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Comment by othello | Hacker News Reader

The surprising fact here is that this can mostly be explained pretty well as the lessons of WW2 still being vivid in the memory of many countries...except that Russia suffered by far the most of any countries on the Western front, and still a majority there would fight a war for their own country.

The persistent glorification of Russia's role in WW2 (although historically justified) might have something to do with it. The amputation of a quarter of Russia's territory right after the end of the Cold War is also used to great effect by nationalists (just like Germany's territory was reduced, by the same proportion, in 1919 - with the same effects).

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> The amputation of a quarter of Russia's territory

Soviet Union is (was) not Russia, it was a multinational empire, similar to Roman or Mongol Empries. AFAIK, Russia itself did not loose much (any?) territory after 1989.

I agree, but that measure compares Russia in 1917, before the Soviet Union, with Russia in 1991, which was 25% smaller.

The Soviet Union was indeed considerably larger than Russia had been since the 17th century.

Unfortunately, many Russians don't seem to feel that way. They are not alone with that however: all former empires occasionally inspire the idea that their demise is an ongoing historical injustice that needs to be rectified. And in the echo chamber of a former-empire nation this train of thought rarely gets questioned.

Russians largely saw the Soviet Union as an extension of Russian power. Hence all the russification that occured in non-Russian majority republics

From the article

Since World War Two, Europe has been relatively peaceful with major exceptions of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and various political suppressions during the Cold War. However, the 19th century was also a relatively peaceful time for Europe that ended with the start of World War I.

So no, the vividity of the world wars is popular but unconvincing.

> "However, the 19th century was also a relatively peaceful time for Europe that ended with the start of World War I."

Operative word: relatively. Still I see more than 18th century (although maybe severity of conflicts vary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#19...

And the 20th century also has a decent list after WWII

More data: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/

I would not want to draw a firm conclusion from this, though. It says that "in Europe the second half of the 20th century was extraordinarily peaceful", but that particular graph only counts wars between nations, not civil wars, guerilla wars and terrorism.

There's a lot of data in that page, though, so I can't really compress it into a HN comment.

Thanks, there is quite a bit of info with great visualizations. It seems 1751-1800 was a relative minimum of years of wars.

Well, the wars in this time may be fewer by number, but not by impact. In this time period, the first truly global conflict was fought. The "Seven Years' War" (1756–1763) was a war between european colonial powers over maritime and colonial hegemony. Some historians call it the "true first world war", because battles took place on all colonial and native frontiers of the participating parties.

This was truly a change of paradigm, regarding the scale of conflicts, not unlike the real first world war.

Also, the two wars that really changed the world (on a ideological level) took place in this time: The American war of independence and the French revolution.

Most Europeans have known living relatives who lived under bombardment or occupation. We may have lived in relative peace since then, but that's largely because the cultural memory of it is still so strong. This is what the precursor of the EU was created to ensure.

> The persistent glorification of Russia's role in WW2 (although historically justified)

Nazi Germany lost WWII largely because of the USSR indeed. That does not justify glorification of the USSR. It justifies celebrating liberation from nazism only.

Maybe not glorification, but definitely respect and appreciation for their sacrifice.

> Russia suffered by far the most of any countries on the Western front,

I do not know, Germany had more displaced people => after <= WWII than any other European countries and 500,000 died in the process [0].

Between 1944 and 1948 about 31 million people, were permanently or temporarily moved from Central and Eastern Europe.

The newly created UN even decided that a criteria for "migrant/displaced" person would exclude German people from the Poland/Hungary/etc...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...

In terms of loss of civilians and military personnel though, it does not compare: the Soviet Union accounted for more than 40% of all WW2 deaths (both civilian and military) worldwide - including deaths on the Pacific front.

The Soviet Union lost a total of 26.6 million people, or 13.8% of their 1939 population. Germany suffered tremendously as well of course, with 5.7 million dead, or 8.2% of their 1939 population [0].

This is obviously not a contest, and I'm sure we can all agree that the suffering was tremendous on all sides. However, when it comes to the perception of war in Russia, the fact that the brunt of the Allied war effort in terms of casualties was borne out by the Soviet Union during WW2 (a fact often little known or recognized in Western countries) is especially relevant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

That's true, I do not disput it.

My point was about the countries as a whole, including civilians and by including the displaced people. And I did include them because you pointed at the amputation of territories, which is something that happened nearly 70 years after the WWII, so I felt I could talk about what happened in the ten years after the WWII.

You know this point about displaced people strikes me because I am French:

I did work with (old) Germans and sometimes I felt some bitterness, including an occasion where one guy in an hotel told me of bombardments on Heidelberg (not a town that suffered heavily) and I was thinking that my father suffered also from bombardments (bombs exploded around him) as a 18 years old in France, so what was his point? Many years later I learned that the Allied discourse of "the good and the bad people" was an heavy (re) writing of history.

> Many years later I learned that the Allied discourse of "the good and the bad people" was an heavy (re) writing of history.

I agree that that was heavily the case on the Eastern front (with the Allies doing heavy cover-ups for USSR genocides so that they are not associated with a "bad guy"), but how did that happen on the Western front?

That is what I point out in my previous replies. You can look also at:

* US (Roosevelt) planned for nearly destruction of after war Germany, fortunately Hoover stopped that policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indust...

* Living with 1200 calories per day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

* Another strange behavior is that Allied forces imposed to De Gaulle to "whitewash" its troops before entering Paris. I suppose it was a only trick to make it impossible for French troops to enter in Paris without having to refuse bluntly, but that shows that the demand of "having only white soldiers" was considered to be perfectly normal and acceptable by UK and US forces.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7984436.stm

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