Sarah Paine

A, I don't know the answer because I'm not a social historian where you would really be doing – I've always – I've done more diplomatic and military, so you're looking top down.

But what you're asking is a very important question for 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 i know that the world war ii generation they came home they just didn't talk about it with their children and uh it's just not not a matter for discussion so i can't answer that of why they uh followed but you look in the west um

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.

Oh, well, it's more as someone's decided what the curriculum is going to be.