REVIEW / THE WORLD AFTER WWII

Sixty years later - how the world has changed, and how it hasn't

 

In the intervening years since August 1945, almost a lifetime, the world has changed beyond recognition. In other ways, cultural and political tensions simmer along fault lines all too familiar to earlier generations

By PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

Beijing _ World War II concluded with two thundering atomic blasts and a muted surrender plea from Emperor Hirohito, enjoining his loyal Japanese subjects to ''bear the unbearable'' as American troops, uncompromising and impatient after the agonies of the battles of Guadalcanal, Saipan, Guam, Leyte, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, closed in on main island Japan.

In the past six decades, the world has witnessed undreamed-of advances in computers, telecommunications, medicine, technology, art, film and architecture.

The Third World broke free of colonialism, China experimented with communism, and the Soviet empire waxed, waned and crumbled.

The unprecedented wealth and cultural confidence of America bankrolled both the sublime scientific victory of landing a man on the moon and a brutal, brutish and unnecessary war in Indochina.

Now as then, Japan and China remain obsessed and fearful of one another, doubts intensified as their relative strengths as economic and military powers show signs of reversing.

The United States is still the world's biggest economy as well as the leading power at sea and in the air.

Back in August 1945, the uranium and plutonium bombs dropped on Japan represented the net sum of all atomic weapons on earth.

The Cold War did nothing to inhibit the terrible new technology; rather, it led to the production of thousands of new nuclear devices thousands of times more powerful.

Long after the war's end, the victim nations of Japan's stealthy, cruel but tactically brilliant southward advance continue to suffer from political upheaval, conflicted loyalties and severe dislocation.

The peoples Japan sought to subjugate, civilise and then in a last minute fit of desperation, liberate still show signs of political disorientation. The Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and Burma remain mired in poverty, the beachhead of indigenous cultural tradition inundated by wave after wave of intense intervention from the outside, whether it be colonialism, fascism, communism, anti-communism, terrorism, counter-terrorism, globalism or commercialism.

In post-colonial Asia, new forms of foreign intervention have complicated political life, not the least of which is accommodating Pax Americana and all the bases and attendant troop deployments it requires.

China, and its ethnic Chinese allies in Southeast Asia, initially backed anti-Japanese and later anti-American liberation movements in turn, only to unceremoniously drop the idea of exporting revolution and instead opting for capitalist exports instead, embracing both Japan and America as its leading trade partners.

Capitalists and collaborators, riding the waves of change, everywhere got rich quickly, profiteering on the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, riding on the coattails of those even richer and more ambitious.

The massive infusion of cash and cash-generating opportunity created all but unbridgeable social divides, economic pyramids capped by Americanised elites sitting on the shoulders of bourgeois ethnic Chinese, whose artful accumulation of capital put them a class above the massive social base of toiling peasants and indigenous indigents.

Hong Kong and Singapore, two fallen colonial cities that saw the tattered Union Jack replaced by the blood-stained banner of the Rising Sun, quickly rebounded after the war as bustling entrepots of trade and value-enhancing labour.

Both remain politically constrained and economically adept, continuing to compete above weight class as vital centres of trade, industry and intelligence.

Thailand, now as then, is the quintessential Southeast Asian country different from the rest.

One of a handful of countries never to suffer the depredations of colonialism due to favourable geography and the wit, wisdom, perfidy and luck of its early leaders, it continues to excel in diplomatic flirtation and political flexibility, somehow managing to convince each of its three most powerful suitors _ the US, Japan and China _ that each alone is Thailand's true love; its alliances with others merely affairs of convenience.

The recently concluded free trade agreement with Japan comes on the heels of increased logistic support for American forces and heartfelt celebrations of 30 years of friendship with China, illustrating an amazing balancing act that goes on and on, keeping all contenders at arm's length without resorting to battle or causing unnecessary offence.

Given such finesse, it is doubly tragic to see Thailand being ripped apart from within, nowhere more obvious than in the violence-wracked deep South, by an inattention to diplomacy, balance and artful dialogue.

The cultural confidence, instant expressions of shared humanity and knack for finding common ground that Thais exude with foreign visitors is sadly lacking in Thai-on-Thai relations at home, where class arrogance, intolerant intervention and incivility to the poor and disenfranchised looms large.

The United States was, by war's end, indisputably the richest, most powerfully armed and technologically advanced nation on earth, and though its relative power has waned, it remains the sole superpower in a complex, multi-polar world.

Germany and Japan, whose wholesale embrace of fascism and racist aggression caused tens of millions to die in Europe and Asia, have arisen from the abyss of criminal cruelty and the ashes of defeat, to become the two of the wealthiest, most democratic and technologically advanced countries in the world, despite still being technically occupied by American troops.

The world in 2005, no less than in 1945, is encircled by a vast ring of US military bases, illustrating America's contradictory impulses; fighting for freedom, bombing for democracy, waging war for peace, ever-ready to intervene and overthrow with the aid of modern weaponry.

And sixty years on, American aircraft still own the skies, screeching and skidding across the planet as self-appointed celestial peacekeepers.

But the fuel the high-flying jets burn with abandon, like the fuel that turns to smoke, particle exhaust and smog in Asia's car-clogged cities, ultimately comes out of the ground and therein lies the Achilles' heel of Imperial America: Oil.

Historians generally agree a precipitous shortage of oil was one of Japan's key motivations in making a pre-emptive attack on Pearl Harbour and advancing south to Singapore and beyond, a strategy designed to secure resources and control vital Asian sea lanes.

It is thus disconcerting to witness, 60 years after the folly of Japan's aggression has been laid to rest by America, to see America itself engaging in pre-emptive strikes and ambitious geo-political positioning in hopes of pacifying corruption-fuelled Islamism while continuing to extract oil from Arabian deserts.

Russia today is geographically diminished and considerably more restrained in its foreign policy ambitions than was Stalin's USSR at war's end, and the demise of Stalinism may be considered an unambiguously positive development, though a weakened Russia no longer serves as an effective counter-weight to American imperial pretensions.

Instead, China, the victim of endless external aggression and reckless self-inflicted social experiments, the bamboo-curtained ''sleeping dragon'' of yore has unified, self-strengthened and opened up at last to play a role commensurate to its immense size, thwarted ambitions and storeyed history.

The rise of China, while reviving age-old antagonisms with Japan in both the physical and psychological realm, marked by offshore territorial disputes and Beijing's growing impatience with Tokyo's increasingly convoluted attempts to escape historical blame, is overall a constructive and stabilising element in the region's economic development.

Along with an amoral trade policy that fills the gaps left by America's unevenly moralistic one, China has quietly assumed, along with a united Europe, a role as balancer to US ambitions while serving as the centre of gravity for a rapidly modernising and prosperous Asia.

Taiwan and Korea, bearing deeply mixed memories of Japanese colonisation which improved infrastructure but heightened isolation, remain hyper-sensitive flash points that could, on short notice, precipitate Chinese, Japanese or US armed intervention, which in turn could set all of Asia on a course to war, causing global integration and prosperity to unravel in a fortnight.

Those mindful of history have a good chance to avoid repeating the dreadful mistakes of their elders.

That is why it is so important that people like Akiba Tadatoshi, the mayor of Hiroshima, has called on his own country to own up to its mistakes in waging war over half a century ago, while criticising both US unilateralism and Islamist terrorism for the violence they bring to the world today, making an entreaty to all countries big and small to rid themselves of the terrible technology that levelled his city in a single flash.

On this sober anniversary, it is encouraging to see the world has not forgotten, to hear the far-sighted voices for peace, whether it be monks or scholars or statesmen or soldiers.

Men and women of this troubled age need not only to reach for the sky, for space, for exploration, for art and science, but also need to reach beyond the narrowly defined and confining national, ethnic and religious walls within which we are all accustomed to live.

PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM is a writer and political commentator.