The Rape of Nanking

On December 13, 1937, the republic of China's capital, Nanking, fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. After this the imperial army wanted to find all the Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians so they begin executing men they felt were lying. Very similar to the way Saddam executed people in his administration when he thought they were spies. The massacre lasted about six weeks. At first men who were thought to be soldiers were killed, but then the army began killing women and children also. Soon after more and more people were being executed. Women were now being raped before murdered. Rapes were happening at a rate of about a thousand cases a night. Along with raping the women, they would also mutilate them before ending their life. They would use their swords to cut off the womens' breasts and disfigure their faces. Cases were reported of women literally being torn open from their vagina. After all was said and done, over two hundred thousand Chinese citizens were killed. That comes out to over thirty thousand men, women, and children a week. It became known as the rape of Nanking. Foreign residents living in Nanking wrote about what they saw. Robert Wilson wrote this in a letter to his family: "The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital." Even after all this, not many people know what happened in Nanking, though about 25 years earlier the titanic made headlines world wide. Why is it that if we aren't affected by an event, whether it be politically, economically, etc, we tend to play the ignorance is bliss card and go along with our business. Why is it that i learned every detail about the war of 1812, and not once throughout high school did i hear anything about Nanking? Knowledge is power, and as a whole, the more we know about each other, past, present, and future, the better chance we have of living in harmony. And even better are our chances of learning from others mistakes so history doesn't repeat itself.