Did humanity learn the right lessons from WWII?

Memory depends on the present as much as on the past. They say history is written by the victors. For the West, World War II was the good war, the defeat of fascism. But across Africa and Asia, the millions who fought returned to new forms of rule. I think an atrocity sometimes can be a necessity. Was it the case that many more American lives would be saved when there is evidence which shows that the Japanese were preparing to surrender? Today's debate, did humanity learn the right lessons from World War II? I'm Mohamed Hassan and this is the Doha Debates podcast. I'd like to welcome our guests. Patrick Porter is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham. Daqing Yang is an associate professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. Carol Gluck is a professor of history at Columbia University. And Tarek Ali is the author of Winston Churchill, His Times, His Crimes. A very warm welcome to the four of you. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. This is going to be an expansive conversation about possibly one of the most written about events in human history. Patrick, if I can begin with you, what would you say is the narrative that we're taught about World War II today? Quite a lot of people learn in the West and at times in the former Soviet territories in Russia that World War II was a good war, the good war, and that it was for the old British Empire, the redeeming war, that if the empire had to go, this was a good cause to burn it on. The problem is that war is never good. It can be just, it can be defensible, it can be a lesser evil. And one problem here, the idea of World War II as a good war that gives clear lessons, clear strategic lessons, clear moral lessons. Well, we've cut and pasted that quite a few times since then. At Suez, at the Vietnam escalation in 66, Iraq 2003, and now still Iran. And that's gone pretty badly. There's something wrong with that. There's something wrong with that idea that World War II is a template for everything. In many respects, it's an anomalous war. It's an unusual war. And most wars don't end that decisively or that clearly. It had very different outcomes. I think it was an important victory over fascism. And that's, we don't lose sight of that. Thank To look on war as a positive, virtuous thing, I think is very dangerous. And it led us into a lot of defeats ever since. When I say us, I mean the West. But of course, this is about a global perspective. you And I'm also from Australia, where there's other things going on as well. Tarek, why do you think World War II is remembered as the good war? for Well, I think the main reason is that the Third Reich that. was run by an incredibly nasty fascist regime, which decided to wipe out its Jewish population, which attacked Slav people as Untermensch, which punished gay people. I mean, there's a whole number of things that that regime did. So it is now remembered as the anti-fascist war. And the war against fascism, which if one looks at it totally objectively, I've always felt that there wasn't just one war going on. There were a number of different wars that were going on. The first was, of course, the unit trying to defeat the Third Reich. But then the question arises. Had the Germans, had Hitler, not decided to invade and start invading parts of Europe, how would it have gone? If the Japanese, as some of their strategists were suggesting, hadn't decided on Pearl Harbor. And that particular thing, and instead, you know, gone as some were suggesting and tried to invade Russia. I mean, the plan was for Hitler and Hirohito to meet on Russian territory to celebrate their big victory. So it was a war that, you know, did go wrong, but it was a war that could have gone anyway. But the war that is barely talked about. And which always surprises me, even now it's a bit better, but I mean, I would argue that the war actually began with the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in '31, and that the war became a proper war with the occupation of China by the Japanese well before it started in Europe. And I mean, we'd had the Nanjing massacre, hardly talked about, but In my opinion, the second worst massacre of the Second World War. I mean, if you take out the genocide, it's the biggest massacre. Carried out with viciousness and brutality, with Hirohito's uncle actually leading, and hardly talked about these days. I mean, if you look at all the big history books that came out in the 50s and 60s, I think there are two lines on it. I mean, there's nothing in Churchill's account of the war about Nanjing. The American historians have added a few paragraphs here and there, nothing much. A number of British books in the Second World War don't even mention what took place in Nanjing. So that war, that made it a world war. It wasn't just, it's much, much broader. Then the First World War, you know, Japan participated in that, too, on the side of the allies. But what it did in the in the occupation of China is hardly ever mentioned, quite honestly. And that's outrageous, in my opinion. So if you look at the war, I would say that there were at least three wars taking place. One was the war, you know, which is now brought into prominence, the anti-fascist war. The second was a war by the Axis powers for more space. Each of them had this argument. We need more space. The Japanese said, we're growing. Look at China. It's got a huge amount of space. Hitler said, look at Europe. There's lots of space there. Daching, how is World War II remembered in Asia specifically? I grew up in the city of Nanjing. And it was not taught when I was a child. So this memory of the war keeps changing depending on the political ideological circumstances in the country, but also worldwide. So to answer your question, I think, yes, in recent years, there's a revival of interest in World War II. Thank In China, for example, this theme of anti-fascist global war is very much the theme, Thank whereas in the past, it's the emphasis on the communists. You mentioned the revolt, so to speak. They were the true defender of the nation, you you. whereas the nationalist government Thank very Pursuing a surrender list policy vis-a-vis the Japanese. On the other hand, in other parts of Asia, much. you I think in Japan in particular, the war has been remembered. very Through the stories of their victimization, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the bombing of the Japanese cities. Thank much. So we are talking also about different modes of remembering in different countries. Could you run us quickly through what exactly happened in Nanjing? To give a little bit of historical context, Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China. When the war started in July 1937, you. The Japanese army quickly overran the Chinese resistance. So the government decided to retreat westward, inland. But they did want to put up a fight in Nanjing. So for the Japanese, they wanted to bring about a total surrender of the Chinese regime so they would make a showcase of their capital city of the resistance. And what happened is the city was encircled with its Chinese soldiers. Many of them took up their armed uniform. Many of them surrendered, hoping that they would be treated humanely. There were also a lot of civilians who were caught in this crossfire. So the Japanese commanders in the field, They essentially allowed their local troops units to massacre tens of thousands of surrendered soldiers as well as civilians caught in this operation. And there were a number of Western missionaries and other personnel, including a certain John John Rabe from Germany, from Siemens, I suppose. Who actually recorded some of these atrocities and also a few Western reporters who stayed in the city for the first few days actually made a revelation to the world. But as you pointed out that for many years it was forgotten, so to speak, even in China itself. The German Rabe, his letter to Hitler was quite strong. Saying, get your allies under control. I mean, it's an astonishing letter written by the head of the German mission in Nanjing to his boss in Berlin, saying this is unacceptable. Of course, not realizing or not knowing that the Germans were about to do the same thing in Russia. But the letter was certainly very strong. And Iris Chang, whose book on Nanjing is very crucial, in my opinion, refers to him, ironically, but correctly, as the Nazi Schindler. They saved lots of lives, the Germans in Nanjing, all the space he had within the German compound. Refugees were taken in by the German Nazis. So it was the massacre was, according to his description, was horrendous. And the descriptions of rape. Again, from young girls above the age of seven and eight to the age of 80, every single day. So this wasn't just an ordinary massacre. It was a massacre with intent, crush them, so they never rise again. Carol, if I can bring you in. I want to talk about this idea of memory. And we've heard about these different wars, these different competing narratives. Why is it that we don't have a collective memory of World War II? It's been eight decades now. Because, well, there's two things to say. First of all, there was a war between nations, and each nation has a national narrative, which is centered on its own nation. And refuses, even after more than 80 years, to accommodate the perspectives of other nations. So it's the nationness, the national quality of memory as it's taught, history as it's taught in the schools or in public debate. In every country, there's a strong story. It's usually one sentence long. Austria is the first victim of Nazism. The Japanese are a people embroiled by their leadership in a wrong war, etc. Every one of these stories, or the U.S. and Britain, the fighting the good war, those historical one-liners are actually formed during or right after the end of the war, and they have terrific sticking power. So the first thing that has to happen is that that has to be complicated. And how is it complicated in the second instance? It's complicated by other people in these various nations wanting to be in the story because those original stories leave almost everyone out. So for the United States, the Japanese Americans were not in that story. They were interned in camps. The All over the world, most of the people in these different countries are not in the story. So the first thing you have is that there are groups in each of the countries you that want to expand the story so they have their place in it. very To complicate the story, this is not an easy process and it very often takes decades, sometimes a half a century for this to happen. much. Memory depends on the present as much as on the past. And so something has to change in the present. After 1990, the end of the Cold War, German reunification, the end of the Soviet Union in 91, the end of the Cold War in Asia, You have a resurgence of war memory, a retelling of World War II. In Poland and Hungary, all of the Eastern Europe countries, because they are coming out from under the Soviet narrative of the anti-fascist war and telling what for them was a double story of anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet occupation and war. And in East Asia... After the end of the Cold War, which meant for Japan two things. China had been rising in economic and political power, and the end of the Cold War meant for Japan that the United States was not the only relevant power in their foreign relations. And Asia, the presence of Asia, which had been in many ways ignored in the public story, there was no China War. In the Japanese story. The Japanese story started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. That's how they define the beginning and end of the war. And there's no accident in that. So the China War that Tariq mentions, which began already in 1931 with expansionism and 1937 with total war in North China. It's not in the story, partly because, or maybe more than partly because, the U.S. was occupying Japan, and the U.S. story of the war was the Pacific War. And so in Japan, what was in fact an Asia-Pacific War, and more a China War than anything else. It became known under the name of the Pacific War, which was the war the U.S. had fought against Japan. That doesn't work after China becomes more powerful and the U.S. becomes not the only important country for Japan in international relations. The difference now, as everyone points out, particularly since last year, the 80th anniversary of the war, the end of the war, is that the generations who experienced the war and their children and even grandchildren, Memory is passing on. So what happens to the war memory when there is no living memory, so to speak? It made me think as well of the way in which the U.S. in particular, as one of the victors in World War II, deliberately sets about reframing the memory of Germany and Japan as essentially victim populations taken over by terrible criminal thugs who had to be beaten so that they could be rehabilitated as buffers against the Soviet Union. So it's not a simple matter of America claiming sole credit, it's a matter of actually rehabilitating former enemies into convenient buffer allies. The Himmerod Memorandum of 1952, I think, where the German military hierarchy I met in an abbey with Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor, and said, if you want us to rebuild German military power, you're going to have to retell the story and redeem us from this charge that we're complicit in genocide. No, no, this is the honorable German army against Nazi criminals, and you have to make that distinction. And only under those conditions will we agree to rearm Germany at your cooperation. And then that is then signed off by Dwight Eisenhower, the president. So everyone has a stake in telling this lie. Uh, and I'm not even saying that as a criticism, I'm saying that as the politics and very similar point and my colleagues here will know more about this than I do, but the way in which America was deeply complicit in the Tokyo trials in rehabilitating Emperor Hirohito as the innocent ceremonial bystander, when he'd been up to his eyeballs in atrocities. But that suited the kind of the innocent sun emperor as the kind of convenient myth on which to build a foundation for a new democratic pro-Western Japan under Western sort of protection. And that then also goes into this, this bleeds into this other question, which is not just Who makes the sacrifices and who is the most worthy, but actually how the victory is won. And these, these to me are actually different questions and a very simple point, very quick point. It would have been very hard for the Western allies and for the Soviets to fight the war alone. There was an interlocking of efforts. The red army does most of the sacrificing and the combat front and we, the Western front couldn't have survived without that. But the Red Army is not much good if it's not supplied, fed, transported, equipped, all sorts of vital factory elements, all sorts of transport equipment, all sorts of tins of spam and millions of pairs of boots and rolling stock and locomotives. And it's actually very hard politically once you've got a Cold War raging to make that point. Tarek, that question about who gets the credit for the victory of World War II, it's something that is very bitter. In your eyes, who should get the credit and who shouldn't get the credit? I think Patrick is right. It was an interlocked war. And there is absolutely no doubt that had the Red Army not existed or had the Stalin-Hitler pact continued, Hitler would have taken Europe. There was no way in which the European armies could have resisted the Germans without the At the same time. The American war industries were absolutely crucial in supplying both the Soviet Union, which they did. People aren't always aware of that. So I would say, ironically enough, that the key people involved who played a decisive role were the United States and the Soviet Union in that sense. The Russians, of course, in terms of casualties, suffered horrific 11 million civilians killed, civilians, and the actual casualties of the war were more than that. And they did sacrifice a great deal, and that's why memories of that war are used by Vladimir Putin today. World War II killed more than 60 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. That's a first. In 20th century warfare, if there were more civilians, as many civilians killed as military. And one of the lessons allegedly learned was that we don't do that kind of bombing anymore. Instead, we have smart bombs or drones or whatever. And it turns out, of course, this is a lesson we have unlearned because the great, the civilian casualties in the so-called smaller wars that have been almost continuous are huge. Not to mention Gaza, right? But all the way through. So this whole idea of what's necessity and what is morality in war is something that is never fully solved. It's never fully solved. And you can see that by other means, militaries are now able. Handily to kill, mostly civilians, because so much of the fighting is actually in cities in the wars of the 21st century. So I think it's important to not get moralistic on one side or the other. I agree. Because also I do think... That you have to put yourselves back in the, I mean, I'm not a fan of Bomber Harris, particularly, but I do know that they put a little statue to him up in London in the 1990s, which I thought was a bit late for that. Thank On the other hand, I think there is a challenge to memory of the bomb. An example I'll give you, well, let me say in general that... you In terms of war memory, the Second World War, the narrative of the atomic bomb for is the one that's changed the least in more than 80 years. And I would argue that's true in every country, that. whereas many of the other memories have changed. And the two most remarkable, and remarkable because they are so incomplete, are the Japanese memories of the atomic bomb and the American memories of the atomic bomb. The Japanese remember... The bomb. And they remember the bomb as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki giving post-war Japan its mission for peace. Right. So for the Japanese, the atomic bombs are the beginning of the post-war commitment to peace. Right, right. For the Americans, the atomic bombs, and this is the sentence, the atomic bombs ended the war and saved American lives. The argument was that if we use the atomic bombs, we will save, and there were lots of estimates. Both things could be true, right? Both things could be true. America's motivation was… It certainly can be true, but it wasn't thought about. So the Americans, what the Americans do… The atomic bombs ended the war. So the Japanese, the atomic bombs began post-war peace. Americans, the atomic bombs ended the war. The Japanese, that means they're each telling half the story. The Japanese are not telling the story of the aggressive war that brought... The ending in the atomic bombs in the first place, and the Americans do not tell the story of what it meant to be victims of atomic radiation or the onset of the post-war nuclear arms race. So you've got two countries committed to this day to half the atomic story, half the nuclear story. Can I offer a slightly different, slightly overlapping, slightly different account of the ending of the war in Japan and Asia? But I don't think that the discussion that was on the table, particularly reading people like Richard Frank, et cetera, a lot of recent evidence has come out through signals, intelligence, and the magic intercepts which we now have. The discussion that was on the table in a very divided Japanese elite was not a surrender. It was whether to entertain a compromise settlement. And that's a very different thing strategically, morally. It wasn't that they were thinking of doing what they ended up doing anyway, but only many more are dead. It's they wanted, even to have, even to be in the conversation, there would be no war crimes trials, no occupation, and I think no withdrawal from conquered territory. I need to check that last one, but it was very much. It was the emperor. And the, of course, the emperor. That's the most important. But to preserve unapologetically. the same power, with the same people around the emperor, that gang, that elite, with no crimes trials. And that then raises a very non-trivial question if you're America, and even if you are thinking about it, is would you, would it make a difference to negotiate, to cut a deal with a power that then might do another Weimar, Third Reich, you know, an incomplete Unsettled war with an unbroken regime. I think that's an important question because that can mean many more dead in the future. Secondly, I think the problem, you're absolutely right, that the Soviets coming into the war, which is so crucial. One of the problems, this is a really important logistical problem, that even if and when they do, the Soviets haven't got amphibious capability sufficient. Japan is preparing, whilst they are having some discussion about a settlement, they're also preparing a furious defense of the home islands, which will take an opposed landing ...on difficult terrain against... Even at the most conservative estimate, a war that will take many hundreds of thousands of lives, probably more, and that's just Japanese, not including Americans, that will be very bloody. For the Soviets to get into that, it may well take another, at least, let's say another year, of the most unimaginable Okinawa to the power of X, which is exactly what obsessed Truman, by the way, looking at what happened in Okinawa and wanting to end the war without that kind of price tag. I think it's hard to rule out an atomic diplomacy angle. They do want to impress the Soviets at Potsdam. They are thinking in those terms. But I think it's a harder issue than... The atomic bombings were unnecessary because there was about to be surrender on the way, in which it happened anyway. I don't think that was really on the table. I think there was a there was a different set of options, a different set of possibilities. So what happens then after the dropping of the atomic bombs and the surrender and the end of World War II was this initiation, this coming together of much of the world to create institutions With the stated aim of preventing this kind of explosion of violence again, and part of that was codifying international law, the Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention, the idea was that this was going to prevent the world from coming back to this arena again in that way. Dacheng, do these institutions fulfill their duties ultimately? Well, I think it's in some ways, if you look at another institution, United Nations, the Bretton Woods system dealing with collective security, economic security, I think it worked to some extent. At least also thanks to nuclear weapon mutual assured destruction, we haven't had major power power. Conflict, armed conflict since then is often during the Cold War, through proxy wars. One of the lessons I think I learned from World War Two is that, you know, the Great Depression, economic chaos can quickly lead to, you know, regional conflicts, the rise of extremism. So the global economic system, I think, worked to some extent. But as you mentioned, the international law has been violated. There are still civilian casualties. And to some extent, you could say, you know, the victor's justice sentiment has not been eradicated, that, you know, if you can win the war, you don't have to follow the rules. So it's, I think it's a mixed bag. We'll That's my answer to your question. Some worked, some didn't. Patrick? It's a great question. Well, I have a darker view than that about be right The states and the regimes that rule the world since whenever, not because they're bad, but because we live in a state of anarchy where no one's going to look after us. It's a world of ruthless self-help. back. If we look at what states do when they think they can get away with it, where they are undeterred, you look at the levels of violence that happen after the war in kind of more localized conflicts, whether it's Algeria, whether it's Korea, or whether it's Afghanistan. There are not major power wars for a very simple but very hard reason, is that for the first time, because of the nuclear revolution, there is a terrible stalemate. Tarek, what does the world under the rules-based order look like after World War II? The rules-based order worked up to a point, but not for the big parts. The United States were never interested in the rules-based order. They used it, obviously. They used it when they could, but they were very clear it didn't apply to them. As recently as, you know, a couple of decades ago, when they passed a new bill making sure that it was clear that no U.S. soldier could be tried in a foreign court. We see it in Okinawa today. American soldiers who do whatever they do in our court have to be tried by a court martial or by a U.S. court. They can't be tried by the Japanese. Basically, in front of the world's eyes, we've been seeing the Israeli assault on Palestine, on Lebanon, on whatever, not sanctioned by the U.N. And there's nothing that can be done about it because the big parts are on different sides So it's a continuation. The Cold War and, you know, the question does arise, why should this Security Council that is there at the moment exist in the present form? I mean, these are the victors and the French being put there was really Churchill's doing. The United States didn't want it for obvious reasons. And the reasons they didn't want it was because they thought France had not fought in the war And they were right. I mean, the resistance which we talk about in which movies have exaggerated was deeply heroic. But the actual fact is that a majority of those who fought in the French resistance were not ethnically French. This is a figure which surprises people. But it's absolutely true. And who were they? They were Italian refugees from Mussolini, Spanish refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and Franco, huge numbers, and then all sorts of migrants who lived there and felt threatened by Hitler. Armenians, Algerians fought in the resistance to help France. And the figures just don't add up. So partially the revival of the French and giving de Gaulle the importance he got was even though Churchill disliked him intensely, he pushed it through. He said it was necessary for Western interests, and on that he wasn't wrong. I don't agree with him, but he wasn't wrong. So this whole business of the UN. And then, you know, if you look at the map of Europe today, why should it be France and Britain for that matter and not Germany? And why shouldn't Japan be a member of the United Nations as well as a major part of these? Why just China? So these are things that have to be tackled, and no one is particularly interested in. In tackling them at the moment, and that is why the rules-based order, I mean, the thing that has done the most, I think, to be totally, you know, try and be totally objective on this, is the failure by anyone to stop what's happening in the Middle East. You know, people watch, it goes on and on. The aim was to preserve a nuclear monopoly. By the powers that had nuclear weapons by the 50s, the United States, the Soviet Union, I mean, Britain had a few things handed over to that. They couldn't do it. The Chinese fell out with the Russians because the Russians refused to give them nuclear weapons. I mean, that was a major cause, by the way, one major cause of the Sino-Soviet thing saying, you're letting us down. But that is now all gone, you know, we have, Israel has nuclear weapons, which is why the demagoguery will be crushed. Doesn't work. You never try and totally attack and destroy a country with nuclear weapons. North Korea is still around nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan have nuclear weapons They know a full-scale war. I mean, it's the same country with borders, and their peoples will suffer extremely if this happens. And the irony is that if Iran had nuclear weapons, it probably wouldn't have been attacked the way it was. Harold, how do you see the post-war period from this lens? Well, there's so much to say about what you've all said. One thing I would say about the UN, this is another clear to my mind example of how the The past and the present. Don't work very well together because that Security Council, those are the five alleged victors in the Second World War. When the 20th century began, there were 50 nations in the world. By the end of the 20th century, there were almost 200. And most of them are everywhere else in the world, now known as the Global South. Well, uh, And so it's a mismatch of past and present. That said, there are aspects of the post-war international order that came out of World War II that have to be acknowledged as historical facts. And one of them is there were real changes in international law. It doesn't mean that that law wasn't violated, but we do have an international criminal court. Rape was defined as a crime against humanity for the wartime rape for the first time in human history in the preamble to international criminal court. We do have, I'm not talking about war crimes tribunals now, I'm talking about the aftermath in law. We also have a whole range of civil law in which victims... ...of past brutalities are suing in class action suits for compensation. These are private citizens, that never happened before, suing either their own governments or governments of other countries. So there are some legal outcomes that didn't exist before. The international human rights regime, no matter what you think of it, is a product of the Second World War. So you had the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the same year as the Genocide Convention, and human rights became an issue in international politics as human rights, which it had not been before. Did this solve lots of problems? No. No, but they are new aspects in the international arena that didn't exist before. And the, as by the way, the definition of genocide. Another thing that comes out of the war that's international is this, what I call the global memory culture. The idea, this sort of politics of memory, that there's a certain way you're nations are supposed to deal with their bad pasts. They're supposed to acknowledge and recognize. They're supposed to compensate and restitute. They're supposed to educate the next generation. They're supposed to apologize. I mean, the idea of heads of states apologizing to other heads of states was as remote an idea as any Martian notion in 1945. And yet, by the 90s, those are things that were expected. So, I think that... The changes that have to take place or are taking place are consonant with the changes in the present. They're just too slow, right? I mean, we're not going to be able to change the Security Council. So you have to move to other aspects of the international sort of landscape to make things happen, which is what you see with the many multilateral, bilateral, middle power type kinds of... of ...agreements or interchanges, whether they're trade or security. So we're moving toward a different international world order. Better or worse, it's not likely to be either unipolar. It's not going to be bipolar, probably not unipolar either. So what we have to do is... you. Try to live in the present a little bit more, but without saying that the end of the international order of the sort that came out of World War II is the only international order possible or even desirable. Patrick, I wonder what you think. Where are we right now? If it's the end of this post-war order, or are there still some of these institutions that are surviving and are still leading the world forward? Well, I don't define order in terms of institutions. I think those are byproducts and the results of the arrangement, the arrangement of power. The rules are a byproduct of who's in charge, including the self-exemption from rules, which is the most defining thing of who's in charge, right? So when people say the end of the rules-based order, I don't think there can be such a thing. You can't have a rules-based order when there's no ruler, when there's no Leviathan above, apart from the most dominant powers. What we're in now is something much simpler and much more brutal, which is the end of the dominance of one colossal state. We grew up with that expectation of growing up in Melbourne. We lived in an American lake, unchallenged American lake, whatever, however boring and annoying life could be, we'd be all right. And that bred a certain kind of sentimentality that we'll always be all right. And there'll always be this great and powerful friend who is altruistic. And we're living through the crumbling of that into something else. In fact, the problem is we're going back to historical normality, and we're not used to normality. We've lived the dream of unipolarity. For some people, that was a very nightmare, but we're into a different thing now. But it's not because this institution or that rule rises or falls. So my thing is that people, whilst acknowledging that there can be some gains, of course, they should never fall prey to the idea that there's anything other than a ruthless self-help world. Well, they should not be sentimental about other powers. That is the only way to survive. A very quick anecdote. Chris Mullen, the British MP, was speaking to Vietnam's former foreign minister, and he said, when you intervened in Cambodia to stop the genocide, to stop the killing fields, to defeat the Khmer Rouge, why didn't you go to the United Nations Security Council first? And the Vietnamese... A former official said, well, we thought about that, but then we remembered that four of the five permanent members of the Security Council had invaded Vietnam in the past 50 years. So we don't regard the United Nations as having the same authority as you do. And I think we should all be a bit more like that in our awareness of power politics. I think a way that we could bring our conversation to a close is that I want to revisit two things. And one is about collective responsibility and the memory of that. And, and that. kind of marries itself with the idea of the memory that's being lost with the generation that lived through these experiences, that lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, that lived through the nuclear proliferation, that has moving on now. And you have a new generation in Japan, in Germany, in a lot of these places that are young, that are ambitious, nationalistic. What is the lesson that they should be learning that we might be losing now because of this generation that's passing? Yeah, I think this speaks to the development of collective memory in Europe. For example, there's efforts to create a sort of pan-European memory that not only draws from the war experience of Western Europe, but also brings in Eastern Europe, which is not an easy process. The idea of bringing German troops back to Polish soil would be unthinkable without this effort to create a sort of collective memory or reconciliation. Unfortunately, this is lagging in my part of the world, East Asia. If anything, the war memory is feeding into the mutual suspicion, animosity. I think you're absolutely right about this realistic calculation. But I would like to add a bit more, namely how people view the other. Also matters, right? Including leaders, but also the public as well. So this is where the history education, the memory culture, the effort to create this kind of collective memory that transcend nationalism is a difficult tall order, but it's still worth trying. It's one of those measures to deal with this transition that is so uncertain. I say something else. Of course. So World War II resulted in, actually, the end of empire in East and Southeast Asia, eventually the end of empire in Africa and other places, so that by the 60s, you have a whole lot of those new countries I mentioned before. Those post-colonial nations, independent nations, Many of them were very much affected, some of them profoundly affected by the Second World War. So Indonesia, as you mentioned, declared independence the day of the Japanese surrender, and its leaders had fought already with the Japanese on behalf of Indonesian independence. So for Indonesia, World War II is independence. For Singapore, World War II for a very long time was the defeat of the British on February 15th, 1942, and that's the day they celebrate as National Defense Day today, okay? Okay. For Kenya and Senegal and all of the British and French colonies in Africa, they sent tens of thousands of colonial soldiers to fight. For the Allies in the Second World War, as did South Asia, India, Pakistan. These people were fighting, the people from British colonies were fighting in Burma, African colonies. Those colonial soldiers who fought valiantly and in numbers of total hundreds of thousands, went back thinking their countries would be on the road to independence. They also went back thinking they deserved the pensions that they're... That the other militaries of their countries deserve. That includes the Taiwanese and the Koreans who fought for the Japanese Imperial Army. They didn't go back to liberation. They went back from liberation into occupation, if it was Korea or Japan or Austria or Germany. Or they went back into liberation into war. Colonial wars lasted. In many places, the long war in the Netherlands and the Indies lasted until 1949. You could say the long war in Indochina lasted until 1975. Ahs So that these long roads to independence, they were continuations of World War II, the colonial wars. you so So I think looking back at the Second World War, remember that most of the world doesn't see the world we see it. much That's a really fantastic point. And before I end with you our conversation, for Tarek, Patrick, what do you think briefly having the lessons that we should be taking away at the end of this conversation? Well, for me and for many others, whether whatever part of the world you're from, World me. War II is the culmination of something we're seeing again today, which is the aggressive return of various forms of utopian, moralistic, crusading thought, whether it's the new man Whether it's the attempt to create the Aryan Empire or whatever it is, and the wages of which often being the concentration camp or the gulag, or at least just disastrous wars that go wrong. Because we are also prone to this, the kind of naive idealistic militarist utopianism, which has led us into this Iran disaster. And so if I had any wish, it would be that World War II was only actually navigated and survived, for those who survive it, ultimately with kind of tragic compromise and careful thought and means ends thinking and a kind of intellectual and moral discipline. And so I would like, if we could take one thing away, it would be perhaps to be less, not us, but those who make decisions, to be a little less moralistic in terms of the absolute certainty that they are right and therefore they're going to win and quickly. And finally, For me, the central issue of this century is... China and the US, the two big powers now. So the question for me is, is the United States going to be able or wants to, or sections of the society or the elite want to, use their military strength, as they've done in relation to other countries, against the Chinese to topple the economic rival aspect of China? Or will they? do some form of coexistence deal. You know, you have your world, we have our world, which is a return to the previous century, but in a very different condition, that it's now effectively Thank two powers at work. And if you look at the Chinese defense strategists who are writing, Till now, and I stand to be corrected, you I haven't read a single text by a serious Chinese commentator very which It demands or suggests even that China is a global power much. and will rule globally, will control the world. It is still couched in very defensive language. Don't interfere with us. Don't antagonize us on Taiwan because Tibet they've already dealt with in their own particular way But let's get on with it and use our worlds and not even think about any conflicts and struggles. So this is, I think, increasingly the question. That is being discussed in both countries. Thank you very much, Tarek, Carol, Daching, and Patrick. Thank you very much for listening at home. Of course, we want to hear what you have to say about many of these conversations, whether it's World War II and its memory, or nuclear proliferation, or what is happening today in Iran and China. So please share your thoughts with us in the comments below. I'm Mohamed Hassan, and this has been the Doha Debates podcast.