文章基本信息

标题：Nations in the looking-glass: the war in changing retrospect, 1945-2005
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作者：Ethan Mark
期刊名称：International Institute for Asian Studies Annual Report
出版年度：2005
期号：38
出版社：International Institute for Asian Studies
摘要：In the beginning, it was simple. Or at least it seemed that way from so many different national vantages that it was hard to dispute. The war in Asia had been a war between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ and while opinions in different places varied on who exactly to count among the good guys, in places as politically and socially diverse as China, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, India, the United States, Korea, and the Netherlands, there was strikingly little disagreement over who the bad guys had been, at least at the national level. Even as the fragile ‘anti-fascist’ alliance of the wartime Allies (and their colonial subjects) gave way to the stark global oppositions of the Cold War, even as bitter colonial wars flared up in Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere, anti-colonial nationalist leaders, (former) imperialists, peasants, government officials, businessmen, capitalists and communists around the globe - including a substantial number of Japan’s own citizens - could agree on this as few other things: Imperial Japan had been the villain of wartime Asia. Promising to lead Japan and Asia to a brighter future free of Western domination, but harbouring a hyper-imperialist and ‘ultra-nationalist’ sense of racial and cultural superiority and a brutal indifference to human life and dignity, the marauding Japanese - like their fascist allies in Europe - had brought only oppression, death and destruction to Asia and, ultimately, to themselves. Against these enemies of civilization, freedom, and progress, war with the Western Allies and resistance from the peoples of Asia had been the only possible recourse.