Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…There's cases in history where it seems like there is a hinge point. Let's say after the Bolsheviks take over Russia or after Mao was consolidating Communist control of China, where it's always hard to plan some takeover. But in those cases, it seems like the way in which they got in was so tenuous and contingent that… would it have been possible and desirable for us to extend greater efforts to prevent these regimes from getting in the first place? Where we've had to deal with the consequences of them getting into power for decades or sometimes centuries afterwards. If you're a Russian of any persuasion, I suspect you'd be really angry that some American from across the seas is going to determine what kind of government you live under. That's a problem there. You asked me earlier about over extension. So we're going to go around the entire world telling others how to live? And then there's another issue, which is that people like Stalin are a reflection of the country at the time. The notion that one guy, Stalin, waves a magic wand and everyone does what he wants and that he is responsible for these millions of deaths? There are millions of people pulling millions of triggers for all these deaths. There are a lot of people who think it's a good idea. They are a reflection of the place. We personify this with Stalin to understand this. It's the earlier issue about generals. We personify how wars turn out often by generals because it gives us a grasp on it. But it's a much more complicated thing. How contingent was the global rise of communism? You've done so much research on Russian and Chinese history, in what percentage of worlds do the Bolsheviks take over in Russia? And if that doesn't happen, does communism spread to China and beyond? Because there's not the Bolshevik example and support of these global communist parties.…

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