The rape of Nanking

¶ … 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.

Subsequent Revisionist History and International Complicity

Chang makes another important comparison between the Nazi atrocities throughout Europe and those perpetrated by the Japanese in China. Specifically, in the decades following the conclusion of World War II, the new German nation that eventually emerged from the physical devastation of the country and, more importantly, from the moral bankruptcy of having embraced, supported, and made possible the implementation of Hitler's racial hatred and the murderous atrocities it inspired. Naturally, certain Germans never accepted responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust, even denying that it ever occurred.

However, the official German government did acknowledge the troubling history of that nation before and during the Second World War and eventually made at least some reparations long after the fact to many of the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. The era of Nazism and of the Holocaust is taught to German schoolchildren as part of the history of the nation, complete with government-sponsored visits from the relatively few remaining survivors so that today's German youth can still hear the truth about that period of German history directly from some of its victims.

Chang devotes considerable attention to the degree to which honest acknowledgement -- even in a purely factual sense, let alone in terms of any acceptance of moral responsibility -- has hardly been the case in Japan. Unlike in Germany, the Japanese government has not acknowledged responsibility or embarked on any educational use of the well-documented atrocities, even in a historical sense. In many respects, the entire nation of Japan has always maintained a position similar to the relatively few Germans who always refused to acknowledge what occurred in their nation. Contemporary Japanese History textbooks still conveniently omit any meaningful or accurate reference to Nanking.

Finally, Chang also outlines another disturbing component of the international response to the Japanese atrocities in China in the subsequent decades. Specifically, she explains that there was a tremendous difference in the manner and degree to which the international community (and the U.S. In particular) insisted in prosecuting justice and historical accuracy in connection with the Rape of Nanking and the European Jewish Holocaust. Whereas Western authorities pursued prosecution of Nazi war criminals relatively earnestly, no comparable effort was made to do the same in connection with Japanese war criminals, except those involved in the murder of Allied prisoners of war. Chang explains that the developing Cold War between East and West and the geopolitical strategy of the U.S. In relation to maintaining Japan as an ally and as an economic partner throughout the second half of the 20th century played a significant role in this deliberate differential in reaction to the respective atrocities.