Remembrance

Did you see those pictures of the revered General Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, on the news? Until the tide of the War turned, he fought with the Japanese on the grounds that they were all Asians together against European colonialism, a position cheered on by Marxist intellectuals in the West. The fall of Singapore, one of Churchill's two great catastrophes along with Dunkirk, did in fact lead to the loss of the British and Dutch Empires in Asia and the Pacific.

The All India Forward Bloc, founded by Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian National Army that fought for Hirohito, not only still exists, but is still in alliance with the Stalinists of the Communist Party of India, with the Maoists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and with the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, a rather familiar-sounding half-digestion of Trotskyism by Bengal's pre-existing Anushilan movement of not just Hindu, but explicitly Brahmin, nationalists. They are all campaigning for his birthday to be made a public holiday, and statues of him are a common sight.

The most obvious precedent for the alliance between, in British terms, the Euston Manifesto Group and the Henry Jackson Society is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But it is not the only one.