This is the second half of the third part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our long-delayed series looking at the theory of history advanced by Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron IV, one of the most popular strategy games today.
This part (both halves together) is fundamentally about politics and policy and the implications that HoI4‘s choices – and its chosen omissions – have on the vision it presents of the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Last time, we looked at HoI4‘s political simulation and concludes that in an effort to streamline the political aspects of the game – to better facilitate the player getting to the ‘good stuff’ of fighting the war – HoI4 adopted a top-down, state-power-centered, frictionless vision of politics which was essentially authoritarian in nature. Democracy, meanwhile, was presented as something between meaningless and simply a collection of penalties. Such a vision of politics, we noted, is hardly required by the period, but is instead a product of the effort at simplification to ‘meme politics.’
For this second part, I must lead with a content warning, as we are going to be talking about mass murder, war crimes, intense human suffering and in some detail. I am going to include images, many of which you ought to find disturbing. While often in discussing history, there is value in remaining purely dispassionate it is also important sometimes to feel something in order to understand some portion of the import of a moment. I am thus including some difficult images because I want you to stop and feel something, to imagine the humanity of the victims, their suffering, their loss. If we do not feel something of the empty pit in our soul where these people should be, we have not fully absorbed the lesson.
Because of course the politics of the previous part did not merely happen on the abstract moving of numbers, they happened to people. Millions upon millions of people. It is, on some level, fundamentally disingenuous to discuss World War II and the countries that fought it, without discussing those millions. They were part of World War II – indeed, the experience of a civilian being brutalized, murdered or starved to death was a far more common, a far more typical experience of WWII than that of the soldier fighting on the front lines.
So we are going to discuss them and then we are going to discuss Hearts of Iron IV‘s decision not to discuss them. Buckle up, folks, this one is going to be rough.
(Bibliography Note: Estimates for the human toll of World War II and the crimes of the Axis regimes vary to a significant degree and the following overview does not purport to be an exhaustive review of estimates. Chronologically speaking, this is not my area of expertise and I have simply done my best to relate the scholarly consensus, as best I can. I have relied in the first instance generally on the estimates collected in the “The Geography of Death” chapter in J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026), 904-908. For greater specificity, on the conduct and implications of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ see relevant sections of A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006). On atrocities in Eastern Europe more broadly, see W.W. Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (2025), T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2012) and A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020). On non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts, especially Soviet POWs, note T.E. Porter, “Hitler’s Forgotten Genocides: The Fate of Soviet POWs” Elon Law Review 5.2 (2013). On the horrors of the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ while somewhat dated, S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978)’s chapter on the topic provides a strong sense of the extent of atrocity and also how strongly linked they were to purely ‘military’ operations.)
The Grim Tally of Inhumanity
The scale and extent of human suffering – most of it suffered by civilians, not by soldiers – in World War II is so astoundingly vast that it beggars our feeble capacity for understanding. We reach for the simplest seeming question, ‘how many’ – a question vast in its implications and yet fundamentally bloodless in its imagination – and the figure is so enormous that even the best estimates have error bars larger than the populations of many countries. And yet the horror of it, the crimes of its perpetrators, are also so vast that even quite well educated and informed people are often unaware of entire swaths of the suffering that took place.
It is worth, in that context, attempting an overview, however incomplete Jon Parshall in his recent 1942: Crux of War presents the following map of the ‘geography of death’ representing the death toll, civilian and military, by country, with larger circles indicating larger death tolls:
I want to focus here principally on civilian deaths. What follows is not intended in any way as an exhaustive list, but rather an exercise in setting the terms here, of giving a sense of the scale, variety and physical extent of the horrors of this period and of their strong connection to the strategy of the war. And to be frank, it is simply worthwhile to cover even just the basics, even in an incomplete way because these things need to be understood and remembered.
We can start with strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia. The morality of strategic bombing remains a deeply fraught question; we have discussed its limited efficacy already. The US Strategic Bombing Survey after the war estimated 305,000 civilian deaths in Europe from Allied (American and British) strategic bombing; this was actually a higher figure than official German statistics. Modern historians have tended to edge this figure up; Richard Overy estimates around 350,000 while other estimates push north of 400,000.1 The United States maintained that its bombing campaign was ostensibly targeted at industrial facilities important to the war effort, not aimed at producing civilian casualties, but of course it did produce civilian casualties as its architects knew it would; the Royal Air Force, by contrast, openly practiced ‘morale bombing’ (what they would call ‘terror bombing’ when others did it) aiming to use civilian disruption and death to try to collapse German support for the war (in addition to industrial and military disruption), a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts.
The United States also engaged in strategic bombing against Japan. Official estimates by the post-war Japanese government calculated some 323,495 civilian deaths from bombing, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; subsequent academic estimates have tended to be fairly close to this figure. American bombing against Japan was notably significantly less concerned with even the token avoidance of civilian death shown in Europe, in no small part for racist reasons. We might thus give a very loose estimate of some roughly 700,000 civilian deaths from Allied strategic bombing across all theaters.
That is already an enormous amount of human suffering and yet at the same time a number small enough to fit within the error bars of what we’re about to discuss.
Of course the Western Allies were not the only parties engaged in strategic bombing and indeed they did not engage in terror bombing first. In Asia, the Japanese began terror-bombing against Chinese cities in 1938, before the war in Europe had even started (and in fact had terror-bombed Shanghai already back in 1932). The first German terror bombing attacks directed against Poland occurred on September 1, 1939, the very first day of the war. And of course the Germans also engaged in terror bombing against Britain from 1940 onward. The Axis powers first unleashed terror bombing as a tactic in the war and then complained that the Allies were better at it. It is rather late in the game to deplore knife fights after you have stabbed someone and only belatedly discovered that everyone else present have longer knives.
I have found it almost impossible to find a clear estimate of the number of casualties of Axis terror bombing – in many cases the loss of life in areas that came under Axis occupation was so high that it obscures the impact. Some 40,000 British civilians were killed by German terror bombing during the Blitz and many tens of thousands more must have died from Axis bombing in Poland, China and elsewhere, but I have no secure figure for their numbers. Those deaths will be rolled into statistics below.
Next, we can consider what we might term the ‘deaths of indifference’ – significantly unintentional deaths that nevertheless resulted from the war and the incompetence or apathy of the major powers. There are two major entries in this category: the Iranian famine (1942-3) and the Bengal Famine (1943). In the former case, Britain and the USSR had jointly invaded Iran in August of 1941 to secure supply lines to the USSR and secure Iran’s oil resources, which they feared falling into Axis hands; the invasion and subsequent allied use of the country’s infrastructure, compounded by a bad harvest caused major food shortages. The USSR banned any food from entering the territory (claiming they needed it for the front), while the United States and Britain both failed to backstop food supply in the part of the country Britain had occupied. The death toll from this famine remains highly contested, anywhere from 3 to 7 million, though most estimates cluster towards the bottom of this range, from 3-4 million.
Meanwhile, a combination of labor and resources shifted to the war effort, the Japanese occupation of Burma (and the British response to it) which closed routes for food shipment and the prioritization of food shipments to Great Britain itself – which was, we must note, also facing food rationing – resulted in severe food shortages in South Asia, worst in Bengal but felt in British India as well. Britain failed to allocate sufficient shipping to relieve the crisis, prioritizing the on-going Battle of the Atlantic and so Churchill and his war cabinet bear some clear responsibility for these deaths too. Once again, the death toll remains contentious, but the scholarly consensus tends to be in the 2-3 million range. Thus the combined indifference by the western allies (to be blunt, chiefly Britain, but also the USSR and United States) to starving peoples over whom they had a fairly clear duty of care may have contributed to a total death toll of 5 to 7 million deaths.2
The Axis powers also starved huge numbers of people in territories they occupied. Japanese occupation and continued fighting caused a major famine in Henan province in China in 1942 with an estimated death toll between 2 to 3 million dead. Imperial Japanese conquests elsewhere also severed food routes and Japan was even less willing to divert any of its shipping towards the relief of conquered peoples than the allies, leading to famine in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies which – combined with brutal occupation and forced labor policies – resulted in 3.5 to 6 million deaths. Germany meanwhile employed hunger as a deliberate weapon of genocide, which will be discussed below.
Which brings us, at last, to the largest total by far – the crimes of malice. The German Wehrmacht and SS entered Poland at the very beginning of the war in Europe already with specialized death squads intending to murder Polish leaders, intellectuals, clerics, teachers and, of course, Jews. It should be stressed that even at this point, the Wehrmacht was fully complicit and both facilitated and participated in war crimes including the mass murder of civilians. So once again, for everyone in the back, the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime.
And those crimes were astoundingly vast. Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht wherever it went (with its full compliance), murdering as they went. Others – Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Soviet and Polish civilians – were forced into brutal labor or extermination camps and there murdered in the millions. Yet more were intentionally starved as the Nazi regime used starvation as an intentional weapon of genocide as part of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ the execution and implications of which were inextricably wound through German military and economic planning as Adam Tooze notes in The Wages of Destruction (2006).
The numbers defy comprehension. The Nazis murdered roughly 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust; non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts were at least as numerous.3 Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered roughly 1,350,000 people in the territory of the USSR alone already by the end of 1942. The Nazi Hunger Plan (alongside active extermination efforts) resulted in the deaths of roughly 4.2 million civilians and 3.3 million Soviet POWs, essentially murder by starvation. The plan had intended to murder more – as many as forty-five million people. Estimates for the total number of Soviet civilians killed by the Nazis range upwards from ten million.4 While the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps are rightly infamous, most of the Nazis’ murders were done with bullets. The scale of Nazi murder is so vast it is difficult to describe any part of it without feeling like one risks minimizing the other parts of it, but all of it was of a piece with the murderous Nazi ideology and all of it was accomplished with the active, knowing participation of the Wehrmacht as both a direct function and an explicit goal of the Nazi war effort.
Fascist Italy’s scope for atrocity was smaller, but Mussolini’s government added its share of horror. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia (which is on-going at the start of Hearts of Iron IV‘s time frame) killed an estimated 382,000 civilians: roughly 17,000 from terror bombing, another 65,000 murdered directly and a further 300,000 who died of starvation as a result of the war. Italian occupation in then-Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania also brought starvation, mass executions, and civilians herded into concentration camps under abominable conditions. And Italy, of course, cooperated with the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews.
The Soviet Union also carried out substantial numbers of war crimes and atrocities, although at a much smaller scale than the Axis. Most infamous was the murder of 21,857 Poles as part of the Katyn Massacre, carried out in 1940 while the USSR was still allied with Nazi Germany, but this was hardly the only such incident. It is important to remember when considering the moral implications of these regimes that both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union entered Poland in 1939 with death squads, intending the murder of many thousands if not millions of civilians; neither of these regimes were ‘radicalized’ into mass murder – mass murder was part of their ideology from the beginning. Estimates of the death toll of the post-war Soviet expulsions of Germans range from 500,000 to 2.5 million. Soviet treatment of Axis POWs could also be brutal (albeit still less so than the Nazis): 37% of German POWs in Soviet hands died. By comparison, just 4% of western allied POWs in Axis hands died, but roughly 60% of Soviet POWs held by Germany died: Soviet treatment was at once inexcusably cruel and at the same time far less murderous than the Nazi extermination program.
The Pacific theater of the war was no less terrible. In China, Parshall offers a total estimate between 15.3 and 21.9 million Chinese deaths as a result of the war (soldiers included), including the famines noted above. Nationalist forces destroyed the levees on the Yellow River in 1938 in an effort to halt the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army, an action which drowned tens of thousands of Chinese and triggered follow-on famines and disruptions, with estimates for the total death toll around 500,000. The impact of American bombing, we have already discussed.
Those figures shrink, however, in comparison to the scale of intentional mass-murder by Japanese forces. Again, using Parshall’s survey of the estimates, Japanese soldiers directly killed between 8.2 and 9.0 million civilians across the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (alongside roughly 3.3 million allied soldiers, the overwhelming majority of them Chinese). That is, to be clear, a figure that is not (so far as I can tell) inclusive of the multiple major famines Japanese occupation (and the Japanese refusal to task its merchant shipping to support civilian populations) created. Japanese forces massacred civilians with bullets, bayonets and swords in Malaya, in the Philippines, in Burma (modern Myanmar), in Korea and most of all in China; functionally everywhere the armies and navies of Japan went, they brought atrocity with them. Japan infamously experimented with chemical weapons using civilians and POWs in China. Japanese forces also treated captured POWs brutally – the death rate for American POWs in the Pacific was over 40%, from executions, torture, starvation and forced labor. These actions in turn were not collateral damage but intentional policy, summarized most horribly in the official Japanese “Three Alls Policy” in China, directing Japanese forces to “kill all, burn all, loot all.”
There is sometimes a tendency to try to smudge this all over, to say that ‘oh well every country does bad things in war,’ but there is a real, staggering, horrifying difference between allied collateral damage and the intentional campaigns of Nazi, fascist and Imperial Japanese murder. Parshall estimates that over the course of the war, taking just the minimum estimates, a minimum of 39.6 million allied civilians died, the vast majority intentionally murdered as a result of the deliberate policies of the Axis powers – with gas, with bombs, with deliberate starvation and most frequently of all with bullets and bayonets. Against this is set a maximum of some 6 million Axis civilian casualties, many of whom were murdered by their own governments.
Allied governments engaged in conduct during the war that may fairly be described as callous or criminal. But once again their crimes pale in comparison with the horrors of the Axis, to the point that the entire sum of Allied atrocities can fit with room to spare inside the error bars on the estimates for the mountain of human suffering heaped up by the Axis. And of course beyond this, but for the Axis decision to have the war in the first place, there need not have been any of this.
I lay all of this out to make two points. First, of course, is the enormity of the horrors that German Nazis, Italian fascism and Imperial Japanese militarism brought with them. But equally that these crimes were not accidents, nor were they divorced from the conduct of the war. The ‘Three Alls’ policy was a military policy, it was a strategic choice about military action taken by the Imperial Japanese Army. The Hunger Plan was a military policy: the Wehrmacht‘s approach to the Eastern Front was predicated on the logistical simplification of starving the populace (so military logic depended on this policy) and the Wehrmacht was actively engaged in carrying it out (so military actions were dictated by this policy) and the entire point of invading the USSR was to produce the strategic end – the Lebensraum, ‘living space’ (devoid of its former inhabitants) – envisioned by the plan. The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
Choosing Indifference
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel, quoted by U.S. News and World Report, 1986. 5
Having done our grim accounting, the question now is asking “how does Hearts of Iron IV represent this historical reality?”
And the answer is that it doesn’t.6 Hearts of Iron IV, intentionally, deliberately chooses indifference.
The closest Hearts of Iron IV comes to addressing any of this is the occupation system, in which countries that are occupying foreign territory are free to pick from a range of occupation policies from things like ‘local police forces’ and ‘military governor’ to ‘forced labor’ and ‘brutal oppression.’ These policies impact resistance strength (which determines the possibility of uprising, though uprisings are vanishingly rare in this system) and compliance (which determines how much of the resources of the occupied territory’s can be accessed. They do not, however, impact the civilian population, despite the fact that the total size of the population (split between civilian and recruitable) is a statistic the game tracks for every state (a group of provinces) in the world.
A policy of “brutal oppression” (the unique policy available to fascist ideologies) does not result in civilian casualties the game cares to measure or model. It does not produce global shock, diplomatic incidents or strategically relevant refugee flows. It does not impact war support. All it does is reduce the resistance target (the value to which resistance will slowly move) by 75%, at the cost of requiring 25% more garrison troops (generally not a significant amount). This is, by and large, a toothless mechanic, one the player-base has already reduced to a simple calculation of garrison costs vs. resources gained that can be gamed out in a spreadsheet with no broader implications. Indeed, my sense is many players broadly ignore this system, leaving their occupation policy on whatever its default setting was.
And that is it, that is all the game models.
Their absence is not an oversight but a deliberate policy: Paradox has made it very clear that they have chosen to exclude war crimes, forced labor, rape and atrocities generally from the game. They’re also explicitly banned as discussion topics in the Hearts of Iron forums and have been since at least HoI2 if not earlier. Though I don’t know that Paradox has ever put out a single clear policy statement about this stance publicly, the basic reasons for it have been articulated here and there over the years and are well known by the player-base.
On the one hand, there is a concern that featuring war crimes or atrocities will attract players who specifically want to ‘press do-the-Holocaust-button’ and from time to time Paradox developers have made statements to the effect that they have no interest in making a war-crimes-simulator. On the other hand, there is also a commercial factor here: Paradox wants – and arguably, financially needs – to be able to sell this game in a wide range of countries and many countries (most notably Germany) have bans on the depiction of certain Nazi symbols or imagery, while at the same time discussion in game of this or that atrocity could trigger controversies that would negatively impact sales.7
And I want to say at the outset that I understand the difficult situation that the developers at Paradox Development Studios and on the HoI4 team are in. I had the chance a few years back to speak with several of them and they’re not unaware of this problem. There is a kind of impossible dilemma here: the entire Paradox approach to making their strategy games is that every country is playable, which means that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan have to be playable. And, while we’re here, while ‘just don’t make Germany playable’ may sound like an easy solution, we do not expect that of any other WWII game – you can play as the Germans in the WWII entries of Call of Duty or Battlefield or in Steel Division or Company of Heroes – and simply making the Axis unplayable would probably damage the marketability of the game to the point that it would no longer be sustainable to make, as compared to competitor titles. There is a space for ‘you can only play the Allies’ WWII titles, but not in this genre and we all know it.
But once it is decided that the Axis have to be playable – that they cannot simply be the bad guy villains in a single-player experience – the design has to envision players playing them. And therein comes the problem: do you want to make a game that is a Holocaust simulator? That problem is of course compounded by things like online streaming: a game which allows the player to initiate the Holocaust as Nazi Germany absolutely will have online streams where modern neo-Nazis film themselves gleefully initiating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. So the solution arrived at was to simply not simulate those atrocities, to exclude them from the game’s model of WWII.
Now there is an immediate problem with Paradox’s, ‘we do not make war crime simulators’ stance, which is that it isn’t true. Forced labor – slavery – appears mechanically in Victoria III, Europa Universalis V and Imperator, along with older titles. Crusader Kings III includes mechanics for sexual slavery – characters of certain raiding cultures can take prisoners and force them into being concubines. Paradox games even feature genocide, most notably with the science-fiction themed Stellaris, where genocidal war is a major gameplay mechanic, with multiple flavors of genocidal intent. And while strategic bombing in Hearts of Iron IV does not cause civilian casualties, in Stellaris, orbital bombardment absolutely does kill civilian pops.
In short then, Paradox’ ‘no war crimes’ policy is really ‘war crimes can be depicted except during the 1930s and 1940s.’ It’s clear – particularly from the design of Stellaris (where population could easily have been heavily abstracted as it is in some other 4X type space-imperialism games) – that the ‘no atrocities’ rule is not a general design principle in Paradox games but a specific design principle about Hearts of Iron. The developers of Hearts of Iron IV have chosen indifference, indeed a strategy of indifference towards the war’s atrocities.
Now I feel I should note that Hearts of Iron IV is hardly the only game to do this. Indeed, it seems like most World War II games do, to some degree. Rarely if ever do games like Company of Heroes or Steel Division II (which takes place on the Eastern Front!) show the atrocities that armies – mostly the Axis armies – were engaged in. I can’t claim to have played every Call of Duty or Battlefield entry set in WWII either, but I certainly do not recall either franchise drawing attention to the Holocaust or other war crimes. It is an absurd and yet true statement that of most of the popular video games which feature the Second World War, precious few are as honest about the nature of the Nazi regime than the anime-alternate-history-World-War-II-with-magical-girls game Valkyria Chronicles.
Hearts of Iron IV is not worse than the norm, but equally it does no better.
Now the defense those games will raise is that they are ‘purely military’ in their focus, set entirely ‘on the battlefield’ and so war crimes and atrocities are outside of their scope. Of course as we’re demonstrating here, that defense is frankly – pardon my language – bullshit. Most Axis soldiers were either complicit or participants in war crimes over the course of World War II; not some, not many, most.8 While a lot of these games focus on the western front, which was – as the war went – the least full of atrocity, atrocity was hardly absent, particularly as allied forces pushed forward and began encountering evidence of the Holocaust.
But Hearts of Iron IV lacks even that flawed defense, because it does not just confine itself to the battlefield: it aims to simulate military, political, diplomatic and economic aspects of the war and these elements are all shot through with crimes. Manpower and strategic resources were diverted to extermination programs. Civilians starved because of disruptions to shipping, because of intentional diversion of food, died because of forced labor used in military production or the extraction of strategic resources. Countries took diplomatic stances because they had become aware of atrocities (again, such as the American reaction to news of atrocities by Japan in China), atrocities stiffened the will to resist in many places, gave rise to partisan and resistance efforts.
Cleaning the Wehrmacht
Meanwhile this particular design choice runs directly into a more serious problem: it effectively constructs a ‘clean Wehrmacht‘ simulator.
The clean Wehrmacht myth is the historical myth that seeks to separate the regular German military (the Wehrmacht) and in particular the regular German army (the Heer) from the crimes of the Third Reich by presenting those crimes as primarily perpetrated by the SS and the Nazi party. The myth has its origins in the end of the war and its immediate aftermath: former German generals rushed to get out a version of events which pinned the blame for war crimes on someone else (not the least of which because some of the criminals were being hanged) and to launder their own reputations. A lot of enthusiast knowledge of WWII remains rooted in some of these early memoirs and this idea that the officer corps of the Wehrmacht specifically was somehow waging a ‘clean’ war in parallel to Nazi crimes even shows up in the works of Cold War era American scholars like Samuel P. Huntington.9
However the clean Wehrmacht myth is just that – a myth – it has been decisively and comprehensively dismantled by modern historians, in both German-language and English-language historiography.10 But as we’ve discussed already there was never a clean seperation between the Wehrmacht and the atrocities. Indeed, as A.J. Kay and D. Stahel conclude, “members of the Wehrmacht [as distinct from the SS] may have constituted a majority of those responsible for mass crimes carried out on the part of the German Reich” and that “it would be reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority [emphasis original] of the ten million Wehrmacht soldiers deployed at one time or another in the German-Soviet War were involved or complicit in criminal conduct.“11 Indeed, given how much of the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front (and the presence of further crimes and atrocities in other theaters) it seems likely that most German soldiers participated in or observed and were complicit in war crimes and atrocities. The same, of course, is true of Italian and Japanese soldiers.
Moreover, at the strategic level, it is impossible to separate the conduct of the war, the allocation of resources, the aims of the conflict – in short the strategic and operational levels on which Hearts of Iron IV is so totally focused – from the conduct of crimes and atrocities. We’re going to come back to war aims and strategic ends in the next part, but it is necessary to note that for Hitler and thus for the Wehrmacht the purpose of invading the USSR was to commit war crimes: the goal was to free up land for large-scale German settlement (this is what the Hunger Plan envisioned) and that was only going to happen if the existing population was enslaved and murdered. Forced labor and mass murder were the objectives for which the Wehrmacht was fighting.
The Wehrmacht fought battles so that it might have the opportunity to commit massacres. That was the purpose of the war.
Likewise the forcible extraction of raw resources using local forced labor was the strategic purpose of Japanese conquest in this period, while atrocious policies like the ‘Three Alls’ were understood as military means to achieve that purpose. The Imperial Japanese military had even less separation between the units doing the war crimes and the units doing the ‘real fighting’ than the Germans, as relatively few Japanese atrocities were carried out by ‘specialist’ units and instead nearly all were carried out by regular units of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Moreover, the decision to commit atrocities had real strategic and operational impacts on the war. In general, the Axis powers were so committed to an ideology of atrocity that the atrocities they committed made their war effort weaker and yet they kept doing them anyway because the atrocities were, at a fundamental level, the point of the exercise. The Holocaust, above and beyond its moral atrocity, diverted a significant amount of soldiers and resources to the task of reducing (by murdering them) the manpower and working population available to Germany’s war effort. Nazi oppression also drove away scientists and intellectuals (when it did not murder them), not a few of whom ended up key elements of allied technological superiority. Mass murder in occupied Soviet territory had a similar effect but also encouraged resistance even in areas where significant discontent with the Soviet regime – which had inflicted its own brutalities – could have provided the basis for collaboration.
Similarly, the Japanese propaganda effort in presenting Japan’s new empire – its ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a crusade against western imperialism might well have found receptive ears (there was certainly no lack of discontent with imperialist oppression in Vietnam, Malaya, the Philippines and elsewhere) if the Imperial Japanese forces had been able to restrain their brutality. Instead, Imperial Japanese troops murdered, starved and brutalized the civilian populace in the areas they conquered – often fostering local resistance even as Japan itself was short on war material, manpower and labor.
On top of this, German, Japanese and Italian atrocities also served to reinforce allied moral and the will to fight on as they demonstrated that these were odious, evil regimes that had to be stopped at any cost. Indeed, without the shocking brutality of Japanese armies in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre, it is unclear if the political will would have existed in the United States to take the steps to curb Japanese aggression that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.12
In short then not only was Axis brutality essentially mandated by their military strategy (as well as their political ideology), it was also strategic in the sense that it was a strategic liability that made the Axis powers even less likely to win the war they had started.
Hearts of Iron IV creates the impression that there is a thing called ‘World War II’ – which includes the Wehrmacht and the IJA and the IJN – which is distinct from these other things – the war crimes – and can be discussed in isolation. And it simply is not so.
In attempting to avoid stepping into the morass of having to make hard choices about how to represent the historical atrocities that occurred in this period, Hearts of Iron IV falls into the trap of essentially producing Nazi, fascist and militarist apologia, embracing the clean Wehrmacht myth and turning the game into effectively a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator.’ In the process, the game is actively reinforcing a long-discredited, irresponsible and deeply damaging vision of history, one prized by Nazis past and present.
Abandoning Indifference
Quite clearly, I think Hearts of Iron IV‘s approach to handling the human toll of the Second World War is insufficient. But equally I will admit that in many ways the developers at Paradox have an impossible choice: they cannot make the Axis unplayable and remain competitive in the strategy game market, they cannot have a ‘do the Holocaust’ national focus for obvious reasons and now I have said that they cannot, in good conscience, simply ignore the whole issue altogether. And yet if I am going to criticize this approach so strongly, I feel I must offer an alternative.
I think the better approach here – and I do not claim this is a perfect approach because I do not think there is one – is to represent these crimes not as player choices, made moment to moment, but rather as direct consequences of national ideology. It was not random chance that made the Third Reich and Imperial Japan engage in such atrocious conduct – their atrocious conduct was a direct consequence of their ideology, which classified entire groups of people as sub-human, worthy only of cruelty, exploitation or murder. I would thus argue that governments of this sort, with these ideologies were always going to engage in atrocities to the degree that they were able.
Incorporating that historical understanding into the game mechanics means removing a degree of player agency, but I think in this case that is appropriate. In this approach, so long as Germany remains fascist, the Nazi campaign of mass murder would continue to progress in the territory it controlled. So long as Japan remains militarist, its armies would brutalize the territory they occupy. And so on.
Based on that progression, the system would trigger events with pop-up notifications for all players providing historical context – written, I would suggest, in a fairly flat and clinical, ‘on this day, etc. etc.’ style, focusing on the scale of human suffering and the clear culpability of the regimes in question. It might even make sense to create a specific design of text-block and image to clearly distinguish between these specific historical memorials as compared to the branching or alternate history events the player engages with. These events would not involve player action – there are no choices they prompt – they would be intended instead as digital Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones,’ a decentralized system of memorials in Europe for victims of the Nazis), a chance to make the player stop and take stock of what the war meant, what the regimes involved were and what they did.
The yet braver choice would be to also give these events gameplay impacts. Now one can easily imagine the almost immediate fear any developer would have, which is creating a game system where players are incentivized by the mechanics to simulate these atrocities. But I think we can avoid that problem neatly in two ways. First, as noted, we’ve already largely limited player choice: the atrocities happen so long as the historical regimes remain in place so there is no button to press.13 Second, I think a fair historical assessment of these atrocities would still make their effects entirely negative. Mass violence against civilians did not push any country closer to victory in the Second World War14 but they did hurt the war effort of the perpetrating countries, encouraging resistance, killing potential workers and soldiers, alienating foreign countries and consuming manpower and resources to no military end.
In that context, to me, it seems quite reasonable that the initial phases of Nazi oppression against the Jews would reduce Germany’s available manpower and probably ought to provide a non-trivial research penalty. As the Nazi campaign of extermination progressed, it might also consume industrial production (represented in factories) and further reduce available manpower. Atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union and China (and elsewhere) could be fairly tied to create effects increasing local resistance, representing the way in which Nazi and Japanese atrocities fueled partisan warfare which in turn had real operational effects not currently effectively simulated in game. Admittedly, this would be a courageous development choice, but I think it is an honest one.
The irony is, Hearts of Iron IV already has a system that resembles this, but only for the USSR and only for Stalin’s Great Purge. In practice, so long as the Soviet Union remains Communist, the Purge is effectively guaranteed to happen (either a Stalinist purge or a Trotskyite one). And while the game remains mostly mute on the civilian impacts of the purge and Stalin’s larger campaign of oppression and the massive system of slave labor camps (the Gulag) that the Soviet Union operated, nevertheless this atrocity is not only incorporated into the game, it has mechanical effects – removing a number of possible military and civilian leaders and weakening the Red Army.
That said, even the pure ‘stumbling stone’ approach – simply documenting via in-game events with no further mechanical impact – would already be, to my mind, a more honest and accurate solution than what Hearts of Iron IV has now or indeed than most modern WWII games attempt. As noted above, it is the normal approach for games set in World War II to simply take the same cowardly dodge Hearts of Iron IV has, to pretend these things didn’t happen or that if they did happen they happened somewhere over there – off stage left, away from the ‘real’ war and the ‘real’ fighting and the ‘real’ soldiers – but this simply is not true. Moreover that approach has the unintended but very real consequence of turning every game in which it is used into a piece of ‘clean Wehrmacht’ propaganda. And that is not a neutral stance either, but instead the preferred rhetorical frame of modern fascists, Nazis and militarists.
It is, I think sincerely, a moral failing to adopt this dodge of indifference out of cowardice or commercial expediency and I think Paradox can do better and should do better. It is time to stop pretending, here and elsewhere, that World War II and the many Axis (and to a lesser degree, Soviet and other allied) atrocities can be cleanly separated, that we may treat the war in the absence of the horror of the regimes we fought in it. We cannot and it is cowardly to try.
We are charged by the voices of the past to remember and cultural products – and a video game is every bit as much of a cultural product as high literature or prestige film and TV – are part of how we remember. And we are charged to remember.
It is not enough to be merely indifferent.
- In The Bombers and the Bombed (2014)
- Though it may equally be argued that the Axis powers, by starting a war like this which would disrupt global food supplies and shipping networks, also bore a substantial culpability here as well. A significant part of the reason that Britain and the United States were not able to alleviate these famines were German efforts to sink allied shipping which made no distinction between war materiel and humanitarian supplies. Still, I think it is appropriate to lay a good deal of the blame here at the feet of western (and Soviet) imperialism here. Also I should note before we move on that I have not counted pre-war Soviet famines here, because they mostly fall outside of the chronological scope of Hearts of Iron IV, but the British Empire was hardly the only one that, sometimes through indifference, sometimes through malice, starved its subjects; the Soviet Union – we may fairly call it a Soviet Empire – surely did so as well.
- Porter, op. cit., 360
- As noted by Porter, op. cit., 359.
- As noted elsewhere, the sentiment and even phrasing are not original to Wiesel. This quote is often attributed to his book, Night (1956), but I cannot find that it occurs there, though I may have missed it; I have gone with the attribution given by Oxford Essential Quotations (2016).
- Except, oddly, the Soviet Great Purge, which is modeled in its impacts to Soviet military leadership, although not in the broader impacts to the Soviet population. Scholarly estimates put the death toll of the Great Purge around 1,000,000.
- Consider: if there was an ‘atrocity’ mechanic, would the use of the atomic bombs qualify? That would be quite the controversy in the United States, where the ethical implications of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain quite contested. They are, as you might imagine, less contested in Japan, but then an accurate depiction of Japanese war crimes implemented into the game would be quite controversial in Japan.
- As quoted below by .J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020) for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, but the same essentially must be true of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy (which murdered nearly as many people, but did so almost entirely through the regular armed forces), so it seems almost certain that more than half of all combatants on the Axis side were to some degree culpable.
- In The Soldier and the State (1957). The idea that the professionalized German officer corps would be party to Hitler’s crimes is an absolutely fatal flaw to Huntington’s argument, so he just pretends it didn’t happen (in line with the elite understanding of the situation in 1957). As noted elsewhere, I think Huntington’s argument is sloppy and incorrect.
- Note especially Smelser and Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front (2008), but equally almost anything by W.W. Beorn, esp. his Marching Into Darkness (2014). Note also, of course, on this topic C.R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992) and the reply D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
- A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020).
- And of course without the Japanese decision to launch a surprise attack on American soil, it is unclear if the political and popular will to see the war to its final conclusion at any cost would have been quite so ironclad as it was.
- And I should note, I would absolutely not craft a-historical atrocity events – no ‘extra Holocaust’ for a Third Reich player who wins the war, etc.
- With the arguable exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose effects are already simulated in HoI4, so that system exists and does not require adjustment here.
_1b.jpg){kind=link}
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.Elie Wiesel, quoted by U.S. News and World Report, 1986.6Hearts of Iron IV, intentionally, deliberately chooses indifference.
The post looks great so far, but all of the text after this quote seems to have accidentally become part of the same quote block – it’s making the text bold and hard to read, on my screen, at least.
Fixed
The formatting seems to be messed up with most of the end of the post ending up in a block quote.
Fixed
I think having specific historical events pop up would feel a little off for a Paradox game – they used to do that, in CK1 and EU2, and often the player’s timeline had diverged so much that they didn’t make any sense. A more general system where atrocities happen based on current game events would make more sense to me. A run with a purely historical setup should generate events which mirror real historical events, but for example, I think we can all imagine what would have started happening in a fascist USA based on the rhetoric of the real American fascists of the 30s and 40s and the game should demonstrate that a fascist regime ANYWHERE would have produced atrocity.
Yeah, given EU5 has basically copied Vic3’s pops system, it seems like a HOI5 could reasonably track culture percentages in provinces and, based on your government type, give you a % chance each month of having a population loss event (maybe clustered around the most productive pop types) in a province that has a high % of un-accepted culture pops. Mechanically, the system basically already exists in the other current gen Paradox games.
Hearts of Iron always has had specific historical events pop up. The Hindenburg Disaster (Oh The Humanity!), Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the death of Wilhelm II, to name a few.
And Paradox already chose a more general system for these events, as they need not happen the same way the actual historical events did: There is a chance that the Hindenburg safely docks at Lakehurst, Earhart successfully circumnavigates the world and the former Kaiser to die before or after 1941.
So they know (or can pretty easily figure out) how to do this.
EUIV is full of historical notice popups, often creating special Advisors in-game that are mechanically superior to regular Advisors while describing a history that shaped that character which bears no relation to the history your gameplay has generated by that point. These are programmed in in a country-specific manner, and they moved their design philosophy away from adding them after they put in country-specific Mission trees, but they are still a normal part of gameplay in most of the formable End Tags.
I think Dr. Devereaux is envisioning that the events that fire are not so much specific historical events, as something that would have a trigger system like:
“Is your government totalitarian? Did you just conquer territory? If so, have those territories eat some economic output potential penalties because your government is ideologically committed to sending in death squads to shoot all the schoolteachers, clergymen, and political leaders it can find.”
“Is your government totalitarian? Enjoy needing to put bigger garrisons in there to suppress the partisans who rose up angry because without you even getting to vote on it, the first thing your government did when it captured a conquered territory was shoot all the schoolteachers, clergymen, and political leaders it could find!”
“Does your government declare exploitative or harsh policies for occupied territories or satellite nations whose infrastructure falls under its control? Have occasional famine events caused by your occupying authorities ruthlessly deciding to starve the peasantry.”
“Is your government fascist? Does it rule, either from game start or by conquest, territories historically containing ethnic minorities it’s likely to target? Eat some penalties associated to the effort the government puts into oppression of those minorities and the ongoing lost economic potential associated with them being oppressed.”
This can be handled by conditional event triggers and flat penalties without too much trouble.
Correction to the caption on the “occupation law”: that is not recruitable population from the occupied state, but garrison size required for the occupation law. That is why more is worse (red) and why the harsher laws have it higher.
My only other note is that the thesis of this post is something I’ve thought for a long time, and in fact commented on the first post in this series. I would quibble slightly about which game mechanics to involve (the Nazi extermination programs should consume infantry equipment, trucks, and trains, not just construction output) but I agree with the core idea.
Weirdly, agricultural production either doesn’t exist in the game at all or is completely abstracted into civilian factories, and so if you’re modeling the diversion of agricultural transport to carry humans to death camps in the game’s existing systems that has to come as a construction malus. The rest I agree with you about, although Paradox would likely aggregate loss of equipment from corruption (also a feature of fascism so ubiquitous that it is also basically a goal!) and loss of equipment from diversion to commit atrocity into a single mechanic.
Fixed
Block quote is unclosed and has messed up formatting for the rest of the post.
Fixed
As written this would be a singular Stolperstein, but there are four Stolpersteine pictured so correction in either direction would be correct.
“Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”? Wasn’t that something from Shadowrun?
Was it actually part of Imperial Japan propaganda or is Bret just using it sarcastically here?
It was a real thing, just less well known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
I for one never heard of it as a Shadowrun thing. The only one I know was in history textbooks in high school.
It’s the Japanese term for the empire they were trying to build in East Asia and the Pacific island chains they were targeting. My understanding (which is limited; not too deep into WW2 history and my Japan knowledge is from Japanese media that mostly pretends Japan skipped directly from WW2 to post-1945) is that they didn’t have global ambitions but intended to conquer China, Korea, Vietnam, and various island chains to secure natural resources for an industrialized economy as well as a stable supply of food, and even with Pearl Harbor they were only planning to get the US to lift the oil embargo strangling their war machine and concede everything west of Hawaii.
I do not think they intended to have any East Asians who weren’t of Japanese descent involved in the prosperity except as slaves; well prior to WW2 there was a long and ugly history of Japanese imperialism in the region not too different from that of European powers except with less of a technological gap.
It’s complicated. Here’s a link to the wikipedia article detailing late war Japanese writings on the topic, it’s a good primer for any neophytes here about what the final realized form of this idealogy was. Basically, the locals were naturally inferior so they needed to be ruled by the Japanese race forever, yada yada.
In practice Japanese politics were fluid and disunited. The aforementioned document was a late war product in part because the Japanese philosophy was Nazified (including by the introduction of half-understood antisemitism) over the course of the war.
As much as trends can be identified, the idea transitioned from a legitimate nucleus of anti-colonialist pan-asian sentiment to a political project which was kept intentionally vague under Konoe to both appeal to outsiders and the hardline ethno-nationalists in the military, and as the military increasingly assumed complete and direct war time power it became an acceleratingly racist institution. How much this was an ideology showing it’s already present true colors versus being changing as the people controlling it changed is debatable, and gets into some very thorny political waters about the legacy of early war Japanese statemen like Konoe. Did Konoe ever actually mean for the GEACPS to be anything approaching an egalitarian institution, or was it always a Japanese version of the British Empire at best?
I personally ascribe to the view that Konoe was being sincere in part whilst also holding that it was always going to become an imperialistic project. As long as Japan was on the jingoistic-militarist path it was always going to steadily radicalize its civilian institutions to justify the war goals its military assigned. It had no effective breaks on this-the utter failure of early civilian oversight of the military meant that there was no way to meaningfully enact cultural change at the military except through utter defeat. For that reason I also think any distinction between Lebensraum is incidental, even if scholars ascribe some Confucian character to the militaries internal writings. If the war had continued ethno-nationalist military colonialism would have progressed down the inevitable ideological pathway of least resistance, to ethnic extermination.
Japan just lost before it got there.
I think we’re allowed to read any “Let’s unite all these countries for greater prosperity for all” with a bit of cynicism (and yes, I don’t exclude the EU from this) – it’s all too easy to add the rider of “Even if they don’t want to, because we know better.”
And once that clause was added, the next step of “We have to rule these places because the locals don’t know better” is just a small leap to turn the whole project into imperialism.
No one is going to hold you down and take your cynicism away from you, but there’s no evidence that the Japanese Imperial project was ever anything but an effort to build a colonial empire. At least as early as 1905, Japanese leaders had understood that the only way to be treated as valid participants in global diplomatic negotiations was to secure access to amounts of fossil fuel and iron ore greater than what could be found within the home islands.
A settler-colonial effort that combined genocidal efforts to drive indigenous people out of their homes with culturally-genocidal efforts to assimilate the survivors was undertaken by Japan as early as the 1870s. Japan didn’t oopsie itself into maniacal ethnonationalism.
I’m honestly not sure ethnic extermination writ large was ever in the cards simply because of the practicalites. (There’s just too many asians for that) That said this obviously doesen’t prevent the japanese military from committing atrocities on a massive scale. The actual plan (such as it is) seems to have been to set up a compliant chinese puppet state that would be economically and politically dominated by Japan, but not really exterminating the chinese population. There might have been more specific plans for eg. some of the pacific islands, etc. though.
One common theme with all fascists is that they never really consider relative population numbers. Lebensraum came with some vague concept that there were Germans abroad who would return to fill in the empty space, but it didn’t enumerate that expatriate population, in terms of policy it basically assumed Germans would appear in the East via spontaneous generation. I think it’s valid to say that the Japanese did not have a timescale in which they planned to carry out a full Yamato-ization of their colonies, but we should not take that to mean that an extermination-boosted assimilation was not intended in all conquered territories.
@Endymionologist
This period (the 1930s and ’40s) was to a large extent prior to the “demographic transition” in developed countries. Fascist countries were not really considering how to populate the ‘Lebensraum’ they intended to massacre the population out of, sure. I’m fairly sure that’s because were tacitly expecting that by a combination of “typical family sizes are 3-4 children per woman and more in some frontier environments so the population will expand to fill the available space anyway!” Plus “women will surely have even more children if we force them to stay in the home and relying on foreign slave labor to fill any jobs that anyone might otherwise hire women for!”
@Simon_Jester
Depends on the country. France, for instance, had transitioned fifty to a hundred years before. Germany was already deep in the process of it. Japan hadn’t hit it though, but it was rapidly oncoming.
In terms of raw math Japan would still have to have taken centuries to replace the natural population of Asia.
@Terry
I agree that you are correct in your discussion of the demographics of historical countries. On the other hand, totalitarians are generally ideologically hostile to inconvenient facts, and I’m quite confident that the totalitarians (including the fascists) of the 1930s and 1940s believed that they could reverse any demographic transition their society had already “suffered” and bring back six-births-per-woman birth rates if they put their minds to it, via social engineering.
This was part of why fascism in particular tended to be very hostile to feminism, and remain so today. To the fascist the world is intrinsically an ongoing slow-motion (sometimes fast-motion) war of races fighting one another for dominance, and it is very much a zero-sum game. To the fascist, to merge with another race is to be destroyed by them, is a fate worse than collective physical death, is a preoccupation that becomes obsessive anxiety.
The fascist thus tends to end up in the same mental place, regardless of where he lives or what the era is: he ends up convinced that women should be, essentially, forced to bear more children of the ‘proper’ race, and tends to think of this as the only truly important social role women should (be allowed to) have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
Nah, that is what the Japanese called their empire. The told anyone who would listen that they were trying to liberate Asia from their colonial overlords. This fooled no one who had to actually interact with the Japanese
This was actual Japanese wartime rhetoric, which the Shadowrun writers were riffing on.
Starting around 1940, when its eyes turned to European colonial possessions, Japan started to present itself as a liberator of colonial peoples; “Asia for the Asians” was one of their slogans. This led lots of independence movements to support Japan in 1941-2, before Japanese brutality exposed “Co-Prosperity” as a lie and forced them back onto the European powers’ side.
A common pattern, from Burma to Indonesia to Vietnam, was a year or more of vicious guerilla warfare between those who were pro-Allied/anti-Japanese from the beginning (usually Communists, ethnic minorities, and close collaborators with the Europeans) and those who bought the Japanese line for a while (usually non-Communist independence movements). The bad blood and atrocities of that fight fueled Southeast Asian civil wars for decades.
Thanks, guys!
It did exist
It was a real policy proposal originating in Japan’s civilian government, which was never seriously pursued in part because the civilian government had by this point been largely sidelined by the military. After the 1941 election (the first in which opposition parties were banned, and which marked the final stage of Japan’s democratic backsliding), the military government stopped using the phrase even as propaganda.
Correction, 1942 election.
They even had an idol group! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Girls_Revitalizing_Asia
It was a real term as used by Japan, yes.
I know this is our ignoraces clashing, but that hurts a bit. It’s like saying “Blitzkrieg? That’s a Call of Duty perk isn’t it? Was Mr. Devereaux using it methaporically, or did Germany used that in their tactics?”. Granted, it’s been long since I touched any Shadowrun games (I much prefer X-Com) so I dunno how well that term gets riffed there.
SR has the “Pacific Prosperity Group” which is… not that close, it’s an ANTI-Japanese group of megacorps. Remember that Shadowrun’s setting was made in the 1980s when people thought Japan was going to economically conquer the world. Areas not Seattle got painted with broad strokes. The PPG was made up in later editions to try to increase the pull non-JP megacorps had.
While on that note, Shadowrun itself has some HoI4 cowardice problems. For example, in the SR setting, the South has Risen Again, and the Confederacy is back. Now to be clear, SR is a dytopia, every government is bad in different ways. SR also wants to use coded sci-fi to dicuss racism by making it be about, like, anti-orc racism. I don’t think you get to play that card anymore if the literal Confederacy comes back though, I think you need something to say about vanilla real-world racism then.
As I recall, Shadowrun is pretty upfront about the need and desire of the “Amerindian” population to use atrocities to establish their own independent state.
Yes and no. Yes, these things officially happened in the backstory, but the tone is “excuses to set up the setting we want” and/or “cool grimdark where badass shit goes down,” not “oh my god we need to lock up these psychopaths who inflicted unimaginable suffering.” The SR setting does not seem to have some sort of equivalent of Palestinians demanding their land back despite the dispossessions being in living memory, barring Ireland of all places I believe (which had something 1000000x worse than the British if taken seriously where Elf-supremacists took over the island and kicked everyone else out).
In Shadowrun, the (new) Confederated American States isn’t really The Confederacy though, but it continues a theme of old identities reviving, nations splintering – which furthers ideological or corporate power, and the past being used irrationally to blanket for the present.
For example, Shadowrun Japan is Five-Megacorps-In-A-Trenchcoat, but that is *not* how it presents itself publicly. Shadowrun Mexico is Aztlan, which recreated an entire Meso-American religion as cover to sacrifice blood to hungry demons, but it’s being done by cold, calculating modern men and women who view sending souls to hell (or whatever) as a line item on the budget.
The writers also aren’t 100% consistent on any of this, of course. Depending on who you listen to, the CAS either has a stronger human-rights track than the UCAS, or possible no metahumans are even allowed legal identities in either country, or some other thing.
Thank you so very much for this so clear and concise exposition of how this war game operates, and how it does NOT mirror the history by which it is inspired, and deliberately doesn’t. This describes so well my objections to these modes of ‘innocent fun.’
Watch The Fallen of WWII on YouTube, it is quite insightful.
A note regarding the German laws around the display of Nazi symbols (StGB §86) has a long list of exceptions in part four, which includes civil education, art, research, education, reporting about the time period and a vague “similar”.
However, originally video games were not considered to be art (which is by far the easiest category to qualify for), so Germany got censored games.
For a significant time (at least until 2010, I do not know the exact cutoff) you also couldn’t import the game version with swastikas or similar into Germany, but this has stopped and since 2018, it’s possible to sell games with Nazi iconography directly in Germany.
Interestingly enough, HoI4 tried adding the swastika and other Nazi imagery to the game, but was barred from doing so, as the game was seen of not portraying the horrors of Nazi crimes enough.
one of the weirder effects of
Just a question – you said something about non-historians doing history in your post on September 25th. What did you think of Timeghost Army’s series on World War II (and World War I, and the Korean War, and…)? They have a special sub-series named “War against Humanity.” among other sub-series, and they talk about war crimes committed by Axis and Allied alike.
Well eritten. Makes me feel guilty for every WWII warfame I’ve ever played.
Having read this I’m reminded of how Morrowind has slavery. The recent Tamriel Rebuilt “Poison Song” finally has a joinable House Indoril. Their cities & chapels look incredible, clothing & armour are beautiful to wear, but then as you wander around you get regular reminders of how unwelcome your PC is, and then you find the local slave market. Some of the TR quests are very ugly, although not too much worse than what’s in the base game, like the “find me a noble born wife” quest that can be avoided, but the detour could take a while…. (need to be level 20 + 40 reputation)
At least you have the option of freeing all the slaves you meet (assuming you have the right set of skills, spells and/or items), while butchering anybody that tries to stop you.
And Indoril is supposedly nicer compared to what’s whispered about House Dres. Likewise, Hlaalu is often compared positively against the other houses for being more “open” to new ideas, but they also run the largest slave-plantations on Vaardenfall.
Hm, I suspect that if the game did note German atrocities — even in a neutral or disapproving away, even if they had negative effects on the war efforts and were disincentivized — you’d still get neo-Nazi streamers showing them off going “yes, this is what we should do!” :-/
One hundred percent would happen and can’t be avoided; you have people unironically say Emperor Palpatine is a figure to emulate. That said, depending on how it’s done it might net give an anti-Nazi message to most players.
At that point, it reflects more to the people wishing for the torment nexus than the “don’t make the torment nexus” itself. There’s no helping those people, you’d need professional help for them.
It’s like how the Soviets were the first to give horned helmets to the Teutonic knights as demonization and now they have become a part of their “badass” image.
On the other hand, having those same neo-Nazi streamers going “yes, this is what we should do” might actually tend to openly turn off a lot of the people they try to recruit. There’s a reason the neo-Nazis have mostly rebranded themselves as “alt-right” or “race realist” or whatever.
Yeah, doing the opposite of love may be the actual correct move here
>the largest total by far – the crimes of malice.
You say this, then the largest numbers you site are from famine. You already said, earlier in the article, that you were counting food policy under ‘deaths of indifference’
Those are malicious, deliberately inflicted famine deaths. As in, the Axis armies deliberately killed the farmers, destroyed the transport infrastructure, etc, etc. They knew that people would starve as a consequence of their actions, and that was the intention.
The distinction here is that for instance Nazi Germany actively ensured people would not have access to food and thus starve to death, while eg Britain had no actual objection to people in Bengal eating, they “just” had higher priorities for their limited shipping.
If some neutral third party had attempted to ship food to Poland, Germany would have attacked the food shipments. If they had done the same to Bengal, Britain would have probably diverted more shipping, but would not have actively interfered and if our hypothetical third party was actually providing enough food Britain would have been quite content to let them.
To play devils advocate, such a solution might not have helped. The issue wasn’t really total supply (the drop in such was minor) but that the poor needed to be given food, as they didn’t have money to buy it or enough private farms to grow it resulting from colonial policy. A small decrease in productivity caused a lot of families to suddenly have slightly too little food, resulting in a price explosion as everyone tried to buy the market surplus all at once, resulting in everyone who was poor having no food. Fixing this across every market in Bengal would have required significant effort on every level, with infrastructure being barely capable of reaching a lot of the local markets to begin with (because it was designed to take stuff out of India, because Britain).
The British still refused to send food to India and there was certainly something that could have been done, even if a famine still occurred. It’s not certain that the state of India, such as it was, could have actually managed the task of distribution, but it wasn’t given the opportunity to try.
Notably what changed after British rule was largely better land distribution, along with much superior infrastructure and local government responsiveness (at least since Bengal split from Pakistan). Since then famines have occurred, but basically don’t result in mass death. You still get effects (stunted child growth, etc.) but few die.
The British before WWII were trying to prevent famines in India, they held Famine Commissions which agreed to the principle that the poor needed to be given food.
The general issue is that the Indian Civil Service wasn’t exactly getting the best British bureaucrats, which meant mismanagement during famines and in creating the infrastructure, such as good statistics on crop yields, to prevent them.
Colonialism sucks.
IIRC specifically a lot of the standing recommendations of the Famine Commissions (which had largely prevented widespread famine for a couple of decades) were ignored due to wartime exigencies.
Annual reminder that categories are fuzzy and that drawing a clean line is almost never possible. I would agree that there arguments for both the Bengal Famine being different from the Hunger Plan as well as noting that they share some similarities.
For my money, I would say that the colonial project of India in its entirety can be called malice – it was based on racism and its strategy was very openly to extract resources to enrich Britain at the cost of the locals – but that the Bengal Famine as a sub-phenomenon was more indifference – the British had no intention of killing off its productive work-force, but it did not consider how its malicious colonial project had resulted in the region being unable to feed itself when global shipping was disrupted.
This claim is at odds with the actual history of colonialism.
Firstly, the British EIC agents were in India mainly to make money fast – the death rate of Europeans in the tropics was high until the late 19th century. Under those circumstances, they had powerful reasons to exploit the locals regardless of ideology.
Secondly, Indian GDP per capita is generally agreed to have fallen under British colonialism, and of course GDP measures domestic production regardless of who owns said production, while national income measures the income of the residents of an area. If the British were effectively exploiting India we’d expect to see rising Indian GDP per capita with steady (or falling) national income per capita.
I don’t quite see how these facts are at odds with my claim. Firstly, it seems you’re disagreeing as far as I can see only in that you appear to think that “make money fast” is not covered by “enrich the core by exploiting the locals” and that somehow this means we can exclude the racism.
Thing is, I will grant that there’s imperial exploitation that’s not racist, but colonialism was racist. The people said so explicitly at the time and we can see how that is also reflected in policy.
But for the second point, “The British were bad at exploiting the colonies for long-term economic gain” as somehow invalidating “The British strategic end of colonization was exploiting the colonies for economic gain”, I have to fully disagree. The speed of extraction and the long-term consequences are not important for the point I’m making – either way, it’s about how the core redirects economic output for its own gain. To what extend emphasizing short-term enrichment over long-term growth is a bad way to reach the desired ends is a different question. And secondly, being bad at reaching the desired strategic outcome does not mean the strategy does not exist – it just means bad at it. And it can be argued that their failure at economic planning in India is a foregone conclusion because the premises on which they based their strategy were flawed – they were racist and their economic policy was based on the assumption that the locals were useless unless ruthless dominated and exploited by white people.
AlienSystem covered this fairly well, but basically, your argument fails to disprove the thing you’ve directed against. FIrst, the argument “EIC agents were in to make money fast” is entirely consistent with malice. If a pirate robs you of everything you own, the robbery can reasonably be attributed to “malice” in the sense of this post, even if the pirate is only “in it to make money fast.” Desire to harm others for one’s own gain qualifies.
Second, you argue “clearly the British weren’t exploiting India effectively or India would have exhibited ABC instead of XYZ.” Long story short, that’s a poor way of proving that the British <i>were not exploiting India</i> or did not have an intent that might reasonably be called ‘malice’ towards India (such as disrespect and desire to prey upon India for Britain’s gain). It is a much better way of proving that the British <i>did not exploit India effectively</i>, at least not as you reckon “effectiveness.”
Part of the problem may be that you do not reckon “effectiveness” in the context of the British Empire. India, in, say, the early 1700s before British domination, was a center of many kinds of economic activity, including sophisticated goods manufacture. It wasn’t industrialized as we now understand the term, but there was a good deal of it.
Over the first century or so of their rule, the British systematically suppressed Indian manufacture so as to ensure a market for their own goods, functionally converting the Indian economy into a (subsistence farming-based) raw material export economy. This assisted them significantly in their efforts to convert <i>their own</i> island economy into an industrial center. But as a result, the GDP gain was in Britain, not India, because that’s what happens when you make a region farm your cotton for you so you can weave it in an industrial mill and sell it back to them at a large markup, forbidding them to weave the cloth on their own.
The kinds of EIC agents who were at the highest risk of dying of disease before they could return to Britain were the kinds of agents that the company would have deemed most expendable. They didn’t incentivize any kind of policy of “extract the wealth quickly, and then get out”.
The company otherwise embedded itself deeply in the regional politics, becoming a significant player in conflicts and power distribution between local princes and subordinate Mughal governors, in the interests of ensuring favourable power distribution, stability of finance and manufacturing of their desired commodities, and ultimately a stake in straight up tax farming.
Why should they have cared if overall productivity went down, so long as they made their quotas? Indeed, the deficit created by such contributed to the fact that World War II was not the first famine to occur in Bengal under their watch.
(Some of the relevant strategic and economic considerations had changed significantly by the time that company government gave way to the Raj.)
I believe the implication is that there were both deliberate famines and inadvertent famines, and while both lead to deaths from starvation, the former is generally worse (and killed more people) than the second? I could be wrong.
What do other historians make of Tooze’s thesis that those murdered during Aktion Reinhardt were killed because they couldn’t have provided more manpower to the Third Reich if left (temporarily) alive?
The idea being that below a certain calorie intake, capacity for labour falls off so sharply that it was deemed more efficient to concentrate the limited amount of food allotted to the General Government amongst a subset of the population (who were chosen to be merely annihilated through overwork) while immediately executing the rest.
Of course it goes without saying that this decision was only forced by the ongoing war of conquest that Germany chose to start so none of this should be taken to excuse their actions.
Well, it requires a perfect knowledge of outcomes for each murdered person. You could say the murderers believed they had perfect knowledge, but that doesn’t really mean much, typically murderers do think they can see where things are going and therefor have to murder.
Broadly, the idea that a person alive can have so little net value that they would be more valuable dead *is* fascism, so arranging breakpoints of value within that framework is always just justifying a conclusion to murder that was reached beforehand.
I’m assuming Lambert’s question was what do other historians think of the validity of Tooze’s explication of Nazi behavior, not what do other historians think of the morality of the Nazi decision.
And I would disagree that there is something inherently wrong with triage when resources are limited, which seems to be your suggestion: concentrating efforts on helping those who will benefit the most seems both rational and moral to me. Of course, there will be times when the decisionmaker’s judgment is wrong: wounded soldiers who would in fact have survived with the medical care that was denied, and those who do not survive even with that care. Or, for something less gory, there will be houses that would have survived the encroaching wildfire and did not need to be demolished, and wildfires that overleap the intended firebreak and reach houses that should have been demolished to make a wider break.
Thank you for writing this. You’re right of course: these games imply brutality and horror on almost incomprehensible scales. I’m primarily a Stellaris player. I have long had an aversion to modern-history sims (and tabletop wargames, for that matter) because they feel ‘too real’ to me – it’s a fine and probably artificial distinction I guess. But while, for my aggressively hegemonic Authoritarian Materialist Militarist space empire, bombing a rival’s planets into submission and resettling the survivors as nerve-stapled food-beasts across my production planets is just another Tuesday, there’s still a thick veil of (wilful?) indifference between my game interface and the individual faces of the conquered blorgs. …I think I may have to take a longer look at my own values.
What counts as a moral justification, an indulgence, for knowingly, intentionally, playing abhorrent nations/entities, at whatever remove from reality?
I tend to think playing or watching an abhorrent nation/entity is fine so long as you remember they’re abhorrent and wouldn’t inherently judge someone just because they play Nazis. I played the Nazi campaign in a Company of Heroes expansion myself once and am an avid Warhammer 40k fan and I definitely do not support Fascism.
Of course, you do get people who play Nazis in games because the only reason they don’t fly a Nazi flag outside their house is that their neighbors wouldn’t tolerate it but I don’t automatically assume this applies to the majority of Germany players in Hearts of Iron. However, since Nazism is a continuing issue I do feel Hearts of Iron should handle it much more carefully than Stellaris handles genocides that never happened against species that aren’t real by governments that never existed.
For Stellaris in particular it’s basically designed to try to let you play every interstellar state (and even non-state polities) in any fiction ever so it both allows atrocities and makes them viable playstyles with bonuses that compensate for being able to employ pops of every species as specialists and rulers without happiness penalties and it avoids actively making you feel bad for playing Daleks or the Covenant or Palpatine. I think this is fine although as I discussed on a previous post personally I usually play empires that give everyone full citizenship as my default with only occasional forays into the slavery/genocide side of the spectrum.
Fiction is fiction, as long as you are recognizing that fiction is fiction, there is nothing wrong with pretending to commit acts that would be abhorrent in reality.
If it’s too detailed or modeled, that gets concerning and can have adverse effects on you, and there are definitely people who love to pretend to do terrible things because they actively want to do terrible things and that’s not great… but as long as it’s not “ha ha … unless?” tier, I just don’t care what someone enjoys, you know?
So few can tell something is fiction any longer, any more than they can tell the difference between lies and facts. This is deliberately caused condition, is ongoing and accelerating.
Thus all journalists, fiction writers, script writers, game writers, ‘influencers’, historians have a moral and ethical obligation to be very careful to deal only in facts, as far as we can know them.
One thing the last 20-25 years have taught me, that we should probably already have known as a civilization, is that the <i>zeitgeist</i> people experience, the collective mass of the impressions they get from the world around them, heavily shapes the thought processes they will bring into action when it is time to make decisions about facts.
If you are brought up on fictional stories that teach you that every suffering person did something to deserve it, then when the time comes to decide whether to be compassionate in real life, that will probably impact you. Even if you are intellectually aware the stories are fiction and that bad luck <i>can still happen…</i> Humans are culturally bound, story-telling creatures. The stories we tell ourselves shape the reality we perceive.
So I think that to some limited extent, deliberately telling stories that enable “clean Wehrmacht simulator” gameplay for all the historically literate nerds of our society for the past 3-4 decades… May have marginally, a little, on the edges, tipped some scales that we maybe shouldn’t want to see tipped. Just a bit.
What people do in their own heads (or in the books they read or the games they play) has no moral valence in my opinion. Just as the women who read bodice rippers do not, in fact, want to be raped nor are they asking to be raped nor are they necessarily passive victims in their lives generally. It’s fantasy.
Bodice rippers exist in a context of sexual politics in which the manner in which the desires of women are policed or obscured is such that the reason why it is a fantasy is that there’s an indulgence in the notion of being absolved of responsibility for one’s own sexuality. That is to say, it doesn’t tend to be a fiction simulating anything resembling actual non-consent, so much as playing on a scenario of getting to enjoy sex without being denigrated for that because someone else was in control.
It doesn’t really work as a be-all end-all of “nobody is responsible for the ethical implications of the fiction they consume”.
I say that as somebody who does think there’s a capacity to play historical bad actors in certain forms of video games without that being an endorsement of them, but the argument for that requires a bit more depth.
Additional to your very valid point, another point is that there’s a significant difference between consuming fiction in which bad things happen where you identify with the person they are happening to, versus consuming fiction in which you identify with the person doing it, or pretend that those people are “okay” as if the things that happened were not significant.
The typical bodice-ripper reader is indulging fantasies of the handsome pirate captain ripping her bodice, not of being the pirate captain and getting to rip all the bodices he wants and rationalizing it as “just perks and they’re probably into it.” The latter is far more problematic than the former.
I think roleplaying evil characters is not wrong, as long as you don’t find pleasure in doing their evil actions.
I broadly agree, and there’s in some cases even room for a sort of cathartic darkness- a recognition that you are exploring mental places that you shouldn’t go, when you roleplay the conquering evil overlord or whatever, or trying to establish a sort of fantasy of ‘honorable villainy’ and things like that.
What’s frankly more problematic is when the structure of the gameplay itself encourages people to not engage with the fact that evil people are evil, either while playing as those evil people, or while playing as someone else.
There’s at least one scholarly book (I don’t remember the title, I heard about it second-hand in a podcast) which argues seriously about the value of supposed “low-brow” entertainment for its viewers and society at large. Not everything needs to be read critically and rationally all the time, things also have emotional and comforting effects, and these can often be what we seek out as viewers.
Long wind-up, but my approach to media consumption is that playing a “villain simulator” can be approached in the same way as enjoying a “dumb” action movie or a reality TV show – if you’re aware that your enjoyment is happening on a different level and that rationally its themes are not worth of emulation, then you’re good. Not every game about a war needs to be This War of Mine as long as we as a society don’t forget that these other experiences of war exist.
It’s an old problem with gaming, both tabletop and computing, dating back at least 30 years.
I remember the panic over Dungeons & Dragons, which was going to corrupt an entire generation of youngsters into satanic worship. And the panic over Doom / Quake, which would turn an entire generation of youngsters into trigger happy gun owners. And the panic over Grand Theft Auto …
We play games because they’re fun. Some people, myself included, think it’s fun to knowingly be “evil”. I can gun down sprites on a computer screen, or nuke counters on a hexgrid, and I’m fairly confident that doesn’t spill over into my real life behaviour. And since western civilisation hasn’t collapsed in the decades since D&D, Doom, etc that would seem to apply to most people.
On the other hand, that’s partly because of my background and culture, which is privileged white male in a peaceful country. So I can also see why some people, for their own reasons, would find these games shocking and worry about the effects. If anyone wants to forbid their children from playing say Call of Duty, I won’t argue. (Well, not much.)
Bret and others are concerned that HoI 4 isn’t teaching history correctly. Maybe it just doesn’t matter?
It matters. Very much it matters. Because so few of the players and even the game writers, know the difference between their fantasies and facts. We have descended into the condition, “I want to believe it, therefore it is true.”
I don’t see why games would be different from books. I understand clearly that I am neither James Bond nor Harry Flashman. No one is, really.
There is an argument that games are different because they are interactive, the player is actively controlling the narrative and events and therefore partly or wholly responsible for the outcome. Someone reading a book or watching a movie is passively experiencing the events, even if they’re horrible.
I don’t think there is any evidence that it actually makes a significant difference: the moral panic(s) over games corrupting the youth seem to have fizzled out in the same way as previous panics over movies and books. Still, I would take it seriously.
Arguably, the fantasy of “being James Bond” or of imagining that James Bond(s) exist may have actually caused real harm by distorting the attitudes of how modern Western societies deal with and engage with the actions of their own intelligence agencies.
That’s not to say “society should censor James Bond.” But we can’t just assume that there is zero harm just because people are at the most basic level intellectually aware that they are not literally fictional characters.
If a generation of people grow up reading comic books in which criminals are these flashy mutant types with weird backstories and an extremely strong tendency to recidivism (your average comic book villain isn’t going to “go legit” because then he won’t sell more comics), it’s nice to imagine that they know better than to project that onto REAL criminals. But… do they? Do they really? If only 10-20% of people have some cross-contamination between the fantasies they read and their perception of reality, is that not enough to sometimes materially shape our politics and lives?
Humans are creatures that grapple with making meaning of the world around them by many means, and one of those means is by telling each other stories. The kinds of stories we choose to tell each other can shape the way we understand and interpret our experiences and what we think about events happening in the background that we learn about on the news.
@Foxessa, I agree very much that the condition is a problem. However I don’t see that changing games would fix the problem on its own, or should even be a priority.
My suggestion would be to concentrate on changing schools, legal systems, journalism first. Do that and gamers will recognise the problems with the games themselves.
Citation needed? Back in the 80s, “president Trump directs his neo-nazi minions to interrupt the peaceful transition of power, then gets re-elected anyway” would’ve seemed a bit too over-the-top for humor, let alone serious prediction.
The United States is not in fact all of western civilisation, and while the US has an outside impact in terms of consumption, military influence, etc only some 4% of the world’s population live in the USA.
My take is that no one plays a game where they control a Nazi and directly thinks Nazis are good if they weren’t going to think that already, but with most people not cracking open weighty academic tomes on any subject popular entertainment shapes what people believe about how things are/were. This can be especially problematic with things like Game of Thrones or Paradox historicals where they put enough work into realism people get the impression they’re even more realistic than they are. With Game of Thrones it’s not a huge problem that it makes the average person misunderstand what kind of army the feudal system produces or how powerful religious faith was in Medieval Europe, because they do not live in Medieval Europe and there’s no actual chance they’ll return to the feudal system. Likewise, Crusader Kings 2 gives a reasonably accurate portrayal and people don’t actually need to know you could be your vassal’s vassal instead of a clean pyramid (but you totally could).
But with Hearts of Iron, we might actually return to fascism; far-right parties are in ascendancy across the political spectrum. I don’t think Hearts Of Iron is directly to blame for that because it’s not hugely popular but the fact that Valkyria Chronicles of all things is closest to the real horrors of the war I think does contribute, albeit with the caveat that I think ironically using Nazis as stock over-the-top evil villains has also helped it rise because it’s made Nazis totemic evil villains and many people find it impossible to believe any real modern person is actually Nazi-like even if they literally have a Nazi tattoo.
But I think if we had more Avengers-style “There are always men like you” scenes in media, even simple morality plays but especially the kind of works with shades of grey it would in fact have a meaningful impact on people who watch the Avengers and do not read history books about the Holocaust even when assigned in school. Part of why art is important is that it does impact how people view the world even when they understand it’s fiction, and video games are art, if usually not high art.
Incidentally I am the user who regularly posts as guy as a guest; with WordPress reworking the interface I got around to making an account and it can’t be a three letter user name. Been posting as both a guest and on this account for password safe reasons but am now working to make myself able to log in on all devices.
Stellaris lets you shape your polity in plenty of morally ‘good’ directions, but it never presents a future in which a player doesn’t have to consider the empowerment of their polity as the primary objective, and generally channels play towards some form of international domination. It is still more likely to produce a story of a heroic good player-controlled faction making the galaxy a better place for persons, compared to almost any other Paradox game. Only HoI really even asks a player if they would like to play the good guys, CK restricts you to characters who are rich enough that their wealth can only be generated in ways that starve humans to death, EU forces you to participate in the creation of a global economy built on colonialism, and Victoria makes you industrialize that colonialism into cultural and literal genocides.
Honestly I feel like at the moment WW2 in particular is simply too fraught to do a strategy game where you control Nazi policy in any fashion in a properly sensitive manner. Company Of Heroes can handle it in mission briefings and by only having an Allied campaign while letting the Nazis be playable in skirmish, but Hearts Of Iron is not well structured for it.
The issue with having historical pop up events is twofold. Firstly, which ones pop up would need to depend upon game progress so even if strictly limited to historical ones it’d make a “genocide checklist”. Secondly, there’s a ton of events in the game and I’d personally probably end up just reflexively closing ones that have no gameplay impact; in other Paradox games I often don’t even read ones that do have an impact, just the tooltips on the options.
I would go with simple and direct mechanical penalties involving loss of population and wastage of resources with fairly generic events on a national level that aren’t tied to which specific provinces you conquer in the event of making a Hearts Of Iron game at all. In the event of not just scrapping the ability to change governments I would tie these events and penalties to ideologies.
But basically I think all the other historicals and Stellaris avoid this level of controversy mostly because everyone involved in the atrocities is safely long dead or are fictional aliens/future humans. With WW2, not only are there still some survivors among victims and I think perpetrators but neo-Nazis are alive and well in our politics, while the target audience for the games has no real expectation the Pope will declare a crusade for Jerusalem or the Atlantic Slave Trade will come back or we’ll be murdered by Daleks. And with WW2 I don’t think there’s a way around this, which is why strategy games set in the period usually leave the atrocities completely offscreen.
With Valkyria Chronicles I will note it is for a Japanese audience about Europe. I suspect if the devs did Valkyria Chronicles 5 set in the Far East it would be very Clean Imperial Japanese Army probably with them as the protagonists. At most you’d get something like a manga I read set on a fictional Japanese destroyer entirely crewed by women for no explained reason, in which the whole involvement with atrocities is that a German officer shows up to ask questions and then later the U-boat captain the protagonists have been meeting with asks them to take on a female engineer and when asked why explains that she’s Jewish. And she joins the crew and doesn’t go out on shore leave and the matter is not discussed further.
You’re free to think it’d definitely be a very clean japanese army. Perhaps it might be, especially as Valkyria Chronicles lost sight of itself in sequels anyway, descending into nonsense. On the other hand, even Final Fantasy Type 0, which is not a terribly serious game, frames its genuinely murderous villains via imperial japanese iconography. Final Fantasy XIV is often deeply confused politically, but takes the specific and politically charged step of saying, in 2021, that an island nation must take in refugees and immigrants, or it will perish (And this is specifically relevant to ongoing discourse in Japan as well, to forestall the refrain at the time that they ‘just mean it about britain’, as eorzea often resembles). Gundam famously vacillates depending on which inmates run the asylum, but part of that vacillation is in fact full throated dismissal of specifically imperial japanese nonsense (While Mobile Suit Gundam, the original, depicts Zeon as the arguably easier to tackle nazi germany, you would see original creator Tomino specifically use the Moonrace to depict IJA/N posturing, and especially to do the posturing of some of the people who didn’t live through WWII but imagine they could have righted the japanese ship and won the war).
You can’t count on any large nation to present one single, uncomplicated view of its own history. I would fully well expect some americans to depict american crimes accurately, even in a commercial work. I’d expect many more to hem and haw, to excuse and to clear their throats; specifically for america, given its civil religion, whenever the criticism passes over the vaunted founding fathers, I’d generally expect a LOT more of the latter. Barring the civil religion specifically, I’d expect similar from pretty much everyone. But I’d definitely expect nearly any modern nation to depict its genuinely bad past as, well, genuinely bad, at least some of the time. Even in commercial works, meant for mass consumption. And I can safely say I’ve seen aspects of it even from mainland chinese people, about mainland chinese people, in commercially available works that mainland chinese people are meant to consume as a primary market, speaking about themselves and not just their own past. Not /often/ or /enough so/, but certainly more than never and more than not at all.
So I am in fact a very big anime fan, and while Japan is often willing to confront past atrocities, Japanese atrocities in WW2 in particular basically don’t get addressed. I am actually not aware of literally any non-clean WW2 Pacific Theater Japanese media, unless you count Godzilla Minus One which having watched it I would say is marginal with having a kamikaze pilot and literally two scenes before the end of the war. I’m sure it exists but it sure as hell isn’t as popular as US WW2 or even Civil War media because I’m plugged in enough I would have heard of it.
I will admit I have not played Final Fantasy or watched much Gundam so perhaps they do address it in allegory but I would advise against confusing commentary on modern politics with reckoning with Unit 731.
Wait, just remembered there is Fate/Redline which is set in a magic war in Tokyo during the ending stages of WW2 with Japan trying to use magic to achieve a comeback victory. It does have army leadership as the villains but is entirely in Tokyo with Nazis as the biggest villains and as far as I know all characters based on history are from the Meiji restoration or earlier.
Oh I’ll freely concede they do not dwell on the specifics. In much the same way the fictionalized jewish people of Valkyria Chronicles do not dwell on the 12 million dead IRL. But they are in fact sometimes capable taking their own historical regimes, who they view as being in continuity with themselves, and depicting them as bad. The specific gundam in question is Turn A, incidentally, which is meant against both contemporary (to it) apologia for the IJM, as well as the IJM itself. A mixed legacy is more or less what I’d expect of anyone.
Heck, I even obliquely indicated this, but Gundam has also served as that IJA apologia itself, most notably in Unicorn. The point is not that JPop Culture is uniquely well suited to self examination, it isn’t. But that I do, in fact, know for a fact that JPop Culture has depicted its own historical regime poorly at times, and (like with any other nation’s pop culture) does sometimes take real political stances within mass-market intended commercial works. Just as at times, an American Pop Cultural thing may actually depict the Civil War as a mostly uncomplicated moral affair (Barring declaring war on the native americans for no fucking reason beyond sheer greed), where the South was clearly rebelling for shit reasons (Sometimes via allegory). But more often, you’ll flirt with lost cause-ism, or justify some romantic bastardry, or try to complicate Lee, or whatever the fuck nonsense this particular thing is doing. People everywhere default to varnishing their history, but sometimes they do critically examine it, and for most nations, there’s little need to presuppose they in particular are bad (or good) at actually examining themselves.
My experience is that japanese media has no problem depicting the WWII (and pre-WWII) military as villainous either directly or indirectly (I seem to remember one series that was about spies in 1930’s Shanghai where the villains were the japanese military, though even then the bad guys were acting from a misinterpreted prophecy of the classic “You’re going to bring about the very disaster you’re trying to avoid” kind of way.)
(I was cut off)
That said japanese media *does* tend to avoid both more widespread culpability. (bad things are done by a clique of scheming military, not by the japanese state as a whole) and specific depictions of actual atrocities. IE: They’re often fine with the “crimes against the peace” but very rarely depicts “crimes against humanity”.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy was a relatively recent (and good!) film explicitly about reckoning with exactly these sorts of atrocities, though from a civilian perspective. Maybe not a blockbuster of a popular film, but it was directed by the inimitable and acclaimed director of Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001).
I did read some manga depicting Japanese atrocities in WW2. They are few, of course, similar to media in the US depicting US atrocities.
Gundam is roughly 50 years of its creators repeating over and over again, “No….child conscription is *bad* actually. Please stop trying to make it seem good.” This has been influential, and generally other Mecha-genre anime doesn’t even consider trying to present military institutions as “clean,” especially not since Evangelion decided to outdo Gundam so thoroughly on the theme.
Major anime do tend to have as core themes that a person living under an Axis or Axis-allegorical regime only ever has two options: inflict moral wounds upon oneself to survive, or don’t. Being revealed to have institutional continuity to a portion of the Imperial government/military that somehow managed to hide and survive at the end of the war is always a heel-turn for a person or institution, and this can happen in a singing magical girl anime as easily as in a grounded serial killer mystery or a sci-fi exploration of virtual personhood.
>while the target audience for the games has no real expectation the Pope will declare a crusade for Jerusalem
As I’ve mentioned previously, one thing you have with such games is the attitude – even the fantasy – that all kinds of really radical outré political outcomes have a chance of actually going somewhere and holding sovereign or geopolitical power. And this sometimes implies a world where everyone is extremely eager to throw down and the general desire for peace and stability is abrogated.
Also there doubtless are people who want that, probably especially given the current situation.
Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts had a Market Garden campaign where you played as Kampfgruppe Lehr.
Company of Heroes Tales of Valor had two campaigns where you play as Nazis, one as more of an RPG (single Tiger crew) in Normandy, and another as a mixed unit in the Falaise Pocket.
In fact, the opening cinematic of the Tiger Ace campaign depicted the crew’s service on the Eastern Front killing T-34s outside Leningrad, before being sent west.
So yeah, it was highly likely you played as war criminals.
I haven’t played Company of Heroes 3 but I’m pretty sure there’s an Axis North Africa campaign.
I haven’t played it myself, but my understanding is that the Axis north africa campaign is told from the POV of a jewish man hiding from Rommels goons. They seem to have deliberately tried to avoid their Clean Wehrmacht problems.
So two things that strike me as notable here. First: The setup in HoI4 sees a stark contrast in Victoria 3. You can go back to the dev diaries and see them talk about how they specifically chose to make slavery not just be economically bad (Which it is, for complicated reasons that aren’t immediately obvious to the player, but will inevitably be felt by the player), but visibly morally bad; To be fair, I never checked this myself, as I’ve never played a slave state in Victoria 3, but in the dev diaries, they talk about making them _look_ miserable and unhappy in a way that even angry pops are not. Because slavery is, well, bad.
Second, I actually disagree that remaining complicit was necessary to be _competitive_ in making a WWII strategy game. Who’s going to be their competition? Slitherine Software? Come on. They’d be fine regardless as top dog, if only via pride of place. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to make their normal strategy game (Though your preliminary suggestions seem fine; I’d add that you can lock them into a bad occupation law, and sap the population of affected states. Population, and produced materials except for, very arguably, oil. Gameplay effects are EXTREMELY doable), but making some sort of single player tactics game is entirely possible, and they are capable of making them engaging.
Oh, and as a third, it’s very, very different to have horrible little rats in spaceships exterminate plant people or whatever. Sure, a lot of civics gesture at real things, but even more gesture at fictional things. Stellaris (and AoW) much more play pretend than any other game they publish, to my knowledge. I have an almost unbroken line of evil or at best mixed vampires since ToB, and contrary to the meme in Stellaris I probably play like 50%+ villains. But I always try to treat the little people-shaped lightning golems well when they’re theoretically representing people that lived and were hypothetically real. It feels _genuinely good_ to proc The New Colossus in Victoria 3, not just for the increase in economic power, but because I feel like I did a good thing. Whereas like, if people-shaped lightning golems that represent bizarre little bearded babylonian men with funny hats kill a bunch people-shaped lightning golems of equally bizarre little bearded men with mohawks… whatever.
There’s actually a use case for slavery in Victoria 3. To get the achievement based on maximizing sugar production as Cuba, slavery is the easiest way to do it, and rushing abolition is not always a good idea when your economy is heavily based on a cash crop.
Which tracks – it was a humanitarian disaster and an awful system, and keeping it costs you population, but there were real trade-offs in abolition (albeit heavily weighted in favor of abolishing anyway, for most countries) and the game can sometimes make you think from the perspective of an elite slaveowner, too.
I’d posit that in the scenario presented (“who would be their competition if they made a strategy game that doesn’t engage in the traditional complicity”), the actual problem is that their competition is the past 40 years’ worth of WWII wargames that you can still just go back and play (including their own prior games).
They’d be competing with their own past as much as any theoretical other producer (something that has been a recurring problem for Firaxis with Civilization as well).
Eh, not really. Most people aren’t really going to deal with UI from older games. Generously, they’re dealing with maybe 15 years of content on the whole. Civ 7 spent most of its uptime sucking and it was still beating civ 5 quite handily on steam’s charts in the week before this series went live (losing to 6, mind, but 6 also has a more modern and playable UI in addition to a better core design). HoI3 would fare far worse if, hypothetically, HoI4 had been made to acknowledge genocide. There’s a few sickos like me who’ve played paradox games before CK2/EU4/HoI4, but not many. And many would say CK2 is still sickos territory, on UI grounds.
One time in CK2 I wanted to arrest my brother and take most/all of his property, so I deliberately provoked him by ordering him to hand over title to land I had no right to ask for. He refused, as I intended. The ensuing war lasted for years and featured so much army mobilization that tens of thousands of my own subjects died from non-combat attrition alone. Both my brother and I survived the war, and after a brief imprisonment I released him with a fraction of his original land, making him subordinate to one of my less-loyal-but-still-loyal subordinates. My brother lived the rest of his life as merely one of the thousand-richest people in the world, and the peasant population regrew at some point after I stopped paying attention. As a result of the war, I was transformed from a generally doubted young emperor into the universally respected vanquisher of the rebellion and never had to worry about vassals colluding against me for the rest of my life.
Crusaders who King are going to be villains, it turns out.
To some extent a game company isn’t competing against rival game companies, it’s competing against disinterest. People don’t HAVE to play your blockbuster new strategy game, and if they decide they don’t like it, you don’t have a market and either go out of business or have to come up with a new game to sell in a hurry.
I think paradox is well aware that while Nazis don’t make up most of their player base, they certainly make up a large enough segment that directly confronting them would lose them money, so they never will.
I think Paradox has demonstrated a willingness to confront Nazis over Deus Vult! from CK2 and have moved progressively further away from Eurocentrism in their other historicals.
But a rather large percentage of people who play Nazis in WW2 games are not themselves Nazis and those make up most of the playerbase.
To add my 2 cents to this, I believe most games about WWII want to sell a fantasy according their design and that they most rely on the player’s knowledge before hand to avoid talking about the issue altogether, and in particular most of the strategic (be it RTS, turn-based or grand strategy) want to sell the fantasy of the mechanical warfare, the blitzkrieg tanks attacking like lightning, the planes evoking the romanticized old duels, etc. They want the player to feel like a powerhouse unleashing the power of mechanized warfare, and nothing more.
I think this is visible when one sees the Panzer General series had a Fantasy Generals spin-off where they just changed the mechanical for the magical and the Axis for Evil Overlord and it played the same or with some mods for HOI IV that move outside of WWII. The war is thus used in so far as it sells a narrative and ignored when inconvenient.
But I’ll say thinks are interesting when you add mods to the table. While I understand that as something outside of Paradox supervision, some mods attempts to either touch or at least acknowledge war crimes (even some not set in WWII), and when dealt with maturity and care it does add to the game, but the feeling of playing the game changes, it becomes a bit less power fantasy and a bit more real, even with all the other mechanics unchanged or in more outlandish mods, and I don’t think most fantasies would want that.
It’s kinda untenable to claim Nazi Germany wasn’t radicalized into its own attrocities. The Nazis original plan was to rapidly conquer the Soviet Union and basically use it like a giant African colony in Europe. Awful, but not inherently genocidal.
They only resorted to genocide via starvation once they realized the victory would be long in coming if it were to come at all, while their core populations were running out of food.
It is basically just a comforting lie to think you need fanatical genocidal ideology to commit genocide. It’s a lot easier to stumble into a situation where mass murder is the only chance you have to save your ass from the conequences of your previous fuckups.
Furthermore, what ideology did Japan even represent?
A bunch of deranged militarists who worshipped aggressive warfare for the sake of it and agreed on basically nothing else?
imperialism and colonialism.
“A bunch of deranged militarists who worshipped aggressive warfare for the sake of it and agreed on basically nothing else?”
they did have two strategies – expanding to the north and challenge the Soviet Union or going south to grab the South East Asia colonies from western Europeans. They all agreed on attacking China though.
It’s honestly a bit more complicated even than that. The japanese government wasn’t really in charge, and the various military cliques often acted without orders, or at cross purposes. There wasn’t even really a consensus about starting a war with China (though once it was afoot they all went along with it)
That is not my reading (or I guess either Brett’s or Adam Tooze’s) reading of Nazism at all. Hitler had no desire to recreate the glories of the former Prussia, with German aristocrats extracting wealth from Polish peasants. He wanted to create a large region populated by German yeoman farmers, which required removing, by one means or another, the current population of that region.
Yeah, specifically he wanted to do to the eastern frontier of Germany what had happened on the western frontier of the USA. The Japanese had been doing the same to the Ainu since the Meiji Restoration and wanted to progress that in neighboring parts of mainland Eurasia. The Italian government was less goal-oriented but interested in Italianization that included border areas in what became Greece, Yugoslavia, France, and North Africa.
Once he realized the war was going to be long, Hitler figured out his only shot at survival was mad extraction from occupied soviet territories. The original plan was to slowly expell Jews from Europe and turn eastern Europe into serfs.
But again, once Britain refused to budge and kept blockading him, he escalated the genocidality of his eastern plans to secure food. Then when rapidly beating the Soviets turned out to be impossible, the genocidality of the occupation spiked again, and they painted over that with a bunch of post-hoc ideological stuff about resettling the east with German peasants.
This isn’t to defend Hitler, but to make it clear how bad actors can get radically worse for entirely practical reasons of survival as opposed to gratuitous ideological madness.
That is not true.
The mass starvation of Soviet civillians was an explicit part of the planning for Barbarossa, and made official policy for the invasion in May 1941. The relevant documents in fact specifically anticipated their “core populations running out of food” due to the British blockade, and intended to prevent this by deliberately denying food to the northern and central USSR.
Yes, they did di that once they realized the Britsh blockade was gonna reduce them ti starvation otherwise.
When I say “original plan” I mean “before the war”
you “forgot” to mention that they started genocide immediately on entering Poland
Third Reich Germany was not such case, they started programs of genocidal murder of own citizens before war even started. For example Aktion T4 was already underway when Germany invaded Poland.
<i>The Nazis original plan was to rapidly conquer the Soviet Union and basically use it like a giant African colony in Europe.</i>
I’m not an expert on Nazi thought, but my understanding is they planned to use Eastern Europe east of the Urals as an analogue of the American colonies, not the African colones. I.e. a settler colony rather than a resource-exploitation colony. And yes, that would require genocide, as a practical reality (resettlement of the native population wasn’t a possiblity, nor were they going to die off of disease as happened in the Americas).
I know little about the Eastern Front, but explicitly the purpose of the conquests was Lebensraum, literally “living space”. Mass displacement or genocide was the stated goal.
It was explicitly modeled on US settler expansion and genocide of Native Americans. Hitler had Westerns distributed to the troops.
@PeterT,
Right, exactly. the Nazis wanted to remove the native peoples of Eastern Europe and replace them with Germans, it’s not like they just wanted to use them as a source of mineral or agricultural goods like the Western powers did in tropical Africa.
“The Nazis original plan was to rapidly conquer the Soviet Union and basically use it like a giant African colony in Europe. Awful, but not inherently genocidal.”
Uhhh … I don’t know what the nazis planned for the Soviet Union, but the genocide on Jews was a pretty central part of the ideology.
Not sure it counts as radicalization if a government that originally planned to commit only one genocide decided, due to practical reasons, to commit a second genocide.
(Sure, that first genocide wasn’t technically a war crime in that it was against the country’s own citizens. But still, if you want an example of a country that committed genocide without a fanatical ideology, Germany is not it. In fact, I don’t think it counts as genocide if there’s no ideology. If a country were to, say, export lots of rice to look successful to the world, starving its own citizens, that’d be a horrible thing to do, but not genocide.)
<i>Uhhh … I don’t know what the nazis planned for the Soviet Union</i>
I think *at best* forcing everyone to migrate east of the Urals (which would have effectively amounted to mass death anyway), at worse starving them to death or just killing them.
“In fact, I don’t think it counts as genocide if there’s no ideology.”
I don’t think that’s a very useful definition. If an army fighting a counterinsurgency campaign turns to more and more extreme methods out of frustration, it can very easily turn genocidal even without a clear ideological justification. Isabel Hull describes how this process happened in early 20th-century Imperial Germany in Absolute Destruction (though she also views ideology as central in the case of the Holocaust).
I tend to call it genocide when the objective of the group doing it is to destroy an ethnic group at least within their territory whatever their reason for having that objective (and I classify forced relocation as ethnic cleansing but not genocide, although both are monsterous). Far as I know that’s the definition used by human rights groups except they may include forced relocation.
I don’t call it genocide when it’s an incidental outcome of warfare like the Bengal famine, although something doesn’t have to be genocide to be abominable. But Nazi Germany was specifically trying to kill Eastern Europeans to get “living space” for ethnic Germans from the start. Big motivator for the war although not necessarily with the intent to kill all of them.
THe aMerican CIvIl War was ABOut STATeS riGHts!
One can say the Germans of WWII started out planning to use the USSR’s land “like a giant African colony in Europe” and that this meant they didn’t have atrocious inherently genocidal plans…
…But then I take a look at the stuff Germany actually got up to in its own African colonies. Including some fairly heinous and intensive genocides that had taken place well within the living memory of 1930s Germans. The Germans massacred something like 80% of the Herero population, and that was only a little more than thirty years ago in 1940.
So yes, the Germans of 1940 may very well have imagined themselves treating the Slavs the same way their parents’ and grandparents’ generation had treated African natives: to be subjugated, taxed, and forced to work, and then massacred en masse and driven out into lands that could not possibly support their population if they showed any sign of resistance to being slowly worked to death as a race.
Yes, I think mechanically simulating self-handicapping effects of atrocity is the correct move. Gary Grigsby’s War in the East for example, while it also omits overt references to war crimes (being an exclusively operational game, it has a few more excuses), at least has abstracted effects of partisan warfare (interdiction, reduced rail capacity, etc) which is more than the HoI4 occupation system, and you can tell it has a theory of history that says partisan activity is something nazis brought upon themselves, because there are no German partisans. I haven’t played it, but I understand Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa deals with this side of the war more prominently.
But also, you can look at other non-WW2 games. Victoria 3 for example is pretty clear in its mechanical implementation that slavery is in fact bad for your country even if there are interest groups that will fight tooth and nail to keep it. Fanatical purifiers in Stellaris might get major bonuses, but they get also a huge diplomatic penalty, and once they have occupied the systems, it would be mechanically better for them to release them as vassals transferring their resources, but they cannot. I particularly like fantasy wargame Dominions in this regard: one of the game mechanics involves hunting for virgin girls to be used as blood sacrifices, but doing so causes massive unrest that cripples the province (in practice completely preventing any recruitment and taxation), and effectively requires a large patrolling force cracking down on the resistance to your operation (in itself a potential strategic liability, since the patrolling forces can be defeated in detail), which the game informs you kill the rebels, killing off the population and ruining the long-term viability of the province forever. Of course in this case there is also a potential strategic payoff since blood magic can be very potent, but it doesn’t mince its words about how the population feels about what you are doing.
The HOI4 occupation system actually does have quite a few effects, it’s just that a lot of them happen in the background. Notably in addition to the actual costs of garrisons (in terms of equipment and manpower) if resistance grows high enough they’ll launch simulated attacks (further costing you equipment/manpower, damaging factories, etc.) if resistance gets high enough it disables strategic redeployment, etc.
Mechanically this can actually become rather expensive, it’s just that it all happens automatically so the player rarely gets a notice that “Hey, you’re 10,000 infantry equipment in the hole because of resistance activity”
Never in a million years would I have expected to find myself defending Call of Duty (!) on ACOUP! And yet, it seems like I’ll have to do so purely in the interests of pedantry, as I know for a fact that the incredibly unimaginatively titled Call of Duty: WWII actually does integrate Axis atrocities into the narrative to a much greater degree than one generally expects from the medium.
That is, the best friend of the American protagonist, fellow infantryman Zussman, is Jewish – and in the penultimate mission of the game, he is wounded and taken prisoner right as the main character has fought well enough to have earned a leave of action. Instead, he chooses to stay on the front and volunteers to storm the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen (whose capture – and the German failure to detonate it in time – had famously hastened the end of the war, removing the need to construct a floating bridge to get the Western Allied troops over the Rhine) in the final “proper” mission of the game. All of this, so that he would get to search the miserable POW/labor camps (with highly visible gallows and all) for Zussman, in a brief epilogue that’s basically an extended cutscene, which I’ll include below.
Now, there’s one major way in which their approach to the above is somewhat romanticized – though in the other direction. That is, just before the Remagen mission, there’s a brief cutscene from Zussman’s POV, where he and all the other American POVs are lined up and a German officer (not sure now if he’s depicted as SS or regular infantry) repeatedly calls on them to identify the Jews; everyone refuses, Zussman eventually shouts “We are all Americans here!”, and everyone just gets sent to a labor camp. While this depiction is certainly quite effective at rousing American patriotism, I do not believe it’s accurate – my understanding is that in such cases, the Germans would have simply forced every soldier to pull down their pants, then shot those who were circumcized on the spot.
Besides that, the player’s squad gets to take part in the Liberation of Paris about halfway through – but the gates for them are opened by a female French Resistance fighter in a (largely) non-combat “social stealth” infiltration sequence where she (and by extension, the player) pretends to be German. She is in large part motivated by avenging her son, executed by the Gestapo some time earlier – and her playable episode concludes in a melodramatic sequence where the officer responsible identifies her in his office (set in the occupation authorities HQ) and brags about personally drowning him to her face – before she manages to stab him in the neck with a poker. Earlier in the same mission, the player-as-her might stumble upon a German soldier attempting to rape a young French maid in the basement of the same building – at which point, she knifes him automatically (the developers clearly recognizing some of the playerbase would prefer to avoid intervening if given such agency, and also record themselves doing so.)
Like with the previous example, this depiction still not-so-subtly recasts history in a far more American-centric light, as it implies the city was primarily liberated by the American troops, with the Parisian Resistance playing a clearly subordinate role and waiting for permission to act from the Americans. This is all totally unlike the actual rush by the Parisian Resistance to ensure the city “liberates itself” before even Leclerc’s Free French tank division had arrived, never mind the Americans – efforts which had only partially succeeded. (Much of the fighting was already done by the time Leclerc and others arrived – but the knowledge their arrival was imminent had also done a lot to keep the German garrison from fighting to the bitter end. As I noted last year, some Communists in the Resistance were reportedly prepared to initiate the Uprising significantly earlier, so that they would negotiate with De Gaulle and the rest while already holding the seat of political power if they succeeded – even knowing that failing would risk the same fate as Warsaw, with ~200,000 murdered by the occupiers.) Hence, its unfortunate that the recognition of Hitler’s Germany crimes substantially greater than the approximate median across WWII games, let alone AAA WWII games, is paired with such blatant myth-making.
Besides that, I cannot speak for the franchise’s most recent WWII instalment, Vanguard – but I recall that the one prior to WWII, World at War, had some limited engagement with the war crimes. That is, the very first mission in both the American campaign (set entirely in the Pacific) and the Soviet one begins with the player character as a POW – and as your captors are ordered to execute everyone, but your character is rescued at the last moment, with the others not so lucky. (The first cutscene of the game shows another American captive in front of you insulting a smoking Japanese officer who then puts out that cigarette in his eye, before killing him after being given the order.) Soon afterwards, the American campaign has your squad attempting to check out a downed American fighter – only for the pilots’ bodies to have been booby-trapped. In the Soviet campaign, the cutscene just before the Battle for Berlin explicitly says the defenders are primarily “the old, the young and the wounded/disabled” – with each of the three suddenly making out one arm of the Iron Cross (the 4th was the Eagle at Reichstag, I believe). About halfway through the mission, you encounter a number of German wounded laying helplessly on a rooftop – and are given the order to finish them off from your superior, who also encourages you to bayonet them and not waste bullets. However, the player is actually free to ignore that order and simply move on.
P.S. While not perhaps not war crimes per se, I should note Call of Duty: WWII featured one more moment of looking at the civilian experience. That is, a mission with street fighting in Aachen suddenly takes a turn as you find a young girl and her elder sister (both German) in a hotel’s basement – and the squad decides to evacuate both rather than risking they get killed by shelling alongside the German troops. The final sequence of the mission was completely combat-free, as you guided the young girl through that basement while avoiding the German patrols – if they spotted you, you would automatically surrender, the mission restarting from checkpoint. You do deliver the girl to the truck, where her sister is waiting…and the latter killed by shrapnel from a stray German shell just before the truck drives off with the girl you did rescue. (A narrative move reminiscent of David Ayer’s Fury – though the game was released so soon after the film, it’s not necessarily clear if they would have had time to integrate its writing into its narrative. Either way, like it Fury it adds a tragic coda – yet unlike Fury, it avoids speculation of what would have happened to a teenage/young adult German girl once the truck reached its destination, whereas the corresponding sequence in Fury centered just that.)
As Brett notes, the German army on the Western front generally treated Allied POWs reasonably well, did not engage in mass killing of men in POW camps (as opposed to prisoners killed in the heat of battle, which happened on both sides), and only rarely attempted or was able to segregate Jewish POWs. I have never heard of an episode such as you describe, where all the circumcised American POWs were shot.
also CoD: World at Wars depicted both German and Soviet warcrimes of killing POW.
I have not played Call of Duty, but the described scene from Zussman’s POV seems a very obvious homage to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddie_Edmonds, a captured NCO who refused a Nazi order to identify Jewish soldiers by stating “We are all Americans here” and informing the Nazi officer threatening him with a pistol that he would be prosecuted for war crimes if he harmed any of the prisoners of war. The Nazi officer backed down.
Were American Protestants not frequently circumcised in the 1930s and 1940s?
The US still has a high rate of circumcision of the general population today. But I’m not sure it’s useful to argue about it given that A) It’s only relevant in an what-if aside in the top comment and B) The Nazis wouldn’t really care if their detection method produced false positives
They actually tended to, on the Western Front. Malmedy is so well-known because it was an aberration.
First up, colonialism is an inherently violent and destructive process. Colonial rulers are heavily incentivised to prioritise domestic political pressures over the interests of the colonies.
And European colonial rule in the tropics was further flawed by the extremely high death rate of Europeans in the tropics before quinine and other treatments for tropical diseases. Even once death rates had come down, the lack of air-conditioning meant that the tropical colonies weren’t exactly getting the best of the British bureaucracy.
That said, the British government did start to take famines in India seriously, with the Famine Commissions starting from 1866. It was however a hard problem for a long time even in peacetime – if a famine was developing in one province, taking food from a nearby province risked simply shifting the location of the famine. The USA and Australia were producing grain surpluses from the 1860s, but they were a long distance away by sailing ship, particularly the USA. The network of technologies that meant you could (in peacetime) call up grain shipments and have them arrive in a few weeks took time to develop.
(I think I messed up posting earlier, hopefully this won’t be a double post)
Yes, I think mechanically simulating self-handicapping effects of atrocity is the correct move. Gary Grigsby’s War in the East for example, while it also omits overt references to war crimes (being an exclusively operational game, it has a few more excuses), at least has abstracted effects of partisan warfare (interdiction, reduced rail capacity, etc) which is more than the HoI4 occupation system, and you can tell it has a theory of history that says partisan activity is something nazis brought upon themselves, because there are no German partisans. I haven’t played it, but I understand Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa deals with this side of the war more prominently: if someone has played it, I would be curious how it treats the subject.
But also, you can look at other non-WW2 games. Victoria 3 for example is pretty clear in its mechanical implementation that slavery is in fact bad for your country even if there are interest groups that will fight tooth and nail to keep it. Fanatical purifiers in Stellaris might get major bonuses, but they get also a huge diplomatic penalty, and once they have won the war, it would be mechanically better for them to release them as vassals transferring their resources, but they cannot. I particularly like fantasy wargame Dominions in this regard: one of the game mechanics involves hunting for virgin girls to be used as blood sacrifices, but doing so causes massive unrest that cripples the province (in practice completely preventing any recruitment and taxation), and effectively requires a large patrolling force cracking down on the resistance to your operation (in itself a potential strategic liability, since the patrolling forces can be defeated in detail), which the game informs you kill the rebels, killing off the population and ruining the long-term viability of the province forever. Of course in this case there is also a potential strategic payoff since blood magic can be very potent, but it doesn’t mince its words about how the population feels about what you are doing.
While I see your point, I think you somewhat overlook the opposite of the people who would love to do gleefully commit the Holocaust: Those who would not want to.
I mean, to a degree the player has do distance himself to play a kind of game like that. If you look at the casualty numbers of the ongoing war and see it go in the hundreds of thousands or millions, that already starts to get uncomfortable already, but still somewhat digestible. It’s a war game, ok.
But then getting constantly told the numbers coming out of Auschwitz? How another train has arrived? How you have to send more people to the Klinkerwerke? At some point it might just be to much.
I once played the infamous The New Order Mod, which does not shy away from showing the inhumanity and crimes of the fascist system (and how it eats and destroys itself). I played the SS state Burgundy. And I played it for about 10 minutes before I had to stop because it was just to much. I mean, one mechanic is feeding slave labour into the industrial machine in an example of what the nazis called extermination through labour. And events constantly tell you the cost of the eugenics-insanity of the SS. And… I just could not continue.
And if vanilla would be that way, I wonder, how many players would feel the same and just stop playing. Which might be a lesson in and off itself, but maybe not great for the game.
Hot take: If you only took 10 minutes of playing to come to the conclusion “Oh god, being complicit in Nazi war crimes is horrible”, congrats. Then that mod was very effective in delivering that message and you were very quick in internalizing it.
And I agree that this is not an experience one wants to have when just looking for some emotional relief by playing a game. You’re fully justified in saying “Thanks, no more please” because what you wanted from the game was not emotional load.
As German, I am rather surprised that anyone would think that playing as Germany in a World War II game could possibly be fun. Even for ten minutes.
I thought the atrocities were quite well known. I wouldn’t want to play as Germany even in a sanitized version, because of the implication. I mean, the premise of you playing the German government during World War II is basically “Imagine you are Adolf Hitler …” and goes from there.
(I know, I know, every country’s male soldiers raped women in war, but that’s not something we’re taught at school in excruciating detail, so yeah, I admit this is maybe just me.)
I’m with you on not playing WWII Germany if I can avoid it. However, if, as HoI IV does, the game does not ever present you with the horrifying bill of German actions during the war, then the rest of the game, as in the case in HoI IV, might be fun to play even if you take the German starting position.
My stance is on however much more heaping the moral responsibility on the developers than the players. And if the moral demand of “The atrocities of war should be depicted to not lessen the moral revulsion we should feel towards them” and the economic demand of “The game should be fun to play so it doesn’t push players away” are hard to reconcile, then so be it. Developers should either give it an honest attempt or don’t make the game.
I struggle to think of a people that would stop playing a hypothetical Warcrimesfull-HoI4 if they have to comfront being the Holocaust perpretator (among other crimes) as Germany. Not just stop playing as Germany, but the _whole game,_ including natii that are fighting against them (which is almost everyone else).
Like, the only people that I can think of are people not historically-nerdy enough to want to play any Paradox Grand Strategy cum Sandbox games in the first place due to their complexity, or Holocaust deniers. And I’d rather not listen to nor take money from the later anyway.
It’s just bad game design. To put it in Brett’s terms, he’s asking the developers to spend the game’s capital to push a messsage. Paradox games already struggle with information overload, and if everyone had this attitude of “add my pet thing”, nobody would be playing HoI4.
As you point out there are also people who cannot stomach the atrocities. A female friend of mine does not play any violent games because she doesn’t enjoy seeing that; I don’t watch horror for similar reasons. At some point you have to bite the bullet and break a few eggs to make a game that’s enjoyable to someone rather than harmless to anyone, but that only applies to things that *make the game enjoyable*, which the proposed preaching largely isn’t.
This is where the consequential event idea wins. Now the addition isn’t just pointless information bloat in an already overloaded game. It can be made into a load-bearing piece. However, that might require taking off the preacher hat and giving the player agency, recognizing that we’re making a game and not a lecture in front of a hostaged audience.
I am a huge fan of adding such things, I think connecting the game to historical reality makes the overall product more compelling. But there are serious issues with bloat – the most serious issue in all Paradox titles – and Brett also imo underestimates how much of the audience will be turned off by the change in atmosphere, even when playing as the Allies. These games live and die by their mechanics and the starting point here, of “I want to teach a specific lesson” + “the politburo must never catch me letting players make the wrong choice” is frankly not conducive to the creation of something worthwhile.
I don’t see any typo thread, so:
> killed an estimated 382,00 civilians: roughly 17,000 from terror bombing, another 65,000 murdered directly and a further 300,000
I think you meant 382,000
While the numbers involved pale in comparison to the Eastern Front war crimes, another use of famine as a military policy that I feel should be mentionned is the Netherlands famine that was imposed on the Netherlands by the Wehrmacht in 1944-45 as punishment for not resisting the Market Garden (failed) British operation.
Considering your game-design proposal… making atrocities and their consequences be the price for certain policy choices makes sense. “You chose fascism, therefore some percentage of your divisions will be allocated to genocide, before allowing you to allocate the rest”. It might make sense to make it as blocking off options – just as a democratic country cannot choose Brutal Oppression of an occupied territory, a fascist one should not be able to choose Local Autonomy or No Garrison. Or perhaps make it a cost to maintain a political system – if you do not allocate enough divisions to death squads versus frontline combat, you risk a coup by a hardline fascist sub-faction (though this would require a more in-depth political system, something clearly needed anyways).
It does seem like some of the choices the game already gives you *are* war-crimes choices. Installing a secret police in occupied territory is unavoidably evil, yet the game allows it. It just seems that the game limits itself to offering choices that are within the range of *all* participants – the Allies installed military governors, therefore that’s “safe” to portray, but no Allies had death squads, so that’s off-limits. That makes the lack of follow-through on the costs curious.
I think omitting ahistorical atrocities breaks the game if you allow ahistorical politics. If one plays a game where the Wiemar Republic survives to the start of game but Mosley’s blackshirts seize control of the UK, it makes no sense for Britain to *only* engage in a historical level of callous famine. If the game keeps those – and they sound extremely popular with players, so that seems unavoidable – you need to have similar consequences for fascist governments outside the Axis and Soviets.
If we make these not merely cosmetic, but actually result in gameplay changes, it seems likely that they would cripple fascist players in the long run, encouraging them to be aggressive and try to win the war before their war crimes cause too many uprisings and sap too much of their productivity. This… seems correct to me? My understanding is that each Axis country planned their war as a quick knockout. Hitler wanted to force a quick capitulation from France and Britain to convert them into allies in fighting the Soviets, Japan planned a quick KO of American naval power so they could expand and match them as peers once they rebuilt, I admittedly don’t know Italy’s plan but I get the vibes they didn’t *have* much of one at the grand strategic level.
Combine that with some tweaks to democracies to better model their economic advantages – I quite like the idea of fascists/communists being able to command factories be set up for things before they are needed, while capitalists can’t start ramping up war goods until a war starts *but* once it does, they scale up faster – and we get a game where fascists *need* to win by 1941, maybe 1942 if they can cripple them enough early on. Or, maybe more interestingly, Axis players would be incentivized to switch to democracy if they fail in a quick war. As a liberal democrat, I quite like the idea of a game where liberal democracy is the inevitable meta choice… though I think a switch like that ought to be unstable, so Western players aren’t incentivized to start by flipping fascist only to turn back to democracy. Maybe the system where other countries belatedly learn of your war crimes (reducing the restraint imposed by popular opinion), also applies to your own populace? “Breaking news, turns out we were doing a Holocaust, citizens appalled, entire government resigns in disgrace, new elections called for next month”.
This more and more seems like it’s making playing an authoritarian power the “hard mode” of the game. I’m more than fine with that, especially if the easiest way to do that is to *shift away from it*, but I have no idea how the HOI playerbase would respond. Even if we exclude the neonazis, do regular civilized players enjoy playing Germany or Italy?
In short – a far better game design proposal than *most* fan-based game design proposals I’ve seen, but the implications need more exploration.
<blockquote>This more and more seems like it’s making playing an authoritarian power the “hard mode” of the game. I’m more than fine with that, especially if the easiest way to do that is to shift away from it, but I have no idea how the HOI playerbase would respond. Even if we exclude the neonazis, do regular civilized players enjoy playing Germany or Italy?</blockquote>
As I understand it, currently Germany is considered one of the easiest countries to play as in the game (though with difficulty increasing over the course of a playthrough). Germany is also the most played country. And when you start a new game, Germany is in the middle of the screen, pre-selected, IIRC. I doubt most players sympathize with Nazi Germany, but it is an easy intro into alternate history, and is presented as such.
You proposal would shift Nazi Germany in difficulty above France but below Poland, which is reasonable. But the game would need another country as the “protagonist country”/tutorial country. I think Britain would be suitable for that. The game would need to take care to make a history where France doesn’t fall just as interesting as one where it does though, because preventing the Fall of France would be the primary goal of a new player playing Britain.
Frankly I think there is a reason WW2 strategy games usually start after the fall of France, often December 7th 1941 as the Japanese planes begin their attack runs on Pearl Harbor. The fall of France and Operation Barbarossa required a large number of poor decisions on the part of the Allies and unless the game sets rules and adds modifiers such that they’re de facto scripted any remotely accurate depiction of the balance of forces would mean they go very differently with a marginally intelligent player who has read one book about WW2.
And Pearl Harbor involved less drastic failings but also depended very strongly on the element of surprise and if you give a US player control of the fleet even on December 6th it will not be in port with much of its crew on liberty on December 7th.
Honestly not sure how to resolve this in HoI without massive power boosts to the Axis relative to history short of making France simply fall by event unless the Allies meet some very difficult threshold of deployed troops, prohibiting the USSR from declaring war, and making it so the US cannot move its fleet while at peace just loses a significant chunk of the fleet automatically if Japan deploys the historical naval strike force to open the war.
I think in a grand strategy game the standard player avoiding the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is not a problem, because it opens interesting strategic choices: Do you attempt to charge across the Pacific to relief the Philippines, a highly risky choice the Japanese were prepared for, but probably a choice the public would demand? Or do you keep the fleet close until you are ready, following the Europe First strategy, and accept the discontent of the people?
Making the Fall of France reasonably easy to prevent for a competent player on the other hand risks making what follows more boring. I think it would be possible to build in interesting choices in that route, based on various plans that were discussed by relevant actors in real history. In 1940 the player needs to prevent the Fall of France. In 1941 they can then attempt to stop the Japanese Strike South strategy while the front in Europe is still static. In 1942 Italy and the Soviet Union move into the Balkans (the latter to take control of the Turkish Straits) and Britains defensive alliances with Greece and Turkey means it is asked for help. At some point there might also be a coup against Hitler and the military junta that takes control offers to switch sides and fight against the Soviet Union with you – but they demand pre-WWI borders between Germany and Poland. If you reject, they align with the Soviet Union.
Gameplay wise it works, offering interesting challenges with escalating difficulties. The question is how accepting players will be if in a WWII game most playthroughs don’t go like the historical WWII. The Crusader Kings players seem fine with a relatively high average amount of divergence from history, but HoI4 has a broader appeal and a somewhat different playerbase, so I am less sure there.
The Fall of France might be more easily “forced” if the game had a robust political simulation. Give them realistic force dispositions but also a high morale fragility, any military loss causes tremendous damage to the regime’s popularity, and give them a low threshold for a fascist coup. That way, not only does a France player need to withstand the German invasion, they need to no-sell it, cede no territory and lose no engagements (or close enough to it).
That does move the median outcome from the historical “army substantially defeated, Paris taken, right-wing military members seize power” to “army stops invasion around WW1 lines, right-wing coup turns them fascist anyway” or “army stops invasion around WW1 lines, next election starts a succession of ineffective governments that collapse after a week for not being able to win the war in a week”, which would effectively be loss conditions (or maybe give the option to continue playing as the collaborationist regime, with a new win condition). That would make France the “hard mode: politics edition”, leaving others to be the “hard mode: economics edition” (Japan?) and “hard mode: military edition” (Poland?).
Britain does seem like the good candidate for the introduction. They’d be just vulnerable enough on all three axes to serve as a tutorial, while not being so hopeless in any as to require expertise. A careless Britain player could lose militarily, or fail to build up enough industry, or manage their politics so poorly as to be thrown out. America might then be a good one for series longtimers who need to master the new political systems (being mostly restrained by popular will when acting prior to any Pearl Harbor-like casus belli), but don’t need a military or economic challenge.
To briefly outline my ideas for a political subsystem: certain events (coup, revolution, electoral loss in a democracy) would put the country in a state of political turmoil, where the player loses control and whatever faction takes over runs on autopilot for at least a month, according to their own goals. These would be triggered most often by sufficiently low satisfaction in your government by different factions (eg. a German player who refuses to invade Russia risks a coup from the anti-communist faction; a British player losing too many battles risks losing election to the Tories). The player regains control only when a faction retains control long enough to stabilize, and (optionally) that faction is aligned with their original goals (eg. a Conservative government still wants to beat the Nazis, a Blackshirt government would not). Democracies would be able to attempt more drastic policies than currently (eg. FDR could instate a draft in Q1 1939), but the political cost would make them suicidal. They would need either significant propaganda investment, or public provocation from the Axis, or ideally both, in order to really unleash their economic and mobilization advantages. Trying to build a war economy before the war starts is an easy way to lose power.
(For an example of an even that would trigger instability without a bar dropping too low, Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin getting assassinated would trigger turmoil as none of their systems of government were built with succession in mind. Not sure if that should be a deliberate act undertaken by another state, somehow, a consequence for particularly brutal play, or just a wholly random event.)
Having an European member of the Allias as the tutorial country has several side advantages – France winning and ending the game in 1940 is genuinely a good thing for a “first playthrough” where you’re just learning the ropes. It also frees you from much of the complexity – the AI will take care of triggering the war for you, economy is less important etc.
“a fascist one should not be able to choose Local Autonomy or No Garrison”
(Whoops, that was the “post” button, before I wrote the actual reply)
“a fascist one should not be able to choose Local Autonomy or No Garrison”
Except that historically, fascist Germany did choose Local Autonomy for the first several years of the occupation of Denmark. There were some (ideologically motivated) special circumstances in this case, and the policy eventually broke down, but its still a counterexample to the claim that a fascist regime cannot choose local autonomy when it suits them.
Paradox games already deal with this sort of case by adding an Event which lets you set some option that you normally can’t select.
No Garrison btw. basically represents “We’re abondoning this area altogether”. With no suppression the resistance will keep increasing until it causes a revolt and the territory either spawns/respawns a new tag or reverts control to the original owner (if they’re still fighting)
The way HOI4’s resistance system works and how compliance, suppression and resistance interacts is honestly not bad *in theory* but for various reasons the end result tends to be that you rarely see the high end effects unless you deliberately screw up.
<blockquote>If we make these not merely cosmetic, but actually result in gameplay changes, it seems likely that they would cripple fascist players in the long run, encouraging them to be aggressive and try to win the war before their war crimes cause too many uprisings and sap too much of their productivity. This… seems correct to me? My understanding is that each Axis country planned their war as a quick knockout.</blockquote>
my reply continues…
The Axis powers planned a short war not because they were afraid that their war crimes over time will cause uprisings but because they knew they had weaker economies and had to strike fast. Germany pretty much always relied on the short war doctrine because of its central position in Europe where it can be attacked from many fronts, this is what led them to develop the <i>Bewegungskrieg</i> concept which then evolved into maneuver warfare. Japan also knew it was unable to sustain a long war against world powers, this is why it always relied on a knockout blow, like in the First Chino-Japanese war in the 1890s, in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 and at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Mussolini’s Italy joined the war in June 1940 at the time of the Fall of France, Mussolini was counting that the war would be over in weeks with the UK coming to the settlement with Germany and Italy would get territorial gains out of it.
As for war crimes, the Axis powers were planning them for a long time. The Nazis were planning to continue their colonization of the Lebensraum to the east into the 1950s which would’ve involved slave labor, expulsion and genocide of the Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians living in those lands. Similarly Japan was certainly not going to let up on its conquest of China.
Yes, the reason that Axis powers planned around a short war was not “our evil war crimes will piss off neutrals and create too many partisans if we keep doing them too long”. But game design that pushes players into the historical patterns, even for different reasons, is still accomplishing the goal of pushing them into the historical roles. Just as a more tactical WW2 game that pushed players into blitzkrieg tactics because the enemy AI can only switch between attack and defense modes at set periods, even if that’s not why it worked in real life, would be pushing players into a historical strategy.
Yes, this would be roughly my suggestions on this issue. Maybe make a system where authoritarian governments get more political power points and more options on what you can do, but get random bad events like “Purge the undesirables: lose 10,000 civilian population”, while libertarian governments have fewer political points and options but get positive events like “Your civilians build you a free factory.” Or maybe have it so fascist governments have a default occupation policy of “brutal repression” that kills off a certain number of civilian population every month, and if you want to have a more gentle occupation policy you have to spend political power to do so.
Obviously this does open up the possibility of a “genocide simulator” run, but I think it might work better to have a system where you *can* “genocidemax” if you want to, but it is obviously stupid and counterproductive, as opposed to just preventing genocide from happening.
Definitely agree that whatever system is implemented should be applicable to any polity in response to ahistorical politics, that an authoritarian America or Britain should have these problems and a Weimar Germany should not.
Your proposal reminds me of the experimental game STAVKA-OKH by Rod Humble. During this game (which is very basic germany-ussr ww2 strategy), small red dots appear on the map. Why? Well, the game doesn’t really say, but if you look them up they are the dates and sites of war crimes committed by both sides.
I had no idea about such things when I played it, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. Now here I am commenting as a hundred-of-hours HOI4 newbie.
I think tying it to ideology in a way that limits player choice is a reasonably idea. But I think a general mechanic as a baseline would be better than building it around events. (I also think presenting these events as special, separate from other events, would make players slightly averse to them, because they don’t like a preachy tone, even when appropriate.)
The base mechanic could just be called Civilian Casualties. The game already tracks population at the level of what it calles “states”, which are groups of provinces. Civilian Casualties would reduce that population. Occupation, fighting, strategic bombings, and logistical breakdowns would cause Civilian Casualties. They are entirely negative: they reduce factory output, reduce available manpower, and increase war support in the country they are core of (to model the impact of strategic bombing on the will to fight, and to also model how German attrocities during Operation Barbarossa increased Soviet willingness to fight), increase resistence against the occupier if they are occupied, and decrease other countries’ opinion about you if you cause them. Fascist countries cause the most civilian casualties, then Communist countries, then Non-Aligned countries, and Democratic countries the least (but still some).
Modifiers and Events could be built on top of that, so for example after the Wannsee Conference for a period of time Germany suffers Civilian Casualties even in its core provinces under its control. American anti-Japanese sentiment could be a comparatively small modifier that makes their strategic bombing of Japan cause more Civilian Casualties than strategic bombing of Germany. The atomic bomb would cause significant Civilian Casualties – no need to take a stand on if it was morally justified.
Now, personally, I would prefer a more active representation of war crimes. Similar to the stress mechanic in Crusader Kings III, it would penalize the player for acting out of character too much. Here, the different ideologies would have different goals, and if you fail at these goals, it increases discord within your party and/or stress for your leader. And more and more bad things happen the more and longer you act out-of-character for your ideology. That does put the player into the position of thinking about atrocities strategically, which is bound to cause controversy, but I think it is valuable education. It would show how wanting Germany and its sphere of influence free from Jews ends up with the mass murder, even if there wasn’t a mass murder plan from the beginning (as I understand it that is the historical consensus today, after the Functionalism-Intentionalism Debate). It would also show that atrocities are strategically bad, leading to most players thinking “this would be much easier if I could just focus on winning the war instead of also having to commit atrocities”. But I understand it that a studio like Paradox doesn’t want the heat caused by the minority of players who would present their genocide run gleefully.
The biggest problem of both approaches, the one where atrocities happen and the player has not direct decision power and them and the one where the player actively controls them, is that to compensate for the negative impacts on the countries commiting them Germany and Japan would need to be ahistorically buffed even more to allow for “balanced” games. This attempt to create balanced gameplay is, in my view, the core sin of HoI4. Presenting the Wehrmacht as powerful enough to defeat the USSR and the US probably does more damage than presenting it as clean.
“It would show how wanting Germany and its sphere of influence free from Jews ends up with the mass murder, even if there wasn’t a mass murder plan from the beginning (as I understand it that is the historical consensus today, after the Functionalism-Intentionalism Debate).”
I really don’t think there is this consensus. Terror murder was part of Nazi political organizing even before there were Nazi elected officials. Perhaps you mean that a viable plan was absent, but vague and even impossible plans really are still plans, and those already existed in the ’20s. Nobody put into a non-“death camp” camp was ever intended to get out of the camp system alive.
That’s not really the case, AFAIK. (for starters, a lot of people *were* put into non-death camp concentration camps and then released for a variety of reasons) the *specific* plans for mass-murder really is soemthing that coalesces as the war gets underway. There’s a point that the nazi path was always going to end in genocide, but there were a lot of escalation to actually *get there*. (and even some division among the nazis) some more harebrained than not.
The early concentration camps were primarily for political enemies and they were often released in return for promising to stay quiet and stay out of politics. Jews were only put into the concentration camps in significant numbers after the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, before that they had been primarily targeted by the discriminatory legislation of the Nuremberg Laws. The Jews put into concentration camps in November 1938 were released if they could arrange for their emigration.
In general, there were two factions with differing goals concerning Jews among the Nazis before the war. One faction was primarily after Jewish wealth, the other primarily wanted Jews gone from Germany. I suspect the former faction was primarily driven by envy towards successful Jews, which was widespread in Germany, and the latter – which included much of the SS – bought into the racial beliefs of the Nazis, which were less widespread among the general population. (Eichmann rose to prominance by organizing a system where Jews in Austria would sign away their property in the process of emigration, with a part of that property then paying for the emigration of poor Jews.)
When the war started Jews in Czechia and Poland were put into ghettos, and in Germany into more distributed “Jew houses”. Long term ideas morphed towards some versions of reservations (the Madagascar Plan, but also ideas for a Jewish reservation in Eastern Poland), where it was accepted that many Jews would die in the process, but total extermination was not yet the plan. The plans for genocide were conceived during the second half of 1941. The mass murder of representatives of Soviet communism like commissars was extended towards all Jews in the Soviet Union (since the Nazi’s viewed communism as Jewish), then came to include Jews in Poland as well, and then finally in early 1942 to all Jews under German control.
Even the more radical side of the Nazis, which did want all Jews gone, seems to have favored expulsion over genocide before the invasion of the Soviet Union. The plans would always involve some deaths, but the number of deaths meant to happen rose over time. From terror murder to scare the others into leaving over reservations where many would die to direct extermination.
With respect @Bret Devereaux – I know you have contacts at Paradox and you’re trying to be collegial. However, you’re being too kind to Paradox here. Every point you’ve raised is valid, but in fact the game is even worse on the issue than you suggest.
They do include atrocities, but they are exclusively allied ones. In the Pacific Theatre, the KMT player can destroy the Yellow River Dikes and recieve an economic debuff representing the lives lost from their actions; the IJA can rampage across China with no equivalent penalty.
I have not played the reworked Raj, but Paradox decided it should include the Bengal Famine – as a ticking time bomb, that would inflict severe penalties unless the player took the correct focuses. However, that timebomb starts counting down from the moment the game begins – in other words, it is in no way tied to the actions of Japan. So Paradox chose to include the famine but completely the context of Japanese involvement – it was quite possible for a player to have pushed Japan back into China, entirely avoiding the strains on Indian and Burmese infrastructure that caused the famine, only for it to trigger. To be clear, I absolutely believe the British government is culpable for the millions of deaths in Bengal – however, it is ahistoric nonsense to suggest that those deaths were inevitable and were going to happen even if no war had broken out, which was how the game presented them.
In other words, this was a vision of the Pacific War where mass civilian death was at least implied if not explicitly depicted – but only as a result of Allied action or indifference. The Japanese player received no such events. In fact, when Paradox released a dev diary for the reworked Japanese focus tree they initially INCLUDED a “Three Alls” policy that made the occupation of China more efficient.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/developer-diary-historical-japan.1861129/post-30785677
After questions were raised about this, they hastily renamed it “Intensify Anti-Guerilla Operations”
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/developer-diary-historical-japan.1861129/post-30785677
Note also that no other famines are depicted: not the Hunger Winter in the Netherlands, nor the Hunger Plan, nor any other food shortages in Axis territory. In fact, the Chinese national focus tree’s economic section warns that a Grain Tax risks causing a famine – again, this depicts CHINA as being more callous towards its civilians than Japan.
There is also an option in the game where a player is rewarded for committing genocide as a minor Axis Power – Bulgaria’s strongest path is through “Bulgarianisation,” where it can get cores on the ENTIRE Balkans. We know what that policy meant in practice: forced settlement, imposition of language, slaughter of resisters, a pre-figuring of the 1990s Balkan Wars. In game, it’s a bloodless decision.
As a final aside, the alt-history focuses also often include coded language that allows a far right player (of whome they are many) to enjoy living out a fascist fantasy. A United States fascist path (the absurdity, not to say stupidity of the alt-history options is anotbher discussion) allows the player to “Extend the Chinese Exclusion Acts,” impose a “Voter Registration Act” and “Honour the Confederacy.”
In sum: historic atrocities and civilian deaths are depicted, so long as they are the fault of Allied Powers.
Paradox Interactive often makes statements about how it is firmly opposed to hate speech, and it is certainly quick to remove explicitly Nazi or Far Right mods from the Steam Workshop. However, its actual actions are simply weak. For example, one of the most popular mods for HOI4 is “The Fire Rises,” essentially a modern day mod with a new American Civil War and various regional conflagrations. It is quite clearly made by people immersed in far right subcultures: the American establishment (particularly the Democrats) are depicted as corrupt tools of the corporations, while there are multiple paths for multiple far right militias, from the Atomwaffen of Florida to Klan off-shoots, all with huge reams of text and images that frankly suggest they were written with one hand.
Can Paradox be held responsible for this sort of mod which never openly crosses the line? Perhaps not. On the other hand, should we hold it responsible for reaching out to the mod team to ensure that they’re one of the favoured fan projects that get access to early patch builds so that they can update as soon as a new DLC comes out? Yes.
FInally, let me end with an anecdote that provides some context for why I feel so strongly about this.
For years, large segments of the fan community thought it was the height of hilarity to refer to Turkey or the Ottoman Empire in Paradox games as “Kebab,” and to say that wars against them were to “remove Kebab.” This apparently silly affectation comes from a 1990s anti-Bosniak propaganda song. Its lyrics seem ridiculous in English, but it was used to provide a soundtrack for the slaughter of Muslims in the Balkans. Anyone who thought this was in bad taste was told they were being woke soyboys, often followed by a cry of “Deus Vult!”
It got to the point that for years, the Europa Universalis 4 Forum – note: not the Crusader Kings forum or the Hearts of Iron forum. This cancer in the fanbase is across their games – had a pinned thread where a Paradox mod asked people please to stop using the word.
Maybe it was just being silly.
In 2019, when I was in the middle of my doctorate, I woke up one morning to find out that on the other side of the world a man had walked into two mosques in the town I grew up in and murdered over fifty people, livestreaming the whole thing. On the side of his gun, he’d written “Deus Vult!” and “Remove Kebab!”
Paradox doesn’t have the pinned thread up anymore. It could be that they think the problem has been dealt with.
Or it could just be that they’re not that interested in fighting the problem anymore.
I mean, the Business Plot was a thing.
Was it? That’s a highly debated topic in and of itself, but even if we grant that it was real the comprehensive failure of it – and the fact that if it existed, the evidence suggests it was tiny and incompetent – hardly implies that there was any chance of a fascist takeover in 1936.
FDR coined the name “New Deal” during the campaign, but the specifics of a “New Deal” weren’t defined until the transition and the decision to make it a legislative program didn’t happen until the new Congress was seated. The First 100 Days was a series of unilateral executive orders by FDR that were swiftly replaced with equivalent laws, and the Supreme Court had to be threatened to get it to allow the New Deal to go forward; if Congress had been unable to pass the laws and the Supreme Court had gone further, FDR would have had some hard choices to make. And if Keynes hadn’t presented FDR with ideas for non-fascist economic interventions, he really might have gone with the globally trending new ideas instead….
Even if FDR had quote “made some hard choices,” I do not think that FDR would have enacted a program recognizable as fascism. There are too many elements of fascism that are specifically ideological in character that simply were not present in FDR’s political framework. “The government is powerful and gives a lot of orders” is not fascism in and of itself, for instance.
“However, that timebomb starts counting down from the moment the game begins – in other words, it is in no way tied to the actions of Japan.”
Acutally not true, AFAIK. The famine will kick off once british Raj territory gets occupied. (on Historical, that is almost always done by Japan) technically the trigger is reaching more than 5% surrender progress.
My mistake then, it’s been some years since I had a look. To be clear, I can give chapter and verse on the crimes of the British Empire, I just felt that they rather whiffed their depiction of this particular event.
You are just wrong though? It is tied to the Japanese going into Burma or Raj, it is directly in the context of Japanese involvement
<i>The irony is, Hearts of Iron IV already has a system that resembles this, but only for the USSR and only for Stalin’s Great Purge. In practice, so long as the Soviet Union remains Communist, the Purge is effectively guaranteed to happen (either a Stalinist purge or a Trotskyite one). </i>
There was a third major option here which was Bukharin and the “right wing” of the Communist party.
I don’t really disagree with any of this, but I also think it’s a little unfair to judge so much more harshly in the context of world war two than in the context of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, the Mongol sack of Baghdad, or any similarly brutal “kill the men and enslave the women and children” moment of history.
There are horrors under every historical myth and legend, but it is the legends and myths we want to inhabit in our fantasies.
I think the problem here is that WW2 is too recent so it actually matters if people forget the horrors of an ideology whose direct heirs are winning elections at this very moment.
No one is winning on a platform of raising Italian legions to invade France in an effort to evade prosecution for deeds performed during their consulship.
@guy,
I think geography matters as much as time period, actually. WWII was, well, a world war, so the Nazi and Japanese programs of conquest affected most parts of the world either directly or indirectly. Plus, modern global communications made people all over the world at least vaguely aware of the scale of mass death. Though even there, in parts of the world which were less directly affected by WWII, I do think that appreciation of the scale and intensity of Nazi evils is, well, less visceral and intense.
The Mongol conquests in contrast were more limited in geographic scope, and in particular didn’t really affect the Western European cultures that were the most direct predecessors for American culture. (Didn’t some Western leaders even toy with the idea of treating the Mongols as potential allies?)
I dunno, now-Indonesia was pretty brutalized by WW2 (it was said, even if slightly hyperbolically, that the Japanese occupation inflict worse suffering than the decade-long Hollands reign) and yet the reactions for Nazi warcrimes are comparatively less intense. I think those are mainly seen in places more affected by Germany’s aggression.
@terrabalt,
That’s interesting about Indonesia! I was thinking about South Asia specifically, which was certainly *involved* in the war (including some of my family), but mostly indirectly in the sense that there wasn’t actual fighting in most of the region, except Manipur and the Andaman Islands. To this day my sense is that Hitler and the Nazis in South Asia are more perceived as run-of-the-mill evil people who killed a lot of people, comparable to other historical villains, and not seen as the epitome of evil as they are for Europeans (and historically for Americans, though that’s unfortunately starting to change).
@Hector,
Yup it’s always funny that here in Southeast Asia also, we treat every WW2 character with indifference, including Hitler, Hirohito, etc. Just another run-of-the-mill evil people and not the epitome of evil. In fact, do we even assign anyone as epitome of evil? Maybe just a different culture traits.
Does he? He has carved plenty of leaves on how brutal war and slavery is in personnage, how bad living under any imperial state really would’ve been historically, how stupid and dangerous the Retvrn people is, etc. Perhaps he’s being less hedged in this post, but that’s because it’s about how a war whose horrors can still be felt today (most acutely in the support for the Levant genocides) is being depicted as sanitized as it ended up become.
Given that just earlier today I ran across people seriously arguing that the Rising Sun flag shouldn’t be seen as problematic workplace decoration because ‘it’s not like it’s a swastika’, WWII media is indeed much too sanitized.
To be fair, that one is an active and ongoing propagnda by the Japanese to erase their crimes in the ww2 to venerate their imperialistic past, unlike Germany who banned the Hakenkreuz so hard they ended up becoming Indophobic and Sinophobic.
the Rising sun flag predated WW2. It may be still problematic, though to be fair, Germany still keep the Iron Cross, which was on the Nazi warflag.
Japanese colonial genocides began with the Meiji Restoration, the rays on the flag are intended to symbolize Japan extending its domain past the home islands.
if the workplace is a Japanese warship, then it is still the official flag of the Japanese navy.
FWIW, the modern Japanese naval ensign isn’t the same as the most familiar form of the imperial flag.
there was no “imperial flag”. The naval ensign is still the same, the army flag was changed from 16 sun rays to a 8 rays design.
I take it you’re another AAM reader?
the game focuses on showing people the operations of modern warfare. Germany is a popular choice because you can experience a lot of operational maneuvers with it.
I think most people playing the game already understand the crimes of the Axis and don’t need to be constantly reminded that “you are the baddie” when they are thinking about how to win the eastern front with their panzer divisions.
The people who did enjoying committing atrocities in this game are somewhat mentally unwell so no amount of “do not do this cool thing” will change them anyway.
Reality isn’t black and white like that though. Sure, most people have enough education to be aware that the Axis powers did bad things, but many are unaware of the scale, the brutality, the disparity compared to allied crimes against humanity, the hypocrisy with which the strength-worshipping nazis chose atrocities to the detriment of victory and military strength, or how clear the history is about all of those. A game like this is a good teaching opportunity to show that no, the nazis were not just another power at war doing the usual amount of war crimes, they were a horrific force of evil even by the standards of states at war.
Also, a lot of people, especially the sorts who are just interested enough in history to play a WWII game, admire the nazis for their percieved practical virtues like industriousness, efficiency, and martial spirit even while giving them a lukewarm denunciation for their moral failings. Such people are easy recruits for neonazis, but a few good reminders that nazism was an albatross aroung Germany’s neck which weakened them in all the ways people think it made them strong, might make them a bit more skeptical of
And sure, there’s going to be some hardcore neonazis whose enjoyment (or streaming viewership) is predictated on optimizing for genocide and punishing that would either fail to deter them or lead them to whine about the game being “woke”, but a lot of people will do an evil run for a laugh, and making it both a guilty and mildly unfun experience would encourage them to stop and think, which might nudge some of them out of the neonazi pipeline.
I don’t want to overstate the impact that responsible storytelling can have. This is just a game, and probably one of many that most of its playerbase play, which has things to say about WWII and nazism. But I don’t want to understate it either, because stories are a big part of how humans understand things we haven’t personally experienced, and even if we don’t explicitly take the things they assert as true, we often implicitly accept the framing those stories present around certain ideas before we even start trying to consciously answer questions, and those questions include ones like “should I vote against this guy who seems to be making sense but has the support of the neonazis”.
I think that view is deeply flawed. It’s not only about constantly showing who the bad guys are and what kind of real human suffering they causes, but also hammering in the conclusion that their way of doing things makes them bad at war. In direct contradiction to nazi and fascist propaganda. And believe me, lots of people, even today believe that propaganda so we need to make that false assumption more public, even in videogames and especially in times like these, where these same ideologies again gain support in the mainstream in many countrys.
Interesting. But I’d argue that no matter that the Axis “started it,” the Allies would have pretty much certainly began strategic bombing of German cities once they had the capacity for it, Blitz or no Blitz. Even before the outbreak of the war, British and American air officers and military theorists were advocating for a new form of warfare in which the heavy bomber would play the decisive role. And men that rose to military authority in WWII like “Bomber” Harris in the UK and Curtis LeMay in the USA would have still held sway. LeMay was even honest enough (in his own cold, soulless way) to admit that had Japan won the war, he would have been executed as a war criminal.
So these men on the Allied side knew what they were doing.
I remember reading some breakdowns of german deaths in Soviet Captivity, and IIRC, in context the Soviets actually come across a bit better than the raw numbers suggested. Namely, a lot of german captives were already heavily malnourished when captured (I believe the Stalingrad captives were in especially bad shape) and the Soviets were themselves suffering through wartime famine. I seem to remember a graph even pointing out that as the Soviets got in a better position the death rates among POW’s dropped markedly, while for the germans it was somewhat the reverse: When the germans were doing well that meant they could kill people quicker.
One kind of interesting thing it strikes me would be produced by the system you advocate for, would be the fact that people playing as the Axis would probably want to CREATE an ahistorical clean wehrmacht. I feel like on balance this is probably good since it would reinforce the (true and also beneficial) idea that atrocities are a bad choice, but I do also worry that people would mistake the meta play for Germany with real history.
Except that the meta play for Germany will always result in a German victory and the historical play for Germany…won’t.
I do think that one of the problematic points is that german atrocities *were* pretty instrumental to letting them fight on as long as they did: Not neccessarily the Holocaust per se but the systematic plundering of occupied territories (and even starting before the war proper) was pretty important. (that is even something HOI4 sort of represents with the “economy of conquest” spirit, in a kind of bloodless way)
Yes, though mostly the wealthier territories as opposed to those being genocided. Though in a Nazi victory scenario that would be a big problem for them by the 1950s, eg France’s economy was fairly rapidly shrinking
Most or possibly all of the relaxation of economic distress that gave them the time they needed to cement power and disestablish competing institutions was created by taking property away from Jewish-Germans (and some others) and redistributing it to German-Germans. Without racialized theft they could not have even pretended to be able to solve Germany’s problems, and nothing about that changed by going to war.
It’s a sticking point that often comes up in anti-atrocity advocacy, that occasionally mass crimes are just massively scaled up petty crimes and so are as rational to the perpetrator as mugging is to a mugger.
Hello Bret,
this is something of an obscure fact, but aside from Paradox’s rational unwillingness to avoid depicting atrocities, in hoi4 attempting to remove population from a state causes issues with the manpower pool (thus why events like the Bengal famine or Great Purge don’t actually reduce any state population). This behaviour has been known for many years now, and presumably Paradox is unwilling or unable to correct it to avoid pandering to the wrong type of crowd.
I agree with everything in the post. Couple of add-ons:
Richard Overy and Adam Tooze re-look at Allied strategic bombing says that it did affect the German war economy quite a lot, both directly in destruction and indirectly in forcing decentralisation with lower productivity, inability to produce new models in bulk and ‘finished’ products that could not be delivered or used;
I would also note that the late C19/early C20 was rich in genocides, some providing models for the Fascists and Nazis – both intentional: Russia with the Circassians, Germany Hereros, the US with Native Americans, the Ottomans with Assyrians and Armenians, Australia with aboriginals; and indifference – another Iranian famine in World War I (up to 2 million) down to British and Russian occupation (the latter described by one Russian observer as brutal and – because Russian – stupidly brutal), famines in Lebanon and Africa.
“On top of this, German, Japanese and Italian atrocities also served to reinforce allied moral and the will to fight on as they demonstrated that these were odious, evil regimes that had to be stopped at any cost.”
Yeah, about that.
Could you write a blog post on that phenomenon?
There’s a shocking amount of people who think that the Boltons in “A Song of Ice and Fire” are very smart to have their sigil be a flayed man (on top of a generally nasty reputation for being torturers) because “that scares the enemy into surrendering!”
Also it doesn’t seem like it’d really matter, since they only got actual evidences of it when they’re already deep inside Europe. Unless you count evidence-less propaganda, but that’s what Axis can do too.
A reputation for brutality can scare people into surrendering, but crucially, only if it’s paired with a reputation for treating enemies who surrender much better than enemies who don’t.
That’s why the sack of King’s Landing was a terrible move strategically, to an extent that I’m not even sure Martin understands.
A reputation for brutality can scare people into surrendering, but crucially, only if it’s paired with a reputation for treating enemies who surrender much better than enemies who don’t.
And, also, if it’s clear that your victory is inevitable. Terror tactics might end a war, but they will not win one.
I have to strongly disagree with you that HOI4 is a “Clean Wehrmacht” simulator. It is not. It is a “Clean Nazi Germany” simulator. A “Clean Wehrmacht” simulator implies that there’s some sort of “Dirty SS” to pass the blame on, but the SS is just as “clean” as the Wehrmacht in HOI4.
One interesting point is that Victoria 3 was released 8 years after HOI4, and actually *does* have some modelled historical genocides (both the Trail of Tears and the Circassian Genocides are modelled via events) the Trail of Tears is interesting in that while it is *technically* avoidable, it requires you to have passed certain laws that it is very hard to have done by the time the event fires. (Though you can mitigate it) The Circassian one is slightly easier to avoid (in that you can either lose the war, pass certain reforms or just decide not to do it, though it will piss off a lot of powerful interest groups)
A genocide by Germans on Romani (Gypsy) population is also worth mentioning.
Your solution is the first thing that came to my mind. Simply have this as a passive “debuff” whenever Axis enemies occupy territory. Players would bitch that playing these forces seems to have strategic balance limitations, but that would reflect the situation as it actually occurred.
The firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than either atomic bomb. In terms of destructive power (or casualties), the latter were not outliers relative to the many conventional bombing raids carried out elsewhere in Japan or those in Europe, either. Their only oddity was that they could be delivered by a single bomber, rather than several hundred. Why, then, should they be regarded as any more of an atrocity than the other similar raids? Letting our judgment of these historical weapons being colored by our greater familiarity with later, multi-megaton (thermo)nuclear weapons, just because they are referred to by the same name, would be an error of the same type as thinking that at the time of its adoption by the Romans, the gladius had the same characteristics as the Mainz specimen.
I think our abhorrence of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki doesn’t merely depend on the number of casualties but on what they represent qualitatively. For example, people dying from radiation sickness after the event. After all, gas attacks in WW1 caused fewer casualties than artillery but humanity justifiably decided after the war to outlaw chemical weapons.
Professor Deveraux has written an article on this, but to paraphrase his thesis: we didn’t ban chemical weapons out of moral outrage. We banned them because they’re impractical: if you need to kill people high explosives can do the job more cheaply and efficiently and are much harder to protect against.
Professor Deveraux has written an article on this, but to paraphrase his thesis: we didn’t ban chemical weapons out of moral outrage.
That was a very interesting article, but I would qualify a bit. I think people often do things for a complex combination of reasons, some moral and some practical, and that goes for chemical weapons too. The fact that the cost/benefit balance makes chemical weapons not a great option doesn’t *take away* from the moral outrage. Slavery abolition, after all, wasn’t purely about moral reasons either, there’s a reason it didn’t happen until the Industrial Revolution changed the economic cost/benefit balance around slavery. That still doesn’t mean that the moral factors were nonexistent.
Fair point!
>We banned them because they’re impractical
If they were that impractical, nobody would bother banning them. We do not see the need to ban backwards-shooting firearms.
I may be recycling something from Brett’s article or the discussion, but I suspect something more like the ban on unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain, the leading naval power, can starve her enemies more effectively by simply blockading them with her overwhelmingly powerful fleet. Submarines are not useful to her because collateral damage etc. Unrestricted submarine warfare IS useful to lesser powers; when blockading is not an option you may still prefer collateral damage + starving the enemy rather than doing neither. So a ban on unrestricted submarine warfare, passed by the dominant power, is great – they don’t need it anyway, and it gives them moral high ground/justification against the enemy.
We DO ban backwards-shooting firearms, though! It’s just that there wasn’t a need to do so in a systematic international way, instead it’s handled on the basis of consumer safety regulations such as implied warranties.
I don’t think you argument is wrong, although I think there’s more context to the events that might impact how people judge it.
For one, that they could be delivered by a single bomber was not some footnote, it’s a pretty big change in the calculus of both the military doing the strategic bombing and the military trying to defend against being strategically bombed. One old Soviet-Era textbook once put it like this: “The Japanese rescinded the air raid alarm because they thought a single air plane was harmless. But there are no harmless air planes any more, and there won’t be until we stop having wars.”
And secondly, there is of course the question of “Were the Japanese about to surrender anyway and dropping the bombs wasn’t needed” vs. “To what extend was dropping a new type of bomb a morale shock capable of causing a surrender in a way a normal terror bombing was not” – I’ve never done the deep dive to find out what historians think, but I know it’s contentious in the general public.
Are there any people who argue that the atomic bombings were atrocities but the fire bombings of Axis cities were morally OK?
Yes, absolutely. Out of the subset of people who know about Tokyo and Dresden at all? I would say most of those say both kinds of bombing are atrocities.
I’ve thought for a while that playing a realistic fascist country in a game should be a pain in the butt. “Oh, you want to tech-rush The Bomb, huh? Sorry, that science is culturally coded Jewish; you got a cabinet minister purged and made no progress. Uh-oh, what’s this? Your charismatic leader just declared that vaccines are a freemason plot to taint the pure essence of the race. Get ready to have some pops ravaged by preventable disease!”
Depends tho, would Italy or Japan got the same debuff? Doesn’t sound like they reject too much science, and super ironically, they tried to advance it very unethically.
It’s not just science but also the application of science, the “D” in R&D. All authoritarian regimes are handicapped because, over-simplifying, successful science, successful R&D, requires people at lower levels to be able to tell the people who are higher ranked / more experienced “nope, you’re wrong”. Of course this is difficult in democracies as well, but generally the bearer of bad news in the western allies wasn’t at risk of being executed for contradicting a superior.
Italy in WW2 wasn’t bad at R&D, naval historian Vincent O’Hara rates the Italian navy as quite adaptable and flexible. It’s probably related that Mussolini was the least successful of the authoritarians, eventually hung by his own people. But Italy did not have the sheer number of scientists and engineers that Britain and the USA had, or even Germany.
The Japanese weren’t bad at science and engineering either, but also had limited resources. And, there were far too many senior military people proclaiming that samurai spirit could overcome materiel deficiencies, for example that parachutes and armour plating just made American fighter pilots less aggressive. Even after the Japanese army had been smashed by Soviet artillery and tanks at Khalka Gol, senior commanders didn’t really see the need. (This did start to change in the last years of the war.)
The Soviet Union was also authoritarian, but had the advantage of being able to “outsource” R&D to Britain and the USA. Paul Kennedy in his book “Engineers of Victory” has an important step in the development of the T-34 tank being a couple of early models sent to the USA for evaluation. The American engineers picked up quite a few problems, which they reported back. The Soviet tank engineers could then design solutions to those problems and safely present them because they themselves weren’t criticising their superiors.
It’s acutally somewhat represented in-game: Democratic governments in the allies gets a “Give refuge to german/italian scientists” decisions that gives them a buff to research speed. Generally speaking allied countries also have earlier access to (and in the acse of the US, just plain more) research slots. *and* they have default mecahnics for research sharing (the axis can technically do that too but it’s more limited and, because of how the game is set up, less useful)
I suspect this part is going to incredibly misleading to any readers who don’t dig deeper, so to be clear:
So, even if we were to treat the Aberdeen report as being earthshaking in its implications for Soviet tank development, it was done too late to have the effect scifihughf (and, I presume, Paul Kennedy? I have not actually read that book – but its Goodreads rating of 3.8 isn’t very good for a work of non-fiction, and plenty of reader reviews there complain about inaccuracies or lack of analytical rigor) ascribe to it as far as WWII goes.
However, even that reading is likely to be too generous, as TankArchives (already linked to by our host earlier on at least the one occasion of that Mad Max post) had translated the Soviet response to the report and it goes from “They didn’t use the proper operating procedures” to “We already knew about issue X before the report and our fixes for it are already in development or even have already been implemented on models produced while the evaluation was ongoing.”
https://www.tankarchives.com/2013/04/aberdeen-t-34-and-kv-1-test.html
And in general, “because they themselves weren’t criticising their superiors” is rather at odds with the purge-era Stalinism explicitly enabling career advancement via accusing a superior of being intentionally incompetent to sabotage the socialist state goals. I.e. I think I already mentioned that the creator of interwar T-37A/T-38 amphibious tank(ette)s, Astrov, was imprisoned and could well have been executed on these charges, once it became clear those really were terrible and a near-useless waste of Soviet resources (even if the blame primarily lay with Tukhachevsky and his allies coming up with their ludicrously permissive design requirements). He wasn’t*, but a few others weren’t so lucky.** I definitely remarked on here a couple of weeks back that Lev Mekhlis – WWI artillery veteran, Stalin’s one-time secretary and eventually one of Voroshilov’s deputies in the last couple crucial prewar years (after he, Yezhov and Voroshilov himself purged the Red Army leadership of opposition to Voroshilov – and a number of others who got caught up in the process) – wrote a scathing report on early-production KV-1, urging that its manufacturing be suspended until a number of issues with its reliability are resolved. Him being ignored on this matter had little to do with rank*.
The funny thing is that your basic point – the USSR had frequently “outsourced” R&D to Britain and the USA – is not just correct, but basically indisputable outside of that specific example. As in, while all the Axis tank-building began with reverse-engineering a British tankette (Panzer I, CV-33 and Te-Ke are all different answers to “What can make Carden-Lloyd remotely useful?” – same as the Polish TK-3/TKS and the Soviet T-27, mostly phased out by 1939), all the interwar Soviet tank models were derived from the exported Vickers models (rejected in the UK itself; often in favour of designs that were ultimately worse). The T-26 was so similar to the exported Vickers tank (primarily differing with its armament), that the Finns could use the spare parts from their prewar Vickers inventory to keep their multitude of captured T-26 tanks operational; T-28, the most useful tank of the Winter War, was another Vickers design, rejected by everyone else for its multi-turret complexity; the aforementioned amphibious tankettes were also derived from an exported British design (only fielded by Thailand, AFAIR); finally, the BT design was invented by the American John Christie; that design eventually evolved into the T-34, whose suspension was still named after Christie. (It also wasn’t a good suspension; once the Soviet designers figured out how to make torsion suspension work, T-44 and T-54 gained an incredible amount of armour while only weighing a few tons more.)
In the air, the main Soviet transport plane was a licensed DC-3 (Li-2); then, by the time of the Korean War, MiG-15/17 notoriously used a British Merlin jet engine sold to them by the Attlee government (to be fair, the USSR captured Me-262 engines too, so some sort of jet fighter would have still been in the air by then) and the first Soviet heatseeking missile was a near-perfect copy of the Sidewinder (captured when it was fired by a Taiwanese Saber at a PRC MiG-17 and failed to detonate). Some R & D came from Germany as well, but mostly during Weimar-era cooperation (i.e. the Soviet 45mm anti-tank gun was derived from the German 37mm one); one of the conditions of the trade and credit agreements associated with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was actually technology transfer, but almost all of it ended up worthless to the USSR (i.e. T-50, whose development was heavily shaped by Panzer III, was inferior to T-34 in nearly every way); ironically, the USSR would have been far better off if Stalin had more faith in his own designers and rejected the deal which had the USSR fuel its own invasion.
P.S. As far as Axis Italy and Japan and R & D go, I think the primary example is how they were both hurt very badly by their failure to adopt radar in time. The Japanese apparently literally didn’t even think such a thing was even possible until the Germans let it slip to them, which left them scrambling to catch up but not really managing it. The Italians had some prototypes, but disregarded their utility up until taking grave naval losses in night battles; they actually managed to implement it on some vessels not long after their surrender. (The USSR was just a little too late; by 1941, the only operational homegrown early-warning radar was mounted on the Molotov cruiser in the Black Sea; land versions of it were deployed around Moscow almost immediately, then spreading to other cities; but the Lend-Lease radars still played a substantial role.)
Besides that, the Italian navy was crippled relative to its full potential by the general interwar European failure to foresee aircraft carriers rendering battleships obsolete. Their 40,000-ton battleships could well have made the North Africa campaign a lot more difficult if they were built as aircraft carriers, but that didn’t happen. (Japanese, for their part, started to realize Yamato was a waste about as soon as they had sunk Prince of Wales from the air, and rebuilt the third ship of the series as an aircraft carrier, one with enough armor to have survived Midway if it were present there; only to lose it to a submarine while half-finished.) Italian tank development was in this remarkable position where it was always about a year behind their rivals; that is, the tanks they had in 1941 would have dominated British Cruisers in 1940 but their actual 1940 forces mostly had tankettes; by 1941, British tank forces were rearmed with Matildas and Valentines; by the time the Italians developed a superior tank, Operation Torch began and they were facing a ton of Lees and eventually Shermans; their Sherman-comparable tank existed, but only ended up used by the German occupying forces.
As with the Japanese tanks, I am not sure how much of it comes down to their command simply realizing that once they committed to fighting the US in the Pacific, the war would be won or lost in the sea and the air, and ground force equipment wouldn’t even play second fiddle. As it was, Khalkhin Gol wasn’t yet clear-cut; while Ha-Gos were outmatched, the anti-tank guns did what they were expected to do, and the contemporary Soviet tanks had taken great losses to them; just not enough to blunt their numerical superiority. Once T-34 entered production, that approach would no longer have worked; but Japan gave up on fighting the USSR by then, so it didn’t matter until the final weeks of war in Manchuria.
*And after he was spared, Astrov soon developed T-40 and T-70, which were both quite good for their intended purpose (unfortunately, both arrived about 2 years too late for the stage of the war they were in; and T-70 was preceded by T-60, designed in a mad rush to have something to help bolster Moscow’s defences). After the war, he developed another light vehicle, the ASU-57 (airdroppable assault gun tankette, basically; technically interesting, but ultimately just one more byproduct of the overestimation of paratrooper capabilities in the Soviet/Russian military), and, much more usefully, the unarmoured tracked chassis used by all Soviet/Russian “medium” air defence, from 1960s onwards; from Kub to Buk and Tor.
**I.e. the executed designers included Dyrenkov, responsible for the truly insane armoured motorcycle proposal and some primitive armoured car designs that were soon rejected in favour of somewhat-superior FAI and BA vehicles****; Kurchevsky (not to be confused with Kurchatov, who did the Soviet nuclear bomb) – who actually firstly got imprisoned back in 1924 after a failed (and apparently expensive) attempt to design a helicopter, then got released by 1929 after Tukhachevsky was impressed by his recoilless gun prototypes and devoted significant funds to adapt them to aircraft, then was executed alongside Tukhachevsky after several thousands of such guns were proven to fail at being recoilless often enough to regularly disable the aircraft or even ground platforms they were attached to; and Syachintov, who developed one of the world’s earliest assault gun prototypes, AT-1.****** Later on, during the war itself, the reports of unreliable gearboxes on early SU-76 assault gun models led to that designer being sent to Kursk area to personally supervise their repairs (where he was killed in a dive bomber raid).
**Although things could well have gone the other way if KV-1’s lead designer didn’t happen to be married to Voroshilov’s adopted daughter. In a truly incredible coincidence, the last name of that designer, Kotin, and of the T-34 lead designer, Koshkin are both quite similar; not just phonetically, but as they both reference felines (‘kot’ is a male housecat, and ‘koshka’ a female one.) While Koshkin died a year before Barbarossa, after getting pneumonia while repairing his T-34 prototype in the rain during a very long cross-country test drive, Kotin went on to design the amphibious PT-76 after the war, which was used extensively in Vietnam for reasons of geography even if it wasn’t especially useful elsewhere. (PT-76 chassis was also used for BTR-50, but that was another design dead-end; a personnel carrier with a top speed of around 40 km/h would have been great during WWII where it would have matched all the Panzers, but it was too slow to be competitive in the Cold War.)
****As in, they had superior performance and BA-3/6/10 were famously the most powerful armoured cars of the interwar era, with the same armament as T-26 or BT tanks – but the entire notion of quickly armouring a civilian car/truck to complement tanks at a fraction of the cost was fatally flawed. While they didn’t perform too badly in the steppes of Khalkhin Gol, from the Winter War onwards, armoured cars without an all-wheel-drive were found to bog down far too often offroad to do much good – especially when they had just 4 wheels! (The Germans withdrew their 4/6-wheeled armoured cars from frontline service as soon as possible, and even the 8-wheeled ones were replaced with halftracks on the Eastern Front as much as possible.)
******Unlike with the other two, Syachintov’s design actually might have been quite helpful if the issues with gun mounts were fixed and it were adopted (and if it replaced some fraction of OTL T-26 production – particularly the flamethrower varieties) – i.e. it would have been a lot more suitable to assaulting the Mannerheim Line than any actual T-26 or BT. Though, since a T-26 was always too underpowered to carry enough armour to be survivable post-1935 or so, its utility would have also been a lot more limited from Barbarossa onwards when compared to e.g. a StuG. On the other hand, the Red Army entering the war with an established assault gun doctrine would have substantially reduced subsequent losses relative to when it was invented on the fly OTL, and many mid-level commanders didn’t properly understand how they were meant to be deployed relative to tanks. (In fairness, the Nazis had similar issues later in the war, when very heavily-armed but “paper”-armoured tank destroyers like Nashorn (Rhinoceros) were at times thrown into counterattacks as infantry support, when their purpose was to sit back and snipe tanks from afar.)