As someone who is half German it was interesting to read
this
post on Joystiq by James Ransom-Wiley about how he couldn't
get past the first five minutes of Call of Duty:World at War because of
how the Japanese are depicted in the game. That's certainly fine as we
all have different tolerances for violence and the issue certainly
seemed to hit home with him given his ancestry. What really got my
goat was that the fact that he then paints the Nazi's (and transitively
all Germans) with the brush of pure evil but the Japanese (who
committed nearly as horrible acts) get a free pass.
While
no one in my family has direct ties to either World War (my great
grandfather came to America before the start of WWI) I still feel some
ties to my ancestry. My family lived in Germany for a number of years
and I've stood in the showers at Dachau and seen the horrors of a
concentration first hand. I've seen the monuments in Russia where the
Nazi's wiped out entire villages and it's something that leaves an
indelible mark on your soul. It's something that we can't ever forget
or allow to happen again. For most Germans this is our cross to bear
as there's not getting around it.
Personally I don't have a
problem killing Nazi's in games like Call of Duty because I've
abstracted them enough to realize it's just a game and that these are
soldiers of an evil philosophy. Not all Germans at the time were bad
people and some fought actively against the Nazi party when and where
they could (something that gets lost in all the WWII move and game
plotlines). If we really look at the mirror of history though it's not
like we as American's were completely innocent (the fire bombing of
Dresden comes to mind) of everything at the time.
Getting back
to the point of this post it's a bit disturbing when you can paint one
group as "evil" while another group is forgiven. Especially based on
comments like:
"I draw a disconnect between Nazis and Germans as
large as the divide between "alien" and human. The Nazis have been
transformed into monsters, which does not need to be justified in my
gaming. But the Japanese Empire that bombed Pearl Harbor and the
Japanese today, even Japanese-Americans, are very much intertwined in
my perception. Those people are connected for me -- a part of me -- and
I see them in World at War."
You have to wonder how much popular
culture impacts a perception like this, if Saving Private Ryan was
based in Iwo Jima would we still have the same perception of the
Japanese? They were just as ruthless as the Germans and Western
culture is fairly ignorant of what the Japanese did to the Chinese
during this period in time. I'm not advocating that the Japanese were
worse than the Germans at the time but we need to realize that there's
a lot of history out there that hasn't made it's way into pop culture
and that it's sometimes too easy to look the other way when it comes to
personal history or things we are connected to.