Should we have celebrated VJ Day?

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day, announcing the unthinkable — the surrender of the great imperial power to the secular, gas-guzzling, unheeding West — seemed like a profanity. So much came to an end with that surrender that it is not possible to celebrate it, particularly since the method chosen to defeat Japan was nuclear-fuelled genocide, not once — which would have been unforgiveable enough — but twice. Surely the Japanese who survived that monstrous pair of bombings, both of which were without any military or moral justification, were staring at what motivated Guy Crouchback — in Waugh’s trilogy — to take up arms in the first place: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful. It was the Modern Age in Arms.’

This is an extract from A. N. Wilson's diary in The Spectator.