Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…People in the YouTube comment section get mad at me when I keep asking about counterfactuals. And I understand. Obviously, I don't understand what was happening at the time. I'm naive about history or whatever. But I do think it's important. What are we trying to do when we try to understand history? We're trying to understand if we had done things differently, what would have happened. What are the lessons we take? And counterfactuals are the main way we can do that. Yeah, I'm all for it. We teach by counterfactuals. Replay it. Can you come up with different options? I think you're in a series of really awful options. The difference between the Japanese and the Nazis is that the Nazis had the ideology that we got to kill millions of people. That is what they believed. The Japanese didn't, in the same way, have that ideology. Naturally, they had, they're a continental [maritime] empire. They also want to trade. And they don't like Communists. They don't want the Communists to take over in China. It just seems like, naturally, if we didn't go to war with them, we might have been allies, as we ended up being later on.…

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