> There would be no WW2 if not for Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.

I was taght in school that the reparations the Germany had to pay to the winers of WW1 were the cause of WW2.

Proof: Marshall plan after WW2.

There's a mistake in the article - the first poll was taken in May 1945 before the war in pacific was over. It makes a lot of sense to say Soviet Union contributed more to the European theatre.

But you do sound a little US biased to me - the Soviet industrial machine in 1945 was phenomenal, and though they didn't have the breadth of technological sophistication as the US, the sheer volume of their production of modern heavy machinery was staggering.

The malnourishment and scale of their losses in large part reflects their stubbornness to commit to devastating and bitter strategic sieges which saw vast civilian causalities - military losses were nowhere near as one sided.

Of course, defeating Nazi Germany was not the work of a single country. But it is perfectly possible to say that the contribution of the Soviet Union was greater, not because they lost more people, but because they defeated far more Nazi soldiers. The majority of the Nazis' losses were against the Soviet Union. If they did this with less technology than the United States and with fewer resources, that makes the feat even greater, as it explains the much greater sacrifice they made to achieve it.

> it's not because Russia sent malnourished troops on donkeyback and lost 27 million men that it "did more" to beat the nazis.

Classic "asian hordes" trope. 80% of German casualties were on the eastern front. Not 30%, not 51%, 80%.

>So who's poising the Web here? TFA's author with its political views and priorities (apparently not denouncing the evilness of the iranian regime in 2026 nor denouncing the evilness of nazism in WWII but denouncing... the acts of Belgium in fucking 1880)?

Ah yes, let's just forget colonialism, we're so over that, just stop mentioning it already. Let's talk about what is comfortable and convenient for me.

> but it's not because Russia sent malnourished troops on donkeyback and lost 27 million men that it "did more" to beat the nazis.

I mean, if we’re splitting hairs, I would argue they “sacrificed more”, if they did not “do more”.

This and other comments on the thread are pointing out what I’m assuming every History major and PhD is deeply aware of, and that is that the narrative of historical events is core to our understanding of them.

But the reason that we’ve come together to talk about this is that LLMs and the poisoning of their data corpus presents a unique challenge to historians that their predecessors did not have to face. Although, their predecessors did have to deal with other unpleasant things like libraries being burned and censorship.

Yes and knowledge of how terrible Leopold was is not uncommon, yes less well known than "Hitler was bad" but that's just about as close to a universally accepted truth as we've managed as a species, it's not a useful benchmark.

> but it's not because Russia sent malnourished troops on donkeyback and lost 27 million men that it "did more" to beat the nazis.

This is a very political question. A lot of people see the "blood loss" as the morally superior thing over kill efficiency.

> Then TFA seems also very slanted: it begins with Russia, China and Iran poisining the web to manufacture consensus but then it's all about Belgium / Leopold in the late 19th century attacking Congo.

Because it's a good and well sourced example to show how long we have had intentional propaganda. Sure, the author could also have used the tendency of Romans to "embellish" even their losses, but it's much more difficult to verify any claims simply because there aren't many sources corroborating or disputing claims.

While this applies to many conflicts, it is very pronounced in I/P specifically. I find it a bit ironic that the author picked this example where, for almost any individual event or date in its history that seems particularly horrible or evil, one needs only to go back a few years to get a very different impression of the conflict.

Fair point, though I'd say the article contains quite a bit more nonsense than that.

HN isn't the place to discuss it of course, but as I'm sure you realize your own points are also murky and contested and many would object to the framing. The basic concern, that LLM framing may reflect biased media framing, is reasonable and applicable to that conflict, as any other.

Sounds like it works better and with less manual effort. What could go wrong.