World War II. Like the workhouse and the Black Death, it has a social significance and a warning for us of our own collective mortality; but politically it is of decreasing importance. Compared with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the end of European imperial activity in Africa and the Middle East, the massed and individual events of World War II have little bearing on our actual lives.

Let's take Japan as an example. For all its pumping up and industrial input, as the United States' critical Pacific barrier to Soviet expansion, Japan is now the least dynamic of the Far East producing nations. It is the newly confident Indochina states - Malaya, Thailand, the two Koreas - that trouble and entrance Western business minds: and India and China themselves that attract Western investment. That's investment, not donation.

Back in 'The War', Japan as a foe spread like a murdering virus through South East Asia. By tank and bicycle they cut through the British Empire to the borders of Bengal. Only the standard American tactic of chucking bucketfuls of troops at an enemy until they win by sheer statistical assault dammed the flow.

So the unstoppable enemy is stopped. Then it's a rapid turnaround and point them at the Soviet Union as the watchpost of the Pacific Rim. Money and culture are poured into the rehabilitation. As the Soviet Union disintegrates the rehabilitation of Japan is suddenly complete and the country, stuck out in the Pacific with only a history of isolationaist superiority and the taint of Western toadying for company, is left to watch over China's hunched shoulder as industry and commerce explode among the dark jungles Japan so briefly owned.

To our parents Japan was terrifying death. To us it was stunning technology. To our children it is...some interesting comic books?

If world politics and economics show little regard for the upheavals of World war II, the same certainly applies to the knee-jerk reactions - social and political - that succeeded the ends of hostilities. In Britain, however much we mist over at the mention of the Spitfire, it is the events of the post-war years, the ultimate victory for the working and fighting man, that mark the greatest legacy of World War II: and illustrate most clearly to me the slide to fusty history of World War II.

Free health care for all is historically a freak occurrence, while the financial protection of a grateful state is traditionally only afforded to a few heroes. The romance of the National Health Service and the attendant social welfare structure is not the equality of a world where illness is no longer a thing one can afford or not, but the notion that free health care and the welfare safety net could ever be anything other than the state's largesse. We tell ourselves it is a right; but only for that generation that struggled at home and on the battlefields through World War II is it an earned right: and rights have to be earned (even the 'rights of man' are earned by being men, i.e. human, and not behaving like animals).

The health and welfare services are nothing more than state charity for anybody born after rationing (and if that means nothing to you, ask somebody older - and thank you for illustrating my point). Just as any lord of the manor in times past might have chosen to support those less well off, so the state chooses to do so now. The difference of course is that the lord used his own money (however objectionable his means of raising it) where the state uses the taxpayers' money. If you pay taxes then the National Health Service isn't free...it's cheap, but it isn't free.

The whole issue of social welfare is under the scrutiny of left wing politicians we have come to expect to leave well alone. Its time is passing. Japan inspires little scrutiny; its time is gone. World War II: are we ready to let it go?