The Second World War was hailed by its winners as a triumph for justice, liberty and democracy. So it was, insofar as a rival victory of the dictatorships would have created a new Dark Age such as Churchill warned of. Yet the Allied cause was fraught with embarrassments and ironies, notable among them the determination of the old European empires to retain their own hegemony over half the world and its peoples.
Western assumptions of cultural and racial superiority remain unpalatable to those who suppose that only the Nazis and the Japanese treated conquered peoples as Untermenschen. As viceroy of India in 1900, Lord Curzon asserted, “The millions I have to manage are less than schoolchildren,” and in 1945 plenty of British, French, and Dutch people still clung to this view.
