Colonialism

Having exhausted his list of cliches and recycled a stack of banalities, Walter Russell Mead (“Bashing the Japan Bashers,” Opinion, June 4) attacks the British with an outburst of scandalous revisionism.

Specifically, he refers to British colonialism as one of “unparalleled cruelty,” and in the next sentence dismisses Japanese colonial atrocities as being “on a smaller scale.” Now I hate trouble his thesis with historical facts, but in one summer in Nanking, Japanese troops slaughtered more than 300,000 unarmed people. That is more civilian casualties than the British incurred in two centuries of ruling two-fifths of our planet! And has Mead even passing acquaintance with the history of Europe’s other colonial powers? Not to mention the United States, which came into existence through raping and exterminating one Indian nation after another.

Indeed, democracy is Britain’s most successful export, and in this league it is unchallenged. Currently, 2 billion people live in freedom in countries that were formerly colonies of Great Britain--hardly a legacy of “unparalleled cruelty.”

MICHAEL WOODMAN

Los Angeles