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Sarah C. M. Paine

lines on the record: 162
first: 2023-10-04
most recent: 2023-10-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And the basics for us. And that's where 30 is holy smooth, 31 is invasion of Manchuria. So let's go back to grand strategy. This is Americans having no grand strategy of not thinking deeply about life is an interaction, right? I can tell you whatever I want to, but then you're going to make your own decisions. If I don't consider what your decisions might be, I'm going to be in deep, dark trouble. And I think about Holly and Smoot. They didn't live to see what they wrought. A lot of young men across the world died because people like them. Failure to think more broadly and think about it, the lesson of the Great Depression. The moment the international economy starts getting a cold, there are meetings of bankers and foreign ministers the world over to prevent it from going crazy ever again because I realize what the consequences are.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go back to our wonderful America firsters of the 30s and the Great Depression hits and it's a mess. And so what we decide is we're going to have tariffs. This is the Holly Smooth tariff in nineteen thirty. We're just going to wall it off because we got to keep jobs for Americans. Okay, this is half court tennis. You're not thinking, well, what's everybody else going to do? retaliate exactly in kind. So for the Japanese who had been good citizens within the International Order, they had maintained really high positions in the League of Nations, which we'd been irresponsible and never joined. The Japanese, this pulls the rug on all the Japanese who said we need to cooperate with the international order. Japan's trade dependent. What are they going to do? No one will trade with them. They're closest people want. Okay, they look at the world. They go, well, we need an empire because we've got to have it big enough so that we get food.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a really effective plan for economic development. And if you look at China under Deng Xiaoping, who's he imitating the Japanese, Deng Xiaoping is rather like a parallel his generation to the Meiji generation. And think what came after the Meiji generation. Bad news. Well, we're into Xi Jinping. That's fascinating. We're into bad news. But do not deny the achievements of the Meiji generation. They're enormous. And then because Japan does all the atrocities, they can no longer brag. About these previous things.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very effective means for economic development because when they're booted in 1945, the Koreans and the Taiwanese actually have something to work with, and then they're often running. And Shankai-shek, who'd been horribly corrupt in the mainland, he could not do land reform in the mainline. Why? Because that's his officer corps. They will kill him. In Taiwan, he can definitely redistribute Taiwanese land, no problem there. He comes in with all the weaponry, redistributes its bloody doing it. He offers the Taiwanese bonds. I think it's going to be like the lousy bonds that he distributed on the mainland. Turns out those bonds were worth money. I don't know how many years on it was that people actually collected on the bonds for all of this. So the Japanese actually had many of the pieces.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the Taiwanese and to the Koreans. And another thing they did, unlike the United States, is they do it from the bottom up. They control the police force and the locality and from there all the way up. So they really have local control. When the United States goes into places like the Philippines, which happens at more or less the same time, Philippine war is like its early 1900s. The United States wants to deal with English-speaking elites sound familiar who are located in the capital. And so we try to negotiate that way, but it never modernizes what goes on. These very traditional and actually not conducive to growth relationship.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go before that, if you think about the Meiji Restoration, and so they colonized Taiwan, they colonized Korea. It was brutal in Korea because the Koreans resisted and then the Japanese got nasty. Taiwan, much less resistant. To this day, the Taiwanese do not have this bitterness about Japan that the Koreans do. All right, so I'm not going to deny there wasn't that there was any brutality. There was brutality. But what the Japanese did when they moved into Korea and Taiwan is they set about creating infrastructure. They put in train lines. They set about educating people. Do they put them in the top positions? No, the top positions are for Japanese. But they do things like publish all kinds of magazines. So incredible numbers of technical journals about agronomy and things so that you have this incredible improvement of output because you're spreading knowledge to people who...”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go back in time. If you get before World War II, which is when the really huge atrocities that the Imperial Japanese Army commits without any doubt, and going into someone else's country and committing atrocities, that's not a winning game plan.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, but I suspect the sins of the West are really obvious because we have an open press. And for anyone who'd been through World War I and had any male member in the family who'd been at the trenches and came back and talked about it, it was pretty horrific, right? And so you can't believe that anything's me worse than that. Or if you go to China under Shanghai Shak and he had a semi-free press, that's how we know about things. And so you look at the incredible corruption going on there. You go, wow, how can anything be worse than this? Well, actually, it could be a lot worse than this.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's called the big lie. And it is amazing how these big lies live and very powerful. But then when they crumble, they're gone for good. People believed, even when I was in graduate school, there were a bunch of people saying, oh, Russia, it has no drug problem. It has all these blah, blah, blah that's better because they're believing the Kool-Aid that's being dished out from Moscow, which is lies.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it? I think it's George Bernard Shaw made a comment. Is that if you haven't been a socialist before the age of 30, you have no heart, and if you remain one after the age of 30, you have no brains, that it's the idealism of it all. And World War I seemed to vindicate so much of what Karl Marx said about how capitalist countries are just imperialist. They don't care about the young. They just throw them over the trenches and destroy them.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're wonderful national archives, looking particularly from the 1917 to 1945 period. And I'm researching the Cold War and you go, oh, but the Cold War didn't begin to 47. I would argue the Cold War began in 1917 because we have this notion that, oh, I decide when wars begin or my side, not quite. If the other side declares war on you, and the Bolsheviks made it very clear that they had declared war on the capitalist order. And Britain was much more attuned to this, worried about communist ideas infiltrating to labor movements and all this other stuff. And so I'm reading their archives. Whereas in the United States was much more asleep at the Switch.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hostile now than then? We're in the Soviet Union while Gorbachev was in power. I actually got into the foreign ministry archives there, but only for the Tsarist period. And in China, you could still get into various archives. I was in the Qing archives. And then the nationalist archives were much more closed. And then now the archives are just plain closed in. Go to Russia now and get yourself arrested. And China, likewise, they've shut down all of these archives. So to compensate for the last, I don't know, it's not quite 10 years, spent two months every summer going to U.S. presidential archives. So starting with, we didn't do it quite in order, but Truman, Eisenhower, and then this last spring, we just did that George Bush Sr. Archives. And now I'm in Britain using”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neutralize some of that thing happened. Yeah, and then three years in Japan over the years and three years in Taiwan over the years of just reading deeply in the archives, Donald Brumsfeld has been much vilified the former Secretary of Defense, but one of his quotations I love is he said he wasn't worried about the known unknowns because he'd go after those, but he's worried about the unknown unknowns. And that's why you do our... Their foreign ministry archives, but then it's much less afterwards in China, well, China and Russia, they've both closed down. There's no way I wouldn't go into either country at this stage.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning about that. They're not fun reads. Anyway, they exist. Now you're asking me about research. Oh, back in the day, what was it? It was a year in the Soviet Union when it was, and then a year in PRC right after Tenement, it was delayed for a year. And that was quite exciting. There were armored trucks all around Beijing University, not to protect the students, but to...”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have co edited with my husband Bruce Ellen a series of books on naval operations. United States is a maritime power. If you want to understand the maritime underpinnings of US security, go to those particularly a book on peripheral operations, expeditionary warfare, which is what we do. The expedition would be crossing the ocean to get there, and commerce rating and blockades, that that is a key to U.S. foreign policy and the problem is if you exercise a continental foreign policy, you're prone to get into all sorts of wars you don't need to get into, that because we have huge oceans that separate us from our problems, it's a major point of strategy of whether to intervene or not intervene. So it's important to understand the maritime position in the United States. So there are these maritime books that if you're interested in”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can make bad spelling errors in numerous languages. I read these things slowly, lots of large dictionaries. And so you can look, and you say, You've got my book Wars for Asia. Go take a look at the footnotes in the back. You'll see they're Russian and Japanese and Chinese. And then read it slowly”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And see if at least some of the citations are in the languages of the countries being discussed. Because how much respect would you have for a book about the United States that has not a single source in English?”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow I'm going to play this game. Well, no more follow football in this way. Think about people who love football in the States. They know about all the opposing teams and who's strong and blah, blah, blah. Well, foreign policy, you need to understand the other side, not just about me, and it's all about the interaction. So I spend my life. I was always wondered about I'd heard that the Russians were really evil, right, growing up in the Cold War. Well, I'll learn more about it. And so I studied first learning about Russia, and then I decided I was going to learn about China. And then I realized, oh, I'll learn about those two Japans in there, so I've got to learn about Japan and wind up studying their relations and tried to be open-minded and understand the world from their point of view. Not that it's right or wrong, but just trying to understand it. So for your point of view, when you're picking up a book and you want to avoid half court tennis, give the book a 30 second rule. What's that? Go flip to the bibliography. Flip through it for 30 seconds.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea about the pipeline, but about me, I can answer those. I grew up during the height of the Cold War and started graduate school. As it was ending, but I didn't know it was ending. And so I have the full up Cold War education where I did studied the Soviet Union when it was, and they had all these huge programs which no longer exist. And if you want to make good decisions, you have to be knowledgeable. You have to be able to make an accurate assessment about yourself and the other side. And so I've devoted my career to understanding the other side. And one of the things that I think Americans are particularly prone to is what I call half court tennis. They study the world from their point of view. They're always focused on Team America. It's like half court tennis. They look only at their side of the court. Balls come from mysterious places. Some people get new rackets. Who knows where they come from?”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're asking the wrong person. You need to interview those people and ask them what influenced them. At my low level in the weeds, I work at the U.S. Naval War College. We have officers from the United States and all over the world who come on in. And then we assign them readings from the kind of scholars you're talking about, what we do in strategy and policy or case studies about wars and have them think about a lot of the kinds of questions you're asking is what we ask students. And so we assign all these things. How much it influences later in their career, you'd have to ask them.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. Well, it's because they're all on death ground, the leadership, et cetera. And then the population's been fed this story that if the other side wins, they're all going to be murdered too. Wars are easy to start, and they are very tricky to end. And this has been your life, right? You have watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Easy to start, very hard to get out of. And now we're into Ukraine. We'll see how long this goes on.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's four times. It's just facts. If you're in a war where you've destroyed all transportation and the ability to get goods anywhere and you've killed the farming population all over the world, you get famine. And by the way, this is an argument for when people say, well, the atomic bombs, can you avoid doing that? That ended the war really fast and probably saved millions of lives because they didn't starve. I meant the war was over and all of a sudden you're starting to ship food around.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends a lot of the people who died in World War II are civilians and they starve to death Huge numbers, in fact, at the end of the war, what is it, in the Pacific, if you look at Japanese deaths from 41 when we get involved to 45? I can't remember the statistics, but it's like tens of thousands of Japanese are dying in 41. And you finally get up to hundreds of thousands.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be speculation. That's also a comment that's been made about World War I, that Britain, for instance, lost so many of its best. And so they don't go on to have children. They don't go on to become strategic leaders. They're unavailable in World War II.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But basically, the Japanese had eviscerated his armies. And then think about it as a communist, you constantly blame the incumbent government, oh, all of our problems, it's all about the nationalist corruption, and they are corrupt, don't get me wrong. But the reason they're having troubles is because of the Japanese. So the Japanese did end the nationalists.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult. The Japanese, the nationalists don't get credit for all the fighting of Japan. There was no way to get Lenis aid to them during the war. If you want to get Lenlease aid in, you've got to have ports and railway systems. And if you look at China, the Japanese did a very effective blockade off China's coast. So we're trying to fly stuff over the hump, which is the Himalayas, and you're flying jet fuel over the hump so that the planes that you also fly over the hum that you can then use them it's just it's it means that there's no way to supply the nationalist armies yeah they're they do some things in Burma which arguably is a terrible mistake I suspect it would have been far better leaving Shankai Shek with all that stuff and then it would have been useful for him in the final stages of the war to get a few wins against the Japanese to make him look good.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that make sense? Oh, yeah, yeah, unlikely. If you look at Russian rail networks, they had the two centers, Moscow and St. Petersburg, which the Bolsheviks controlled. So if you're anybody else, that means you're on the end of these different railway lines and there isn't the ability to link up with everyone. Whereas the Bolsheviks at the center can fan out. And so it gives them they also occupying the industrial centers. So it gives them the ability to pick off their enemies in detail and win that thing.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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. And then you asked me earlier about overextension. So are we going to go around the entire world and telling others how to live? And then there's another issue, which is people like Stalin are a reflection of the country at the time. The notion that one guy Stalin weighs a magic wand and everyone does what he wants. And this notion that Stalin personally 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. So they are a reflection of a place. Now, in order to understand this, we personify it with Stalin. It's your earlier issue about generals. We personify.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, we tried very hard. The Britons tried very hard, particularly in Poland, because think about why does Britain get into the war? It's over Poland. And it's not feasible. When you get to the end of the war and the Red Army is fully in control of Poland, there is nothing we're going to be able to do about it. Americans had had enough of the fight.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have Stalin your ally, of course, you're going to say nice things about him. Well, that doesn't make you a communist. That just is managing an alliance. What are you going to spit in his face while you're fighting the war?”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, A. He died, right? Some we don't know fully, but he was mobilizing the United States to prepare for war while the America Firsters, because were saying, no, no, isolationism is the way to go. So he was preparing all of that. And yeah, if you're going to defeat Hitler, if you're an offshore power like Britain and the United States are, as in the Napoleonic Wars, you need a local continental power with a huge army if you're going to deal with that continental problem. Russia has that army. Which is Hitler, who's far more efficient than the Russians are. He's also located near the high value areas of Europe, the industrialized parts of Europe, whereas Russia is further away. You're going to deal with Hitler first.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, there's a choice at the end of the war. So there was some talk about whether to invade up through the Balkans and try to put Western armies there. Okay, so let's put you back in time as a serviceman, and you look at it and go, do you want to lose your life by going up through the Balkans? Or are we just going to call it a day? And also, by the way, Stalin is a land power with a huge army in place. Excuse me fighting at advantage. Do you really want to lose your life doing that? And you have US leaders looking at it and going, this is going to be good enough because the cost, the costs are too high.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fingo, and this is to give a tangential comment. This is how sanctions work. People look at sanctions and go, oh, they don't work because you don't make the whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing. What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great cost. But if you look over time, initially Stalin rebuilds and does quite well, but then you start looking in its 60s, 70s, all of a sudden their growth rates are not like Western growth rates. And yeah, they're still growing, but the difference is growing and the compounding effects of this are enormous so that if you fast forward to now Russian standards of living, I think Russia's entire economy now, I know it's lost all these territories, is less than Mexico. There's nothing wrong with Mexico, but the Russians have this idea that they have this huge, they don't.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the Louvre en masse, his armies, because French people feel nationalism and it's incredibly powerful. And nationalism has been spreading its way around the world ever since. Once you have nationalism, have fun hanging on to a non-contiguous empire because the locals are going to fight and resist. It will make the commercial advantages, well, there won't be commercial advantages. It'll be too expensive to hang on. So Britain, in most cases, did not fight to hang on to its empire. It left and negotiated its way out, whereas France did the fight in Vietnam, which it lost and the fight in Algeria, which it lost. The British didn't do that. Now, Russia is a different event. It's all contiguous. Wherever that Red Army is, it can hang on to it. And so, yeah, it hangs on to Eastern Europe.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're fundamentally different kinds of empires. So Russia is a classic continental empire. What it owns is contiguous. Britain's empire was all about trade. And having enough coaling stations around the world, that was initially what it was all about. You got to have coaling stations everywhere and then you want to get the trade through. And then what the British did is they trained barristers all over the world. What a barristers did lawyers and local people, right? And so it lays the basis not on purpose, but in fact, of having international law where people who are eventually going to be running these independent countries have a legal training to use international law to their own kind of trees benefit. But anyway, so Britain has this non-contiguous event, and after the war, it does not have the ability to hang on to them, particularly because nationalism, think about nationalism. Nationalism starts in the Napoleonic Wars. That's what Napoleon leveraged.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really pernicious ideologies on steroids, fascists and communists. And that's how you get all that evil, is out of a gross mismanagement of World War I. Once they're off and running, you got problems on your hands, and you've got a long solution. So back to your initial question, does grant strategy matter? Yes, it does. Look at World War I when they didn't practice it, and when the civilians they allowed the officers to make all decisions. Britain is a country that is maritime by geography. Britain built a continental sized army. That is not Britain's great strength in World War I. And it was the beginning, the loss of the victory in World War I, but at horrific cost was the beginning and of the end of the British Empire.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the problem is World War I. World War I has enormous consequences. It is the West in fact all sides allowed their generals to make strategy. No one is doing grand strategy in World War I. It's all about operational success. This is what we're all going to do. And then the generals keep sending people waves and waves of young men up over the trenches. And what do you think is going to happen to them if you send them over the trenches? This is how you get these horrific death rates. Hundreds of thousands in a battle. And now our own day, it's inconceivable. As a result of that war, not only does it upend Europe by getting rid of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire gets rid of all of those. And so you have massive power vacuum. But it puts two”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, his idea is the Ukrainians need to pretend they're Russians, and then they can, that's fine if they do that. The question you're asking is it's not a happy ending what you're describing. It's a horrendous ending.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suspect to be worse. Why? Because the Germans are far more efficient than the Russians were in those days. And what is it? She was married to the poet Osip Mandelsham. And she was talking from the prison camps and saying, well, at least it's Russians doing this because if it were Germans, there'd be no hope. With Russians, there's always a hope because they're inefficient. And she's Russian talking about it. Hitler is he's talking about annihilating entire peoples.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say they do it, that means Hitler forever. And that means if you're anything but a nice Aryan, Your days are numbered. Certainly have been the most massive ethnic cleanse ever in Europe.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I doubt he thought of Japan overextending in China what expertise does he have? He liked guppies. He likes studying fish in his backyard. He has no expertise. And then, of course, there's the hubris of it all, that we're going to dominate this place. And they look at the Chinese as an absolutely feckless backward place that's had all these warlord things going on. And it doesn't dawn on them that by their extreme brutality in China, the Chinese finally get it going, We're not the problem, the Japanese are the problem. And it is what the Japanese do that super glues China and is the great impetus to nation building. You can see parallels with Hitler doing the same thing in Russia and also right now Putin's busy canonizing Zelensky and creating a real nation out of Ukraine that's never going to forget these Ongoing events”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagreed and he didn't disagree for a long time that he would be assassinated or proclaimed deranged, and he had a perfectly good underage son to be used as a figurehead. He knew that he couldn't do much about it. At the very end, when he decided he was about to get nuked, that's when he intervenes to break the deadlock and at the cabinet meetings. And there are a variety of people at the very top who realizes it's over.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fight another day. In Japan, you're a failure. And therefore, if you go and come home back as a failed soldier, you bring dishonor to yourself, your family, your locality, anyone you are associated with. So that's why it is so difficult for them to surrender. However, by the time you get to the end of the war, they are so exhausted. Think about it. Their economy is, I don't know, I can't remember the statistics exactly, something like a tenth of our economy. They have something like a thirteenth of our, I can't remember what it's coal or steel production, and they don't have any local oil production. They're importers of food and they're not getting that food. So by the time you get to 45, they're exhausted. And it's a shattering that occurs. And finally, at the very end, you have Emperor Hirohito, who knew full well earlier if you just”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. It's because it's a different culture. So in Japanese culture, you belong to in-groups or out-groups. So the biggest in-group the Japanese belong to was Japanese people and everybody else. But within Japan, you come from a province, a locality, et cetera. You go school education, various places. You belong to a job wherever you have, and there are various units within your job. And you owe loyalty, its obligations. In the West, it's all about liberties and my rights. In the East, it's about obligations to other people. And so you owe obligations to all of these organizations. And when soldiers are thinking about war, they're not thinking about grand strategy. They're thinking about operational success. So the moment you as a soldier start losing a battle, instead of in the West where you can retreat, you can surrender, and it's not dishonorable because you're going to live to...”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, A, I don't know, but B, Japan had been at war since 1931 in China. They had been sending large armies. This isn't like recent U.S. wars, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is they're sending hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Manchuria. The Chinese don't give up. It goes on and on and on. So by the time you're getting to 1945, it's a long time. Also, they had committed atrocities in China and they knew all about it. And the atrocities got even better. When there were wounded Japanese soldiers, their commanders ordered their fellow soldiers to execute them because they didn't want cripples going home. They couldn't deal with them there. And so rather than have the Allies pick them up, they executed them in place. Can you imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about this?”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the United States did not put the people of these countries on death ground. The leadership had self-put themselves on death ground by where basically the problem for a tojo hide is if he backs down on anything, he's out of office and then he doesn't know what happens after that. So he personally is on career death ground and possibly he thinks, well, we're planning to that he would get executed at the end of the war. But the Japanese people eventually figured But the United States was never going to put the German people, start massacring them in the way that the Russians massacred the Poles when they moved in. The Germans massacred the Poles. How do you wind up with eight or nine million Polish deaths in World War II? Think about that's a large number. It's because they're massacring. They're being massacred.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the time you get to the end of the Civil War, where you have northern armies, or at least those people have been all over the country, they have a real sense of nation by the end of that one.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Okay, 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 who didn't leave their apartment buildings are being leveled by Russians. Ukrainians think, aha, you know this idea that we can coexist with these people over. And our irony is Putin's forging Ukrainian national identity. And wars often do this. In the United States, we start out with our 13 colonies and they're all very different after the Revolutionary War that starts forging a national identity.”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Griffiths translation of Sunzu, 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...”
2023-10-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source