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Gord
Joined: 25 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 8:26 am Post subject: |
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| Cthulhu wrote: |
| The Divinity Library recently received a photocopy of the extensive diary of John Rabe. This diary came to light only a few months ago when Rabe's granddaughter was tracked down by a researcher who had come across Rabe's name in the missionary accounts held at the Divinity Library. Rabe's diary is of particular interest because he was a German and a member of the Nazi Party. Germany was strengthening its alliance with Japan during this time period and it was of no possible personal gain to Rabe for him to expose the Japanese atrocities. When he went back to Germany in February 1938 and tried to bring the Japanese activities to the attention of the German government, his efforts were rebuffed and his career suffered significantly. Since certain Japanese officials have sought to characterize American accounts of the Nanjing massacre as fabrications designed to discredit the Japanese, it is of note that a German ally's accounts clearly corroborate those of the Americans. |
Rabe estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people had been killed in total and that the focus of the deaths was aimed at military persons who take tried to hide amongst the populace, or was thought to be part of a resistance cell.
Before the city fell, most of the populace had fled. Take any two men of military age in the city after the fighting ended, and one of them will have been a soldier that dumped his uniform.
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| Although also imperfect, I think a better comparion than Kuwait would be one comparing the situation of the Westerners working in Nanking with the helplessness of U.N. peacekeeper Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda as he and his tiny force tried to save Tutsis by making a safety zone in a small area (a soccer field in that case) as murder went on all around them: |
I know shockingly little about Rwanda beyond the basic of what learns from reading about it for a short time. I think this weekend I will read up on it more.
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| It seems to me there were more than Chinese sources talking about a massacre, and these ones were in the middle of it. One can dispute the numbers, but I find it difficult to dispute a massacre took place unless one can find a way to discredit those Western businessmen, doctors and missionaries. |
The problem of that is most of them had no authority or organization to deal with what was going on. If Bucheon suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree in holy fire, how would I be able to tell you how many people died? I could give some anecdotal stories and from that make a guestimate, but that's about it. Rabe at least had a staff and could go to many places without fear of being gunned down. And his notes don't support the claims that the Chinese government made. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 9:44 am Post subject: |
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| I heard someone the other day make this point: Chinese nationalism is scarier than others because it has both rage and humiliation behind it. |
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Cthulhu
Joined: 02 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:11 am Post subject: |
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Gord wrote:
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| Rabe estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people had been killed in total and that the focus of the deaths was aimed at military persons who take tried to hide amongst the populace, or was thought to be part of a resistance cell. |
While 50,000 to 60,000 might or might not be accurate (as you say he had limited access to the city) there seems to be little doubt from Rabe's own accounts that the focus of the killings and rapes extended beyond Chinese soldiers and deserters:
Then the Japanese began burning down the city and the people in it. When army officers demanded Chinese workers, a trusting Rabe suggested where they could be found. Days later, he discovered that 43 of the 54 workers the Japanese had rounded up were led to the riverbank and machine-gunned, ''ostensibly because they were the employees of an enterprise managed by the Chinese Government.''
Rabe mentions one day when he was cleaning the safety zone: ''We find many bodies in the ponds, civilians who have been shot (30 in just one pond), most of them with their hands bound, some with stones tied to their necks.'' At another time, he complains that 50 corpses lay unburied. At still another, he reports that a German colleague saw 300 corpses in a dry ditch near one of the city gates.
Rabe records all sorts of atrocities: a woman is found dead with a golf ball inside her vagina, another bayoneted there. ''You can't breathe for sheer revulsion when you keep finding the bodies of women with bamboo poles thrust up their vaginas,'' he writes. ''Even old women over 70 are constantly being raped.''
NY Times Book Review of the John Rabe diaries
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| The problem of that is most of them had no authority or organization to deal with what was going on. If Bucheon suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree in holy fire, how would I be able to tell you how many people died? I could give some anecdotal stories and from that make a guestimate, but that's about it. Rabe at least had a staff and could go to many places without fear of being gunned down. And his notes don't support the claims that the Chinese government made. |
I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese claims are inflated, but even Japanese sources extend the numbers into the 200,000 dead range so it seems that by any measure we are talking about both a prolonged atrocity and a massacre.
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| I know shockingly little about Rwanda beyond the basic of what learns from reading about it for a short time. I think this weekend I will read up on it more. |
There's an excellent documentary called Shake Hands with the Devil based on Dallaire's book of the same name. In it he goes back to Rwanda and talks about his experiences there. Disturbing stuff and a reminder that genocide is not simply an issue for the history books.
http://www.whitepinepictures.com/dallairesite/ |
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Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
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| Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 10:20 pm Post subject: |
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| The Bobster wrote: |
| is not one that has been concocted solely by the Marxist regime in China. You are disningenuous to suggest such a thing. |
Why are you making a strawman argument? You questioned whether Japanese accounts of the "rape" of Nanking are the most sophisticated. I then told you why the Japanese account is more sophisticated considering the level of freedom in Japan to debate the issue compared with China. Chinese historians can't throw up any position at odds with the government line unless it is even more exaggerated. An accurate account of history is rarely arrived at under dictatorships.
I reiterate; answer the question I put to you earlier. It is a "yes" or "no" question.
Gwangjuboy asked
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| Do you really think that debate about the rape of Nanking could take place in China to the extent that it did in Japan where Japanese authors were writing books highly critical of their government, and imperial Japan's war time record? |
Last edited by Gwangjuboy on Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:15 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
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| Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Cthulhu wrote: |
| I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese claims are inflated, but even Japanese sources extend the numbers into the 200,000 dead range so it seems that by any measure we are talking about both a prolonged atrocity and a massacre. |
I wouldn't mind taking a look at the Japanese sources you are refering to. Unlike China, Japanese accounts of Nanjing differ. For example, Shudo Higashinakano puts the figure at significantly less than 100,000. Akira Nakamura also tore apart Iris Chang's book on the massacre widely hailed as the bastion of truth by Chinese historians*. Did something ugly take place in Nanjing? Yes, I am sure it did, but I doubt it was to the extent that the Chinese would have us believe, or that it was any worse than the actions of the allies at times who were noticeably absent as defendants at the International War Crimes Tribunals set up after World War Two.
* http://www.jiyuu-shikan.org/nanjing/nak.html |
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Cthulhu
Joined: 02 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 5:37 am Post subject: |
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Gwangjuboy wrote:
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| I wouldn't mind taking a look at the Japanese sources you are refering to. Unlike China, Japanese accounts of Nanjing differ. |
It shouldn't be too difficult--it's from the same source you've been flogging over in the Current Events forum for awhile now. You supplied the source and you kept harping on the validity of it so I'm more than a little surprised you didn't read through it yourself:
"The Great Massacre School ranges from at least 100,000 (Eguchi), more than 120,000 (10 süman), a figure which has become the orthodox position of this school and which is advocated by Himeta, Inoue, Kasahara and Yoshida, to the older orthodoxy, 200,000, which is still advocated by Fujiwara and Takasaki."
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/Askew.html
Look familiar?
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| Did something ugly take place in Nanjing? Yes, I am sure it did, but I doubt it was to the extent that the Chinese would have us believe, or that it was any worse than the actions of the allies at times who were noticeably absent as defendants at the International War Crimes Tribunals set up after World War Two. |
I'd be very suprised to hear of widespread gang rapes among the British and Americans, including putting various objects in female vaginas as was reported by Rabe and the missionaries in Nanking. I'd also be interested in accounts of allied troops doing wholesale slaughter of captured foreign troops and/or civilians. I recall reports of small scale incidents among troops in the heat of battle and the odd battlefield execution but I've yet to hear of any account of any allies outside of the Russians doing organized killing of civilians.
Your beef with China aside, I still don't understand why you seek to minimize the actions of the Japanese during WWII and try to find equivalency with our soldiers. The Japanese were brutal on a far grander scale than anything our troops ever did, or do you feel comfortable comparing the actions of our troops to the actions of theirs? In that case there are a number of ex-POWs from Bataan, Hong Kong and other places who'd love to hear about it.
Was there a Manchester Death March of Japanese prisoners back in '42? Did the Japanese POWs in America lose a significant number to starvation and disease? Did the Americans execute captured Japanese bomber pilots? Did Chinese scientists do biological experiments on Japanese prisoners? Did thousands of Japanese POWs and laborers die building a railroad to Cardiff? Did Australian troops bayonet 150 Japanese prisoners for sport as was done by Japanese troops to the Australian POWs in New Guinea in 1942? Was Tokyo a target for widespread rape and murder once the allies moved in after 1945? Give me examples of the equivalency you clearly feel when you say that the atrocities of the Japanese military during WWII were no worse nor more endemic than those of the allies. |
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jajdude
Joined: 18 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 7:09 am Post subject: |
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"the Rape of Nanking"
and "The Good German of Nanking" (John Rabe's memoirs... a German guy who was akin to Schindler, in China in 1930s.... the Japs wouldn't touch him as they were allies with Hitler's fine nation at that point)
are fascinating and disturbing books.
(the photos are enough to make one stop reading and ponder the wickness humans are capable of, though. One I recall shows Jap soldiers stabbing a Chinese while smiling and posing for the photo. They stabbed them and proubly used them for practice.......... since they were Chinese
they were not real humans, just animal. And another one showed a Jap proudly displaying his collection of Chinese skulls)
The Jap soldiers there and then were sociopathic horrors up there with Hannibal Lecter.
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Still a lot of ugliness in Korea too.
In 1998 one CDN guy I knew in Pohang got his motorcycle burned. He was seen with hi K-- gf. Local yokels did not smile at that.
Koreans rarely have foreign cars. A few have got in trouble for being unpatriotic.
The Kyopo guy at work speaks Korean well but pretends he only speaks English so he doesn't have to use Korean in class and so the students will not just speak Korean to him. But he understands everything they say and acts oblivious. he seesm to be good actor. He tells them he is from Singapore! Some kids think he is unpatriotic not to speak Korean. In English class!
Um, English class must be 99% in Korean? |
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Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
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| Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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| [quote="Cthulhu"]It shouldn't be too difficult--it's from the same source you've been flogging over in the Current Events forum for awhile now. You supplied the source and you kept harping on the validity of it so I'm more than a little surprised you didn't read through it yourself: |
I did, but you obviously didn't.
"The Great Massacre School ranges from at least 100,000 (Eguchi), more than 120,000 (10 süman), a figure which has become the orthodox position of this school and which is advocated by Himeta, Inoue, Kasahara and Yoshida, to the older orthodoxy, 200,000, which is still advocated by Fujiwara and Takasaki."
Notice that the link I provided labels this "an older orthodoxy" while clearly stating that it supports the 100,000 figure. Further down we find,
Ironically, perhaps, the Great Massacre School can be said to share much with the Illusion School. Both can be highly ideological and dogmatic, both can be extremely violent in the language they use, and both can be more than careless with the historical facts and sources.
Very much so.
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| I'd be very suprised to hear of widespread gang rapes among the British and Americans, including putting various objects in female vaginas as was reported by Rabe and the missionaries in Nanking. I'd also be interested in accounts of allied troops doing wholesale slaughter of captured foreign troops and/or civilians. I recall reports of small scale incidents among troops in the heat of battle and the odd battlefield execution but I've yet to hear of any account of any allies outside of the Russians doing organized killing of civilians. |
Do you know anything about Dresden? I suggest you look it up.
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| Your beef with China aside, I still don't understand why you seek to minimize the actions of the Japanese during WWII and try to find equivalency with our soldiers. |
Is "minimizing the actions of the Japanese" the latest euphemism for "searching for the truth?"
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| The Japanese were brutal on a far grander scale than anything our troops ever did, or do you feel comfortable comparing the actions of our troops to the actions of theirs? In that case there are a number of ex-POWs from Bataan, Hong Kong and other places who'd love to hear about it. |
Sir Arthur Harris should have been sent to the War Crimes Tribunal for the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden which resulted in the deaths of thousands of German civilians. This isn't about whether the Japanese did some bad things; they did. It's really about the selective imposition of justice at the end of World War Two.
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| Was Tokyo a target for widespread rape and murder once the allies moved in after 1945? Give me examples of the equivalency you clearly feel when you say that the atrocities of the Japanese military during WWII were no worse nor more endemic than those of the allies. |
Sure,
Harris argued that the main objectives of night-time blanket bombing of urban areas was to undermine the morale of the civilian population and attacks were launched on Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden and other German cities. This air campaign killed an estimated 600,000 civilians and destroyed or seriously damaged some six million homes. It was a highly dangerous strategy and during the war Bomber Command had 57,143 men killed.
In March, 1945, Winston Churchill gave instructions to Harris to bring an end to area bombing. As he explained: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWharris.htm |
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Cthulhu
Joined: 02 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 8:49 pm Post subject: |
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Gwangjuboy wrote:
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I did, but you obviously didn't.
"The Great Massacre School ranges from at least 100,000 (Eguchi), more than 120,000 (10 süman), a figure which has become the orthodox position of this school and which is advocated by Himeta, Inoue, Kasahara and Yoshida, to the older orthodoxy, 200,000, which is still advocated by Fujiwara and Takasaki."
Notice that the link I provided labels this "an older orthodoxy" while clearly stating that it supports the 100,000 figure. Further down we find,
Ironically, perhaps, the Great Massacre School can be said to share much with the Illusion School. Both can be highly ideological and dogmatic, both can be extremely violent in the language they use, and both can be more than careless with the historical facts and sources. |
You asked for a Japanese source that gave 200,000 and I gave it. The Great Massacre school isn't dead, is it? It hasn't been discredited, has it? Or has Askew discredited it somewhere in his article and I missed it?
I find it curious that you praise the sophisticated Japanese research while at the same time by Askew's (and your own) admission 2 out of 3 schools of Japanese academic thought on the matter are ideologically driven. And yet you berate Chinese for being ideologically driven. It's nice that one school might actually have gotten it right but Askew's article isn't exactly a slam dunk for the Middle of the Road school.
He highlights four methodologies: oral history, burial records, data sampling and Japanese field reports. He more or less dismisses oral history, which is the one where records from Chinese sources would have had quite a bit to say. For burial records he gives his own research estimating the number of dead at around 32,000, though his only source is his own unpublished manuscript. He mentions data sampling, though the only example of it is a field survey measuring every 50th house that he says has "an enormous amount of data that has not yet been properly analysed" but doesn't explain how it favors one school of thought over another. And finally the Japanese field reports, which, as he also admits in the case of the other methodologies, has its limits. I will say I'm a bit surprised he mentions counting bullets to measure the accuracy of the death count when multiple Western sources mention numerous deaths by bayonet, a common fixture among the ends of Japanese infantry rifles. One doesn't even need to consider the Chinese claims of live burials and beheadings.
Is the Middle of the Road school correct? Perhaps, but I'd need to see more than that article to conclude that.
And while I'm on Askew, if, as he claims, the Rabe diary supports the Middle of the Road school, how can Rabe's figures of 50,000-60,000 dead be taken into account? According to Askew the Middle of the Road school "range from "several thousand" (Nakamura and Unemoto) through about 10,000 (Okazaki, Sakurai, and Tanabe) to about 20,000 (Hara)" Am I missing something there in the number-crunching?
As far as your comments about WWII go, yes, the Allies did bad things (virtually all of significant ones falling squarely on the head of Harris and Bomber Command). My point was that the problem of atrocities among the Japanese was more endemic. Sure, Bomber Harris and some of his colleagues should have gone on trial but that doesn't change the fact that the Japanese as an army had a lot more problems dealing with atrocities among its troops than did the allies. It's also something that makes me instictively suspicious when those actions are minimized in any way. We can curse Bomber Harris because historians are writing the truth about him; I only hope the same can be said for historians in Japan. And on that note, I find it hard to see how Nanking can be referred to as an "incident" by any stretch of the imagination. It was a massacre. |
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