”For most non-Europeans, the war was not a struggle for democracy, but a conflict between empires”

Truly global view of World War II https://t.co/aCbpzXhPIC 第二次世界大戦をイデオロギー闘争ではなく帝国間競争と見る。日本帝国とイギリス帝国は何か違うのだろうかと。ラナ・ミッター氏が評者。

— mozu (@mozumozumozu) November 6, 2021

Truly global view of World War II Richard Overy has done a signal service with this compellingly written, impressively researched book BOOKS October 2021

For most non-Europeans, the war was not a struggle for democracy, but a conflict between empires

both Britain and France were undertaking an “awkward double standard” in their defence of democratic values, as their Asian and African possessions “rested on a denial of those liberties and the repression of any protest against the undemocratic nature of colonial rule”. While this argument has been made before (not least by figures such as Nehru and Gandhi in India at the time), Overy does something unusual and revealing: he compares the western empires with Japan’s justification for its own imperial project in the early twentieth century.

 Britain committed colonial massacres (Amritsar) and deadly repression (Mau Mau). So did Japan (the rape of Nanjing, invasion of Manchuria).

Britain’s empire also created an aspirational middle class full of cosmopolitan nationalists, and drew on ideas of loyalty to recruit its subjects to fight in world wars. All these things are also true of Japan, which like Britain was a multi-party democracy for much of its period as an overseas empire (between 1898 and 1932), and whose capital city was an intellectual hub for political activists from across Asia.

In comparison, the Japanese drive for empire was murderous and brutal, but not genocidal. It was Japan, rather than Germany, that was the more conventional empire-builder

Ideological wrangling may have occupied the minds of the wartime leaders, but “geography, ideology and propaganda, military culture” all fell by the wayside when, in the words of one American engineer in the Pacific, it was time to “KILL, KILL, KILL.”

Rather, it is to raise awkward questions about the major wartime goal of preserving empire, which has too often been treated as secondary to the language of democracy and freedom.

　アジア人の側からすると、例えば、アメリカ人があの戦争を民主主義をまもるための正義の戦争だった、とマジで信じている・・・・ことが笑える、というか、信じられないんだけど・・・マジなんだよなああ。

　だから、米軍性奴隷問題とか、原爆による大量市民虐殺問題とかにーーごく一部の識者を除外すればーーーリベラルジャーナリストも含めていまだに直面できていない。 

　フェミも出羽守も・・・情けないよなあ。

　第2次世界対戦の勝者は勝ったゆえに戦争を反省する機会がなかった・・・いまだにない・・・恐ろしい話である。

（歴史問題）