Category Archives: War

Judgement at Tokyo, by Gary J. Bass

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Summary: A gripping account of the flawed and politically compromised attempt to bring Japan’s wartime leaders to justice.

The title of Gary Bass’s book echoes that of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg. Like the film, the book intercuts biographies of key participants—including the judges and defendants—with appalling accounts of the Japanese atrocities under consideration. These include the stories of an Australian serviceman who survived an attempted beheading and a nurse who survived gang rape and the murder of her friends and colleagues.

But, as Bass explores, the Tokyo trial was in several respects more legally and morally problematic than its Nuremberg counterpart. Opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948, it indicted 28 Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twenty-five ultimately received judgments.

For a start, the judges were deeply divided over the legal foundations of the tribunal, particularly its authority to punish individuals for waging aggressive war. The majority secured convictions, but never produced an entirely convincing answer to the charge that they were applying criminal law retrospectively.

Second, General Douglas MacArthur, the effective American ruler of occupied Japan, considered it politically expedient to exclude Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. MacArthur’s officials also sought to prevent evidence implicating the Emperor from entering the proceedings. Whatever conclusion a properly constituted court might have reached about Hirohito’s individual guilt, his exclusion prevented the tribunal from fully examining the responsibility of the person at the apex of Japan’s wartime state.

Third, Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731, responsible for biological warfare and forced human experimentation, received immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. The demands of American military science were thus placed above either justice for their victims or the tribunal’s professed commitment to individual accountability.

Fourth, the United States had itself carried out attacks involving the mass killing of Japanese civilians – not only the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the incendiary destruction of Tokyo and other cities. Whether or not these attacks were legally equivalent to the crimes prosecuted at Tokyo, their omission exposed the tribunal to the powerful charge that it represented the justice of the victors rather than the impartial application of universal law.

In his discussion of the Second World War in the Pacific, Max Hastings describes “technological determinism” as one factor behind the use of the atomic bomb: once an enormously expensive and powerful weapon existed, the impulse to use it became extremely difficult to resist. Hastings argues that Japan’s eventual defeat was already assured by the naval blockade, the destruction of its industries and cities, and impending Soviet intervention, although he also emphasises the ferocity of continuing Japanese resistance and the pressures facing Truman.

Robert McNamara, who served in the statistical machinery supporting the American bombing campaign, later recalled Curtis LeMay’s observation that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed, adding that both LeMay and he had been “behaving as war criminals.” His question – what makes an act immoral if one loses but not if one wins? – goes to the heart of the moral difficulty Bass describes.

Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that the Tokyo judgments proved considerably more controversial than those at Nuremberg. The most famous dissent came from the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who called for the acquittal of all the defendants. His opinion appalled Jawaharlal Nehru but was enthusiastically appropriated by Japanese nationalists, who treated it as vindication of Japan’s war while often ignoring Pal’s own recognition of the atrocities committed by Japanese forces.

Pal’s dissent nevertheless exposed genuine defects in the proceedings: retrospective law, selective prosecution, colonial hypocrisy and the refusal to subject Allied conduct to the same moral principles imposed upon the defeated. Yet those defects did not make Japanese aggression or atrocities imaginary, nor did the Allies’ hypocrisy absolve those responsible for them. That tension – between the necessity of judgment and the partiality of those presuming to judge – is the intellectual centre of Bass’s book.

As in his account of Bangladesh’s war of independence, The Blood Telegram, Bass takes a complex event of major global importance that has become largely neglected in the West and turns it into an enthralling narrative. He explores not only the legal intricacies and geopolitical hypocrisies involved, but also gives voice to their appalling human cost.

Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

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Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process

Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process. 

Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.

It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.

Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.

The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.

This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.

Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.

It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.

Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.

Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.

As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked. 

But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.

21st Century Candidates for Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

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Summary: an evolving list

Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.

As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.

Accountability — A principle once thought central to democracy, now regarded as the bad manners of social inferiors.

Betrayal — The dispatch of Caesar by his own signature methods.

Consolation — The knowledge that nits become lice.

Context — The reason a “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault.

Decency — An elusive quality discovered in Caesar only after the knives have safely done their work.

Empathy — An existential threat arising from the dastardly impulses of fellow feeling and compassion.

Gullibility — A touching belief in the stories told by plutocrats.

Hypocrisy — The art of applying opposite principles with identical conviction.

Human moment — A politician’s self-pity.

Human rights — Rights universally acknowledged until someone inconvenient claims them.

Investigation — A process for discovering that a “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.

Realpolitik — A posh name for complicity in atrocities

Responsibility — An elusive quality, once thought central to professionalism, now applied only to those without sufficient privilege.

Rule of Law — An antiquated idea, dating back to Aristotle and Sophocles’ play about that loser Oedipus, that even important people should be accountable.

Self-defence — Violence committed by ourselves.

Special relationship — How vassals describe their vassalage.

Terrorism — Violence committed by the enemy.

Tragic mistake — Violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.

Wealth — The safest substitute for wisdom and expertise in policy discussions.

Wisdom — The consolation losers derive from losing. Of obsolete utility because of wealth.

    Mikaeil Mirdoraghi on his way to be killed

    The careless application of high explosives: reflections in the shadow of the unlawful US-Israel assault on Iran

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    Summary: The myth that violence solves problems persists despite history often proving the opposite.

    At the end of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George shoots his friend Lennie. Lennie, a well-meaning but simple-minded man, does not understand his own strength or the fragility of others. So, he has accidentally killed a young woman, and George knows that if the mob reaches him first Lennie will be tortured before he dies. 

    Steinbeck understood something that popular culture often forgets: violence rarely solves anything cleanly. Yet in cinema it frequently does. From Westerns to modern action films, societies’ problems are tidily resolved by lethal force.

    Wyatt Earp invariably sorts out his society’s ills by use of his six-guns. James Bond’s liquidation of supervillains always makes the world a better place. 

    The satisfactory resolution of daunting problems through the use of violence is so commonplace a trope in cinema that it is perhaps now as deeply embedded a cultural idea in the West as that of Santa, and the Easter Bunny. However, unlike these last two myths, some adults seem to continue to believe it. 

    Put another way, in spite of the vast historical evidence to the contrary, they believe that the most complex of geo-political problems can be solved, as Eddie Izzard’s character says in the movie Valkyrie, “with the careful application of high explosives.”

    Anyone who has any experience of actual war will attest that the matter is much less clear-cut. Violence tends to be the bluntest instrument in problem solving, often ineffective and opening as many new problems as it was meant to resolve. 

    As Shakespeare warned, in war the dogs are let slip. The ensuing carnage leads to the ties that bind society being sundered, civilians being slaughtered in even the most “surgical” of military strikes, and the infrastructure of daily life being decimated. 

    There may be diverse reasons that people celebrate the unlawful 2026 US-Israeli assaults on Iran and studiously ignore the piles of children’s corpses that have resulted. What those celebrating have in common is a lack of empathy with the innocent falling under the weight of metal, and a lack of imagination about what will transpire. In particular, they fail to conceive of the legacy of bitterness that will result. 

    Violence rarely ends a conflict. More often it plants the seeds of the next one. As James Baldwin noted, “The perpetrator always forgets; the victim never does.” Societies that know little history never learn this truth. That has long been true of much of England. It is also true now of the United States. 

    Anyone who watched the Tucker Carlson interview with US Senator Ted Cruz will have been struck that US foreign policy is being made now by the spectacularly ignorant. Cruz did not even know the population of a country he thought the US should invade. 

    Such people are malicious contemporary equivalents of Steinbeck’s Lenny – simple-mindedly disdainful of complexity, absent of empathy, and contemptuous of those who are fragile before their military strength. 

    The world is currently in the hands of such dangerous buffoons, people who treat violence as a solution and assume they will never face consequences for the murderous destruction they unleash. 

    Even Steinbeck would be at a loss to find a neat narrative resolution to deliver us from their evil. 

    Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

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    Summary: Theatre in a theatre of brutal war.

    Glorious Exploits is something of a literary first cousin to Michael Hughes’ superb Country, a retelling of the Iliad transposed to the mountains of South Armagh during the Troubles. 

    Like Hughes, Lennon tells his story of the ancient world in an Irish vernacular – Dublish, in this instance – and the result is a comparable dark magic that brings to unsettling life a barbarous moment from humanity’s bleak history. 

    In the aftermath of the collapse of the Athenian invasion of Sicily two literature loving Syracuse potters, Lampo, the narrator, and his childhood pal, Gelon, take to visiting the prisoners, exchanging food for snatches of Euripides. After a while Gelon has the idea of staging a full production of Euripides’ masterpieces Medea, and his new play, The Trojan Women, with the doomed Athenian prisoners in the quarry where they are quartered. 

    Though his motives are never fully explained, one gets the sense that Gelon hopes to provoke an empathy for the prisoners similar to that Euripides encourages his audiences to feel for his tragic protagonists. This, perhaps, might save both some prisoners and a threatened portion of Syracuse’s soul as it hovers on the edge of a monumental war crime.  

    The story is based on a true episode in the ghastly Peloponnesian War, and Lennon’s imaginative exploration of it in turn seeks to provoke in the reader an empathy for the long-dead, and help understanding that war’s pities are a constant in human history.  

    Glorious Exploits is a wonderful book. 

    The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism, by Eric Lee

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    Summary: an account of how an abortive insurrection in Georgia irrevocably split the Left

    There is an anecdote in Cyril Cusack’s short book, The Humour is on Me, about a TV cameraman filming pro-British, loyalist, rioting in Belfast during the 1970s. The unfortunate journalist was set upon by a woman armed with an umbrella, offended by the fact that he was “filming things that were not actually happening.”

    Similar attitudes have surfaced in other wars and conflicts before and since, including the Bolshevik onslaught on Georgia, the subject of Eric Lee’s The August Uprising. This fine book recounts the doomed 1924 revolt against Soviet rule and the moral choices it exposed, which ultimately divided the socialist movement itself.

    Lee shows how those habits of denial, later seen on the streets of Belfast, flourished among Stalin’s defenders. He records some particularly shameful examples of propaganda from apologists for whom partisan loyalty mattered more than facts, decency, or human life.

    Lee’s book follows the chronology of Georgian history, roughly from the outset of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, through the overthrow of the government of Georgia in 1921 to the bloody crushing of Georgian independence efforts in 1924. In describing the machinations of the Bolsheviks, Lee shows that the brute force used by Stalin and his associates in suppressing Georgian independence prefigured later atrocities, including Stalin’s murderous assault on the Russian people, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.

    What makes Lee’s account compelling is not simply its chronicling of another crushed national movement, but its portrayal of a deeper struggle, between democratic socialism and the totalitarian impulses that would consume it.

    While the facts on the ground created by battles, torture chambers and execution grounds may have been decisive in establishing the nature of many Eastern European societies, the ideas that diverse leaders used to justify such violence were also of vital importance to many. 

    Trotsky, writing an introduction to one such work, noted it was composed “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war.” One suspects that, as commander of the Red Army, he might have had more urgent matters than writing a work of political philosophy. But perhaps reassuring himself of his righteousness helped him sleep at night.

    Stalin, of course, needed no such soporifics, and his own writing may have amounted to little more than execution lists. Yet, even as the corpses mounted he still had enough useful idiots, including on one occasion a delegation from the British TUC, to obey and reassert the Party’s final, most essential command, as Orwell put it, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” 

    Such fantasy-island politics can endure only so long in the face of atrocity. Eventually there must be a reckoning. In Lee’s telling, the suppression of Georgia and its social democratic movement became an object lesson for the entire European Left, showing that there could be no meaningful alliance between democratic socialists and the “red fascists”, as the German communist Otto Ruhle branded the Bolsheviks. 

    That lesson has lost none of its relevance. The temptation to mistake ideology for truth, and moral certainty for moral rightness, remains as potent as ever

    Sudan stories III: war by remote control

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    Summary: Elphaba on some disturbing new trends in the Sudanese conflict

    We are constantly learning how this obsene tit-for-tat war goes between groups who care nothing for the folks in the middle. Towns fall to one side and then are re-taken, new weaponry allows for new tactics in an unclear strategy. 

    So it is that drones this week hit Singa taking out the power supply and with it the water. I imagine a person many miles away with a computer programme and some coordinates playing an online game with lives. Of course on the ground there has been a rounding up of people suspected of guiding the missiles to their targets.

    There is a deep weariness as people say: “Ah so we’re back to that again” and for how long?My family member, Ax, says they came in the middle of the night Wednesday and it took several attempts to hit their target.  The noise sent people scurrying outside. Some left Singa again, crossing the river as they were revisited by the trauma and fear of last year. He kept the family indoors more worried about the risk of falling debris than immediate re-occupation. But that grim possibility is never fully out of mind.

    The scaling up of threats from RSF (they hit the airport that the government was boasting they would re-open soon, they claimed to have taken Fasher, they threatened cities beyond Sudan that support the Govt) and counter attacks from the government (they killed the leadership of communities in Kordofan as they met last week) seems to be in preparation for talks in the US – talks that although reported are hotly denied in Sudan. Even talking about them is risky.

    Meanwhile Ax and I mused on the differences between towns in England and Sudan: a mini tale of two cities. Where in dying town-centres in UK the shops all seem to be nail-bars, second-hand clothes shops and takeaways, in Singa  every shop is a pharmacy, mini-clinic or something medical related.

    We are hoping this latest wont lead to something more serious.  

    Sudan Stories II: Not Exactly a Getaway Car

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    Summary: second in a series of guest blogs from “Elphaba” on the ongoing war in Sudan

    There was some great excitement in Singa this week as it was announced that many vehicles had been found and owners could bring proof of ownership and reclaim theirs. Ours was a battered, old, much-loved and very unreliable crate. She appeared to have some kind of sentience: working on a whim for some and not others. Opening and closing the windows was an act of will power (no winders that worked). But she had given great service carrying sheep, produce, people and everything in between for several years before she was taken at gun point last summer

    A family member, Ax, went to see if she was there. He said the site was depressing. It was full of lines of metal shells, most with no wheels, broken windows and some with little or no innards. 

    At the back of his mind in going to look for the vehicle, apart from the fact that it is “something to do” when daily routines are still restricted, was a potential to get her back “in case we need to run”. But then you are an easier target in car than on foot. Behind this is the reality that although our family are for the most part fine, there is a thin ice feeling.

    On the 4th October a friend in El Obeid rang and we were delighted to hear all was well. The next day he rang to say that they had been bombarded with drones. Omderman has also been hit. Nothing is resolved. And South Sudan is still unravelling.

    One of the fall-outs of the war coupled with climate change (I think) has been a steep increase in Dengue fever. We also hear disputed reports of cholera outbreaks. Now at the tail-end of the rains is the malaria season 

    In the end we could not locate our vehicle. We laughed that she was never exactly a get away car, except in the sense that we seemed to get away with paying very little road tax over the years. In this seemingly endless war, the citizens who have lost most of what we think of as essentials are expected to pay significant amounts to reclaim their cars at a time that inflation in the costs of everyday needs, and the continuing devaluation of currency, bites. 

    Arbitrary Power and the Rule of Law: The UK’s Criminalisation of Protest

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    Summary: The UK government’s shenanigans around Palestine Action undermines fundamental principles of rule of law

    In 2010, Tom Bingham — former Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and Law Lord — demonstrated in his book The Rule of Law that the concept is fundamental to any tolerably functioning democracy. He set out eight principles, including that:
    • legal rights and liabilities must be determined by law, not the arbitrary discretion of, for example, ministers;
    • the law must provide effective protection for fundamental human rights; and
    • the rule of law requires states to comply with their obligations under international law as seriously as domestic ones.

    The British government appears to violate all three of these particular principles in its decision to ban Palestine Action and criminalise anti-genocide demonstrators.

    To begin at the beginning: there is no agreed definition of terrorism in international law and little academic consensus. The terrorism scholar Alex Schmid once suggested that terrorism might be considered “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” That deliberately omits atrocities such as Hiroshima, Dresden or Gaza, but it is easy to see why governments responsible for mass civilian killings might resist such a definition that makes them seem at least terrorism adjacent.

    In the absence of international agreement, terrorism becomes whatever individual governments decide it is. In the UK, the government has defined it broadly as violence against people and damage to property in pursuit of a political cause. Yet even by that standard, its application is arbitrary. The killing of close to 100,000 civilians by a UK ally is treated as legally too complex for ministers to judge, but the throwing of paint on a weapons system is not. To brand the latter vandalism as “terrorism” is to reduce the definition to a tool of political convenience — a textbook example of arbitrary discretion, and thus a breach of the rule of law.

    This arbitrariness also undermines basic human rights protections, most clearly in the assault on the right to peaceful protest. On 6 September 2025, Steve Masters, a British military veteran, was arrested while sitting in his wheelchair in Parliament Square holding a poster. He was one of 890 people detained that day. Their “crime” was not violence, but conscience: holding placards in solidarity with Palestine Action. Farcically, many will be charged with terrorism offences.

    What their protest reveals is the UK’s deeper breach: the failure to honour its obligations under international law, including its duty to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. Training officers of a military engaged in mass civilian killings, and rolling out the red carpet for those officers’ political masters, cannot plausibly be described as discouragement of genocide.

    Protesters hold up a mirror to the British government, and the government recoils from its reflection. Yet it is only the protesters who offer any hope that the UK might one day be able to face itself with any self-respect, once the atrocities with which it has been complicit have passed.