Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…When you look at the soldiers who fought these hopeless battles, where tens of thousands of them on a single island might starve or be forced into a banzai charge that they knew was hopeless and they were all going to die, and they knew that they were put in this hopeless situation because of these destructive petty fights between the Navy and the Army, where one of them isn't willing to supply the other one, why didn't that break their morale more? It's just like, "Look, we're supposed to die and commit seppuku because you guys didn't give us the right supplies, because you guys aren't willing to share information or something." I don't know the answer, because I'm not a social historian where you would really be doing- I've always done more diplomatic and military, so you're looking top-down. But what you're asking is a very important question: how do individuals react to all this? And that I do not know the answer. And you'd have to--and there's another piece that makes it hard in Japan since people don't want to talk about failure because it's considered a loss of face. Whereas in the West, one of the fundamental assumptions of Christianity is we're all sinners, right? Original sin, we're all defective goods from the very beginning. And so there isn't this expectation for perfection because it's known you're kind of a mess to begin with, and so you can talk about these things. So that's a whole other problem of getting people to open up about truly horrible events, so I don't know the answer. 01:37:16 I know that the World War II generation, they came home, they just didn't talk about it with their children. It's just not a matter for discussion. So I can't answer that, of why they followed. But you look in the West in World War I, soldiers would go up and over the trenches, and they knew exactly what was going to happen to them. And yeah, there were people who didn't, and then they were court-martialed and shot. A lot of people were shot in World War I. But there's been a change in society about what young men are willing to do when their officers start telling them. The way the Russians solved this problem in Ukraine, but Stalin would do this too, is you send people up ahead, and then you've got the KGB, or whatever the killer unit, so that anyone who tries to go the wrong way in the battlefield, they get machine-gunned by their own side. That's one way to get an army to go forward, and that's what Putin is doing right now. But anyway, in more democratic places, people aren't willing to go along with this now, but in the West, we did it too. When you're having lunch with your colleagues, with the people who are also experts in this field, and you're discussing, "Look, what are still the big unresolved questions? We don't understand why this person did X, or why events transpired in a certain way," what are the big things where you guys have to hassle it out?…

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