The RAPE OF NANKING, 1937
Japanese Occupation of China (1937-1945) htp://www.princeton.edu/~nanking/html/nanking_gallery.html
In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army went on a 14-week carnage that constituted the worst single atrocity of World War II in Asia, afterwards to be known as the Rape of Nanking.
To eradicate any civilized notions of mercy, young Japanese soldiers were encouraged by their superiors to terrorize and savage their colonized victims. Filmed footage and still photographs taken by the Japanese themselves document this brutality. Pregnant women were raped and gutted, fetuses destroyed, babies tossed up in the air, impaled in bayonets as they fell, or thrown into vats of oil or boiling water. Men were tied up, soaked with gasoline, and burned alive. Those who were not killed on the spot were taken to the outskirts of the city and forced to dig their own graves. Eyewitness reports by Japanese military correspondents reflected a mentality in which the brutal dominance of subjugated, inferior peoples was considered just. In the United States, the American public was skeptical of news reports because the savagery was mind-boggling to believe. During the Japanese occupation of Nanking, American and European missionaries described the daily scenes they witnessed as “hell on earth.” One wrote of the Japanese soldier: “I did not imagine that such cruel people existed in the modern world.”
Overall, most Americans had only a passing knowledge or little interest in Asia. Attention was focused on the situation in Europe where Hitler’s Germany was starting to run amok.
This is why Memorial-monuments are important. They are a silent reminder of moments when “civilization lost its humanity and humanity lost its soul.
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