The majority of Koreans and Indo-Chinese, and of Asiatic peoples generally, have seen the wars in quite a different light. To them they have been civil wars, in which the Issues were political, social and economic. On the one side were ranged the forces of revolution, on the other those of reaction. In Indo-China it seems clear that without French intervention the Viet Minh would have long ago become the established government of the greater part, if not the whole, of Indo-China. As the only organised resistance movement under Japanese occupation it had in fact, at the end of the war, become the effective government, and was recognised as such by the allies. The complicated and unsavoury story of the break-down of negotiations between Ho Chi Minh and the French for the settlement of their future relations reflect little credit on the French. Had British policy in India been followed by France, these relations would certainly not have been worse than they are now, and they might well have been as mutually satisfactory as those between Britain and India. In any case, a tragic and useless war would have been avoided.

This, however, is not to say that without the intervention of the French there would have been no bloodshed in Indo-China, civil war was almost inevitable, as it was also in Korea, even without the artificial frontier there. Indeed, the basic conflict in both countries, as in China, has been an internal one, a conflict of interest, classes and ideologies. It is internal in the sense that the opposing groups belong to the same race and nation, and those who seek change as well as those who oppose it are thinking in terms of their own society. On the other hand these conflicts are International, or at least Asian, in the sense that similar clashes in more or leas clearly defined form are occurring throughout the East.

Paradoxically, it is the West which has inspired the revolutionary forces of Asia, both in the broadest sense and in the specific character of the movements. Not only did the West bring to Asia its conception of political and social reform, but the present leaders of Asian revolution, including Ho Chi Minn, were educated in Europe and acquired most of their ideas from the study of, and association with, the radical movement of Europe. And if some of these, again including Ho Chi Minh, took their advanced training, so to speak, in Russia, the Russian revolution in its turn had been directly inspired by Western thought, and its original leaders by their Western contacts and experience.