In the BBC1 programme to mark VJ day on Saturday evening, Japanese expansionist ambition was presented as a “bad thing”, to be resisted. Those who resisted it, in support of the status quo ante, faced great hardship and cruelty.
It struck me very forcibly, however, that the country of my Ugandan daughter-in-law has no equivalent celebration of successful resistance of an expansionist empire. What, pray, would be the moral or effective difference between British expansionism in earlier centuries and Japanese expansionism in the 1940s?
Let’s ask the rest of the world: do you prefer Japanese cruelty or British cruelty?