Racism: The Two Faces of Empire
The Allies may be regarded as the 'good guys' of the Second World War, but the hypocrisy apparent in their treatment of colonial peoples drove many subjects into the arms of their enemies, as Mihir Bose explains.
The Second World War is well established as the classic fight between good and evil. We all know who the goodies were, yet the war saw many people choose to favour the baddies. They argued that they had to do so as the goodies had skeletons in their cupboards that made them not much better than the baddies and sometimes worse. These choices were made largely in Asia by leaders of countries fighting to be free of Western colonial rule. Given the mountain of material the war has inspired, you would expect historians to tackle this subject with some frequency. Yet it has merited little attention, particularly in the West.
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