The Geographical Pivot of History?

Where is this "Taiwanese airspace"? According to the pretensions of the Republic of China, it must be the skies above the whole of China, most of Mongolia, and parts of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Myanmar and, yes, Russia.

Like Taiwan and indeed Ukraine, Russia is of recent provenance as a middlingly democratic-to-undemocratic, undemocratic-to-democratic state. Today's anti-war demonstrations were able to be held, as would not have been the case in our beloved Saudi Arabia.

Such protests will soon be illegal in Britain, where the bundling of participants in them into the back of a police van has never been unusual. They would stand no chance against the emergency powers that have been invoked in Canada.

Ukraine, like Russia, is barely and recently part-democratic, it is Olympically corrupt, and it is highly militarised. How inextricably intertwined the two are is also evident from their violently opposed yet strikingly similar ultra-Nationalist ideologies.

As it is from the presence, at least until this week, of three million Ukrainian citizens in Russia. Eight NATO member states have fewer than three million people, which is the population of the NATO member state of Albania.

Neither all of the Ukrainians in Russia, nor all of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, are products of population transfers by a Soviet regime in which Ukrainians and part-Ukrainians were highly prominent. But what if they were? That puts their roots anything up to a generation earlier than either the arrival of the Empire Windrush or the creation of the State of Israel, although in fact these populations are often centuries older than that.

The same is true of the ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. When, as in Ukraine, they protest against the removal of, for example, Soviet statues of soldiers, then why would anyone want to take down such a monument? The ones that were simply to the Soviet Union, as such, came down 30 years ago.

Those which remain, and which have Soviet symbols on them as another of the same vintage might sport a crowned GR, are memorials to the Second World War. The people who would tear them down think that the wrong side won that War.

In the Baltic, those people are in or close to the governments of NATO members states. As they are in much of Eastern Europe, where NATO's official publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the collaborators as the liberating heroes.

Meanwhile, India, which is supposedly crucial to a maritime alliance of freedom-loving peoples against Eurasian authoritarianism, is run by the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi's Nazi-linked assassins, and it has always recognised among the fathers of the nation the likes of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of Japan during the War. He has featured on stamps six times, and on coins three times. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport is the aviation hub for the whole of eastern and northeastern India. There is also a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island. Yes, an island.

Japan is also supposed to be crucial, and it is run by people who believe, "that Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated," as well as that the comfort women were not coerced.

The first of those, at least, has been a widespread view in several of those countries at the time and since. Indonesia, as such, is a direct product of it, since the Japanese-backed rulers of the Dutch East Indies simply declared independence under that name at the end of the War.

Park Chung-hee, the dictator of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, had been an officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that occupied Manchuria. And one who always regarded Japanese as his first language and Tokyo as the cultural capital of his wider civilisation was Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected President of the Republic of China on the island where we came in, Taiwan.