Misguided Figures

Reviewing Christopher Hitchens's autobiography, Ian Buruma writes:

But if modern Japanese history must serve as a guide to our own times, Hitchens might have mentioned a different category of misguided figures: the often Marxist or formerly Marxist intellectuals who sincerely believed that Japan was duty-bound to go to war to liberate Asia from wicked Western capitalism and imperialism. They saw 1941 as their finest hour, the moment when men were separated from boys, when principle had to be defended, when those who didn’t share their militancy were disloyal weaklings. These journalists, academics, politicians, and writers were not all emperor-worshipers or Shintoists, but they were believers nonetheless. The man who emerges from this memoir is a bit like them: clearly intelligent, often principled, and often deeply wrongheaded, but above all, a man of faith.

I had honestly never thought of this comparison for those neocons who still identify as part of the Left, but it is a very apposite one. Until the tide of the War turned, the revered General Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, fought with the Japanese on this very basis. 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.