Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it
In the news comment area of ”The Xuanzang Temple in Nanjing is dedicated to the Japanese invaders”, many people mentioned Zhang Chunru. Iris Chang, a Chinese-American writer, wrote The Rape of Nanking for the first time to systematically excavate and present historical materials of the Nanjing Massacre, and for the first time let Western countries know about the incident. No less than the atrocities of the Holocaust. In 2004, Zhang Chunru, who suffered from severe depression, committed suicide in California, USA.
Some netizens compared Zhang Chunru to Wu Ahping, the protagonist of the news, and believed that the latter had a shallow understanding of ethnic trauma. However, some netizens found that Wu Ahping’s confession “often reading books about the Nanjing Massacre” is very likely to include Zhang Chunru’s “Nanjing Massacre”. The act of worshipping the Japanese invaders is of course outrageous, but behind the high national sentiment, there are several more long-term and complex issues: how can we continue to tell history without succumbing to the distortions and denials of others, and without being imprisoned of your own hatred and fear? After looking straight into the abyss, how can we continue to have confidence in understanding and trust between people?
Today, Zhang Chunru talked about his original intention of paying attention to this history, the efforts of the Chinese community to tell this history, and his warning to the world to forget this history.
Preface to “Nanjing Massacre”
Written by: Zhang Chunru
Chronicles of human cruelty to fellow human beings tell long and harrowing stories, but if there is indeed a difference in the level of human cruelty in such horror stories, few atrocities in world history can match the intensity and scale of the first. Compared to the Nanjing Massacre carried out by the Japanese during World War II.
Americans believe that World War II began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the US naval base Pearl Harbor on that day. Europeans saw the German raid on Poland on September 1, 1939, as the beginning of World War II. Africans believe the war started earlier, starting with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. However, for Asians, the beginning of the war must be traced back to the first step in Japan’s military control of East Asia – Japan’s occupation of northeastern China in 1931 and the establishment of the pseudo “Manchukuo”.
As Germany under Hitler did five years later, starting in 1931, Japan, with its highly developed military machinery and superior national mentality, set out to establish domination over its neighbors. Northeast China soon fell, and the subsequent pseudo-“Manchukuo” was nominally ruled by Puyi, the deposed emperor of the Qing Dynasty as a puppet of Japan, but the actual jurisdiction was in the hands of the Japanese military. Four years later, in 1935, parts of Chahar Province and Hebei Province were occupied; in 1937, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai fell one after another, and finally Nanjing was not spared. The 1930s were difficult times for China; in fact, the last Japanese troops did not withdraw from Chinese territory until 1945, at the end of World War II.
“The Diary of Rabe”
There is no doubt that in the 14 years of the Japanese invasion of China, there have been countless atrocities that are difficult to put into words. We will never know in detail how many tragic events took place in the thousands of cities and villages ravaged by the Japanese army. But we are well aware of the massacre that happened in Nanjing, because some foreigners at that time witnessed the horrific massacre and spread the news to the world; in addition, some Chinese who witnessed the massacre survived and became eyewitnesses. If there is any historical event that can expose the heinous nature of unscrupulous military adventurism, the Nanjing Massacre is the best example. This book is about this event.
The details of the Nanjing Massacre are beyond doubt, and only some Japanese are still in denial. In November 1937, after the successful capture of Shanghai, the Japanese army launched a large-scale attack on Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. On December 13, 1937, after the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a brutal massacre that is rare in the world. Thousands of young Chinese were gathered and driven out of the city, either being machine-gunned to the ground, used as a bayonet practice target, or doused with gasoline and burned alive. Over the past few months, corpses have been scattered all over the city of Nanjing, and the stench of corpses has filled the air. Years later, experts from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that from late 1937 to early 1938, more than 260,000 non-combatants were killed by Japanese butchers in Nanjing, and some experts estimated that the number was more than 350,000.
This book provides only the most basic overview of the Japanese brutality in Nanking, because my purpose is not to prove numerically that the Nanking Massacre was one of the most vicious acts in human history, but to gain insight into the event itself and learn from it. , to warn the world. However, different levels of brutality usually elicit different responses, so I must present some statistics to give readers a basic idea of the scale of the massacre that took place in Nanking in 1937.
One historian once estimated that if all the victims of the Nanjing Massacre stood hand in hand, the procession could stretch from Nanjing to Hangzhou, a total distance of about 200 miles. The total weight of their blood can reach 1,200 tons, and their bodies can fill 2,500 train cars.
Judging from the death toll alone, the Nanjing Massacre surpassed many barbaric atrocities in history. The Romans slaughtered 150,000 people in Carthage, and the Catholic army slaughtered in the Spanish Inquisition, but the atrocities of the Japanese army in Nanking were far more than that. What the Japanese did even surpassed the atrocities of Timur, who executed 100,000 prisoners in Delhi in 1398 and used their skulls to build two ossuaries in Syria in 1400 and 1401.
Of course, the tools used for mass killings were fully developed since the 20th century, Hitler killed 6 million Jews, but that number was accumulated over a few years, and the massacres of the Nanking people by the Japanese were concentrated in a few weeks within.
Indeed, even compared to the most devastating war in history, the Nanking Massacre was the most brutal example of mass extermination. To better understand the relative scale of the Nanking Massacre, we must reluctantly look at other statistics. The death toll in Nanjing alone (a Chinese city) exceeds the combined civilian casualties of some European countries throughout World War II (61,000 in the UK, 108,000 in France, 101,000 in Belgium, and 242,000 in the Netherlands). Recalling such incidents, people agree that strategic bombing is one of the most terrifying means of causing mass destruction, but even the most violent air raids in World War II could not surpass the Japanese ravages of Nanjing. The death toll in Nanjing is likely to exceed the number of bombing and fire deaths during the British raid on Dresden (at that time, the internationally accepted death toll was 225,000, but according to later more objective statistics, there should be 60,000 deaths, at least 30,000 people were injured). In fact, whether we use the most conservative number – 260,000, or the largest – 350,000, the Nanjing Massacre far exceeded the death toll of the US bombing of Tokyo (estimated 80,000 to 120,000). deaths), even more than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombing of the two cities at the end of 1945 (estimated 140,000 and 70,000, respectively). Every time I think about this, I can’t help but be shocked and angry.
We must remember not only the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre, but also the brutal methods by which many of the victims were killed. The Japanese used the Chinese as live targets for practicing bayonets, and even held beheading competitions. An estimated 20,000 to 80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many Japanese soldiers even gutted Chinese women, cut off their breasts and nailed them to the wall after raping them. The Japanese army forced the father to rape his biological daughter, the son to rape the biological mother, and forced other family members to watch. The Japanese army not only made living burial, castration, organ removal and roasting of Chinese people commonplace, but also adopted other more cruel torture methods. For example, hanging the whole person with a hook through the tongue; burying the person alive to the waist, and then happily letting the German black shells tear them to pieces. Such a brutal scene was so shocking that even the Nazis who lived in Nanjing at the time were horrified. One of them publicly called the Nanjing Massacre a “beast machine” atrocity.
The movie “Nanjing! Nanjing! 》
However, the Japanese atrocities in Nanking have been little known. Unlike the atomic bombing of Japan and the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, the horrors of the Nanking Massacre are hardly known outside of Asia. Most historical documents published in the United States ignore this historical event. A careful survey of American high school history textbooks reveals that only a few briefly mention the Nanjing Massacre. Few of the full or “authoritative” historical works on World War II released to the American public detail the Nanking Massacre. For example, The American Heritage Picture History of World War II (1966), the best-selling single-volume picture history of World War II in the United States for many years, not only does not include a single The pictures of the Nanjing Massacre don’t even mention the event itself. Whether it’s Churchill’s 1,065-page book, Memoirs of the Second World War (1959), or Henry Michel’s 947-page classic, World War II ( In Second World War, 1975), there is no single word about the Nanjing Massacre. In Gerhard Weinberg’s 1,178-page masterpiece, A World at Arms (1994), there are only two mentions of the Nanking Massacre. The only passage I can find about the Nanking Massacre is in Robert Leckie’s 998-page Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War II (1987): Any scandalous deeds done by the Nazis under Hitler that humiliated their victory paled in comparison to the Japanese soldiers under Ishine Matsui.”
I was very young when I first heard about the Nanjing Massacre. The incident was told by parents, who survived years of war and revolution in China, and later took up teaching positions in college towns in the American Midwest, where they were able to settle down. They grew up in China during World War II. After the war, they first fled to Taiwan with their families, and finally came to Harvard University in the United States to study and pursue academic research in the natural sciences. For 30 years, they have lived peacefully at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducting research in physics and microbiology.
But they never forgot the horror of the Sino-Japanese War, and they hoped that I would not forget all of this, especially they hoped that I would not forget the Nanjing Massacre. Although my parents never witnessed the Nanjing Massacre with their own eyes, they heard people tell about the incident since they were children, and later told me about it. I learned from them that the Japanese army would not only cut babies in half, but even cut them into three or four pieces; there was a time when the Yangtze River was dyed red with blood. Their voices trembled with anger as they spoke. They believe that the Nanjing Massacre was the most brutal and tyrannical crime committed by the Japanese invaders in this war that killed more than 10 million Chinese.
Throughout my childhood, the Nanjing Massacre has been deeply hidden in my heart, a metaphor for an unspeakable evil. However, the Nanjing Massacre in my impression lacks relevant character details and analysis of human nature, and it is difficult for me to distinguish which are legends and which are real history. When I was in elementary school, I searched the local public library for information on the Nanjing Massacre, but found nothing. This puzzles me deeply, if the Nanjing Massacre was really so bloody, as my parents described it, one of the most barbaric atrocities in human history, then why hasn’t anyone written a book about it? I was young at the time and didn’t think of using the University of Illinois’ rich library resources to continue my research, and my curiosity about the matter quickly disappeared.
Time flies, and nearly 20 years later, the Nanjing Massacre broke into my life again. By this time I was married, a professional writer, and living a quiet life in Santa Barbara, California. One day, my friend in filmmaking said that several East Coast producers had recently finished a documentary about the Nanjing Massacre, but had financial difficulties when it came out.
This incident reignited my interest in the Nanjing Massacre, and I quickly got in touch with the two producers of the documentary, respectively, to discuss the topic on the phone. One of them, Shao Ziping, was a Chinese-American activist who worked for the United Nations in New York, was a former president of the Association to Commemorate the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, and assisted in the production of the video “Maggie’s Testimony” ( Magee’s Testament); the other is Tang Meiru, an independent producer who once produced and co-produced the documentary “In the Name of the Emperor” with Cui Minghui. Shao Ziping and Tang Meiru introduced me to a social circle of activists, mostly first-generation Chinese American or Canadian, who, like me, believed that all surviving victims should be brought to Nanjing before they died. They testified about the massacre, collated their testimony and made it public, and even demanded compensation from Japan for the Nanjing Massacre. Others want to pass on their memories of the war to future generations, lest the assimilation of North American culture cause them to forget this important piece of history.
There is a vast and intricate network of relationships among Chinese people all over the world, and a grassroots movement to promote the truth about the Nanjing Massacre came into being. In urban centers where Chinese gather, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver, many Chinese activists organized conferences and educational activities to publicize the crimes committed by the Japanese during World War II. They showed or exhibited films, videotapes and photos about the Nanjing Massacre in many museums and schools, disseminated relevant facts and pictures on the Internet, and even ran full-page advertisements in newspapers like The New York Times. Some event groups are tech-savvy enough to reach a worldwide audience of more than 250,000 people with just a click of a mouse.
In December 1994, after I attended a meeting in memory of the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the Nanjing Massacre I remembered as a child was no longer an ethereal folklore, but an authentic oral history. The conference, sponsored by the Asian Chapter of the World War II Historical Preservation Federation, was held in Cupertino, California, on the outskirts of San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The organizers displayed poster-sized photos of the Nanjing Massacre in the conference hall, many of which were some of the creepiest I’ve ever seen. Although I have heard many accounts of the Nanjing Massacre since I was a child, these photos are still unpredictable, and the stark black and white images are unbearable: the victims are either beheaded or disemboweled, naked women are raped The perpetrators forced them into various erotic poses, their faces were contorted, their expressions were painful, and their expressions of shame and anger were unforgettable.
The movie “The Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling”
After a moment of dizziness, I suddenly realized that not only life is fleeting, but human’s historical experience of life is equally vulnerable. We know what death is from an early age, and any of us could be hit by a common truck or bus at any time and lose our lives in an instant. Unless there is a religious belief, we would consider this deprivation of life not only meaningless, but unjust. But we also all know that life and the death process that most people go through should be respected. If you are unfortunately knocked down by a bus, someone may take advantage of the fire and steal your wallet, but there will definitely be more people who will help and try to save your precious life. Someone will call the ambulance for you, someone will run to notify the police on duty in the area, and someone will take off their jacket and fold it and put it under your head. That way, even if this is really the last moment of your life, you will die in small but real comfort knowing that someone cares about you. However, the pictures hanging on the walls of Cupertino show the fact that thousands of lives are lost due to a flash of evil by others, and their deaths are meaningless the next day. Even if such deaths are inevitable, it remains the most horrific tragedy in human history. What is even more intolerable is that these executioners also insult their victims, forcing them to suffer maximum pain and humiliation before dying. This cruelty and contempt for death and its process, this great retrogression of human society, will be relegated to a worthless episode of history, or an insignificant glitch in a computer program that may or may not again cause any question. Unless someone prompts the world to remember this history, tragedy could repeat itself at any time. With this in mind, I suddenly fell into a huge panic.
During this meeting, I learned that two novels about the Nanjing Massacre have been planned for publication, namely “Tree of Heaven” and “Tent of Orange Mist”. The book was published in 1995; a photobook on the Nanjing Massacre, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, was also in Published in 1996. But at that time, no one had written a long documentary monograph on the Nanjing Massacre in English. After delving into the history of the Nanjing Massacre, I found that the primary sources needed to write such a book have always existed and been available in the United States. Missionaries, journalists and military officers in the United States have recorded their views on the event in the form of diaries, films and photographs for later reference. Why haven’t other American writers or scholars made full use of this wealth of first-hand information to write a non-fiction monograph or academic paper devoted to the Nanjing Massacre?
Soon, I had at least a partial answer to the elusive mystery of why the Nanking Massacre has not received enough attention in world history. The reason why the Nanking Massacre is not as well known as the Nazi slaughter of Jews and the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima is because the victims themselves have remained silent.
But each answer implied new questions, and I turned to thinking about why the victims of this crime didn’t cry out for justice. If they did speak out, why was their suffering not acknowledged? I soon discovered that behind this silence was political manipulation, and the actions of all parties involved led the world to ignore the Nanjing Massacre for reasons dating back to the Cold War. In 1949, after the founding of New China, the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait did not claim war reparations from Japan (just as Israel claimed reparations from Germany). Even the United States, in the face of the communist “threat” from the Soviet Union and China, sought the friendship and loyalty of its former enemy, Japan, and never mentioned it again. Thus, the tensions of the Cold War allowed Japan to escape the harsh interrogation and punishment that many of its wartime allies experienced after the war.
In addition, the atmosphere of terror in Japan has suppressed free and open academic discussion of the Nanjing Massacre, further hindering the world’s understanding of the truth. In Japan, publicly expressing a true view of the Sino-Japanese war (as it was, and still is) would threaten one’s career, and even risk losing one’s life. (In 1990, Nagasaki Mayor Motoshima and others were shot in the chest by a gunman for saying that Japan’s Emperor Showa should be responsible for World War II. He was shot in the chest and nearly died.) This danger pervades Japanese society. The atmosphere made many serious scholars afraid to go to Japan to consult relevant archives and conduct research on this topic; in fact, when I was in Nanjing, I heard that China was not encouraging scholars to go to Japan to conduct related research due to personal safety concerns. . In this context, it is difficult for people outside Japan to access the first-hand archives of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan. In addition, most Japanese veterans who participated in the Nanjing Massacre were reluctant to be interviewed about their experiences. In recent years, only a very small number of veterans have risked rejection or even death to make their experiences public. .
What puzzled and saddened me in writing this book was the stubborn refusal of the Japanese to acknowledge this history throughout. Compared with Germany, Japan paid less than 1% of Germany’s total compensation for war victims. After World War II, most Nazis, if not imprisoned for their crimes, were at least forced to withdraw from the public eye, while many Japanese war criminals continued to hold high-ranking positions in industry and government. While the Germans continued to apologise to the Holocaust victims, the Japanese enshrined their own war criminals at the Yasukuni Shrine — an act that one American victim of the Pacific War said had political implications like “building a memorial in the center of Berlin. Hitler’s Church”.
During the long and difficult process of writing this book, I have been strongly inspired by the stubbornness of many prominent Japanese politicians, scholars, and industrial leaders who still stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the historical fact of the Nanjing Massacre in the face of overwhelming evidence. In Germany, it is illegal for teachers to remove the Holocaust from history courses; by contrast, Japan has systematically removed references to the Nanjing Massacre from textbooks for decades. They removed photos of the Nanjing Massacre from museums, altered or destroyed the original materials of the Nanjing Massacre, and avoided mentioning words like the Nanjing Massacre in popular culture. Even some well-respected history professors in Japan have joined the right in fulfilling what they see as a national responsibility: refusing to believe reports of the Nanjing Massacre. In the documentary “In the Name of the Emperor,” a Japanese historian denies the entire Nanjing Massacre with these words: “Even if only 20 or 30 people were killed, the Japanese side would be extremely shocked. At that time, the Japanese military had always been They’re all model troops.” It was this deliberate attempt by some Japanese to distort history that made me all the more convinced of the need for this book.
In addition to the above-mentioned important factors, this book also wants to respond to another point of view of a completely different nature. In recent years, sincere efforts to ask Japan to face up to its history and take corresponding responsibilities have often been labeled as “strike against Japan”. It is important that I do not want to argue that Japan was the only imperialist power in the world or even Asia for the first 1/3 of the 20th century. China itself has sought to extend its influence to its neighbors, and even reached an agreement with Japan to divide the two sides’ spheres of influence on the Korean peninsula, just as European powers carved up commercial interests in China in the 19th century.
More importantly, if the criticism of the behavior of the Japanese in a specific time and space is equal to the criticism of the Japanese people as a whole, it is not only an insult to those men, women and children who were killed in the Nanjing Massacre, but also to the Japanese people. s damage. This book is not intended to judge Japan’s national character, nor to explore what genetic make-up led them to commit such atrocities. This book is about the power of culture, which can both strip man of the thin coat of social constraints on being human, make man into a devil, and strengthen the constraints imposed by social norms on man. The reason why Germany is better today than it was in the past is because the Jews did not allow the country to forget its crimes during World War II. The American South was also better off because it recognized the evils of slavery and recognized the racial discrimination and segregation that persisted 100 years after the emancipation of black slaves. Japan should not only admit to the world, but also self-confess, how bad it did during World War II, otherwise Japanese culture would not move forward. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a considerable number of overseas Japanese had begun to attend conferences on the Nanjing Massacre. As one of them put it: “We want to know more about real history as much as you do.”
This book will describe two interrelated but independent atrocities: one is the Nanjing Massacre itself, that is, how brutally Japan wiped out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a Chinese city; the other is the cover-up of the massacre, That is, how Japan attempted to obliterate the public’s memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the silence of other countries’ aid and abuse, thereby depriving the victims of their rightful place in history.
The structure of the first part of the book is heavily influenced by the film Rashomon. This is a famous film based on the short story “In the Bamboo Forest” by Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa, about a 10th century rape and murder case in Kyoto, Japan. On the surface, the story is simple: a gangster blocks a road and robs a passing samurai and his wife; the samurai’s wife is raped and the samurai is killed. But the plot gets complicated as different characters in the story tell their own experiences from their own perspectives, with the gangster, the samurai wife, the dead samurai and an eyewitness offering different versions of what happened. In this way, the reader must comprehensively consider each person’s recollection and discern the authenticity of each person’s narrative. In the process, objective judgments of what has happened are made through subjective and often selfish descriptions. This story should be included in the textbooks of all criminal justice courses, and its thrust goes right to the heart of historical research.
The movie “Rashomon”
This book will tell about the Nanjing Massacre from three different perspectives. The first is the Japanese perspective. Japan’s planned invasion of China: what orders the Japanese army received, how they were carried out, and the reasons behind. The second is the perspective of the Chinese, that is, the perspective of the victim. This is the fate of a city when the government is no longer able to protect its people from foreign enemies. It also includes the stories of individual Chinese people, the stories of frustration, despair, betrayal, and luck that they endured when their country was destroyed. The third is the perspective of European and American people. At least at one point in Chinese history, these foreigners were heroes. During the Nanjing Massacre, the few Westerners at the scene risked their lives to save Chinese civilians and informed the outside world of the various atrocities that were taking place in front of their eyes as a warning. In the second part of this book, which deals with the postwar period, we will mention how indifferent Europe and the United States were about the atrocities reported by their diaspora who lived through the Nanking Massacre.
Finally, this book explores the forces that have attempted to wipe the Nanking Massacre from public consciousness for more than half a century, as well as recent efforts to challenge this historical distortion.
To correct this distorted history, one must first figure out how Japan, as a nation, managed, nurtured, and sustained their collective amnesia, and even collective denial, when confronted with their historical record during the Holocaust. Their handling of this history is not to leave a blank in the history books for being too painful, in fact, the ugliest acts of the Japanese army during the Sino-Japanese War were all erased from Japanese school education. What’s more, they hide Japan’s responsibility for waging the war in an elaborate myth that Japan was a victim of World War II, not an instigator. The horror experienced by the Japanese during the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped this myth to replace historical truth.
To this day, before the courts of world public opinion, Japan remains obsessed and remorseless for its wartime actions, and even shortly after the end of World War II, despite the guilt of some of its leaders, Japan is still deliberately evading the civilized world moral trial; Germany was forced to accept this trial and take responsibility for its crimes in the nightmare of war. The Japanese continued to evade trial, thus becoming the perpetrators of another crime. As Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago: To forget the Holocaust is to do it twice.
The number of survivors of the Nanjing Massacre is decreasing year by year, and while these historical witnesses are still alive, my greatest wish is that this book will serve as a guide to inspire other writers and historians to investigate the experiences of Nanjing Massacre survivors. Perhaps more importantly, I hope this book will awaken the conscience of the Japanese and take their responsibility for the Nanjing Massacre.
As I wrote this book, I had a lingering reminder of George Santayana’s immortal aphorism: Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
(This article is excerpted from “Nanjing Massacre”,
Provided by CITIC Press)
▼
Join the Single Read Subscription Plan
Guard our innocence
——-
This article is from: https://ift.tt/2hEIRjX
This site is only for inclusion, the copyright belongs to the original author