In Mortal Combat and the Coldest Winter pretty much cover it, though.
Not sure how I can say my point without becoming P&R like, but yeah I agree, when it comes to Vietnam I think in the USA … well… in the USA I think mainstream academic analysis of Vietnam is still warped. Bizarrely I think even today American academics are more likely to have a balanced view of 9/11 or Iraq than they are Vietnam. As always I blame baby boomers… :)
Is Compass Games connected to L2 Design Group in some way? Seeing Russia Besieged and Bitter Woods at the Compass site, which is nice to see them continue. I noticed a post on CSW that Bruce Maxwell’s NATO: The Next War in Europe is getting revisited by Compass. I’m hoping they might revisit his Air & Armor game as well.
I would strongly recommend Russia Besieged.
Funny/sad thing about L2 Design Group, they took so long to get their version of War at Sea published that I’d completely forgotten that I bought it and was very surprised one day when it arrived.
Heh, you won’t find me defending the idiocy that runs rampant in so many college faculties, and which has been with us for quite some time. In the sixties and seventies, it was the left that was originally frozen out, what with there scandalous attempts to write books about non-whites and non-males, for instance. Then the worm turned, and the same disgraceful behavior became all too common when dealing with people whose ideas challenged what had been radical but had become orthodoxy. Right now it seems purely ideological, but really, it’s a byproduct of the way the academy operates. The system that arose in the late 19th century and which still prevails pretty much guarantees crap like this, as the focus is less and less on contributed knowledge and more and more about protecting sinecures and carving out areas where you can publish without being challenged.
That being said, in the same way Thomas Kuhn described science working, paradigm shifts are difficult and awkward. Any orthodoxy has a huge built-in advantage over even the best challenges to its power. Eventually, if the challenges are worthwhile (think heliocentrism vs. geocentrism) the new becomes the norm, and a paradigm shift occurs. It’s entirely possible Moyar’s work is part of this sort of shift about Vietnam. It’s also possible it hasn’t gotten much traction because not enough other historians have written stuff that supports it, or helps to create a new paradigm. Or, perhaps, it is solid stuff but no one else is willing to risk ostracism to go ahead with the sort of work that would build the critical mass necessary to shift the needle. If the latter were true, that would indeed be sad.
tl;dr, academia sucks in a lot of ways, but it’s not a simple left/right thing. It’s an entire paradigm of atrophied scholarship and intellectual morbidity that screws over alternative viewpoints from the left and right, believe it or not. It’s also one reason why you get such hyper-focused monographs, books no one gives a rat’s ass about, because such works are impossible to critique by anyone not intimately involved in that sort of thing–and the authors carefully choose the topics to make damn sure there ARE no others who can really give them hell about their work.
It’s easy to confuse this sort of structural toxicity with some concerted ideological master plan, but really, the true liberals in the academy are just as frustrated. There are many academics, with politics that run the gamut from one extreme to another, that actually do feel the best thing is to have as many different viewpoints as possible, as long as basic standards of research are adhered to. Sadly, these folks are usually not in charge.
My impression of Russia Besieged was that it was a redesigned and upgraded The Russian Campaign.
Correct. It is The Russian Campaign with a ton of chrome added on top. That could have gone a bad way, but it ended up being additive to an already great game.
Consim Press has a new TRC game coming out as well. I think that is on the GMT p500 pages.
Oooh, I will also buy that. I dont need it but hey, consim press. Anything from them is pretty much an auto buy.
Then why was The Hunters so terrible?
Good point, I wasn’t down with playing as the Kriegsmarine. I enjoyed Silent Victory though! Did you not like its mechanics? I thought it was pretty fun dice chucking.
Oxymoron :)
Oh, I don’t see it as any master plan. Structural toxicity is the norm. It is the inevitable byproduct of the fact that humans are a pretty terrible species. But now we’re in P&R! Or something.
Hmm I edited my blather out. Good post. Good discussion.
Weren’t we just talking Korean War books? Look what’s in the latest issue of the Journal of Military History (April 2018)!
I have the ‘original’ L2 version from years ago, and it’s okay, but they basically added chrome to TRC that wasn’t needed, IMO, at least for the most part. I personally felt it made an extremely elegant game inelegant. It feels more complicated than it should be, and the added chrome wasn’t worth it. Just my own opinion, I know many people feel it improves upon TRC.
I own the same version. I agree with you. I hate chrome in general.
re: Journal of Military History
Sale made and completed. Do you get a commission? :)
I’m just trying to get on their good side so they go with my “scholarship for research on boardgames” idea!