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Radhabindo Pal (1886-1967), the great Indian jurist, was the only one out of 11 Allied justices who handed down a not-guilty verdict for Japan’s wartime leaders in the Tokyo trials of 1946.

Not because he was in denial about Japanese war crimes; he recognised the severity of acts such as the Nanjing massacre. Rather, he insisted that Japan’s wartime leaders “should be acquitted on all charges” because it was farcical for America and Western colonialists - the droppers of the atomic bomb - to sit in judgement on the Japanese.

In his 1,235-page dissent, which was banned under the US occupation of Japan and only released in 1952, Pal criticised the treatment of Eastern war crimes as somehow more unusually cruel than Western acts of war.

Why China matters

Kerry Brown: The importance of China in solving our main global problems

BACKGROUND

• The poison infecting China

• The farce of bashing China's human rights record

• China is losing the human rights race

• How experts replaced intellectuals

Eco-imperialism is alive and well and living in the West

James Woudhuysen: The West's pleading with China to cut carbon emissions bursts with ulterior motives

Today, history is being repeated as farce - or rather, farce is being repeated as even bigger farce.

The lowlife double standards that informed Western views of the vicious Easterner 60 years ago are being rehabilitated in the modern era by human rights activists, who are calling on Western democracies to put pressure on China over its occupation of Tibet and its human rights abuses.

The West has no moral authority to lecture anyone, including China, about rights and democracy. Respect for liberty is at an historic low in Europe and the US.

Here in Britain, the right to jury trial has been curtailed, Habeus Corpus has been obliterated, and free speech has been curbed through the creation of new thought crimes (see the Racial and Religious Hatred Act).

European elites are increasingly uncomfortable with – if not hostile to – the idea of democracy. When the Irish dared to reject the Lisbon Treaty they were widely discussed as uneducated, ungrateful ‘plebs’ and ‘clowns’ who should be forced to vote again.

Human Rights Watch wants Gordon Brown to pressurise China over its antics in Tibet. Yet Brown is one of the chief cheque-writers for the destruction of Iraq, which has left an estimated 400,000 people dead. It’s like asking Rose West to opening a halfway house for young runaways.

Why would anyone want Brown, Bush or Sarkozy, all of whom have shown a naked disregard for fundamental freedoms and international stability, to “educate” the Chinese? People in the moral gutter cannot take the moral highground.

The message of the human rights activists seems clear: while the West occasionally makes “mistakes” – in Iraq and Guantanamo, for example – the East is more naturally wicked. Consider the words used to describe Chinese officials who abuse human rights : they are “evil goons”, “thugs”, “robots”, even “retards”.

In short? “Our” human rights abuses are blunders; “their” human rights abuses spring from a culturally ingrained (a PC term for “racially driven”) wickedness.

Human rights campaigners are unwittingly rehabilitating the White Man’s Burden in relation to the East. That might allow Bush and Brown to feel momentarily superior, but it will do precisely nothing to develop democratic rights in China.

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Join the Debate: Read Minky Worden on how China is losing the human rights race

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Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked