Thursday, February 26, 1998
Remembering the ‘forgotten Holocaust’
BOOK: ‘Rape of Nanking’ chronicles horrifying, graphic cruelties
of war
By Christopher Bates
Daily Bruin Contributor
"War is cruelty," said General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863.
Sherman was speaking of his own war, the United States Civil War.
However, his point has become relevant even during the 20th
century. With the development of weapons of mass destruction,
mankind has been able to inflict cruelties unheard of fourscore and
seven years ago.
Sometimes the cruelties have been so great, so horrifying, that
there has been resistance to incorporating them into the historical
record. Such has been the case with the events Iris Chang
chronicles in "The Rape of Nanking."
In December of 1937, Japanese troops managed to capture Nanking,
then the capital city of China. It was the successful culmination
of a six-month long struggle with Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in the
Yangtze valley. For the Chinese, it was a crushing defeat.
What followed were the sort of unspeakable atrocities that human
beings like to think of themselves as being incapable of. Between
260,000 and 350,000 people were killed in an eight week period.
Chinese men, women and children were used for target practice,
decapitation contests, and, of course, as victims of rape. The
destruction was finally curtailed with the establishment of a
"Safety Zone" controlled by Westerners.
Given the nature of the crime and the time frame, even the most
historically uninformed reader will be inclined to draw a
comparison between the rape of Nanking and the Holocaust. Chang
notes the parallels frequently; in fact her account is subtitled
"The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" and is in many ways
structured like a history of the German-initiated Holocaust.
Chang begins with the political and historical context for the
Japanese invasion of Nanking. The typical Holocaust narrative
generally begins with the end of World War I and the punishment
inflicted upon the Germans at the end of that conflict in 1918.
This is an extremely shortsighted approach, for the tensions that
led to the Holocaust date back much further than that.
Chang improves on this approach a bit by starting her narrative
in 1852, with the arrival of American troops under Matthew Perry.
She argues that his swashbuckling display of force created immense
resentment among the Japanese and awoke a militaristic strain in
Japanese culture that made the rape of Nanking possible. Going back
this far is an improvement, but she would have done better to go
even further back, for, like the Holocaust, the cultural tensions
that allowed the the invasion of Nanking to happen were centuries
in the making.
Having set the stage, Chang moves next to graphic descriptions
of the violence inflicted upon the Chinese people by Japanese
troops. One of many examples:
"Death by Dogs: One diabolical means of torture was to bury
victims to their waist and watch them get ripped apart by German
shepherds. Witnesses saw Japanese soldiers strip a victim naked and
direct German shepherds to bite the sensitive areas of his body.
The dogs not only ripped open his belly but jerked out his
intestines along the ground for a distance."
Stories like this are extremely powerful by themselves and less
skilled authors will tend to rely too much on them to carry their
book. To Chang’s credit, she offers enough examples to convey the
story she is telling without going overboard.
Still following the basic structure of most Holocaust
narratives, Chang moves on to what might be described as the
rescue. The German Holocaust was so immense that there was no
large-scale rescue prior to the end of World War II, only isolated
instances of human lives being saved thanks to the efforts of
individuals like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved,
respectively 1,200 and 100,000 Jewish people from the German
concentration camps.
Since the Japanese invasion of Nanking affected fewer people and
was geographically condensed, there was a bona fide rescue. The
successful effort to establish a Nanking Safety Zone was led by one
John Rabe, an avowed member of the Nazi party. Not surprisingly,
Chang makes the obvious connection to Oskar Schindler, but does
nothing with it.
More distressingly, she does not do much to explore the
character of John Rabe and to explain the complexities of a man who
was a white supremacist, and yet was willing to risk arrest and
death to save the lives of Chinese people.
The Holocaust narrative structure is not surprising, for it
works well for this kind of history. It allows the details, which
are so emotionally affecting, to speak for themselves, with a
minimum of interference from the author.
However, Chang breaks from this format in two interesting ways.
First, most stories like this are told from the point of view of
the victim, presumably under the assumption that the guilty parties
are not worthy of any more historical examination than is necessary
to label them the "bad guy" and move on. Chang, however, makes an
effort to tell the story from multiple points of view, including
that of the aggressors. This adds much more complexity to the
story.
The second aspect that distinguishes Chang’s account is her
continuance of the story to the present day, arguing that a "Second
Rape of Nanking" has occurred, with the Japanese government still
refusing to accept responsibility for the crimes committed in China
between 1931 and 1945. Some readers might take objection to this
part of the book, by equating the lapse in historical memory with
the event itself she necessarily cheapens the significance of the
actual event. Nonetheless, the point is an interesting one and
provides for thought.
The great weakness of this book is its handling of the "other"
Holocaust. It is tempting to draw the connection between the rape
of Nanking and the German Holocaust, because the two events
involved mass destruction and happened at essentially the same
time. But there are key differences that should be considered: the
German Holocaust lasted much longer, was supported by a much larger
number of people and resulted in 20 times as many deaths.
However, if the comparison between the Holocaust and the rape of
Nanking had to be drawn, Chang should have done so much more fully,
using the two together as a case study to determine how these
things happen and more importantly, how they can be avoided in the
future. If she had done so, the book would have been not only a
service to those whose anguish has been forgotten but to the rest
of humanity as well.