Inferno - Max Hastings [423]
“It is important frankly to discuss what happened in the Second World War,” he added, “because today relations between China and Japan are so poor. But there is a problem in starting such a discussion, because so few younger Japanese know any facts. There are many people who do not support our militant nationalists, but still find it offensive to endure endless criticism from China and Korea. They dislike those countries poking their noses into what they see as matters for the Japanese people. Most of us think that we have apologised for the war: one of our former Prime Ministers has made the most fulsome apology. I myself think that we have done enough apologising.” This remains a matter of debate, and some British and American people strongly disagree with Hando. As recently as 2007, the head of the Japanese air force was obliged to resign his post after publishing a paper in which he asserted the philanthropic nature of Japan’s activities in China between 1937 and 1945.
Palestine was among the lands most conspicuously influenced by the outcome of the conflict. For more than two decades of British mandatory rule, its future had been keenly debated. Capt. David Hopkinson was one among the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who passed through the Holy Land in the course of his war service, and pondered its rightful destiny. Hopkinson had a special interest, because his wife was half Jewish. He wrote to her from Haifa in 1942, expressing a hostility to Zionism founded in his belief that “Jews are of greatest value within the countries where they have been long established. I am as impressed as everyone must be by the technical and cultural accomplishments of Jews in Palestine, but for an intensely nationalistic minority to seek to carve out for itself an independent state from territories to which others also have a claim seems to be inconsistent with the high ideas of peace and humanity in which civilized Europeans believe.”
Yet in 1945, such temperate views were swamped by the ghastly revelations of the Holocaust. It is important to emphasise that, even after newsreels from liberated Belsen and Buchenwald had stunned the civilised world, the full extent of the Jewish genocide became understood only slowly, even by Western governments. But it became manifest that the Jews of Europe had fallen victim to a uniquely satanic programme of mass murder, which left many survivors homeless and dispossessed. The U.S. commissioner of immigration Earl Harrison visited the displaced persons camps of Europe and was shocked by what he found there. He reported to President Truman in August 1945: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” By a vast historic irony, Hitler’s persecution transformed the fortunes of the Jewish people around the world. It provided an impetus to Zionism which seemed to many Westerners morally irresistible. Never again would anti-Semitism be socially acceptable in Western democratic societies; and the slaughter of Europe’s Jews precipitated the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. Yet, if the Holocaust made a devastating and lasting impact upon Western culture, many other societies around the world have never identified themselves with its significance, and in some cases even deny its reality. Widespread bitterness persists that the Western powers assuaged their own guilt about the wartime fate of the Jews by making a great historic gesture in lands identified by Muslims as rightfully Arab.
There is a wider issue: some modern historians who are citizens of nations that were once European possessions regard their peoples as victims of wartime exploitation. They suggest that Britain, especially, engaged them in a struggle in which they had no stake, for a cause that was not properly theirs. Such arguments represent points of view rather than evidential conclusions, but it seems important for Westerners to recognise these sentiments, as a counterpoint to our instinctive