Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is probably wrong, I want you to correct me, but maybe one way you can explain why the Japanese were so brutal in their campaign around this time is, if you think that when you lose, you have this idea that you have social death, it's better to kill yourself than go back to your family and say, "I surrendered". Maybe they just applied, this is their failure to empathize with, or think it from, the perspective of their enemy, but they were just thinking, "Listen, if we lost, we would commit seppuku. When they lose, they forfeit human rights." And in some sense, it was just applying the principle of social death to their enemy. The whole war is brutal. They're doing a lot of hand-to-hand brutality, and part of it has to do with lack of equipment. That firebombing of Tokyo happened in one night. I think it's 80,000 Japanese are incinerated. Okay, let's talk about brutality. Now, the reason why Americans did that is because they knew the alternative was sending American kids onto Japan who would die doing that. And so the decision was it was better to kill a lot of Japanese civilians than it was to kill American soldiers. And that's also the reason that went into the atomic bombing. That's controversial, right? The Americans, why did they drop atomic bombs on the Japanese? And there was no disagreement about that in the United States at the time because it was a question of: are you going to send American young men your age- and millions of them would have died hitting the home islands- or are you going to do the bombing? And of course, the Americans did the bombing. So there's brutality all around in this war. Wars don't come up with clean hands. Was there any way for the West to, or for America to, win the Pacific War without the firebombing?…

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