The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II

by Iris Chang

The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.

What baffled and saddened me during the writing of this book was the persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with its own past.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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Only one in twenty-five American POWs died under Nazi captivity, in contrast to one in three under the Japanese.

Another lesson to be gleaned from Nanking is the role of power in genocide. Those who have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.

“Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.”

R. J. Rummel, perhaps the world’s greatest authority on democide (a term he coined to include both genocide and government mass murder),

And there is yet a third lesson to be learned, one that is perhaps the most distressing of all. It lies in the frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into passive spectators to the unthinkable. The Rape of Nanking was front-page news across the world, and yet most of the world stood by and did nothing while an entire city was butchered.

Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.

“Those who ignore history tend to become its victims,” warned Carlos Romulo, the Philippine foreign minister and Pulitzer Prize winner who served as General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp during World War II