It's complicated, to say the least (as I said, even anti fascism symbols get banned and "The Downfall hat to remove the svastika from its cover due to those rulings). The point is that you cannot draw a line for every game. Therefore you have the general rule. Judges aren't very tech savy, and usually when you see a svastika, it is in a bad way.

You can show remembrance without showing those signs. Germany, eg, has the memorial of its biggest downfall right next to our seat of government, in the heart of our capital. The downfall of the Weimar Republix and the reign of the nazi party including the holocaust, warcrimes, etc are mandatory subjects in school. There is currently a movement by one acitvist that puts a "stepping stone" before each house were a jewish family lives and every city generally has a memorial for the people that died. Be it racial minorities, political activists or people prosecuted of their sexual orientation.

You don't need to show svastikas to remind people about what happened. You can remember people without those signs. Those signs are insulting to the victims, they don't want to see them ever again. Heck, I even spoke to some people who never want to hear the german language again. And you won't find svastikas in Yad Vashem, for that matter..

In addition to what I said above, those illegal signs (also the SS rune) can be shown in proper historical context. Schoolbooks, documentaries, memorials. But a game is not a proper historical context (at least in 95% of the cases). Banning the public showing of a sign is not surpressing it. Most people who were oppressed by the system have now died of old age, therefore it doesn't seem so relevant anymore. But how do you thing those people would have felt walking through the streets of Berlin seeing the same symbols again under which their whole family was exterminated. Just because other want to celebrate their "freedom".

The svastika is no longer simply a sign, it is a symbol of the worst humanity had to offer and it is rightfully banned from public display.

@SimonG:
I think you are forgetting that a sign/symbol can have more than one meaning - there is an entire field of science known as semiotics that study the meaning of signs and how we interpret them. A swastika could be interpreted as an insult to the survivors of the Holocaust but it can also be seen as a sign so we DON'T forget what happened ie. as a reminder. The only thing the survivors have the right to is the truth - nothing more. It wasn't the swastika that killed 6 million Jews but it was Germans who did it. And we need to understand what made ordinary Germans do such crimes and that is not achieved by hiding and banning all that horrible stuff including swastikas and scientist who claim the holocaust didn't exist.

The problem with censorship is that someone must decide what someone else can't and can say. And what is ridiculous to one person is not to someone else. In America there are some religious groups that want atheism labeled as hate speech but for some of us atheism is just common sense. Censorship is nice if you are in the majority who choose what to censor but it's pretty bad if you are in the minority.

Lastly remember what R.G. Ingersoll said: "I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot".

I don't get it. So if victim of Third Reich launches Return to Castle Wolfenstein - and as long as it's svastika free it won't bring back the terrible memories? Having ROTK game with svastikas is disrespectful, but having the exact same game with other signs isn't?

Everything about Third Reich comes to the svastika?

PS. I hope you do show svastikas in museums and history books, don't you?

Ok, I understand you in Germany don't want to make German svastika a symbol of pop-culture. Video games devaulate the horrible meaning behind those symbols. But I don't think it's the right reason to ban them. But I've never been to Germany, so I don't know.

We have plenty victims of nazi ideology in Poland, but I haven't seen any protests against using them in video games either. It's the opposite actually. I've talked to a person that survived concentration camp once, and he said that svastika should be present in public life, as a reminder, and also as a good education to minors. Something like "if you see that sign in somebody's house, you will know that you're dealing with evil man"

Also, I repeat the question: Is hammer & sickle also banned in Germany to honor the dignity of Stalin's tyranny victims? Hell, the hammer & sickle are even more overused in popculture, but nobody's crying about it...

Ah, yes. So much is obvious. ;-P

Videogames are a weird issue. When the law was made, there were no videogames. And since videogames are still considered along the lines of toys, therefore no svastika. "Serious games", which seem to be more en vogue with each day, might seem differently. And educational there already have been published in Germany with svastikas. (In coop with the youth organisations). It's simply that the svastia shouldn't be used as "entertainment". "Kriegverherrlichung" ("propagating war") can also get a game banned. (Like River Raid, yes, that River Raid). We take our history very serious and war is not a game. Might be hard to understand nowadays, especially by kids that never seen what war can do nowadays. I certainly didn't understand until I was older.

You are reading my posts?

It's not my call to critizise Poland, but my personal experience in Germany and Israel has brought me to the opinion that those signs should never be used again for whatever reason. The way Brad Pitt used them in Inglorious Bastards, that we can talk about. But that's about it.

If somebody wants to use them in their own home, and mod them into their games, that is fine with me. But I don't want to see it handing from flagpoles.

They were banned of usage in Germay, when they were still associated with our banned party. There are very basically two ways a symbol gets banned. EIther it is part of a illegal party or organisation (that formerly affected also the Hammer & Sickle, not anymore as that symbol is now universally seen as symbol of the USSR). This is part of the state protecting itself against parties or organisations that want to fight it.

The other reason, and that is the reason we are talking about here, is the usage of symbols by the NSDAP, svastika, Heil Hitler, some songs, etc. Those are forbiden out of the reasons I explained before. But those were our mistake, our crimes. We don't need to amend for other peoples crimes. That is something the Russian Federation has to figure out and not our place. Also, Germany was hardly a victim of the Soviet Union, so we don't have to protect "our" people. Germans did suffer under the Red Army, but nothing that goes beyond the scope of your "average war" (displacement, rape, murder). And certainly nothing we didn't have coming. If we would start banning Hammer and Sickle for those reasons, we would have to ban the swedish flag for what happened in the 30 years war and so on, and so on. And iirc, they are forbidden in quite a few places in Eastern Europe that suffered more from the soviets than we did.

And I will say one last thing about the whole "but Stalin was also bad "debate" ". I don't buy into this "they were also evil" schmuck. Because one country was "more evil" doesn't make the other "less evil" or anything. Any discussion in this direction always borders revisionism in my book. And I will not have it. People can talk about the crimes of the Soviet Union, but they are not mine to judge or comment, as I have no connection to them. But whoever likes to plays those disgusting "comparison games" can do this without me

It's time for you to find a new forum.

The problem is, trolls like him never leave voluntarily.

Look, there are two things that really make my blood boil. Racism and misogyny.
The thread might not have been very subtle, but I do hope that I at least got a remote point across.

If by "getting your point across" you mean giving XmXFLUXmX something to think about, I'd say that you are wasting your time.

Isn't this, basically, magic ? You are punishing a symbol. That's, to use an analogy, like sticking a pin into a voodoo doll.

Yes, me too. I also greatly enjoy politics, history and philosophy; I never post about any of these things here because they have nothing whatsoever to do with GOG, gaming or anything else that GOG involves itself in. The audience on the GOG forums is also too dumb, as you and Flux are demonstrating, to intelligently discuss them to any degree, partly because they're only concerned with GOG matters which is exactly how it should be.

Hence, keep your frustrations, politics and "anti-x" attitudes out of GOG and forums like it and find a more appropriate outlet. Have a look at Reddit, blogspot, twitter, rant at your friends on Facebook; Google for forums for anti-misogynists and anti-racism. This is not the place - at all - to any degree, for venting your frustrations, unintelligently exploring the political spectrum or baiting other dickheads. Nor is it the place to mull over the health implications of Nutella; that place is the Nutella company mailbox.

My blood has been boiled by so many things this week. How many threads did I open here? None. If I had any points I needed to get across, I talked to my friends about them, I might have tweeted one or two things - I even sent a letter to my MP! I didn't go to every damn forum on the planet and spill by guts out over them.

Get the fuck out unless you think you can contribute positively to some degree. Same goes for Flux, you fuck off too. There's absolutely no need to get your anti-bigot points across here because your words fall on an unlistening crowd.

tl;dr find a better outlet, it's better for everyone, GOG isn't your blog

Think about this for just a moment. This could only result in preaching to the choir. What's the point of telling anty-misogynists how wrong misogyny is ? They already know that.
What you're suggesting is sequestering information, so that you only get ideas from sources to which they belong. This leads to a small but novel problem - we start living in a world where we're only faced with what we want to see and hear only about what we want to hear. How will we find out about new things ? We won't search for them, since we don't yet know they exist.

What you are suggesting is following a dangerous trend to its logical conclusion. This would result in a very "tidy" but sterile world. I'm not 100% sure what the right course of action is but gut instinct tells me that these bits and pieces of informational mish-mash and seemingly worthless babble are actually BENEFICIAL to our mental health.

Downrepping due to trolling.

De-basing yourself to the low levels of your enemy hold no victory, it's a shameful act. This forum isn't a vehicle for your agendas, you could've avoided this farce by using the PM function.

We should be a classy community,not the SPUF one.

Yes, kudos for posting about your umbrage on the forums of a smallish Polish game company.

And it means that, in future, you'll lack credibility if you complain about people doing exactly the same thing.

Win/win, for sure.

"There is nothing wrong with faggots. " - FraterPerdurabo

Whoa whoa whoa! The general discussion forum has always had blatantly off-topic threads. It's cool because you get to discuss whatever you want with people who are into video games by default. Some of my favorite threads have had nothing to do with GOG. The community is still good, it's not dead yet, and I think we can still talk about politics, history, and philosophy.

Look at your post, it's great, even though I completely disagree with it! There's never been any formal documentation of any topic being unsuitable for the general discussion forum that I know of, and I think it works just the way it is. Sometimes we get heated, but we also manage to keep it more civil than much of the internet.