I refer to the letter ' The difference between Chin Peng and Japanese investors ' by A Kid Then, and wish to contribute my discussion to the issue.

According to the writer, "Chin Peng, during World War II, did fight the Japanese alongside the British, but it was a marriage of convenience. Each used the other for their own objectives - the British to keep colonial rule, the other to take over and form a communist Malaya. I do not see his role as fighting for his country. He was fighting for his party".

I do not see anything wrong in the military cooperation between CPM and the British in fighting the common enemy of Japanese imperialism. If A Kid Then reads history broadly, surely he would empathise with CPM and the British at that time - the Japanese had massacred millions of Chinese since the September 1931 Manchurian Incident and the July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident.

One must be really apathetic not to be infuriated when the Japanese attacked and invaded Malaya, Singapore, the whole of Southeast Asia and later attacked Australia.

In politics, especially international politics, "making use of each other" - or building alliances - is normal and necessarily in times of grave crisis.

Another point that A Kid Then does not seem to realise is that in 1948 when the so-called Emergency began, there was no independent Malaya, or Malaysia, for him to speak of "we" or "this country". Every party, including Umno, was fighting for itself and, by extension, independence. A Kid Then should not read the present back into history.