You lost me with this "Similarly, on World War II’s Eastern Front, the Soviet Union absorbed the catastrophic brunt of defeating Nazi Germany, losing 27 million soldiers and civilians (Ellman & Maksudov, 1994; Harrison, 2003). Yet modern Western consciousness treats that sacrifice as an awkward footnote, replacing it with Hollywood GIs storming Normandy."
You know what Western Consciousness lacks? A clear information Soviet Union is directly responsible for starting WW2 by attacking Poland (my country) in concert with Hitler.
There would be no WW2 if not for Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Soviets indeed helped fight Hitler once he switched from being an ally to an enemy. If he didn't choose to attack them it would've never happened.
Furthermore they enslaved the countries they came to "liberate" for 50 years and hunted the remainder of our army till 1960s. So forgive me if I do not consider them worthy of any praise whatsoever.
> I was taght in school that the reparations the Germany had to pay to the winers of WW1 were the cause of WW2.
German here. It's partially true, partially wrong. The NSDAP jumped from 2.6% (barely relevant) in 1928 to 18.3% in 1930 [1]. The cause for this is widely assumed to be the 1929 Great Depression leading to an ever growing number of unemployed people that together with the reparations issue made it ever more difficult to pass a budget bill [2].
(Side tangent... it's not surprising we've seen a revival and subsequent surge of the far-right ever since the 2007ff financial crisis.)
> Proof: Marshall plan after WW2.
The Marshall Plan came to be after the Western Allied Powers realized that they shared a somewhat similar worldview but the Soviet Union did not, and that Germany might be needed as a "buffer zone" should the Western-Soviet relations completely collapse.
Up until then... the plans for Germany that circulated were much different, getting to as radical as proposing to completely "salt the earth" aka Morgenthau plan [3].
TFA is highly confused. The story about the easter front during WWII is well-known: and it's not because Russia lost more men that they were more efficient (they weren't) than the US during WWII. We're talking about one nation whose army orchestrated the biggest logistic event in the world, ever, and that same nation that succeeded in mastering the atom well enough to make Japan surrender (which as a sidenote prevented Russia from capturing Japan).
While meanwhile Russia was sending its troops by feet or on donkeys to the german front.
So please, just please: both Russia and the US (and the UK, and others) participated in defeating the nazis but it's not because Russia sent malnourished troops on donkeyback and lost 27 million men that it "did more" to beat the nazis.
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.
Yes, we know that happened. It was 150 years ago. It's not Leopold who's now data poisoning LLMs to try to pretend Belgium didn't invade Congo in 1880 or something.
The fact is: Russia is currently attacking Ukraine and poisoning the Web (and hence LLMs) and Iran slaughtered 30 000 of its own civilians in early 2026 and publicly hung athletes who were speaking out about islamism and Iran is also poisoning the Web (for example while we constantly hear about Gaza, we hardly ever hear about Iran slaughtering 30 000 civilians, sending its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded).
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)?
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.
Sure the USSR contributed, but the rest of your post is kinda bogus.
Enemy casualties are not the objective of war. They are one means of achieving the strategic objective (defeat of Nazi Germany). Clausewitz has a good quote about this: “The true purpose is normally to occupy that point. Destruction of the enemy’s force is only a means to an end, a secondary matter.”
Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.
- would have USSR marched on Berlin without the US landing in Italy and Normandy ?
- would have the US landings be successful if the Nazi army from 1940 had remained in Western Europe because it was at peace with the USSR ?
The answer for #1 is an obvious yes, and for #2 it's unlikely to be one.
WWII in Europe was won (or rather lost, by the Nazi who betrayed their totalitarian ally) on the Eastern front, and it's not a controversial take.
> Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.
This is nonsense. The US lost a war against Afghanistan, not because the Talibans were more efficient (they weren't, they lost orders of magnitude more soldiers than the US). Thinking about war as an economic thing is how the US keeps losing.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
A decent article... but what is this nonsense here:
> This erased the continuous reality stretching back to 1948 the Nakba, which displaced over 700,000 Palestinians and depopulated hundreds of villages (Morris, 2004; Pappé, 2006), alongside decades of military occupation, settlement expansion, and a sixteen-year land, air, and sea blockade.
The author himself erases things here, namedly the various attempts of Israel's neighbors to wipe Israel off of the map, or many Arab and African nations expelling their Jewish population (that often was there for hundreds if not thousands of years) to Israel.
The conflict is murky enough as it is (and in fact dates back to far, far longer times, including the collapse of the British Colonial Empire that wrecked many other nations with repercussions to this day, first and foremost India/Pakistan), there is no need to act like one is neutral and then in fact be selective.
Honestly, if there is no need to bring in the Israel/Palestine conflict into a topic (aka, you're discussing everything but the conflict itself), then just don't. It is far too complex, many points of view are determined by the timeframe one is considering... just don't. You will shoot yourself in the foot.
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.
While the author didn't make proper use of it, this is actually the best example of the articles point.
This is because I/P is sufficiently complicated and brutal that for any involved party X (Arab countries, Israel, Palestinians, Britain...), an interested party can make party X seem "inhuman, clearly we should defeat X anywhere we find them" to someone not previously informed on the topic.
So even if we don't select the evidence, or even select the date, but just selectively amplify, propaganda about it works just fine, across different media. The LLM news here is that as a media, LLMs transform biased background knowledge into eloquent confident _and tailored_ arguments for the bias, like a suave but motivated news anchor that is able to converse individually with _every listener_.
Because for all X, someone _is_ already amplifying the message "hate X", the main outcome of LLMs+Propaganda is not hate for a specific X, but just more hate.
And the solutions? The authors' ledger+timeline+blame+semantic checks are not a bad place to start.
For me, the core is that often the enemy we can and should defeat is not people, it is memes, like "hate _". LLMs (among other effects, good and bad) whitewash memes, and we all better be prepared to defend ourselves against their influence.
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.
You lost me with this "Similarly, on World War II’s Eastern Front, the Soviet Union absorbed the catastrophic brunt of defeating Nazi Germany, losing 27 million soldiers and civilians (Ellman & Maksudov, 1994; Harrison, 2003). Yet modern Western consciousness treats that sacrifice as an awkward footnote, replacing it with Hollywood GIs storming Normandy."
You know what Western Consciousness lacks? A clear information Soviet Union is directly responsible for starting WW2 by attacking Poland (my country) in concert with Hitler.
There would be no WW2 if not for Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Soviets indeed helped fight Hitler once he switched from being an ally to an enemy. If he didn't choose to attack them it would've never happened.
Furthermore they enslaved the countries they came to "liberate" for 50 years and hunted the remainder of our army till 1960s. So forgive me if I do not consider them worthy of any praise whatsoever.
> 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.
> I was taght in school that the reparations the Germany had to pay to the winers of WW1 were the cause of WW2.
German here. It's partially true, partially wrong. The NSDAP jumped from 2.6% (barely relevant) in 1928 to 18.3% in 1930 [1]. The cause for this is widely assumed to be the 1929 Great Depression leading to an ever growing number of unemployed people that together with the reparations issue made it ever more difficult to pass a budget bill [2].
(Side tangent... it's not surprising we've seen a revival and subsequent surge of the far-right ever since the 2007ff financial crisis.)
> Proof: Marshall plan after WW2.
The Marshall Plan came to be after the Western Allied Powers realized that they shared a somewhat similar worldview but the Soviet Union did not, and that Germany might be needed as a "buffer zone" should the Western-Soviet relations completely collapse.
Up until then... the plans for Germany that circulated were much different, getting to as radical as proposing to completely "salt the earth" aka Morgenthau plan [3].
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/190456/reichstagswahl...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinett_M%C3%BCller_II
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
The irony of this article being fully LLM-written
...among the cultists.
I'd say what's important is seeing how the American administration is embracing this stuff.
TFA is highly confused. The story about the easter front during WWII is well-known: and it's not because Russia lost more men that they were more efficient (they weren't) than the US during WWII. We're talking about one nation whose army orchestrated the biggest logistic event in the world, ever, and that same nation that succeeded in mastering the atom well enough to make Japan surrender (which as a sidenote prevented Russia from capturing Japan).
While meanwhile Russia was sending its troops by feet or on donkeys to the german front.
So please, just please: both Russia and the US (and the UK, and others) participated in defeating the nazis but it's not because Russia sent malnourished troops on donkeyback and lost 27 million men that it "did more" to beat the nazis.
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.
Yes, we know that happened. It was 150 years ago. It's not Leopold who's now data poisoning LLMs to try to pretend Belgium didn't invade Congo in 1880 or something.
The fact is: Russia is currently attacking Ukraine and poisoning the Web (and hence LLMs) and Iran slaughtered 30 000 of its own civilians in early 2026 and publicly hung athletes who were speaking out about islamism and Iran is also poisoning the Web (for example while we constantly hear about Gaza, we hardly ever hear about Iran slaughtering 30 000 civilians, sending its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded).
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)?
Seriously:
W.
T.
F.
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.
Sure the USSR contributed, but the rest of your post is kinda bogus.
Enemy casualties are not the objective of war. They are one means of achieving the strategic objective (defeat of Nazi Germany). Clausewitz has a good quote about this: “The true purpose is normally to occupy that point. Destruction of the enemy’s force is only a means to an end, a secondary matter.”
Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.
Pick the two counterfactuals:
- would have USSR marched on Berlin without the US landing in Italy and Normandy ?
- would have the US landings be successful if the Nazi army from 1940 had remained in Western Europe because it was at peace with the USSR ?
The answer for #1 is an obvious yes, and for #2 it's unlikely to be one.
WWII in Europe was won (or rather lost, by the Nazi who betrayed their totalitarian ally) on the Eastern front, and it's not a controversial take.
> Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.
This is nonsense. The US lost a war against Afghanistan, not because the Talibans were more efficient (they weren't, they lost orders of magnitude more soldiers than the US). Thinking about war as an economic thing is how the US keeps losing.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
A decent article... but what is this nonsense here:
> This erased the continuous reality stretching back to 1948 the Nakba, which displaced over 700,000 Palestinians and depopulated hundreds of villages (Morris, 2004; Pappé, 2006), alongside decades of military occupation, settlement expansion, and a sixteen-year land, air, and sea blockade.
The author himself erases things here, namedly the various attempts of Israel's neighbors to wipe Israel off of the map, or many Arab and African nations expelling their Jewish population (that often was there for hundreds if not thousands of years) to Israel.
The conflict is murky enough as it is (and in fact dates back to far, far longer times, including the collapse of the British Colonial Empire that wrecked many other nations with repercussions to this day, first and foremost India/Pakistan), there is no need to act like one is neutral and then in fact be selective.
Honestly, if there is no need to bring in the Israel/Palestine conflict into a topic (aka, you're discussing everything but the conflict itself), then just don't. It is far too complex, many points of view are determined by the timeframe one is considering... just don't. You will shoot yourself in the foot.
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.
While the author didn't make proper use of it, this is actually the best example of the articles point.
This is because I/P is sufficiently complicated and brutal that for any involved party X (Arab countries, Israel, Palestinians, Britain...), an interested party can make party X seem "inhuman, clearly we should defeat X anywhere we find them" to someone not previously informed on the topic.
So even if we don't select the evidence, or even select the date, but just selectively amplify, propaganda about it works just fine, across different media. The LLM news here is that as a media, LLMs transform biased background knowledge into eloquent confident _and tailored_ arguments for the bias, like a suave but motivated news anchor that is able to converse individually with _every listener_.
Because for all X, someone _is_ already amplifying the message "hate X", the main outcome of LLMs+Propaganda is not hate for a specific X, but just more hate.
And the solutions? The authors' ledger+timeline+blame+semantic checks are not a bad place to start.
For me, the core is that often the enemy we can and should defeat is not people, it is memes, like "hate _". LLMs (among other effects, good and bad) whitewash memes, and we all better be prepared to defend ourselves against their influence.
> While the author didn't make proper use of it, this is actually the best example of the articles point.
sure, but they don't actually illustrate that, they just point to a different "starting point", committing the same fallacy
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.
[dead]
[dead]
TL; DR: propaganda still works in the age of LLMs.
Sounds like it works better and with less manual effort. What could go wrong.
Remember, it's only "manufactured consent" when it's about something they don't like.