I’ve been quite horrified this week to see the almost complete lack of moral sense - or certainty - in our commentariat (including the BBC, the worst offender, but also ITV and Channel 4), over the subject of VJ Day.
It’s as if we’ve been entirely removed from the moral anchors that have established our civilisation and society over centuries. All I’ve heard this week (apart from veteran’s memories - remembering their sacrifice and of those who did not come back is a good thing, of course), has been an abysmal parade of ignorance, most notably on the moral question: ‘Was it right to fight the war, and end it in the way it did?’ We’ve even had extraordinary bleating about the need to ‘hear both sides’ and to allow the ‘victims a voice.’ Do you mean the 20 million victims of Japanese imperialism? No, of course you don’t: you mean the victims of American immorality and aggression in dropping the bombs. Spare me. Its the same abject lack of moral clarity we have about the terrorism continuing to be waged by Hamas against the people of Israel, Palestine and Gaza. I’ve had to turn off the TV and radio more than once this week, to regain my breath. We are truly lost.
No, its not racist to celebrate victory against Japan. There’s a telling moment in the new mini-series of Richard Flanaghan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North in which the older Dorrigo Evans is confronted by a young journalist, who questions his memory - and therefore his morality - because she’d been to Japan and met Japanese and they were nothing like the ones he remembered from the war. Her post hoc view was as valid as his, apparently. We are living in precisely that moment, folks, and its a terrifying one.
Forgive me for having the temerity to do what our leaders and those of our Churches should have been saying this week, rather than posturing about Hiroshima and the end of the war with Japan. Its a subject I have been immersed in since 1990 when I first started studying and writing about the war, especially that in the Far East, and of meeting veterans, both Allied and Japanese.
What should we do on VJ Day? In a word, we should REJOICE!
We celebrate not just the victory, but because of the peace it brought.
We should rejoice in the way that folks did across the free world on 15 August 1945: there was no moral ambiguity about the need to end the war, and do so quickly. There was a war to be won, a war started in terrorism and by state terrorists, who’s war aims were fuelled by hatred and blood.
We opposed them because of this, not to replicate or copy them. The moral basis of our actions were vastly different to those of the aggrandising militarists in Tokyo.
The Allies fought the war to bring about peace. They didn’t fight to conquer or destroy. They fought to bring an egregious war to an end. Many soldiers I have interviewed, here and in India, told me that they fought specifically and deliberately to bring about a new world.
The suggestion that the way in which the Allies forced the war to a denouement was wrong, is morally perverse. War’s moral purpose was to defeat an aggrandising tyranny, rescue Japan from militarism, free its victims - millions in East Asia - from slavery, and secure a lasting peace. War is horrible, of course, but in its response to Japanese aggression in 1941 (and from 1931 in China) our purpose in fighting - moral, physical, intellectual and in every other respect - was to end the war.
There we are, BBC, ITV and Channel 4, it wasn’t too difficult was it?
Thank you Sir for always managing to speak up for those who gave everything. My late Father Robert Wilkinson made it through the second World War. Leaving his RAF. Regiment service in India and Burma behind, but bringing back the nightmares he suffered for years later. I remember all too well as a child my Mum consoling him after such dark nights.
Thank you to the Greatest Generation!
The USA today is still using the Purple Hearts they minted in anticipation of the monumental casualties they expected in invading Japan. Rejoice indeed that the atomic bombs forced Japan's surrender and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Not to mention Japan's post-war turning it's face against the naked imperial aggression that had led it to that point.