Ben Bruce Blakeney: Challenging the colonial status quo in Asia, and the continuing difficulty of a truly international law

Abstract

Oklahoma native US Army Major Ben Bruce Blakeney was a member of the legal defense team at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which, along with the Nuremberg trials in postwar Germany, was a turning point in the development of international law. In his defense of ‘the cause of Japan’ (also the title of one of Maj. Blakeney’s IMTFE clients, former foreign minister Tōgō Shigenori’s memoirs—which Maj. Blakeney helped translate and edit), Maj. Blakeney attacked the legitimacy of the IMTFE and many of the actions of the United States before, during, and after the Greater East Asia War. IMTFE justice Radhabinod Pal agreed in part with Maj. Blakeney’s arguments, finding all of the IMTFE defendants not guilty on every count. Justice Pal had also been influenced in his thinking by trials of Indian National Army officers who had worked with the Japanese military in the attempt to end British colonial rule in India. In this essay, I examine the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist nature of Maj. Blakeney’s defense strategy, arguments made at trial in the Indian National Army officers’ defense, and the legal and political foundations of international law more generally, concluding that international law is largely Western colonialism and imperialism in legal disguise, and that, as such, truly international law remains a distant dream.