- Poor, poor Iris Chang.
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- I have often observed that if the brain had no
filters, and we could exactly understand the totality of human evil and
stupidity---all at once---we would promptly commit suicide.
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- This, apparently, is what happened last week
to poor 36-year-old Iris Chang. No more filters. She broke them down. She
barraged her brain with the ugliest information about the ugliest acts
of human beings until the filters burned out.
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- But she died a hero.
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- Chang wrote "The Rape of Nanking,"
published in 1997, which is as unyielding and sickeningly specific account
of "man's inhumanity to man" as ever has been written. The author
had heard tales of the "atrocities," as such things are conveniently
and almost benignly labeled, from her parents, who had fled China to ultimately
became research scientists in America. They never forgot the stories they
had heard of the Japanese attack on Nanking in December, 1937.
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- Perhaps, unfortunately, they never let their
daughter forget, either.
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- While in grade school in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois,
Chang went to the library in search of information about this orgy of wickedness:
the sex torture of women, dismemberment of babies, beheadings of men, and
the endlessly---and gleefully--- imaginative ways Japanese soldiers slaughtered
Chinese civilians. She found absolutely nothing.
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- "That struck me as odd," Chang wrote
in the introduction of her book, years later."If the Rape of Nanking
was truly so gory, one of the worst episodes of human barbarism in world
history, as my parents insisted, then why hadn't someone written a book
about it?"
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- Twenty years later, Iris Chang did.
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- She was a journalist, not a historian or scholar.
This was not the work of an academic pursuing a niche, but of an intelligent,
sentient, decent human being who was so frightened by what she learned
that she felt an obligation to report the information to the world.
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- More historians should take a cue from her. Where
the majority of history books tend to render the past something distant
and dessicated; fodder for analysis, Chang's pages ran with the blood and
disemboweled guts of China's victims. Where so many texts speak dispassionately
of deaths, dates, places, "agonies," "suffering," Chang
exploited graphic narrative histories available in diaries, films, and
photographs of first-hand witnesses. Histories that had somehow never been
made public before.
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- "Why had no other American author,"
she asked in her book, "exploited this rich lode of primary source
material to write a nonfiction book or even a dissertation exclusively
devoted to the massacre?"
-
- The answer lay in the art, the science, the game
of rendering everything just detached enough; the means by which all human
events and misdeeds are clinically commodified in order to be dealt with,
in terms of policy and expedience. The same mechanism that has most recently
turned 100,000-plus dead innocent Iraqis into something called "collateral
damage". . .
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- Politics.
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- After WWII, the two rival governments of China
were competing for Japanese trade, so there would be no rubbing Japan's
nose in Nanking. The U.S., of course, found considerable strategic value
in controlling Japan's future, what with mainland China under Mao's communists.
. .
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- So, 300,000 hideously tortured and murdered civilians
and soldiers were swept under history's rug.
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- Until Chang's book.
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- That's all it took. One outraged human being
with a little drive.
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- But why bring up The Rape of Nanking at all?
What good could it do? Why not leave such malignant past behind? Anyone
who must ask such a question is precisely the reason this book was written.
As Chang said in interviews, all human beings have the capability of committing
almost unimaginably cruel acts. The only proof against such acts is their
acknowledgement and condemnation, and the concurrent, implicit exalting
of compassion.
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- Chang knew this, and became obsessed, even possessed,
by it. In her book, she notes the merciful human penchant for offering
comfort to the dying, say, as with someone fatally injured in an accident
who is kept warm by a stranger's coat. She related her sheer asonishment
at the absence of such humanity in Nanking:
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- . . .those who had brought about these deaths
could also degrade the victims and force them to expire in maximum pan
and humiliation. I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect
for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be
reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer
program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced
the world to remember it.
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- So she did. She forced the world to remember
it.
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- And well we might remember Chang's lessons today.
Wanton, fiendish deeds of the kind loosed in war are habitually hidden
away under flags and claims of morality. For Japan, they were a bayonet
through a vagina, men forced to rape their mothers before they were beheaded,
screaming children---even babies---cut into quarters. In Iraq today, the
same demon has been let out of the bottle, what with innocent civilians
kidnapped and beheaded, prisoners subjected to sexual degradation by gleeful
American men and women, well-trained professional soldiers who relate to
killing as they do to video games. Here are quotes from U.S. soldiers about
killing in Iraq from a recent article in the Daily Telegraph:
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- "You guys get to do all the fun stuff. .
.It's like a video game. I got my kills. . .I just love my job. We've taken
small arms fire here all day. . .It just sounds like popcorn going off."
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- No, soldiers cannot be faulted for "doing
their jobs well." But the stuff of Nanking is ever-lurking in their
"work," and the first hints of it are in phrases like "you
guys get to do all the fun stuff."
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- Chang knew this, perhaps better than anyone,
and she suffered for it. The price of her crusade: the woman could not
get this "reversion in social evolution" out of her mind. She
lived in relentless incredulity at humanity's capacity for evil. Her office,
as a friend described upon her passing, was a shrine to human pain. She
was furious over Japan's continued refusal (to this day!) to apologize
for the Rape of Nanking, yet she was heartened by average Japanese citizens'
interest in learning about it. She wrote other books, including a history
of the Chinese in America, but it was the victims of Nanking---people she
had never met, had no relationship with---that stayed with her, walked
with her.
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- The news reports say that about five months ago,
she had a "breakdown" and went into a "clinical depression"
that culminated with a single gunshot wound in her car on a country road
in Northern California.
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- A shot that might as well have been fired by
the maniacs of war.
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