Iris Chang's account of the Rape of Nanking massacre

¶ … Iris Chang, the Rape of Nanking: The forgotten Holocaust of World War

New York: Basic Books, 1997. By ____ June 8, 2012.

The book the Rape of Nanking: The forgotten Holocaust of World War II presents a tremendously disturbing historical account of an atrocity committed during wartime that rivals even that of the infamous Nazi Holocaust that consumed more than 6 million Jewish civilians throughout the entire occupied region of Europe during World War II. To use the phrases rivals is not at all to suggest equivalence in scope, because there is no dispute that the Jewish Holocaust resulted in approximately twenty times as many victims. On the other hand, in terms of senseless brutality and the depths of absolute inhumanity of man toward fellow man, the Rape of Nanking, as the occupation of that historic Chinese city came to be known, exceeded even the incredible brutality of the Nazi extermination camps and treatment of the Jews in their systematic slaughter throughout the war.

Whereas the Nazi atrocities were designed to achieve a specific purpose, albeit one that shocks the conscience of any normal person, the Japanese atrocities perpetrated in China were utterly without purpose other than the intentional infliction of suffering on noncombatants. Crudely put, even most of the Nazi's wartime atrocities were a "byproduct" of the means to achieve the objective of a national psychosis that violated the most basic tenets of humanity. Meanwhile, in China, there was no equivalent "objective" at all for the atrocities committed by the Japanese military; instead, those atrocities seem to have been the objective.

The Scope of the Japanese Atrocities in Nanking

In the United States, the book Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946) has been a fixture in middle school education since its first printing, initially, as a magazine article to commemorate the first anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the conclusion of World War II. The fact that more than 100,000 civilians were killed in an instant has always been regarded as one of the most horrific aspects of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and, three days later, on Nagasaki, killing approximately half as many civilians in another instant. Likewise, the fire bombing of the German city of Dresden and of Tokyo have been regarded as the other most troubling moral decisions faced by the Allies during the war.

Chang immediately puts into perspective the scope of the massacre perpetrated against Chinese civilians in Nanking by reporting that the number of civilians brutally killed by their Japanese occupiers exceeded the death toll of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of both Dresden and Tokyo, combined. In fact, out of city of nearly three-quarters of a million people, the Japanese murdered approximately half that many. The fact that they did so in less than two months and after as many as half of all the city's inhabitants had already fled only magnifies the horrific nature of the events.

In essence, the Japanese managed to kill Chinese civilians at much faster rate than even the Nazis did and without any of the industrialized mechanisms for doing so introduced by the Nazis. Moreover, whereas the Nazis eventually settled on the industrialization of murder in a factory-like process as much because of the psychological toll murder in such volume exacted on even the most fanatical, battle-hardened and racial hatred-indoctrinated Nazi "SS" soldiers, the Japanese soldiers described by Chang's historical narratives seem to have been immune even to the most basic and natural revulsion for their crimes.

Conclusion and Reaction

The Rape of Nanking is an incredibly depressing account that is as difficult to read as it is important to understand. To paraphrase the proverbial observation of philosopher George Santayana, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. In that respect, the subsequent public response on the part of Japanese society, even at the highest levels, would not seem to bode well for the Japanese people or society. Notwithstanding the fact that very few of those responsible for Rape of Nanking are still alive to prosecute or of their victims to compensate, it is important from the perspective of human history to acknowledge and appreciate the nature, scope, and, most importantly, the underlying causes of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking during the Second World War. Notwithstanding the difficulty of reading the detailed accounts, many of which come from eyewitnesses and survivors, the book is an important read, especially with respect to Santayana's observation.