Apple made a bold move today by removing games from the App Store that contain imagery and in-game graphics that display the Confederate flag. Ultimate General: Gettysburg and all the Hunted Cow games were just a few of the titles removed, as reported by Touch Arcade.

This rapid and sweeping removal of the Confederate flag from vendors and now digital marketplaces has caught consumers off guard, even though most of us that might be in support of these actions had we had a moment to process the idea. The truth is though, there hasn’t been sufficient (intelligent) dialogue about the Confederate flag’s appearances in products and media that have been designed to accurately represent that period in our history. As a gamer, I would find it very odd to play a Civil War-era game that has been censored, and is therefore no longer historically accurate, even in the most basic sense of the word.

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Not to mention that while you can’t download any games from the App Store that have the Confederate flag, you can sure as hell download a game like Wolfenstein 3D, and you can bet your Aryan ass there are truckloads of swastikas in that game, including very tasteful portraits of the one and only Adolf Hitler.

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When I first heard about the horrible shootings that took place in Charleston, I remember saying to my spouse, “This is going to change things…” At the time I wasn’t sure what exactly would change, but I fully admit I would not have guessed commercial entities would begin to censor their own publishing platforms in what appears to be a joint effort to begin the rewriting of history.

I’m not (publicly) saying I’m for or against this kind of censorship, but it certainly feels like we’re moving really fast down a slippery slope where no one knows what’s at the bottom.