I couldn't agree with you more ezrust. This lack of integrity isn't something i'm willing to put up with and i feel like i'm strongly involved in this game community. The hard part is that i remember myself having this ignorance when i was 16 or 17, fearfull of life and it's immensity, it was easy to point a powerfull finger at someone and yell studmuffingot, or wetback or whatever ill-contrived slander just to try and step above my self-worthlessness. I was lucky i got to travel the world for real and learn that the human connection binds all of us. It is funny like you say that terne would ask in an internet game if hblair is black. Maybe hblair is a green chicken from Mars, who doesn't shave his underarms and sleeps hanging from the ceiling. The point is what's the difference? We are all here to play and enjoy ourselves. Each of the countries involved in WWII has and still does deal with these issues of classification and slander. The U.S. may not be guilty of the horrendous genocide that took place in Germany at that time, but by no means is it innocent. Consider the "internment" camps for American/Japanese of the time, or the civil rights movement didn't even begin to take hold here for another 15 to 20 years after that war. What makes this community really interesting is that behind all these little nicknames are numerous people of vastly differing background. And we are all connected in similar interest, and for many like me it is personal. My grandfolks lost 10 family members as they fled Prussia during the Red armies' advance. My grandfather is decorated with "nazi" medals and yet in all his fighting on the eastern front he never met an SS official. Lucky for him he was shot in the bellybutton a couple times and managed to get out to a hospital. But the toll that war had on the world isn't just limited to the 40million dead, and their friends and families. What about all those that survived to become war shocked alchoholics, abusive, neglectfull, hatefull etc. I think many of us still feel the repercussions of that war. And HOW ABSOLUTELY F**CKING WONDERFULL that we can actually share something of it here, from the comfort of our homes, peacefull, yet involved, and fascinated at the thrill of combat without that nasty side effect called death.
