realise we are all different and start working on coexisting despite our differences the better we will be. Sorry a bit off topic and ranty, but for me it is fundamental we understand that.
Was it a reaction to my post? Because I agree completely with what you're saying here: Perhaps something in my post made it unclear? edit: actually there's an exception. I do believe that people who condemn and prevent harming or persecuting others because or colour/nationality/sex/orientation/faith/etc. have moral privilege over those who praise it and carry it out. But that's another story and not relevant to discussion about game that we're having here.
Also, dude, 738000000 isn’t that wide a range of the population (12%) and that’s only if you include part of Russia. 60% of the population is in Asia, which is relevant to the inherent Eurocentrism of the background.
