Admiral Tolwyn- Madman or military savior?

Stop with the Hitler Lies !!

hey,

honestly, stop with the inaccuracies about hitler.

1) he is no war hero. he was awarded the Iron cross 2nd class which was handed out like candy, this aint no knights cross people !!, later he was recommended for the 1st class and recieved it in 1918. (ironically recommended by a jewish regimental adjutant)

2) he was no warrior. he was a messenger courier in the last years of the war when he won the first class IC and was recommnded for bravery cos he would dispatch himself on message runs to the complete disregard of his own saftey, he wasnt exactly taking bullets for his mates, jumping on grenades etc... (again can be attributed to being slightly nuts)

3) he only rose to the rank of corporal, which was a field commission, and is pretty pathetic when u put it in context with the high attrition rate of the front and the years he served there (the whole 4 year war, with periods out due due to injury etc). basically in the front the sargeant will die and the guy next to him recieved a field promotion. reality of the front. the reasons why he didnt get his promotions was cos his commander declared him lacking of presence and leadership quailties, and prolly saw that he was a little nuts and over-enthusiatic.

4) before anyone says it, he wasn't proven to have a jewish grandfather. his dad was a bastard child to a poor mom, with the father unknown, and *could* have been jewish based on the high jewish population of germany at the time. no-one knows...

also, never cheated on his wife?? was he ever married!!?

that questionaire was made by someone (prolly a arts major, or even worse a jornalist) with far too much time on their hands.
 
wankski said:
2) he was no warrior. he was a messenger courier in the last years of the war when he won the first class IC and was recommnded for bravery cos he would dispatch himself on message runs to the complete disregard of his own saftey, he wasnt exactly taking bullets for his mates, jumping on grenades etc... (again can be attributed to being slightly nuts)
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didnt he capture a bunch of Allied soldier single-handedly though?( dunno for sure, just thought I heard that he did)


wankski said:
also, never cheated on his wife?? was he ever married!!?
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Im pretty sure he was married to the girl that commited suicide with him in the bunker, but again Im not sure. He did go cruising the streets when he was young though.
 
This debate has been done lots of times since WC4 and TPOF. If you are really interested, there's also lots of past threads the CIC and older, but not less interest ones, at alt.games.wing-commander.
 
McGruff said:
Was Hitler lead astray by his love for humanity?
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No I do not believe he was, my point was that Hitler and Tolwyn are completely different. They may have both supported genocide, but for different reasons, neither of wich are justifiable, no genocide is justifiable.

McGruff said:
Hitler too was an honest warrior who was awarded the Iron Cross for his exploits in the trenches of WWI, but that does not make him a good man.
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Being an honest warrior was not the only reason I think that Tolwyn was, in the loosest sense of the word a good man. For one he was not a politician, he was an admiral, yes I agree that being an admiral gives you some political clout, my point being that Tolwyn, unlike Hitler, was a warrior and soldier at the core, Hitler in my opinion was not, he had a very bad sense of tactics and strategy, and little contempt for his soldiers fighting under his POLITICAL command. Tolwyn on the other hand had a keen tactical mind, and his reasons for sending pilots, marines, or any other combatant into their death was of a strategic and tactical reason; in other words, he had to, and every time he did he felt the loss, this has been illustrated in many of the novels, especially Fleet Action, and False Colors.

In the end I must admidt as much as I admired Tolwyns actions durring the war, the eugenics program developed under him is scarily reminiscent to nazi germany and the atrocities commited there. My point about Tolwyn is this, the things he did were not excuseable, but the reasons for turning him to commit those atrocities were far different than Hitler, so no paralell can be drawn.

Tolwyn WAS a good man, but somewhere along the way the war killed him, and the Tolwyn we see in WC4 is not the Tolwyn we know from earlier days, that is what I meant by he is a true casualty of the kilrathi war, he lost himself not just his life.
 
Iceman16 said:
didnt he capture a bunch of Allied soldier single-handedly though?( dunno for sure, just thought I heard that he did)





Im pretty sure he was married to the girl that commited suicide with him in the bunker, but again Im not sure. He did go cruising the streets when he was young though.
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hrmm, never heard of the first of your claims. if he did, it would *certainly* be in mein kampf, and it is not. his military career was unspectacular, the carry home message was, he found a home and a sense of belonging there when he lacked one before - even tho he loved the military and desperately wanted to be a leader, he failed. just as he failed his first dream of becoming an artist. whatever he had willpower and desperation, he clearly lacked ability.


as to the second claim, i beleive you are refereing to eva braun, whom was only referred to as his "mistress". if they did marry it was prolly in the dying moments in the bunker or something, before suicide. i never heard that he was successful with the ladies, he prolly failed there for the same reasons he failed as a person, socially, and in the military which i cited above. You will also note that eva braun who was ostensibly considered attractive, (and perhaps feeble-minded) was attracted to Hitler for his position. this was a man that had unparalleled support and fame in germany post-1938, much in the same way that a donald trump or whatever (insert stupidly rich ugly crusty guy here) attracts beautiful young brainless models today.
 
wankski said:
as to the second claim, i beleive you are refereing to eva braun, whom was only referred to as his "mistress". if they did marry it was prolly in the dying moments in the bunker or something, before suicide. i never heard that he was successful with the ladies, he prolly failed there for the same reasons he failed as a person, socially, and in the military which i cited above. You will also note that eva braun who was ostensibly considered attractive, (and perhaps feeble-minded) was attracted to Hitler for his position. this was a man that had unparalleled support and fame in germany post-1938, much in the same way that a donald trump or whatever (insert stupidly rich ugly crusty guy here) attracts beautiful young brainless models today.
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Brainless, hehe, I get it :)
 
Haesslich said:
Considering that the Nephilim were at least ten years into the future, the Firekkans aren't a conquering sort of species from what we've seen, and that the Kilrathi were too busy trying to survive outside of the odd Kilrathi Warlord, I don't think those considerations were crossing anyone's mind at that time. Even if they lost most of Confed, those few survivors might've been useful for building a new society from the remnants of the old - and there'd be all that useful infrastructure just lying around waiting to be used.
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Even in a best-case scenario, I don't see Confed rebuilding to its previous strength until about fifty years have elapsed after the use of Gen-Select. They would have been sitting ducks for the Nephilim if Tolwyn's plan had gone through.
 
I've wondered quite a lot what would have happened to humanity in the Prophecy period if Tolwyn's plans for humanity would have happened. I'm assuming that after offing Blair, the war on the Border Worlds would have then taken place and would certainly have put up a good fight but eventually been out-powered.
So when the alien invasion (scout force thing) came through and the Midway was the only ship in the area, in Tolwyn's Confed would there have been a much larger military presense throughout the galaxy?
 
You can't really discuss Tolwyn's actions in WC4 without thinking about how FC explains how he changed after BOT and Behemoth. He was consumed with trying to stop Belisauris and at the same time making sure the plan within the plan was going ahead. The way Tolwyn treats Blair also is quite different from how he talks to other people such as Bondarevsky, Banbridge, Richards, and even Kruger. Tolwyn is definitely a complex man, that seems to have been morphed by 30 years of war....
 
Ijuin said:
Even in a best-case scenario, I don't see Confed rebuilding to its previous strength until about fifty years have elapsed after the use of Gen-Select. They would have been sitting ducks for the Nephilim if Tolwyn's plan had gone through.
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Again, they didn't know the Nephilim were on their way and assumed that the Black Lance would be sufficient for defense until humanity had recovered from its winnowing. It's like saying that the Americans should've pulled out of West Germany in 1975 because East Germany and the rest of the Iron Curtain fell fifteen years later - that's the product of hindsight, and it wasn't something that could've been predicted at the time. The Black Lance would probably have been sufficient to defend most of the remnants of the Confederation for at least the next decade or so, until some of the survivors from the bioconvergence plague could've been trained up into proper soldiers and assigned to ships.
 
Tolwyn's problem was simple...

....Absolute power corrupts absolutely, no matter how it begins.

Over analyzing a simple problem usually causes the problem to become more severe than what it was when it started.
 
cyberkitten01 said:
I'm assuming that after offing Blair, the war on the Border Worlds would have then taken place and would certainly have put up a good fight but eventually been out-powered.
So when the alien invasion (scout force thing) came through and the Midway was the only ship in the area, in Tolwyn's Confed would there have been a much larger military presense throughout the galaxy?
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What Ijuin, McGruff, and Haesslich (to some extent) are saying, and I agree, is if the Genselect weapon worked, there wouldn't be enough manpower to rebuild Confed quickly. Tolwyn's plan was half-baked, it didn't take infastructure into account, becuase he thought that civillian infastructure was also a weakness. But like in our current economy, civillian and military infastructure are very dependant on one another. For example, it takes Confed at least 5 years to build a carrier. If the majority of the civillian workforce is killed off by a bioweapon, training new workers would delay a project even longer, especially if those with the technical knowledge are also killed. Not to mention mining, manufacturing, R&D, would all grind to a halt. 10 years is not enough time to rebuild, and most likely the remanants of Confed would have been defeated.

Also, a common misperception is that the Midway was the only Confed ship engaged with the Nephilim. Playing WCP can give you tunnel vision, as we clearly see other forces engaged in battle in Secret Ops (and Unknown Enemy). Confed clearly has signifcant miliatary presence in the galaxy at the time of the Nephilim invasion, especially thanks to the support of individuals like Blair, who fought to keep the military strong.
 
Blah blah blah.
Tolwyn was a facist genocidal insane jerk in hid final days. And his plan was so dumb it can only be explained by the fact that it was created by not-very-good writers. Even the stupid genocide plan in Rainbow 6 is better than this...

(before you call me WC basher, I must note that I REALLY loved playing WC4 and watching the cutscenes, but I must state that its plot is kinda weak. Very space opera-ish. The sidestuff in the story was actually a lot better, and the details were very well fleshed out.)

Back to the topic, no amount of inane talk will change the fact that tolwyn wanted to slaughter a lot more people than the whole Kilrathi war body count. He believed he had the right to choose who would live and who would die. Hell, 99,99999% of the people in this forum would buy the farm. Maybe I'd get killed for having flat feet. LOAF would be gone too. Anyone with spectacles, Splorsh, dead. Now that's fucking noble. How much love for human kind. Hooray.
 
Even if Tolwyn was a great military leader in the past, nothing could ever justify his later acts. What is more, he was this good hearted leader only in the books, the gamemakers view of him was always a jerk and he was already losing his mind in WC3.

The Tolwyn in the non-game books is so different from the one in the games that it's probably a case of paranoid Schizophreny. Sucha enormous change is quite rare, even more considering that he was a great guy not long ago (Fleet Action). In End Run he risked the Concordia to save the Tarawa, something he'd never do in wc4. He'd gladly let the Tarawa die, along with entire sectors and fleets.

What is more, his rethorics about "the price of freedom" are as empty as Maniacs brain. What kind of freedom is his, with 90% of the Human Race DEAD and the remaining being under the yoke of a military facist dictatorship? The fact that he was fighting this Deus Ex Machina plot device called Belisarius makes no sense and explains nothing, because he became something far worse than what these so called conspirators (where is the evidence of their existance?) would ever be. No "regular" military coup d'etat would be so harmfull and destructive to Confed as the GENSelect atrocity. Ergo, his "philosophical" """"justifications""" are bullshit.

I'm sure that mankind would rather die fighting this unknown menace and die as a rece than become grounds for the experiments of a madman. Who gave him the power to decide the fate of our species? mind you, animals may follow the law of the strongest, but manking has gone against that principle for the last few centuries: glasses compensate for bad eye sight, wheelchairs and protestics allow people with disabilities to be as productive and complete as anyone else. Stephen Hawkins is practically just a brain with eyes and three fingers, but he's smarter than all of us... It is human to accept difference and help. Tolwyn was clearly insane.
 
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