The Confederate Flag Outrage Spirals Out of Control: Now You Can’t Have It in Civil War Videogames
Want to smash the Confederacy like General Meade did, skirmish by skirmish, on your iPhone? Now you’re out of luck — or at least you’ll have a hard time identifying the enemy.
Apple has yanked a series of Civil War strategy games from the App Store because they contain images of the Confederate battle flag. Ultimate General: Gettysburg, the most popular of the extirpated games, is billed as committed to being “the most accurate, historical, playable reference of the Battle of Gettysburg,” a goal that hardly seems to flatter the Confederacy.
Apple joins Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other prominent American retailers in pulling merchandise featuring the rebel banner. The move is a step farther, of course, than pulling, say, actual flags, but it may not be too surprising considering CEO Tim Cook went out of his way to make clear his opposition to the flag earlier this week.
My thoughts are with the victim's families in SC.Let us honor their lives by eradicating racism & removing the symbols & words that feed it.
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 21, 2015
Apple would be willing to sell Ultimate General “if the flag is removed from the game’s content,” the game’s developers said in a statement today. But so far the game makers have refused: “True stories are more important to us than money.”
“We believe that all historical art forms: books, movies, or games such as ours” help people to “learn and understand history, depicting events as they were,” the developers write. “All historical commanders, unit composition and weaponry, key geographical locations to the smallest streams or farms are recreated in our game’s battlefield.”
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“We receive a lot of letters of gratitude from American teachers who use our game in history curriculum to let kids experience one of the most important battles in American history,” they said.
Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List “did not try to amend his movie to look more comfortable” the developers noted. They’re on board with the sentiment, anyway, saying they “hope that Apple’s decision will achieve the results desired.”
Meanwhile, Apple continues to sell World War II–themed games featuring Nazi and Soviet imagery with titles like Blitz Brigade (“online multiplayer shooting action!”), Strategy & Tactics: World War II, World Conqueror 2, and Glory of Generals.
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And Apple still hawks the action classic Wolfenstein (“You are OSA super agent B. J. Blazkowicz and you must escape from Castle Wolfenstein and defeat the twisted Nazi regime!”), a pioneer of its genre and decidedly less committed to teaching history than are the guys who created Ultimate General: Gettysburg.
The Confederate battle flag has a complicated history with varying interpretations – to say the least. But expunging the flag from historically themed games goes beyond stupidity.
No word yet on when Apple will disappear Ken Burns’s The Civil War.