First, let me reject the basis of the argument: China certainly does regard the Nanking Massacre as just as important as the genocide of the Jews. You can’t turn around without bumping into it. It’s what plays on TV when they haven’t got any other important content. It justifies Chinese racism, chauvinism and xenophobia. It’s a fundamental creation myth of the modern state.
And regarding the " hierarchy of death", Han Chinese people put the Han Chinese at the top.
Secondly, dunno about Nanking, but the Japanese were genocidal in Singapore and Malaysia. And although some people perhaps think that what the Germans did was worse than bayoneting Chinese babies, I don’t think that that kind of comparison is meaningful.
I believe that “The Holocaust Was More Horrible” argument comes from killing people because of their religion, rather than what country they came from.
The Holocaust was more horrible argument doesn’t stem from religion, it stems from the massive scale of it. Religion per se had nothing to do with it; Jews were to be eliminated as an ethnic group along with the Romani, Slavs were to be killed on a mass scale but not entirely eliminated, some would serve as slaves. A batch of Soviet POWs were in fact the first murdered by gassing using Zyklon B at Auschwitz. Add to that communists and homosexuals. It made no difference at all to the Nazis if one was a practicing or non-practicing Jew. Jewish atheists and Jews who had converted to another religion made no difference to the Nazis either, they were all going to be murdered. Eleven million people were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, not just six million Jews. This was also only the Small Plan of Generalplan Ost to be undertaken during the war; had they won they intended to carry out the Big Plan, which had some 70 million people slated to be murdered.
The Holocaust was also an organized, planned, and industrial mass murder – not a relatively spontaneous expression of rage and hatred, but a cold and calculated plan to eliminate a race of people, step-by-step and in an orderly fashion (as far as such a thing can be orderly) over a period of many years. I think that’s another part of what makes it different.
There is a difference between what the Japanese did during WWII to Chinese civilians and soldiers, and what the Germans did to Jews in 1930s and 40s Germany. The Japanese atrocities were brutal, and were most certainly war crimes and crimes against humanity. But they were not the attempt to wipe out a race or a culture. Rather, they were the attempt to subdue resistance in the occupation of foreign territory, which is something Americans have a history with as well.
Nobody denies that what the Japanese did in Manchuria and Nanjing were horrific acts that should never be denied or referred to euphemistically. But there are fundamental differences behind the intent of these war crimes. Nazi Germany was the extreme, violent manifestation of decades of visceral hatred directed at an ethnic minority. It was an attempt to drive an ethnic group into extinction, which is not what the Japanese were trying to do. While it is unclear that the German people knew the extent to which Jews were being slaughtered and the precise manner of their mass murder, they almost certainly knew and supported their forcible removal from immediate Germany, if not beyond. To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that such an ideology existed in imperial Japan.
I understand that the Chinese view it as a genocide, but it wasn’t really a mass extermination in the form of ethnic cleansing. You could argue that the Sook Ching massacre in Malaysia / Singapore was an example, but that was situational. The massacre was based on the assumption that the Chinese population was hostile to the Japanese invaders. American internment of Japanese, though largely non-violent, were premised on similar grounds. Again, not in any way to lessen the severity of what took place – it was a disgusting act, one among many.
I don’t know about Nanking, but the Japanese were genocidal in Singapore and Malaysia.
NOT “an attempt to subdue resistance”. RATHER, an attempt to wipe out a race and a culture (in Singapore and Malaysia).
I don’t know about Nanking.
I reject the assertion that it was just because the Chinese were hostile: Yes, the Chinese that were being eliminated in Singapore were preferentially young men, and were hostile to being eliminated, but the elimination of middle-class women and children was genocidal in the form of ethnic cleansing.
You know what, right now is the perfect time to try to revise the history of WW2 because hardly anyone who fought in it is still alive so there’s no one with first hand knowledge to refute what you say. But it’s not the first time that people have tried to re-write it.
Wikipedia says that:
“In 1984, in an attempt to refute the allegations of war crimes in Nanking, the Japanese Army Veterans Association (Kaikosha) interviewed former Japanese soldiers who had served in the Nanking area from 1937-38. Instead of refuting the allegations, the interviewed veterans confirmed that a massacre had taken place and openly described and admitted to taking part in the atrocities. The results of the survey were published in the association’s magazine, Kaiko, in 1985 along with an admission and apology…”
We could debate the particulars I reckon but I’ve generally viewed the Japanese atrocities to be largely similar to those committed by Western empires. They believed in the supremacy of their culture and value system, and they sought to impose that on the people they conquered in the land that they annexed. And they brutally crushed resistance. But I would say that Serbian atrocities and the massacres in Rwanda probably have closer parallels to Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, there is total agreement that it’s ominous that Japan’s right wing is now essentially taking their white washing of history into the mainstream of public discourse. When I was there 10 or so years ago, you did have your Nanking deniers, but there was at minimum the acknowledgment that Japan’s war conduct was regarded a sensitive matter and that you don’t just nonchalantly wax reminiscent of the good ole empire days. It would seem that times have changed.
This is the first time I’ve heard of Nanking Massacre denial, but yeah, I’d rank it up there with Armenian genocide denial and Holocaust denial. The atrocities were horrific enough, but trying to wipe out history and demean the survivors (and their descendants) compounds matters.
I was reading about the 1905 Japanese-Russian war, during which the Japanese treated prisoners of war very well, counter to European assumptions that they were savages. Later something went disastrously wrong in Asia, even as the Japanese were proclaiming themselves champions of Asian races against the white man. Nanking was far from the only example (take for instance the hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians killed in revenge for the American bombing of Tokyo in 1942).
It’s hard to erase history, but revisionists with racist and nationalist motives keep trying.
I agree and further the Holocaust is more relevant to Westerners because it was perpetrated by an advanced Western industrial country in the ‘modern’ industrial age. This is the other side of the coin of “people [understood to be ‘white’] don’t care about X atrocity because it wasn’t white people”, phrasing it as a moral accusation against the West for what it doesn’t care as much about. But it’s genuinely more morally relevant to Westerners what an advanced Western country did (now just) within living memory than what the Japanese did at that time or what Westerners did centuries ago.
Anyway as you suggest there are a variety of ways in which it’s different, starting with the clear falsehood in saying Japanese Army atrocities in one particular city were an attempt to eliminate a whole people. That makes no sense even besides the serious doubt about the number of civilian victims relative to ‘300k’. OTOH total civilian deaths in China 1937-45 related to the war were in the millions though mostly from disease and starvation which wouldn’t necessarily have occurred without the war. Millions also died from famine India in 1942-45 at least partly if less directly related to the Pacific War. But I think the last illustrates the problem of just counting up deaths. The history of warfare in poor countries (ie almost everywhere till the industrial age) was often civilian deaths, other than direct killings by military forces, disproportionate to military deaths. In some sense those were the fault of whoever started the war. But it’s not literally the same as planning to eliminate a people.
Nor are anti-guerrilla warfare atrocities and genocide synonyms. The bulk of China throughout 1937-45 was either not in Japanese hands or never saw much guerrilla resistance to the Japanese. Anti-guerrilla atrocities were committed in the limited areas of active guerrilla resistance. That’s committing war crimes, not genocide.
Agreed overall. This is a very clean parsing of the situation and the terminology.
I’m no apologist for the Japanese Empire in the WWII era. They were a nasty piece of business for sure. But …
Racially motivated killings are not equal to genocide. A racially motivated attempt at mass extermination which has a reasonable chance of mostly succeeding, at least within the relevant geographical boundaries? Now that’s genocide.
Means, motive, opportunity, and significant overt acts in furtherance. Having motive is “mere” virulent racism.
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Millions also died from famine India in 1942-45 at least partly if less directly related to the Pacific War
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The main causes of why the famine of 1943 occurred was because of one Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill, who refused to permit Canadian or Australian grain to be brought over (previous shortages in 1941 and 42 had been dealt with).
There were also factors though related to the Japanese, like cessation of grain imports from Burma (which the Japanese had seized), British seizure of coastal transport boats in Bengal (for fear of the use in a Japanese campaign v India), and deliberate dismantling or lack of repair of railroads in the period before the famine where they’d have most likely been used in a Japanese offensive from Burma, not a British one back into Burma.
It’s true and I’m well aware there’s an argument for blaming the British, either for the defensive measures which reduced grain production and distribution capability locally (were they really necessary, and how was the risk to British prestige v Indian lives measured?) or what measures were or weren’t taken to relieve the situation by transoceanic shipping of grain. For that matter the Nazi’s would have some culpability on the latter point since they started what turned into a global maritime war which limited availability of transoceanic shipping. My point was how it’s dubious to directly equate war policies which pushed very poor places into famine and pestilence with deliberate genocide. I’m not saying there isn’t any culpability or that it lay only with the Japanese in case of the Indian famine.
Well, the governing authorities in Bengal took their lead from the charming fellow who said:
I’m glad that Churchill helped the Allies win WW2, but as someone of Irish/German/Bengali ancestry (my late father was born in Bihar in 1928), I loathe that rotten motherfucker, as much as I can hate someone who died before I was born, anyway.