from their encampments and unleashed a new form of terror on suspected Japanese collaborators—or “running dogs,” as the Communists termed them. Kangaroo courts tried them, and angry mobs took over the region with vigilante justice. Distinctions between criminality and ideology blurred. The civil conflict was precisely the pretext that the British Military Administration needed to reassert colonial control in Malaya with its own form of liberal imperial harshness.[96]
