Liveblogging The Lifting of the White Man's Burden

Professor J. Bradford DeLong has posted an editorial from the Economist, September 3, 1939 as Europe slid into war.
An excerpt follows, emphasis added.

These, then, are the four principles of peace: Democracy, an International Order, Restitution and Generosity. Their translation into precise details is a matter which cannot now be undertaken. But there are certain points to which it is essential that we should all now commit ourselves as publicly as we can, while our visions are still unclouded. There must be no annexations of German territory and no indemnities. There must be disarmament, but no expectation that Germany will remain disarmed while other nations are armed. There must be a genuine sharing of colonial benefits and responsibilities through the widest extension of the mandatory principle. There must be a new League of Nations, with the hesitations and half-commitments of the old removed. There must be an end of the more senseless forms of economic nationalism.

In the madness and the agony that is to come, we must cling fast to these principles. Only so can we be quite sure that, in defending democracy, we shall not betray it, and that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built.

What is the "mandatory principle" referred to above?

Following WWI, the League of Nations established a system of "Mandates." In theory, the Mandate system had the benevolent intention of preparing the "natives" of various regions for self government. In practice, the granting of mandates often represented nothing more than the granting of spoils to the different victorious allied governments. The basis of the mandate system was Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which gave broad authority to the mandate powers regarding preparation for self-rule.

"Colonial benefits" - what are those? The ideology of colonialism is that Europeans (and later the Japanese) were shouldering the burden of civilizing the rest of the people in the world at great cost to themselves, the fact that there were benefits to the colonizer, that the very reason for colonialism were these unspoken benefits was not commonly spoken of.

The fact is that Germany, Italy and Japan were latecomers to the colonial game, and so the empires they desired had to come at the expense of the existing ones, and that was the root of World War II.

"The freedom we fight is for" is "freedom for all men" - so Africans and most Asians were not fully human. The colonial benefits, the Economists editors hoped, would continue beyond the conclusion of the great war.

Let us remember that the "evil" Axis powers and the "good" Allied powers were two sides of the same coin, both fighting for control of the system of exploitation of what is now called the third world.

Notice that colonialism was perfectly compatible with "freedom", "democracy", "capitalism", "free markets" etc., as those were conceived of in 1939. Let us remember then that these words in scare quotes mean only as much as is put into actual operation. Whatever the existing order is, the masters of that order will talk of it in terms of "freedom" and "democracy". (In the Cold War, both the West and the Soviet Union claimed to have "freedom" and "democracy"; the dispute was over the economic system.) In 1939, 30 million Englishmen might sing the praises of "freedom" and "democracy" even while denying it to 300 million Indians.

World War II utterly annihilated that evil system, and the world breathes freer today. Had Hitler not incinerated so many people in his death camps, World War II might be even now known as the Great War Of Liberation (though liberation was an entirely unintentional consequence of the war). I suspect in the long term, when history is not dominated by European preoccupations, that is how the cataclysm of WWII will be remembered.