I've just finished reading a book from Iris Chang about the Rape of Nanking.

I must say, Throughout history, i havent seen as much brutality, cruelness, evil even, performed on a people.

The questions I have here to open a debate are fairly simple ones, but complicated in their nature.

1) Why isen't this attrocity, war crime, and massacre talked about more often?

2) Why is everything world war two related over-shadowed by the holocaust? and do you think this is because the jewish lobby has alot of influence on the american and european governments?

3) Why arent there any mueseums shining light on this tradgedy, and why isent anyone shining any light on the fact that people have been murdered, yes murdered, for trying to research this area in modern times?

There is actually a museum here in the states. Chinese Holocaust Museum
As well as the Nanking Massacre Museum. Link


One would obviously have to take into account that there were approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi's. That coupled with the fact that, yes the Jewish lobby is very influential in the US.

That is one museum, when germany is made to open a new one to the holocaust every week it appears..

But also, largely forgotten it seems to me, is the japanese treatment of POW's.

I think the point i'm trying to make here is, why isent japan made to pay like germany has for her war crimes?

Germany had the holocaust, and 6 million jews is alot of people. But 6 million of them werent individually tortured but were killed on a mass scale. (as horrible as it is, but I think that is what seperates the two crimes)

This is from a Japanese website, but this is a snippet of what they have to say:


Figures to countries (exluding the US) are listed on the page.

Link

Sure shuts me up thanks man.

There are thousands of Crimes that havent been recognised.

1915 Armenian Genocide most notably.
But there have been many more that dont get any attention.

In 1971 between 1-3 bengali Muslims were slaughtered by the Pakistan government.

From 54 - 62 The French massacred hundreds of thousands of Algerians in that Independence war.

Just think of the number Mao killed; some say as many as 78 million. For me, the biggest tradgedy in WW2 were all the deaths of the Russians not the Jews. WW2 is host to a lot of incidents no one cares about. The Croation Utasha killed over 500,000 serbs. We did a lot too, like Dresden and the Tokyo firebombing.

In short, the atrocities are definded as either a crime or a necessary evil depending on who you asked. Most things we do are "necessary", but anything anyone does is usually a crime

In part because it happened BEFORE what is generally considered to be "World War Two" started, i.e., before the German/Soviet invasion of Poland. Also, there is less identification with the Chinese victims and Japanese aggressors than there is with Europeans and Germans, not surprising given the fact that ours is a European Civilization, not an Asian civilization.

It is not because of a "jewish lobby", it is because it happened in the European's backyard, because a lot of the survivors emigrated to the US, because it was Allied troops who discovered it, and because the "red curtain" fell across China shortly after WW2, obscuring the legacy of Nanking in the fog of the Cold War. One final, important element, is that the postwar Japanese have essentially have shut down about the war crimes committed by Imperial Japan.

Hardly a mass slaughter there.

Bikerdad's post was right on. Let me also add that the Chinese already had a nation of Chinese. The Jews did not have a nation of Jews. The holocaust gave the zionists a strong argument in favor of a Jewish state.

Why is Japan not paying?? The Japanese government has been paying through the nose to Communist China for years, and there are many memorials to the event in China. It hasn't been very known in the West till Iris Chang's book came out in the US.

Aside from that, you read the whole book, huh? Great. Then you must be familiar with just how illogical and washed up her story is. While I don't have a copy at hand, I remember laughing out loud at one particular sentence... it was something to the effect of:

The rapes in Nanking were numerous and brutal, so brutal that not one woman has come forth to claim she is a victim.

... ooooookay, so if there are no reports, why are they assuming the rapes were numerous? Where are the thousands upon thousands of Chinese-Japanese children of the rape victims? Was every rape victim killed? Are you sure? Every single one???

There are many other obvious flaws in her book, not to mention the unsupported statistics. When the mistakes and inaccuracies were pointed out and corrected for reprinting in Japanese, Chang herself was enraged at the publishing company. She didn't want them to correct the LIES in her book? Hmmmmm... something's not right...

There are several books in English written on the topic, including "The Alleged Nanking Massacre" by Tadao Takemoto and Yasuo Ohara, which points out the many, many innacuracies in China's official stance on the incident.

No official documents have been found ordering any mass executions, witnesses' accounts contradict with one another, and all witnesses and pictures came to light AFTER Japan surrendered. All this (and more!) makes one wonder if there even WAS a massacre. Anyone that even suggests it may not have happened (or may have been less than 300,000 victims) is accused of being a "racist" or "Nazi", and I'm sure I'll get a lot of replies of that nature.

Also, if anyone can find links to some of the pictures, I'd be much obliged. I'm looking for one in particular, the one with the general holding a Chinese head. Thanks!

A lot of people who do more than dabble in History agree this is some of the most evil behavior in history. Not just that they were killed, but in the horrible manner.
I've often heard people say Pearl Harbour was attacked because we laid an oil embargo on Japan, and they were going to run out of oil in eight months. What I say is the embargo was justified. What we wished we did when Saddam started killing, we did indeed do to Japan at the right time. We cut them off as they should have been.
As horrible as this stuff was, a lot of people got dirt on them in that war. Our aerial war against the axis caused a massive loss off life, and I don't think it was all needed. We did though hold the people responsible for their governments. I don't really believe in that though, but it does make democratic people keep an eye on their national affairs.

Satsujinki - It's a fact that Nazi Germany became very upset with Japan for their treatment of the Chinese. This from racist government that probably didn't care much about China to begin with. This was long before the end of the war. You may want to look into this, so you can come to terms with what your country did.
Today you guys are the best trade partners we got, and even though you prosper; you don't seem overly greedy to me. Don't though, deny the past. This book your talking about is not history. It's one woman's version of it. Maybe your right - It may indeed suck, but she wasn't the one that told us what happened there. We Americans keep track of everything. Why do you think we got 1001 arguments for attacking our own government.

Here's an account of an American journalist who was there.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/nanking.html

One thing you may have overlooked in that article: "Civilian casualties also were heavy, amounting to thousands." (First sentence of "Civilian Casualties Heavy") Thousands? Wait, I thought this was a massacre of over 300,000 people? If this article is, indeed, 100% trustworthy, that alone would disprove the Chinese government's official stance of "300,000 killed."

I really don't think this article is very accurate, though, because the writer only relies on unverified witness accounts. For the record, there were only five Westerners in the area during the alleged time of the killings, and only 25 murder cases were officially reported by the Nanking Safety Zone Committee, none of them verified. Only two executions were witnessed personally by Westerners, and both were later found to be legal actions:

One, testified by Rev. John G. Magee, was of an incident on Dec. 17th, when two Japanese soldiers challenged a Chinese man on the street. The man ran away, and was shot. In the battlefield, such a case could not be avoided. The second one, witnessed by C. Kroeger and Hatz, of a plain-clothes man being executed near a pond, was investigated by the Safety Zone Committee, and found to be a legitimate execution.

Not that the Japanese don't keep track of everything either... If the rape of Nanking was indeed a massive military operation, why are there no documents about it in the Japanese army's archives? Wasn't it a military action?

Same goes for the Chinese. Why did the Chinese never bother to speak about this until after Japan surrendered?

Also, it wasn't Nazi Germany that was upset, it was John Rabe, the former German weapons trader in China, as well as chairman of the Nanking Safety Zone Committee. Of course he doesn't like the Japanese, because they requested that Germany stop selling arms to China, making Rabe go out of the arms business. Many of his accounts are known to be conflicting, as he sends differing numbers of casualties to different governments (to Japan, he said that 49 Chinese were murdered, to the British Embassy, hundreds, to the German Embassy, thousands, and finally to Hitler, 50,000 to 60,000). In the end, Nazi Germany disregarded Rabe's wild claims of the barbarity of the Japanese.

I don't want to sound like an infomercial, but...
I refer to "The alleged 'Nanking Massacre'" by Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo a lot, and I'd recommend it to anyone willing to hear the other side of the argument. We are, after all, a democratic country, are we not?

Well, 10,000 American POW's were killed just moving to their POW camps in the Philippines. I will use this as barometer with which to judge. That is a fact, not an opinion. The Nazi government, not just this guy your talking about were upset over the incidents in China. I've met Pacific Islanders who've given me earfuls about what's happened to their relatives.
You Japanese are incredibly smart, inventive, and a great workers; and pretty fair minded in business. I hope you don't get offended when I say the Japanese people are possibly the worst historians in the world. Your pride comes before facts, and that is wrong. Japanese entertainment refects this obliviousness to history. The fact that you try to dance around what happened in WW2 is sickening. We Americans take all our shame, to a point where we can barely be proud despite all the help we've given folks over the years. You could learn from us.

Here is a page which covers the Japanese level of denial of these incidents, along with other versions of these crimes in Asia.
http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMNJ.html#nmj

Maybe its got something to do with a feeling of guilt for having used nucear weapons against Japan?

IMHO...because we are a European dominated society. There are so many aspects of Asian history that Americans don't pay attention to, disregard, just don't know. The best example I can think of right now is up to 1999-2000 NYS required 1 year of "global studies" and 1 year of European studies (in addition to 2 years of American studies, government and economic)

that right there...says that European history is more "important" to teach and what the emphasis was...

FYI - the 2 years has been combined into a more true (but still European dominant) Global Studies



OK...over shadowed? there is a reason...I feel awful for the treatment of 300K or so citizens of Nanjing....and I am sure countless other atrocities around China from 1931-1945, however the situations are a bit different.

1. 12 MILLION people died in the Holocaust...6 million Jews alone...in addition to 5-6 million more musicians, artists, intellectuals, slavic decent, communists, homosexuals, handicapped, mentally retarded, etc etc etc...

2. The Holocaust was a well planned out system for eliminating a ethnicity. Eliminating it entirely...I'm not sure the Japanese could have even tried to wipe out the entire Chinese population, and their brutalities were awful, but the Final Solution was government sponsored genocide.

Let's not leave out clergy who resisted. While some of the cowards may have went along with it, there were also tons of intellectuals, artists, musicians who went along with it also.
They don't tell you this in college, but the Nazis were modern day free-thinkers - maybe not by 2004 USA standards, but by 1940 standards they were. They read philosophy, studied darwin; and were very educated. They didn't completely dump religion like the Marxists did, but they lessened it's importance. It seems everyone in this world thinks you can stamp a label on yourself to make yourself a good person: Free Thinker, Christian; Humanist, liberal, conservative. None of that makes you clean in itself. You have to demonstrate splendid behavior.
I'm not really browbeating the person I quoted that much; just attacking a common notion I see too much: The idea that knowledge and education makes you good - it don't. You know what makes us so civilized? It's morals, reason, and law enforcement, and not a whole lot else.
Now you just watch, someone will come on here and will say I was supporting the Nazis; despite this sentence.