Possible culturally insensitive question, apologies....?

I don't know if I'm out of line here, but I'm just wondering if Adolf Hitler will ever make an appearance in a future Civ game? I mean, I wouldn't want him to be the only option for the German Civ, because I'm sure there would be plenty of Germans who had a problem with that. But by the same token, if Stalin was the only option for the Russian Civ, I'm sure there would be plenty of Russians who had a problem with that.

I don't really see how you can argue that Stalin is permissible but Hitler is not.

I just wouldn't mind the inclusion of a few leaders with....how can it be said diplomatically.... somewhat dubious reputations. Such as Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler etc.

 

Stalin was actually a Great Power statesman, who had read deeply into the work of Bismarck.

Hitler was simply a fool who made one gamble with his country's future too many.

Now, i'm all for AI who are so aggressive that they are borderline ******** (looking at you, Shaka and Monty ) but Hitler combines this with the fact that he LOST his civilization within 12 years and some still hold a great deal of resent and embarressment towards him today.

He isn't ever going to make it in, except for user-made mods.

 

No.

He's not going to be added in, no matter how you argue it. The moment they add in Hitler in the match; the game will be instantly censored or banned in Germany. Also there's no way any modern games that actually put Hitler in. Leave it to the mods.

 

What match you are talking about? And your point with Hitler being censored from German release is............? Censoring/altering little bit everything is normal not only in Germany.

You have a very strict definition of modern games considering Hearts of Iron 3 was released last year.

 

There are loads of modern games which feature Hitler, always have been. They just remove him from German editions. They have to edit German editions for language anyway, so they are already making a different product for the German market - it is not a big deal to feature Hitler in a game, and simply omit him from German editions.

He will never appear in Civ, however, because he would lack context, which is different from how he appears in other games. In other games, he is either presented as an AI baddie (a la Castle Wolfenstein) or he is presented in the context of that historical time and place (as in Hearts of Iron).

 

Any game that puts in Stalin or Mao as playable characters has little moral ground to stand on for not putting in Hitler too. That said, the only people who idolize Mao are too busy screwing up a country's culture to play video games, and the only people who idolize Stalin are in his casket, but there are still idiots who idolize Hitler and think he was right to kill Jews, and I don't want people like that being able to indulge any such fantasy that doesn't also involve suicide. I'm not excusing anything here, but the 20 million Stalin killed and the 100 million Mao killed didn't have any rich relatives to memorialize them or generate outrage in the Western world over their murders. Human life in Asia is so cheap that no one ever cared, but that doesn't make the 6 million Jews more important or more deserving of our sympathy and refusal to ever let something like that happen again.

At the same time, let's not impose modern American values on other cultures and time periods, no matter how laughable they are or how quickly we're going down the toilet because we've forgotten the sacrifices that built this country. It was a different time and a different place. Hitler actually accomplished something everyone thought was impossible. Many times. And that gave him a mighty big head. He found out he wasn't infallible, but only through sheer bulk of incompetence. Had he and his movement been killed early in the war and the German generals allowed to run things, I think it's very likely he'd be seen as a political genius on par with Bismarck.

But ignoring his bad points would be ignoring a lot. He makes a good villain template and that's about all.

What was the question?

 

Having Hitler as the head of Germany in civ would be like having Romulus Augustus as the head of Rome.

Stalin and Mao aren't really great choices from the point of morality, either, although they at least were somewhat successful - Stalin won WWII and expanded the USSR; Mao defeated the Nationalists and founded modern China.

But the real reason Stalin and Mao were in the game likely has more to do with the fact that when civ I was released the Cold War was *just* ending and the leaders of these states were still pretty much seen as "Other." I doubt anyone considered that civ might actually even be *sold* in those countries.

 

No, Hitler is on a worse moral level than Stalin or Mao. People are determining morality by simply tabulating up deaths resulting from rule, this is incredibly stupid. By this standard a clumsy person person tripping over and knocking someone in front of a bus is morally equivalent to a murderer.

Don't get me wrong, Stalin and Mao were very nasty leaders. However, the millions they killed was largely due to stupid policies (such as policies which caused famine) rather than deliberately deadly ones, whereas with Hitler it was exactly the opposite, his millions of deaths come entirely from a deliberate policy to exterminate groups of people.

I'm also not saying that there were no deliberate murders by Stalin and Mao, of course there were many, but the deliberate murders of Stalin and Mao were more of the sort that is common in any totalitarian regime, purges and political assassinations or disappearances - completely different to death camps (though it should be mentioned that while the Gulags were forced labour camps not death camps, huge numbers of people died in them).

 

I remember reading a recent poll which found that a majority of Russians thought Stalin was a great leader.

 

Yeah. Ol' Vladdy Putin has trained them well.

 

Well, it is hard to ignore the fact that he did defeat Hitler, especially if you are Russian. Russians would not have fared well under Hitler.

And while there are nits to pick with Stalin's military policy, especially pre-war, he did beat the Germans, something that the tsar was notably unable to do in WWI, despite facing a significantly less challenging German army.

And I suppose he did raise the USSR to superpower status.

So while I wouldn't want to live under Stalin, I can see why he meets the "great leader" test.

 

Stalin: Sent a formally backwards nations on a crash course of industralization in the scary short time of 15 years.

Mao Zedong: Lead the Communist forces which unified mainland China.

Hitler: Poor diplomacy and military leadership (he butted in a lot) eventually lead to Germany being sliced in half for, oh, 45 or so years.

That's why. What did Hitler do that was beneficial to his country? Stalin and Mao arguably did something that, while rather barbaric, did benefit their country in the long run. China was unified under the People's Republic of China and defeated the Nationalists forces in the lastest civil war while Stalin, again, threw Russia into a crash course of industralization and set the pieces to establish the Soviet Union as a superpower once WW2 was done with.


Yes, there are many Russians who actually see Stalin as a hero. Mao Zedong, well, it's confusing. The Cultural Revolution combined with China's policy of secrecy has kinda lead to the downplaying of Mao Zedong but Hitler?

Seriously, Hitler ruined his country into the ground. The only little good he did was increasing the morale of the Germans and helped the economy....a little bit. Ok, that's a lie. The German economy eventually became reliant on war loot because of the sheer costs of the crash military build-up. Little known fact: If the war in Poland lasted a little longer, the Germans would've been drained because at the time, Hitler was invading with a showroom military.

As a matter of time, if France had actually pushed, the war would've probably ended a several years earlier. But let's not forget Hitler's ultimate failure in invading the Soviet Union and the Battle of Britain.

Seriously, it isn't a moral question as to why he's not in (at least, not as big) compared to the fact Hitler completely split Germany in two for decades. He's almost the anti-Bismark.


I just want to continue on about Stalin. he didn't interere with military affairs like the Tsar during WW1. Stalin is seen as a great hero among the likes of Peter the Great and Catherine because he turned Russia around and defeated the Fascists in the west, something the previous Tsar not only failed to do, but failed in such a way to make Russia the laughingstock of the international community.

 

Diminished value of (non-European) life.

"but he was EXPANDING his economy by not feeding the slave laborers he wasn't hateful maniac who wanted to kill them and put them to furnaces. yeah there were hundreds of millions of killed thats bad but YET IT STANDS"

You can try to reason the greatness of one bloodthirsty dictator over another bloodthirsty dictator however you want. I bet the Civ 5 team did that too so we can enjoy these great neutral neverheard leaders of Wu Zetzingjangshagan and Catherine the Great.

 

Hundreds of millions?

Stalin starved the Ukraine to get them to play ball. Still, he's the victor and his country wasn't torn in two for 50 years because of his idiocy.

Catherine is as neutral as you can get. The worst she did was become a sell-out to the noble Russians and allowed them to keep their serfs because they helped her get into power (she was going to free them).

Catherine, never heard of though?

I would probably dig up some dirt on Wu Zetzingjangshagan but wikipedia says he doesn't exist and Wiki is usually right about who does and doesn't exist.

 

You have good eyes Billy. Another was non-capitalized letters.

Wasn't torn between the growing gap of elite and repressed? Wasn't torn between inhuman cult of personality authoritarianism and by then suppressed democracy? Ouch, I forgot country needs to be torn by outside military intervention and total collapse economy for it to count. My bad.

Germany hadn't lost the war or wasn't partitioned when Hitler was in power duuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! It was all Dönitz's fault!

Thanks for explaining. One does never get this information by accident because she's so neverheard.

Compared to Stalin? Lenin? Even any Alexander or Nikolai? Yeltsin? Goddamn yes. Oh right, we seem to be picking leaders by rationally choosing the one who had the maximum expanding impact on empire-building sense. But because she's so neutral I have no clue whatsoever if this is the case on her.

Great comeback Billy.

 

Hitler was a pretty bad leader, even if you ignore the holocaust, he was still awful at strategizing(declaring war on the US on the basis that germany was 100% white and america wasn't, invading russia in the winter) but I think it would be nice to have him in the WWII mod instead of vice chancellor whoever they put as Germany's leader.

 

There *is* a reason she is called Catharine the Great:

Kind of makes her better than Yeltsin, I think... (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

 

True, but Mao ignoring everyone he killed in his communization plans was a very incompetent and thus bad leader; yet he made it into civ games. Not making a case for Hitler, just making a case against Mao I would prefer Qin, but even the no-one-heard-of Wu Zetianshangmahrntzian would be better.
More on topic again not only would any other leader be more "politically-correct" than Hitler but most of them would be a better leader than Hitler.

 

Wait until Saddam Hussein is shown as the leader of Babylon!