War is bad for children and other living things

I delved back into history by exploring one of my favorite twentieth-century topics - the less popular history of WWII. In 1997, Iris Chang released The Rape of Nanking, creating a stir among my roommate and several other Chinese-Americans in my freshman dorm. The massacre, rape, pillaging, and destruction of a city and hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants in 1937, years before WWII would come to Europe (and even longer before it would reach American shores) is a story that needed to be told, to resurrect memories of the past and learn from them.

Chang writes:

Whatever the course of postwar history, the Rape of Nanking will stand as a blemish upon the honor of human beings. But what makes the blemish particularly repugnant is that history has never written a proper end for the story.

And despite the attention that Chang and others brought to the topic, it is still, as she calls it, "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II."

As far as the writing goes, Chang does not spare the reader a full share in the horrors of what occurred. It's gruesome, and turned my stomach a few times. (What is frustrating is how familiar to other atrocities it sounds. How often in the course of human history have we treated our fellow man and woman so brutally. Why do we do this? Why do we continue to?) More prosaicallly, perhaps, she constructs her narrative in a clever and effective manner, retelling the events from the perspectives of the Japanese invaders, the Chinese victims, and the expatriate Westerners who risked their lives to help save the people of Nanking. Each section illluminates a different aspect of the invasion, massacre, and occupation.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I admire Chang's determination to tell a wrongly overlooked piece of history as well as her decision to use her voice to demand that the world avert their eyes no longer. If I have any qualms (and how difficult it is to voice them about a book so harrowing), they would regard the insertion of authorial emotion. Chang's insistence that the reader acknowledge the horrors of the Rape of Nanking is so strong that the Rape becomes almost an event unique in human history. She is careful in the epilogue to state that the Japanese are no more prone to evil than others, that "human being can [easily] be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." Yet that consciousness, that the Rape of Nanking took place in a war of atrocities, in a century of atrocities, in a history of atrocities, is sometimes missing, and could have strengthened the moral authority of the book.

I sound harsher than I mean to. It is a truly stunning work.