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Freyberg

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Posts posted by Freyberg

  1. If I had one wish in the graphics department it would be curved roads.

    Straight angles and straight roads are so unnatural it hurts my eyes every time.

    I would like something similar to the flame/flamethrower effects in Graviteam Tactics. Note also the blistered paint and shed track.

    ...

    Both these suggestions are great - curved roads (and other curvey things?) and thrown tracks would both look excellent.

  2. I believe the Chinese claim 35 million civilian victims while most western historian peg the number of chinese civilians who died as a result of Japanese aggression at around 20 million.

    Either way, yes, the scale of atrocities committed by the Japanese in Asia is as monstrous as what the Nazis did in Europe. However, unlike the Germans, the Japanese have never really faced up to their past or apologised for their actions.

    Really! I must have been confused, perhaps it was someone else's claim I remember - anyway, the Japanese Empire behaved every bit as brutally as the Third Reich.

    Having said that the modern Japanese, at least the ones I've met. born after the war, are as sorry and regretful as the Germans - they know more about the war than we Commonwealth people do about our Imperial crimes. Kids can read about some of the Japanese wwii crimes in at least one well-known kids comic.

    I think the thing with the Yasakuni Shrine is that they may apportion less blame to particular leaders than to themselves as a people because it was a bottom-up fascism, not top-down like in Europe and the USSR. There were certainly a lot of people at the Yasakuni Shrine the day I went, including a handful of apparent fascists albeit mostly looking more like 'Alf's Imperial Army' or here in NZ.

  3. The problem with the Japanese is that they still see themselves as victims of the war. As a dutchman with quite a few elderly friends (dutchmen and Indo-dutchmen) who lived and suffered in the Dutch East Indies during the war under the cruelty of the Japs I'm also disgusted by the Japanese approach of the war in the Pacific. A brother of my grandfather died in one of their camps after being tortured to death in the most sadistic way. I understand Erwin. What the Japs did to Europeans and Indo-Europeans (and the Chinese, Korean etc. etc.) was almost as bad as what the Germans did to the Jewish people. Imagine the Germans having monuments for their war criminals. Well, the Japs have.

    'Almost as bad' is needless understatement. What they did in China was an almost exact equivalent to what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe, and was every bit as murderous - the Chinese claim there were 15 million victims in China.

  4. It's complicated, the Nazi atrocities were so inhuman and shocking that we understandably hold them as being the epitome of evil, and yet doing so does tend to act as a distraction from the atrocities - also shocking and inhuman - that our own societies have committed, particularly since the mid-Nineteenth Century.

    Then Nazi apologists then take that moral imbalance and try use it to somehow mitigate the wrongs of the Nazis. Like adding sleight of hand to myopia.

    As a Kiwi, thus a descendant of the British Empire, I think some of what *we* did, particularly in Africa and China (the opium trade), had a human toll at least as high as the concentration camps. But the Commonwealth redeemed itself at least to some small degree by doing the right thing and fighting Hitler.

    'Everyone did it' is the worst possible excuse.

  5. .... while we're on the subject - would it not be possible to create a new foxhole object specifically for ATG's ? With one large foxhole/breastworks for the gun and 2 or 3 of the current variety around it for the crew - as it stands, foxhole protection for ATG's is pretty rudimentary - players generally workaround with sandbag walls and so forth, but is a dedicated ATG "fortification" not feasible ?

    I'm basically OK with fortifications poking up out of the ground slightly - though any improvements would of course be welcome - but ATG emplacements would be an excellent addition. And camouflage !!

  6. My problem with comparing the body counts of Hitler and Stalin, is that we know Stalin's total body count because he reigned for over two decades until his natural death. Hitler was in power for a shorter time, and his reign was cut short by a bullet. You look at Nazi plans for Russia, the planned extermination of the majority of the slavic population in areas occupied by the Germans, Hitlers body count would have been much higher than what stalin managed had he not been defeated...

    This is a really good point. The Nazis laid waste to the lands under their control in a murderous frenzy that went beyond even the admittedly terrible barbarism of the Soviets.

    Although evil at the level of Hitler and Stalin is impossible to quantify (who was 'worse', who could measure that?), the ordinary German was a lot more likely to engage in atrocities than were Soviet troops, and the atrocities were a lot worse.

    However, with all the horrors of modern history - Japan in China, the European powers in Africa - societies do tend to highlight the actions of the Nazis to draw attention away from their own dark histories - though the term scapegoating is hardly appropriate, since Hitler and pals were anything but scapegoats.

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