Empire’s Bloody End

[Draggingtree]

1. Empire’s Bloody End

JUNE 2023BY ALAN J. LEVIN

A Continent Erupts: Decolonization,
Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955

by Ronald H. Spector

W. W. Norton 

560 pp., $40.00

This excellent account of East and Southeast Asia in the 10 years after the end of World War II is a follow-up to Spector’s earlier work, In the Ruins of Empire, which dealt with the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender. It is blunt, honest, often unpleasant, and, at least by contemporary standards, sometimes politically incorrect in its implications and judgments.

The period of decolonization was not one of a simple fight between justice and injustice, or against “white supremacy” or Western imperialism, nor was there a clear-cut conflict between Communist and anti-Communists. Nor were the regions involved “dragged” into the Cold War. Rather, the Cold War was, as Spector puts it, “invited in.” Struggles for independence were crisscrossed by fighting about who would rule after the old masters left. Many minority ethnic groups believed with good reason that their European rulers had protected them against persecution and worse by the ethnic and religious majority.