Quote Originally Posted by Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll View Post
Reducto ad absurdum. There's a huge and obvious difference between removing a single war-cry phrase, and removing entire historical organizations, religions, and events that have been co-opted. Literally nobody in good faith is saying "Don't have Jihads in game." At most you'd get "Portray Jihads in a way closer to real history and further away from anachronistic popular notions of medieval jihads as a mere mirror of Crusaders." Plus the modern history of the racist Deus Vult meme has Crusader Kings as a key step between the historical useage and the modern memes calling for genocide.

Yes, it is almost impossible to make historical games without at some point them being co-opted by racists and such-like, especially for the periods that Paradox covers: colonization, Crusades, WW2... But that doesn't mean you should ACCEPT it.
But that's the issue - Deus Vult isn't an inherently racist phrase, it's considered racist because racists are using it to make reference to the Crusades. If we get rid of it, they'll just pick another one, and we'll remove that. And then they'll pick another one, and we'll remove that. They'll adopt the Jerusalem cross as a symbol and we'll remove that. They'll found an organisation called the Kingdom of Jerusalem and we'll have to remove that. In short: the problem is the Crusades, everything else is problematic because of its connection to them.

Anyway, this is rather a pointless debate considering that it turns out they're not actually doing it in the first place (whether or not they originally intended to is another question, personally I'm more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Paradox devs than Gamer Network but have no real evidence either way and to be honest I'm not sure it matters).