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Published · transcript-backed

Sarah Paine: belief

23 Jan 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

“I think by the time, those deaths are Japanese deaths for us. We're looking at these things and we've lost a lot of people.”

— Sarah Paine

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Sarah Paine
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
23 Jan 2025
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…How much should we question the demand for unconditional surrender, knowing that most of the deaths in World War II happened because, if there wasn't unconditional surrender, maybe we could have reached a peace earlier, and most of the deaths could have been spared? I think by the time, those deaths are Japanese deaths for us. We're looking at these things and we've lost a lot of people. Our idea is, "Hey, we're almost there." We're not worried about Japanese civilian deaths or Japanese military deaths. We're looking at, these are the people that have killed how many Chinese? And I don't believe China was ever part of Japan. What were they doing there? So then you're asking for tender mercies out of Americans for the Japanese in those days? No. After all that had happened. It's ugly by the time you've killed this many people, the kind of bitterness on both sides. Was it a mistake to demilitarize Japan after the war? A couple of things: One is, look, they did become an ally afterwards, and if they did have a military, they could have helped us in the Korean War. The outcome might have been different with military help.…

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