Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why was Russia eventually so robust in pushing back against the Germans? Despite losing tens of millions of soldiers, the government doesn't collapse like the Tsars did in World War I. And not only that, but a communist country is able to produce really advanced tanks in large and reliable numbers. There are so many mysteries there like why did central planning work? Why didn't the government collapse? Despite the fact that Stalin killed off so many of his people. He would have been hated, right? Ah, but Hitler killed more and was more hated. What you're thinking about is what did the Russians do? I'm going to flip it. What did the Germans do? A useful concept comes from the Samuel Griffith' translation of Sun Tzu, which talks about death ground. What's death ground? It's when your enemy puts you on death ground, which means they're going to kill you, and therefore, you have no choice but to fight, because if you don't fight, you're dead. And even if you fight, your odds are poor, but at least that's the only way you're going to get out. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans. Why? Because Stalin and friends had imposed the terrible famine of the early 1930s on them. And they couldn't imagine that anything would be worse than that until they met Nazis, who then had them dig their own mass graves. The Ukrainians rethought that whole thing. And if you do this to people, you will conjure a formidable enemy. So that's what happened to Russia. You can see it happening to Ukraine now before your eyes. Go back before the invasion of Crimea in 2014. You've got Ukraine, which has a very corrupt government and people were at sixes and sevens about whether they want to do Ukrainian things or Russian things. Fast forward to now, where you have Russians blowing away the people who were most loyal to them in the eastern part of the country. Their apartment buildings are being leveled by Russians. Ukrainians think, “Aha. This idea that we can coexist with these people is over.” The irony is Putin's forging Ukrainian national identity and wars often do this. In the United States, we started out with our 13 colonies and they're all very different but the Revolutionary War starts forging a national identity. And by the time you get to the end of the Civil War, where you have northern armies, at least those people have been all over the country. They have a real sense of nation by the end of that one. It's interesting because the strategy we pursued with Germany and Japan was unconditional surrender. Obviously we didn't commit genocide or anything, but do you think of that as different than the sort of total unlimited policy objectives that Germany had in Ukraine or Japan had in China? We also pursued unconditional surrender against the South in the Civil War. How do you think about that? Because that's also something where your back is up against the wall. Why did that not result in the same kind of morale?…

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