I love all the sliders and sats, but there are so many errors in the text. Every page I go to there are multiple grammatical and spelling errors. It looks like you didn’t proof read it. I would recommend you use one of the online spell and grammar checkers and check you work. It really takes me out of the story. Good luck!
Update pls !!! 
great game
As a Poli-Sci/English double major, I find it impossible to enjoy this game.
You, sir, need to take at least entry-level political theory courses, and enlist a proofreader, before trying to create a gamebook this ambitious.
I’d also recommend toning down your character’s language. Either you, the author, are using the insults towards the mother for cheap shock material, or the narrator is so hotheaded and immature that no self-respecting reader would connect with them, much less consider them fit to run a nation.
@ADNox Please refrain from throwing insults to try and prove a point. For someone who looks through the comments to see what the community thinks before trying a game you make in an impossible feat to sit back and ENJOY the game in its progress. If you are going to be harsh, at least make it CONSTRUCTIVE.
Thank you for your consideration.Criticism isn’t an attack just because it isn’t covered in chocolate and delivered by a team of singing cherubs. I’m equally direct when I like something.
Unless you mean where I used ‘hotheaded’ and ‘immature’? If you do, I admit I insulted the narrator for the way he spoke to his mother and will gladly apologize, the moment he becomes a real person and thus capable of being offended.
This’ll doubtlessly degenerate into a debate over mean vs constructive criticism, but please use my inbox. Thank you for your consideration.
Hey, hey, Zane! Good job on the game! I hope it turns out good!
I, personally, think Stalin’s uber-dictatorship was way worse than Hitler’s reign. It is estimated that Stalin killed 14 million people in his rule. His secret police (KGB) killed anyone who even disagreed with him. Bad, bad, bad.
Stalin didn’t intentionally murder that many people. He had no reason to. Most of the people that died under his rule was a result of his economy policy of focusing on heavy industries at the expense of exporting all of his country’s grain. I’m not saying what he did was right, but it did modernise Russia and prepare it for the Second World War. Stalin was brutal, but not evil… well, not as evil as Hitler.
I’d put them on equal ground
Namely for how he saw anybody he thought could be a threat and eliminated them, and his neglect of his own people. Remember Hitler revitalized the German economy and believed he was doing God’s work, I think both of them are some of the closest incarnations to pure evil we have, also Pol Pot.
What Hitler did was spend his country into so much debt through re-militarization that he had no choice but to start the Second World War in Europe. The revitalization of the German economy was a facade that lasted only as long as Hitler’s government had money to spend. However, that’s not the point I wanted to argue. The point is, no matter what else Stalin did, he never systematically began the extermination of a people. That’s the intentional murder of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, ect. Systematic extermination of political dissenters is nothing new in human history. Systematic extermination of a people just because it’s convenient is something entirely different.
Hitler didn’t spend his country into debt, they were already in debt from the harsh agreement during World War I, he kept them afloat which is why they followed him, like with the annex of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, the nations were overjoyed for that, the dude had that much power and charisma it was crazy. and he didn’t do it out of conveniency he did it because he was insane, insane enough to believe his own propaganda nonsense
That’s what scares me that the dude could get into power like that, how he could turn things around and become a force for evil. But his success is why he was TIME’s man of the year, his success is why people didn’t want to mess with him, Hitler didn’t hurt the debt until the war began, before then the Nazis were keeping the debt from spiraling back into the post World War I inflation they saw, keep in mind this was all during a global depression too, so while he didn’t revitalize it like we’d imagine today he certainly wasn’t hurting it
I’m not denying Hitler’s evil, but I’d also rank Stalin up there right along with Hitler, maybe not as bad but pretty close but I can understand the Hitler’s worse because he took to some pretty bad extremes.
Also sorry if I’m using bad grammar or trail off a bit, I’m running on 2 hours of sleep
@hahaha01357 - Yes, Stalin did. Ignoring The Great Purge, the deaths of the civilian population due to the forced re-modernisation of the industry and other incidents such as the Katyn Forest massacre is enough…
Also regarding Hitler, he has less responsibility for the Holocaust than other members of the Nazi party, it’s an academic debate that still rages today. There’s evidence in both directions but the general idea is that Himmler was the one who pushed through the holocaust ideas whereas, Hitler himself had enacted more ‘peaceful’ ideas (i.e. the deportation of Jews not the extermination of them). But really, that’s a topic that would require far too many words to explain fully on here, you may like to read about it though, I had to do my examination on the Holocaust on where the responsibility lay, it’s grim reading but interesting none-the-less.
@RockBou - I object to any insanity claim against Hitler, it seems to be the new-age historians who forget their ethos is to be completely un-biased who seem to like writing rubbish about Hitler’s mental state. I’ve had the “joy” of watching dross on TV calling him ‘insane’, a ‘sexual deviant’ and so on and so forth. Even history books are starting to incorporate that language and I certainly hope that in the UK at least those books and TV shows do NOT make their way into the classroom.
His handling of the German economy was good, but the general idea is the economy was basically a patch-work economy. It was difficult to get it back on good footing during the recession, his economic model was one tailored to building up, stockpiling and getting on their feet. It’s generally understood that in order for the economy to keep going there had to be a war at some point. What is amazing is that he never switched the economic situation in Germany to a war-footing until late in the war, it’s one of the reasons used for their eventual defeat.
Even so I think that’s pretty impressive, keeping the civilian population in a civilian economic climate is likely one of the major factors for maintaining civilian morale if I think about it.
"The point is, no matter what else Stalin did, he never systematically began the extermination of a people. "
ughaaa?
So what are the Ukrainians, Eastern border Poles, Volga Germans, Chechens, and what have you? Chopped meat?
The fact that he wasn’t that interested in killing off every single one is irrelevant to the extreme because Hitler (in truth) was not either; they just wanted them to be assimilated into the mainstream German/Russian society that they were seeking to construct after having their identities (and any and all those who clung to them, or those who needed to get the axe to diminish the population to a number that could safely be absorbed) pulverized. The fact that Hitler was quite happy to use the issue of eugenics and Jewish(/Polish/whatever) “racial degeneracy” as a sort of bastardized cliff’s notes of his intentions (and probably believed in some of it subconsciously) doesn’t radically set him apart from Stalin and the Soviet government, even if the former racked up a kill count that was a higher percentage of the overall population than Stalin did because the Nazis preferred to organize mass murder and the extermination of all that did not conform quickly while the Soviets preferred to murder those anchoring the cultural identity into them and then brutalize them until they adopted Russian customs.
Make no mistake: if Khruschev had been a proud and unassimilated Ukrainian instead of a partially assimilated one, he would’ve never survived in the higher echelons of the Soviet government under Stalin.
@Turtler Do you understand what communism is? Its about the disestablishment of the old bourgeoisie in favour of a “proletarian paradise”. The unfortunate fact that the bourgeoisie is as much associated with a nation’s culture as the proletariats is what caused so much destruction of the culture of these people. Just as many if not more ethnic Russians were murdered for the same reason. And in almost every other communist country in the world ever. Those that were killed were ultimately those that were unwilling to give up their property or listen to the Soviet government.
Again, as I said before, using brutality to force people to submit is nothing new. Alexander enslaved the entire population of the city of Tyre after taking it as an example to other cities of the consequence of resistance. We talk about his name today in awe and in respect. There is nothing at all respectable about what either men did.
@RVallant I see the actions of the two men this way: One says, “submit and follow our ways, or else we will kill you.” The other says, “submit and follow our ways, and unless you don’t have just the right skin colour and cultural background, we will kill you.” It’s really very similar isn’t it? But if I personally have to choose between genocide and cultural conformity, I’d choose the latter.
@RVallant, that’s what I’m saying its so really interesting when you look at it. As far as Hitler’s insanity I don’t mean insane in the traditional sense, I mean insane enough that the guy can think of and go through with all of that. There’s got to be some kind of cog lose there
couldn’t you argue that Hitler’s genocide was ideological too? Super-dark insane but still based on his ideological beliefs of the superior race and yada yada
I think I need to save your comments for my history projects, you guys are giving me great material!!
in my greatest honor of need
pretty sure ment greatest hour of need
Yes I understand what Communism is. The problem is that you’re misunderstanding the role Stalin’s view of ethnic minorities played in how he viewed the world and the Soviet Union, and I am not pleased at the condescension implying that I somehow haven’t done my research. It is absolutely true that he viewed nationalism amongst the Ukrainians/Georgians/etc as being counterrevolutionary along with non-Communist nationalism in general. It’s also true that he could be as methodically savage on the Russian “Bourgeoisie” as he could be on any of the minorities (just ask the Kulaks or anybody accused of being one). However, that alone doesn’t explain what we see under Stalin, or his policies.
This wasn’t just an effort to eliminate the “Bourgeoisie” that inadvertently wound up damaging the identity of the Ukrainians, Poles, or what have you. The fact is that Stalin or his underlings played a very active role manipulating the ethnographic policies of the Soviet Union right from the get go when Lenin/Trotsky/etc trusted Stalin with formulating their policy towards the ethnic minorities. This was something Stalin did not see separately from the greater Communist struggle, because he viewed it as part and parcel of building Communism in the Soviet Union, which he viewed as necessary to build around Russia and himself. Given that Russia was by far the most powerful and dominant of the Soviet states. had a language that was the great lingua franca of the entire ex-Tsarist Empire, and one of the most thoroughly controlled by the Bolsheviks as far back as the Civil War, on top of the fact that Stalin himself was not just a paranoid megalomaniac and ideologue but also a thoroughly assimilated Russophone in spite of his Georgian origins, it’s not surprising this translated to favoring centralism based on the RSSR. That’s why he largely saw his ethnic policies as being a way to play divide and conquer with the other ethnic groups/nations under the Soviet sphere. That’s why we have him do things like creating minority “Soviet Nations” and ethnic enclaves inside pre-existing, larger Soviet Republics willy-nilly: it was meant to break up the unity of potential threats against the central government and ensure the obedience of the outlying territories to him and his vision of Communism being built, which was conveniently Russocentric.
If said groups did not, Stalin had absolutely no problems advocating policies that effectively had the same intended end as Hitler’s did. The fact is that they *branded* certain minorities for elimination when it suited him, often times right after he had finished granting them preferred status such as a separate “republic” within the USSR. The Volga Germans, Chechens, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Karelian Finns were not targeted on the basis of their connection to their own “Bourgeiose” elite, they were targeted as ethnicities (or “nations” depending on the parlance used) on the basis of their supposed ties with anti-Soviet forces, whether factual or artificial. The Manchurian Koreans got forced to pull up stakes because of their association with a Japanese-dominated colony in spite of the fact that they proved to be remarkably loyal to the Soviet cause. The Ingush and Chechens were branded by Beria because they rose against the Soviet government and thus were no longer useful to the Soviet regime, leading to their deportation and the importation of ethnically Russian settlers into the areas they were forced to vacate because Stalin believed said settlers would help secure his regime. The fact that he had granted them an (ethnically autonomous) government mattered little to none.
We know this because the Soviets made absolutely no bones about why they were doing it. They wrote it out on the records, as shown by the documentation covering the plans for said deportations, the plans for massacres designed to gut the cultural identity of various groups, and the plans behind the withholding of aid to the Holodomor victims and Soviet measures to make the famine even worse, just like they candidly spoke of adopting similar measures against the Russian peasantry (not because of national reasons, but in order to crush what they viewed as the rural “Bourgeois” and a threat to their power). The aim was the weakening and then destruction of their identity and its’ absorption into the great Russian mainstream so that Stalin could have a freer hand to build his vision of the Communist future.
In doing so, they ironically had the end goal Hitler had towards the Jews and many of the other groups of Central Europe (though I’m not altogether sure about whether Slavs were actually subject to this view or whether he legitimately hated them on a biological level, the evidence is somewhat scarce). As his private writings cover, the main threat came not so much from blood itself, but from cultural identity as a Jew, Sorb, or what have you instead of with the greater German Reich and its’ community of people. As such, those who refused to assimilate had to be eliminated. This was why he conflated cultural identity with race and was happy to have people like Himmler and Rosenburg hash out an ideology based on social darwinism and race to get what he saw as the essentials out to the German people. It’s also why he was so surprisingly flippant about his own classification, what with his handing out of “Honorary Aryan” status regardless of any racial problems his own regime’s ideology would have had.
So no, I do not see how what Communism is or is not is relevant to this, or at least any more relevant than what Stalin saw as Communism. The bottom line is that what Stalin intended towards groups like the Jews, Ukrainians, Chechens, Baltics, and others amounts to genocide as accurately as what Hitler intended. The fact is that while Hitler emphasized killing those who did not conform and assimilating the rest while Stalin emphasized uprooting the community and stressing it until it assimilated does not change the fact that both policies had the same result in mind: a secure, homogenous culture for their empires to flourish in. Excusing Stalin from that isn’t just ignorant, it’s honestly offensive.
@Turtler First of all, I apologize if I offended you, but I fail to see how mass deportation can be compared at all with genocide. I ask: is it not the goal of every nation to ensure a safe environment for their people to flourish? Is cultural homogeneity not seen to promote this safe environment? Why do you think there was segregation of black and white Americans in law well into the late twentieth century? Why do you think there was a Head Tax on Chinese immigrants into Canada until 1947?
Honestly, when I see Hitler, I see a man that engineered genocide and created and promoted an ideology based on racism and hatred. Personally, of these two things, I feel more morally opposed to the second than the first. Where as the first can be done by one man or a group of men, the second creates more people of such dangerous thoughts. If you can convince me that Stalin did both of these things, then I will concede that he is just as bad as Hitler.
What one sees and what one does not see are as irrelevant to the objective facts as the obstruction of a horse’s blinder, and whatever offense you have given me in the prior posts has been wholly outdone by what you have done with this post here. I will be blunt, and I will offer no apology for what I say next because my integrity as a historian and a person as well as the memory of the dead dictate I give no quarter.
Firstly, if you do not see how mass deportation cannot be compared with genocide, you are one of the most deficient students of genocide I have seen. It shows a startling ignorance that genocide uses mass deportations as a tool (even if mass deportations are not almost always genocides), it ignores that the event that gave us the word genocide *was* the Ottoman Turkish internal genocide, culminating in the mass deportations of “troublesome” minorities into intentionally insufficient boondocks where they would be left to die while the regime finished the extermination of those who remained behind. It fails to ignore it was exactly this strategy that was utilized by the Soviet regime from the very onset of its’ existence (as shown by the fate of the Cossacks), which was continued under Stalin and taken to new levels (they didn’t deport the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia or the cream of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to Siberia because they expected them to make it a productive heartland, that is for use), and which mirrored the intentions and actions of the Reich in things like their Madagascar plan (which contrary to being a “softer option” like some Nazi thugs make it out to be, it was to more or less send the Jews of Europe to a relatively tiny, disease ridden island where most of them would die or be killed, thus traumatizing and breaking the will of the few survivors to the point where they could be annexed into the German national body) and the Final Solution (which was why they made the areas around the camps living hell and intentionally gave them less than sufficient resources to survive, so that they would die off even without actually going around to gas or shoot each one, again not unlike the design of the Soviet camps). This is one of the most pivotal and fundamental grounds of genocide research and for you to be ignorant of it not only destroys any credibility you have on the matter, it is a gross disservice to the victims and to the people on this discussion thread.
Secondly, your attempt to turn this back on me only showcases ignorance and lack of proper study. "I ask: is it not the goal of every nation to ensure a safe environment for their people to flourish? " That would depend on the definition of what we mean by “nation” and “their people”, but ultimately I would say the answer is No. Hitler was downright giddy that his Reich would be engaged in a decades long war to subjugate what it had conquered even if it somehow *won* WWII because he saw war as having a positive, developmental effect on the fine tuning of his master people. If there was one thing Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Trotsky agreed upon, it was that the building of Communism would require forced industrialization and the deaths of vast amounts of not just the “Bourgeois” but of the Proletariat because they believed the trauma and terror were necessary or at least preferable to create the proper market and demographic conditions to create a true Communist society. The peoples of Central Mexico believed it was essential for there to be *perpetual* warfare so that there would be enough sacrifices for the world to continue existing. Perhaps we can argue that by some alien and bizarre morality that these strategies were somehow ways that these governments and the societies they constructed were trying to ensure a “safe environment” for “their people” to flourish in a roundabout way. But we would have to argue for both Hitler and the Soviet government doing it, not selectively parsing so that one’s form of democide is somehow less abhorrent than the other’s form of democide (in the case of the modern totalitarians) or that the Mexica etc. al.'s belief in the necessity of sacrifice somehow means that objective reality should get thrown under the bus to justify it. But in any event, I am not inclined to argue said points, because they are besides the real issue.
So in effect, what you said is an interesting-sounding generality that falls apart with an actual study of some governments and societies, which in turn snaps the entire chain of your logical argumentation, thus rendering it useless. As such, I have no need to go and debunk it further; however, I will do so anyway.
“Is cultural homogeneity not seen to promote this safe environment?”
Why no, not always! In particular, societies and cultures that depend upon things like chattel servitude or perpetual sacrifice-driven warfare fall apart the more homogenous they get. It’s a death knell for something like the Antebellum South because it raises the uneasy question of who exactly you’re going to have working the plantations for the agricultural elite when everybody is the same. *That* is why while some level of homogenity was preferable or necessary- for instance, a common language between slaves and slaveholders so that they could all communicate- we see very heterogeneous societies in things like the American South. Ditto things like the Spanish American colonies, who enforced a strict caste system that gave us terms like “Mestizo”, “Creole”, and “Penninsulare”.
Likewise, the fact that such systems start to fall apart the more homogenous they get can be seen by things like the career of Frederick Douglass and other blacks who became well versed in “White” political culture and thus entered mainstream society and politics leading the charge that dismantled the Antebellum slave society and then Jim Crow. Likewise, Spanish Mexico ceased to exist when a growing caste of half-white or native-born white elites grew and became the catalyst for revolution against Spanish Mexican society as it had existed at the time Finally, I also note that totalitarian regimes like those of Germany’s second and third Reichs and both Russian Empires (require not merely an “other” to fight against and define their society, but an all-consuming other that can be used to dignify and excuse atrocities of unimaginable scales as the efforts necessary to keep/maintain a truly safe environment for *their people.*
So not all societies see cultural homogeneity as a way to promote safe environments, in fact some embrace the opposite to try and create it. Even my current Sociology professor could have gotten that much through, and she’s a lunatic hack who I’m pretty sure knows less about the subject than half the class.
“Why do you think there was-”
Why I think such injustices were committed against people who did not deserve it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and from what I can tell a phenomenally offensive and outrageous attempt to compare an apple (even one laced with laxatives) to a severed head. Perhaps if you covered the US’s treatment of the Amerindians, slavery, or Leopold II this might be more relevant since it at least covers the full scope of the prejudice, but even then it would be beside the point.
It is worthless for the purposes of this discussion not because I am a racist or a white supremacist, but because not only did the Soviet regime (and the Russian regimes bracketing it) mirror or even exceed such petty prejudicial matters like those in the West, they also committed crimes orders of magnitude greater than anything we have seen in the modern West (except maybe under Leopold 2’s Congo Company). I refuse to engage this discussion because it is a waste of time and misdirection; if I chose I could go in to a lengthy debate and analysis of it- in which I would bring up how cultural homogeneity is not always stabilizing or seen as beneficial- but I refuse because it is besides the point.
Honestly, the point is this: when I see you and your prior posts, I see a person who is not only speaking on matters which they are woefully unqualified to speak on, they are doing so to try to (futilely) argue for an indefensible situation, in defense of an indefensible regime and indefensible ideology. At best, it speaks to a need to do more research and hit the books. I will not even go in to what other scenarios might indicate.
When I see Hitler, I too see a man that engineered genocide and promoted a sickening and dishonest creed based on racism and hatred. That is true, and it is indisputable.
However, I see similar if not the same thing when I see Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Bismarck, and their spiritual kin that cursed this 20th century and still haunt us into this century. I am not alone, because I see it on the basis of decades of studious research, decades of intelligence work, and decades of blood and spirit sacrifice by those far greater than either of us that has allowed us to know what is roughly the full extent of their collective crimes. I have seen how I have noted Stalin’s minority policies in my first post and it has been completely ignored in your recent reply. I have seen old canards be repeated in your prior post that the Communist genocides somehow were not genocides because they only targeted the “Bourgeois”, ignoring how entire nations and races were targeted on the basis of their ethnicity for the expansion of the dictator’s chosen “race” or nation, be it Han Chinese, Russian, or Icelandic Moon Men. I have seen this because I have seen the seminal works of seminal scholars like Conquest and the words of the tyrants and their underlings themselves be ignored in this discussion such as it is.
I have seen enough to know that the fact that you apparently “personally” feel “more morally opposed” to racist, totalitarian genocider A rather than racist, totalitarian genocider B has no bearing on the truth and more bearing on you and what peace you make with it.
So no. There is no reason for me to convince you that Stalin did both of these things. The proof is in the public domain. It’s out there for any serious, studious historian or civilian to read. There are others who have done this far more eloquently and convincingly than me, to reveal the shared monstrosity of totalitarian regimes regardless of political stripe- be they absolutist, fascist, communist, or just plain whack job- and how they engender genocide, hatred, and racism.
So it is not my place to “convince” you of the truth behind Stalin. It is yours to learn the actual truth. Now, I will say this: if you are an earnest student of history and do not have an agenda to whitewash terror and butchery, I beg that you take your leave on this topic and do some research. I will help you however I can, but it is not this thread’s place for that subject matter to be covered, and in saying what you have said you have done a signal disservice to all reading it, and to those who have suffered because of the hatred, the racism, and the other toxins Stalin and his ilk spread.
That is all that needs to be said; I ask now that we can redirect back to the game in progress.