Usually the moral high ground comes from America's role in the world post WWII. Just look at the expectation that America would get involved in conflicts like Kosovo.
Thank you for supporting the worst stereotypes about USA. The Kosovo conflict was about a poor kosovars and oppressive serbs.
When the UN gets involved, you're screwed when it comes to arguing the moral high ground:
On 23 September 1998 acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1199. This expressed 'grave concern' at reports reaching the Secretary General that over 230,000 persons had been displaced from their homes by 'the excessive and indiscriminate use of force by Serbian security forces and the Yugoslav Army',[116] demanding that all parties in Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) cease hostilities and maintain a ceasefire.
[...]
At the same time, acts of violence by any party were condemned and acts of terrorism to further goals, and the Council reaffirmed that the status of Kosovo should include autonomy and self-administration.
Any area "fighting for autonomy and self-administration" == freedom fighters, fighting for "righteous independence".
Indeed, why ever pretend to understand one of the most complicated region on the earth, when you can paint black the one side, white the other and say "Fuck off" to international lawы, in that time thinking about himself as some Hero of Justise. And kosovars built such enlightened state after that with
respect to culturial heritage of that country and where native serb population had nothing to fear.
Was Serbia only fighting against insurgents and terrorists - or
had it embarked on a deliberate campaign to displace citizens of a certain ethnicity?
The CIA was aware as early as last autumn of a plan, codenamed Operation Horseshoe, to kill or drive them out over several months. A village a day was the rate that Mr Miloševic calculated the West would wring its hands over without acting. In Priština, public records have been combed to identify precisely which homes, shops and businesses were Albanian-owned; Serb police and paramilitaries have emptied towns and villages neighbourhood by neighbourhood in a pattern that has been as unvaried as it has been ruthless. The packed trains, the snipers picking off those who strayed out of line on the forced marches to the borders: every detail points to the existence of a detailed blueprint, without which so many could not have been murdered or driven into exile within a fortnight. In this context, yesterday's reported sealing of the frontiers by Serb forces is a sinister development; there is no such thing as safety in Kosovo for a people marked for destruction solely because of their racial identity.
No doubt these are all American lies, you know, like the holocaust.
Fighting terrorists is one thing, ethnically cleansing an area is entirely another.
But if we were to make a game about this incident, what do you think your options would be if you played as the Serbian side?
And for example, when countries want to overthrow their repressive, militaristic regimes and install a democracy, do turn to Russia for help - or America?
They turned to SU help, when repressive, militaristic regimes were USA allies.
So you're saying that when a regime wants to ethnically cleanse an area of their country, they turn to the Soviet Union? No doubt it's because of the SU's vast experience in such matters.
Those things happen in any conflict but America has never, in its entire history, had anything like
Order 227.
..
Now if America had been invaded during WWII, sure, maybe things might've been different. But then you have the
Gulags. About the closest thing America had were POW camps - but they were nowhere near the scale of Russia where "Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment."
I'm inclined to agree that US had relative humane treatment of their own people and POWs. But if you look a bit under the carpet you find enough, for example:
Internment of US citizens during World War Two
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American_internment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian-American_internment
If I made a game called "Japanese POW Camp Manager", I'd include options to:
-
Randomly behead prisoners.
- Starve them.
-
Forcibly relocate them in a manner that kills many of them.
- Use them as
slave labour to build railways.
Now if I was making "American Internment Camp Manager", my options would be (from the information in those articles you linked):
- Require them to surrender hand cameras, short-wave radio receiving sets and radio transmitters.
- Make them register at their local post office.
- Exclude them from designated military areas.
- Force them to move their home to another suburb by creating exclusion zones.
- Freeze their assets, so that they can't relocate from the exclusion zones.
- Create "Assembly" and "Relocation Centers" and demand they report to them.
- Impose a curfew.
- Give them 'the intolerable stigma of being branded as enemy aliens'.
- Oh and when it was all over, there'd be no option for you to apologise for what you did!
It'd be a really,
boring game.
I shouldn't need to mention "German POW Camp Manager" and what that would involve.
Now, someone here design "
Russian Gulag Manager".
My point is, if
everyone beheaded their POWs, it'd be a complete non-issue. But not everyone did. Only the Japanese did that, hence any game about it would surely mention it or even use it as a mechanic
because games use tropes. Those "unique" things are what define the experience - or those tropes are what the game is built on, such as "American Special Forces operating without impunity all over the world for truth, justice and the American Way!". Because getting people to believe (and therefore buy) a game where American Special Forces are the evil criminals sent to wantonly kill civilians and rape and pillage would be a lot harder (except in Russia, obv).
So yes, a game about nuclear testing in America would likely include the option to use Guinea Pigs.
The British used Australians for the same thing. There's even a (fictional)
film about it - it's well known in popular culture here.
And Russia had Gulags, so of course they get mentioned. Nobody else had Gulags. Germany didn't have Gulags. The British didn't have Gulags. The Russians though? Gulags.
Who created an "Order 227"?
Who ordered "anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be sent to fight"? The Australians maybe?
Now who has stories of sending their soldiers into battle without enough rifles? Is there even
one story of the Americans doing that, anywhere? The British? Germans? Japanese?