I just finished a very sobering book called The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. It accounts of how that Chinese city was taken by the Japanese forces in WW2, and how at least 300,000 civilians were butchered or tortured then butchered and untold numbers of women were raped and tortured, and often then either killed outright or kidnapped and forced to become sex slaves. Another some odd 300,000 people were saved by a small band of people from other countries (German Nazis and American religious people for the most part), at enormous risk to themselves, who attempted to set up "safe zones" for refugees. One of these people, an American woman, committed suicide after her return to America and saftely. She could not bear the weight of the things she had witnessed. She had saved so many women that she has been called a living Buddha by the survivors of the city. Another, a member of the Nazi party, tried to bring the plight of the Chinese refugees even unto the ears of Hitler upon his return to Germany, and faced Nazi persecution as a result, followed by discrimination as a Nazi party member at the hands of the Aliies after the war. His detailed diaries are one of the greatest resources of historians trying to piece together exactly what happened...especially as he copied the diaries of some of the Americans who were in Nanking into his diary, and therefore corraborates their versions, word for word, translated into German at the time the events happened. The author explores how such atrocities are possible...both this, the Nazi Holocaust, what has happened more recently in the Balkans and Rwanda. One of her conclusions is that governments can sometimes hold too much power, that they become corrupted with it, that power can allow them to sanction killing, and that absolute power can sanction absolute killing. Of the some 600,000 people in the city of Nanking at the point in time when it was taken, some 300,000 were saved in the "safe zones". Most of the rest died terrible and brutal deaths. In places the military trucks, including the ones carrying the last American press correspondants out of the city, travelled over corpses piled five feet deep in the streets. ******************************************************
Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell <i>Edited by: Duchess of Malfi at: 2/22/04 11:05 am </i>
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