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Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

Calling it the Russo-German War is (probably deliberately) ignoring the sacrifices and sufferings of millions of Ukrainians and Belorussians and other nationalities in the USSR.

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Perhaps it's a weird term, but please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar territory. The last thing we need is bitter disputes about who suffered more.

Also, please edit swipes like "probably deliberately" out of your comments here. With that you broke at least two guidelines: the one against flamebait and the one that asks you to assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, can't edit anymore. That said, I believe the title itself is flamebait - you don't need to be an expert in WWII to see that. It is not a question of who suffers most, just historical facts about where the war took place and who fought in it.

Just look at the summary and maps here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) and tell me again that I am the one nationalism baiting by pushing back against the term "Russo-German war".

But you are correct that I cant assume bad faith by the original authors. There might be other reasons.

You have a point, but the art of commenting well here involves resisting the effects of provocation. If you react to provocation with more provocation, others do the same and we get flamewars. I know it's not easy to avoid (for me either) but we all need to work on this in order to have a shared space that's a bit better than internet default.

I also found it bizarre to use this term. It's called World War for a reason, on both sides there were multiple countries and nationalities involved. "German" side was also full of soldiers of Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, etc origin.

I believe the designation in Russian is "The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945".

Then things get simplified for English-speaking audience titles ...

There are terms that are both simple and not actively misleading (as much of that war happened in non-Russian USSR) - what's wrong with "Eastern front of WW2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) ?

Well, depends how far East you go… But generally yeah that makes sense. Or talk about the two governments: "Nazi-Soviet war"

Saying "Russia" rather than "USSR" in this context is not really simplifying, it is more like distorting history. Like saying Prussia instead of Germany. "The Prussian-French war of 1940-1945"

How about the "Austria-Serbia war of 1914-1918"?

The weirdest part of it is that it seems to be an academic article. A lot of people are lumping all USSR and even exUSSR nationalities into "Russians" after the Cold War era dehumanization, but this doesn't seem to be ignorance.

Not sure why the "Otechestvennaya" part in "Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna" is usually translated as Patriotic while it actually means Fatherland.

Patriotic etymologically has the same meaning, and bears much more sense in the context.

[flagged]

Not at all. The Soviet Union was a self-proclaimed multi-ethnic state that was only Russian in the sense that the Russian soviets were the largest and dominated political life.

Soviet Union was called "Russian" because it was built on remnants of Russian empire. Russians were not the largest group until Holodomor in 1932-1934, and political life was dominated by Jews.

Please stop using HN for political and national battle. We ban accounts that do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you are really want to for HN to be better place, maybe it's better to fix HN instead of trying to fix HN users.

First, fix problem with down-votes — down-votes are used here to hide alternative views on a problem, from politics to quantum theory.

Second, fix problem with off-topics — create possibility to separate off-topic branches from main branch, so users can discuss their problems without disturbing others.

Third, text contains no emotions or political battles. It's just text. Minor correction of text between two historians can be major insult to you.

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