Collateral

During the course of their most well-remembered battle for self-preservation, western liberal societies committed acts which I have always considered to be atrocities, even though the question of whether they were avoidable or excusable is surely more nuanced...Dresden, Hiroshima etc.

It always used to bother me that my parents and many of their generation took a rather absolute line on this. The enemy was evil, representing a clear existential threat and compassion for their citizen victims was to be muted at best.

Cross-generational family arguments ensued.

And now that generation has largely passed, I still think it is wrong to withhold one's empathy for the civilian victims of conflict, no matter how fundamental it seems, yet I remain very wary of the "both sides" equivocation, which was used to very ill effect here in Central America during the era of civil wars.

In the case of the Japanese empire one can detect clear precursors of the fallacious notion that it's not brutal imperialist conquest if it is not Europeans doing it.

This has been adopted very successfully by the Arabs, in particular because the Europeans themselves have been encouraged to internalise  this myopic historical perspective.

A new existential threat faces generations of westerners with no direct household memory of amoral totalitarianism. Like my parents and their friends they are, sadly, going to have to learn to calibrate their sympathies for those caught up behind the aegis of the wicked, unholy holiness of demented ideology.